MOUNTAIN ROAD INFORMATION

On my way this morning to pick up the grandies for a day at the beach, I as I wended my slow way down the curvy mountain road from the upper unshorn rice paddies rich in rice stalks pendant with their weight of gold, on past the lower shorn rice fields still gleaming in the morning sun, the lines of stubble echoing the curves of the paddies like stitches on an ancient tapestry - halfway down there was a farmer harvesting, streaming his whole field of rice into the back of his truck - in between the eaches of it all I looked out over the Lake that was mostly Prussian blue, with long winding bands of dark sapphire and lapis layered in here and there all the way to the far shore, the entirety speckled with bright sailboats and motor boats, cruisers and yachts, one long white wake of a cigarette boat slashing along in a loud hurry to get out of all this beauty, as across the Lake the mountains rose in sun-stippled granite, above them in turn the way-higher mountains of alive white clouds tumbling upward, ending in the same sheer blue where the silver full moon lives, all below shimmering with the gold that streams from that early slant of the autumn sun... There is priceless information on a mountain road...

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER TRUCK

Yesterday when they were repaving our road to make it look more like a road than something out of Huck Finn, which is great for a road as a form of literature, I've got nothing against that, Mark is a man dear to my heart, but from the beginning of living up here I had to motorcycle that road early in the morning and late at night, which - apart from a couple of accidents due to the burden of residual youth - became no problem once my autopilot had memorized the road's quirks and pitfalls.

For lack of deep inquiry I had come to believe that the roadway (which is half ours as it passes our property) was the collective property of the original cooperative, and so would never be paved again in the history of the world unless the few of us living up here coughed up a few million yen each, which basically meant never, so I never asked.

But here it was all of a sudden being repaved (I'm now curious about how that came to be), the big dump trucks full of asphalt backing slowly up the steep grade (some with lady drivers!) past my window to get to where the pavers were starting to work near the top of the road; then the empty trucks would freeroll all the way back down along that enjoyably scenic curvy road, an infrequently used byway that was brand-new to the drivers and a lot of fun to zig and zag down along, especially when free after trucking all morning with a dead heavy load in back. It's like flying at that point, careening playfully down the long mountainside like a vertical Le Mans or something, which was what one of the drivers in the throes of the little-known 'unladen dumptruck rapture' finally did-- i.e., fly.

It was right where you most expect to fly when you're speeding down, by the last slow curve in the forest there, where the road suddenly opens from the trees to that tricky quick zigzag through the last of the lower paddies, which were laid out way back when, (a thousand years or more ago would be no surprise) and then not for the ease of a road at all, but for the ease of creating a paddy by hand out of the mountain landscape, so a thousand years later that fact might well be a problem for a bored truck driver having a bit of driving fun, so it was no real surprise that just after Echo left for the big village down south along the Lake she phoned me to say that a big truck had not zagged after the fifth zig and so had launched itself into the air over the first rice paddy on the right side of the road and had landed upside down in the middle of the second paddy on the right side of the road, and now the road was filled with police cars, workers, tow trucks and onlookers from all over who had come to see what happens when a truck flies down a mountain, and because of seat belt, air bag and soft paddy mud, it didn't look like anyone was hurt much.

Goes to show though that you just never know: some days, on some roads, are just like that truck, so no matter how professional you think you are, keep your hands on the wheel and enjoy the ride, but not too much; let your wishes fly if they want to, but follow the road.

STOP ACTING LIKE A HOOD ORNAMENT

Came out of the house in a rush this morning 'cause I was a bit late in my usual train-catching schedule, reached to put the key in the motorcycle and beheld, there where you'd put a hood ornament - if you were of such a mind and a motorcycle had a hood – there, facing forward with all the green hauteur you've ever seen, a proud bright-emerald frog, bulgy black eyes gazing ahead like the elegantly stylized hood ornament on a Rolls Royce Green Ghost, as though he were thinking: now this is speed, this is quality, this is where I belong-- but of course it wasn't a Rolls, as I've indicated, it was merely the humble motorcycle I use to freewheel down the mountain to the train in the morning and power back up at night, but frogs can get carried away.

Even though he was way too classy for the vehicle, I wanted to leave him there, posing like a green Mussolini with his proud amphibian heritage, but I couldn't see him holding office very long when I really got rolling; and waiting for that embodiment of pride to fly off like a spinning frog and get splatted flat on the road would not only be a shame in terms of froggy nobility and all that, it would distract me from the total focus that is essential for freewheeling fast down a one-lane, sharply and blindly curvy - and wet - mountain road with now and then delivery trucks and automotive residents speeding up it on hurries of their own.

So although I wouldn't have minded having a live emerald hood ornament, I had to get the supreme leader off there, and I was in a hurry as I say, so I poked him in the rear with the key. He jumped much as Mussolini would have jumped in response to such impropriety, but the crafty little green guy landed on the hub of the front wheel inside the spokes, begetting even more grotesque freewheeling images that posed even greater loss of face and whatnot for Il Duce.

So as the clock ticked I had to get down on my knees and poke around in there, trying to reach inside the spokes and prod the frog again with the key, backed by a series of not carefully chosen yet carefully enunciated words, but the key was too short, the words were too alien and the space was too tight, his greenness gazing at me in that bulgy way, as though thinking 'You're in a hurry, aren't you,' so I went and got a short piece of bamboo (a lot of that around) and poked and prodded him from spoke to spoke, he really didn't want to leave, finally winkling his brightness out of there and onto a nice bouncy plantain leaf where he belonged.

So then I had to avoid the plantain leaf when I was pulling out, and really hotwheel it down the mountain, speedsqueezing past an upcoming truck along the way. Anyhow I made the train, intact and by a whisker, so on the ride into the city to the office and another long day of desk work in exchange for pieces of colored paper with dead politicians' pictures on them I got to think about what a great life that frog must be having right now, up there where I say I live...