Ancient Is the New Now

Big-shouldered typhoon, flooder, landslider and tornado generator Man-Yi stormed the night through the country, leaving big wet long wide footprints all over filled with trees, cars, roofs, rivers, sheet metal and mountainsides.

At about 4 am on Monday I'd been sleeping to the roar of the heavy rain (up to 8 cm (> 3 inches) an hour!) that had been falling for, oh, the past couple months, seemed like - it was becoming the normal ambient sound - so I didn't really notice unless it stopped, then suddenly in utter dark the first big shoulder hit the side of the house. I lay there wondering if the walls and roof could withstand much more of that, then the wind blew harder and I pictured the outside, what might be flying around out there, sounded like a slow-motion train derailment, metal somewhere in the din doing loud wind-torquing back and forth-- later learned it was the demolished neighbor cabin roof.

In the spitty gusty morning our trees are raggy leaved, what's left of them; large-branch loss from cherry and chestnut, couple of trees fell on a cabin below us, half-rubbling it, a bigger tree fell on the roadside, looked like it had been mauled by a giant tiger. The slavering, growling beast removed roofs, tossed some buildings stopped the trains too, of course. During the daystorm, against the blur out the window I watched our old chestnut tree shimmying and shaking itself apart, out front the high old cedar tree, trunk a meter around, was rockin in the wind like at a Stones concert as the weeping cherry did a whole different rubbery dance, the house rocking and shuddering at the serial impacts of giant windshoulders as the rooftiles rang like fine marimbas up there.

On TV, while we had it, the rampaging Yodo River in central Kyoto was higher than I've ever seen it, lashing at the splendid old bridge in Arashiyama, and I realized that that the famed and lovely stone walk along the river's banks beside Ponto-cho, like the supporting poles of the striking riverside restaurant platforms, aren't there just to be pretty-- they are of ancient necessity, as long ago folks here learned from experience over millennia, and again this week.

Seems the earth is increasingly revisiting its old ways, as though asserting its authority, shrugging off carbon footprints, ramping up earthquakes and beefing up the tsunami department, reviving ancient weather patterns, droughts, floods, wildfires, volcanoes coming back around again for longer, fiercer times, tweaking the DNA spectrum to give us all new challenges, as we begin to relearn (or not) the truth of long-ago solutions, as ancient becomes the new now, testing once more whether and what we can overcome, that we may move on...

JABBA THE HURRICANE

So here we all are, all 130 million or so of us living here in the big J, the entire country, all the prefectures bright red on the weather map, bright red meaning big-time torrential rains, carrying on with or lives as best we can beneath the vast rain muffin that comprises whatever number this typhoon is - already a bit early but maybe not, since it’s been a wet summer anyway hard to tell the difference but whats new, some kind of prepping for weirdness to follow.

The strange thing is, this typhoon doesn’t move -- it just sits there right on top of the country like Jabba the Hurricane, slithering wetly maybe ten feet a day toward China. It delayed the trains in Yamashina (one end of the Rashomon path) on Friday night and its still here on Sunday afternoon, will be here tomorrow and for who really knows how long thereafter, hanging around blocking the light, puffing a bit here and there, blowing some stuff around, looking into the windows like a big wet wild creature you shouldn’t have fed, now it’s gonna hang around and drench everything, bring down mountainsides, flood villages and cities, rain rain rain on everything, no exceptions.

It does produce bit of wind at times so it can earn the name Typhoon, it shows up round and whirly on the weather maps, has an eye at its center and all that, but. Even now it sits atop the mountains, the fog of its being slowly drifting down over our house toward the lowlands... I cleared the rain gutters this morning, and yesterday was out in the rain-blustery garden propping up the toppled tomatoes that were burying me in tangly wet dripping green, when I was just trying to save them, get them up there where they could catch the most sun, if they remember sun, if there still is such a thing that will ever reach the surface of the earth again if Jabba ever moves before all the green things just say the hell with this we’ll give it another try next year, maybe there’ll be sun at a new budding...

FEET OUT IN THE RAIN

Out today into the wet, windy face of the lowering hurricane to get some water from the spring, stopped along the way at the country store for Echo to copy some documents on their old copier, and while I waited in the car all sealed up against the rocking wind and rolling rain I saw through my rain-jagged window an old farmer come out of the store with his purchase of a few packs of smokes, he must've been in his 80s, completely rain-garbed like farmers do when they harrow in the rain, but with his wife's shopping slippers on - men do that in Japan, put on whatever's handy in the genkan - and with a few weeks growth of beard, he shuffled along the storefront to the store ashtray, a smoke on his mind from the eager look of him, probably been out of cigs for a time, he slowly plumped himself right down onto the ground beneath the store eaves beside the ashtray, cracked a new pack of smokes, hung one between his lips and flamed it, took a big puff and breathed it away, relaxed back to the max, feet stuck out in the rain, wet slippers who cares, what the hell, rice is in the ground, everything's wet anyway except the cigarette, and that’s the thing right now, few pleasures remain at this age, during a hurricane...

Strange version of joy he was there in the blown rain, puffing away alone beneath the eaves, staring out into the storm, chillin' to the brim, both feet into the downpour.

THE GIANT KID

Hurricane #18 (seems they don't give them names anymore, which makes it difficult to talk hurricane history around here: was that the #18 of 1987, 1992 or 2009?) came through last night like a giant kid through a roomful of new toys, some of those toys being my house, garden and general vicinity.

Needless to say, the kid a made a giant mess, though among that mess was a bunch of big fat chestnuts I saw all over the ground this morning while touring the scene in the accompanying downpour.

Another thing I have to thank the big kid for is the fact that the trains weren't running this morning; despite my desperate efforts, there was no way for me to get to my beloved office. Heartbreaker, believe me, to sit home sipping tea and weeping for lack of purpose.

Yesterday afternoon I was out gathering in the last of the pumpkins and the butternut squashes before the big messy kid could get his airy hands on them. Turned out though, that the kid may have been hyper in the whirly way, but was hypo in terms of moving ahead; he didn't get here till about 4 am, when he woke me up with a Niagara of rain, heavily punctuated by an hours-long series of shingle-rattles and downed-branch thumps, heavy objects blowing from wherever throughout the night, e.g., the big snow scoop bumblewending its way along behind the house till it finally reached the toolshed with a closing bang. Came morning and it was clear that the landscape around our our humble home had been one of nature's battlefields.

Tokyo and northward is the battleground now; by tonight there will be atmospheric calm all over the country, though another giant kid might be coming around any day now.

CROW REMEMBERS

Hurricane now gone by, trailing a heavily clouded sky. The big wind was called Man-yi or number 4, depending on whether it was Korean or Japanese - they both claimed it, had different predictions for the big windy spiral, neither of which panned out - the Korean weatherpeople expected it to plow up the center of their peninsula, the Japanese ditto expected it to roil its way up the center of their archipelago, posing a serious wind and rain threat to every major city, indeed, every village and house in the country, but they didn't give regular updates on tv as one in a focused world would expect.

Surf the tv channels urgently for the latest and all you got was it the usual celebrities cooking and eating, the usual celebrities in silly quizzes and the usual celebrities in hot tubs, they just carried on with the the always startling vacuousness of regular programming - such as that is - in the hours after warning the nation of imminent weather disaster. Which approach would have been disastrous had the hurricane performed as the weatherpeople predicted-- there would have been no time to batten down, evacuate, whatever; just thank the big wind (the weather-p as wrong as they so often are), that it pivoted slightly at a crucial point and just broadshouldered its way along the side of the country, with pretty strong winds and heavy rain...

Yesterday afternoon, after the rain had stopped, out in the stormedge, the sky was empty of life except for a crow, of all birds. As I watched him way up there quietly doing his thing, it came to me that back in the way-ancient days, when the animals made their early tradeoffs, the crows traded aerodynamic skills for the kind of lowdown savvy that enabled them to survive yet be lazy, a quality that over the eons of crow-cunning evolution has led to the uniquely non-aerodynamics that crows exhibit today, such as understanding the nature of trash bags and the potential value of shiny objects. But apparently they've never forgotten what they gave up in exchange, as I saw in the sky.

You know how crows have always flown since the big tradeoff, all wingknuckles, gawk and bentfeathers when it comes to serious aerodynamics, outflown and pestered all the time even by sparrows. Well that crow was recalling what joys his kind had once embodied, he was ecstatic at being able to fly so fast, even moreso that the hurricane was doing all the work. He wasn't about to go sit down in a safe tree like every other bird, including the hawks-- he kept gawkily climbing, spreading those big black wings and speed-spiraling in wide circles alone, now and then gliding straight then diving swiftly even as a hawk: he was remembering the ancient but alien feeling of speed and elegance, wanted to do so for as long as it lasted.

I kept expecting maybe a YIHAAA! or corvine equivalent, but being savvy he wasn't reckless. He was silent with a kindred to the concentration one summons in zen archery, after a target unknown but remembered, a black bundle of nostalgia in a darkening sky.

As for me watching - and you too, I hope - may we so savor own hurricanes...

The harder
the rain, the louder
the frogs