Apocalypse Never

One of the great things about our village of Akiya is that one minute you can be scuffing your way down the beach, stumbling over sea shells and starfish, dodging shore fishermen while looking down for pottery fragments that have washed up . . . and the next you can make a hard left turn and head up the river like Captain Willard. Well, they call it a river, but it’s more like a stream that makes it’s way down from Mt. Ogusu. Which they call a mountain but is more like a large hill. The open space at the top, though, is the highest point on the Miura Peninsula, and from it you can see Yokohama, Mt. Fuji, and the sprawling spread of the much larger peninsulas that put Miura to shame: Izu to the west and Chiba to the east. Miura and Chiba are like crab claws closing around Tokyo Bay: Chiba’s the big fat one with lots of meat; Miura is the little thumb-like appendage.

M and I used to make the trip up the hill often, but since little m’s been around, we have gotten lazy. It’s only a four-kilometer-or-so hike, but it’s mostly carved out steps too high for little legs and numbingly painful for larger legs carrying little legs. But the prefectural government has done something very nice. For about a mile upstream from the sea, they’ve laid a series of (very natural) stepping stones that make a slightly uphill and very secluded walk through the forest and along the stream that little m can handle. On the round trip, we may pass one or two hikers, but that’s it. The stream passes through bamboo groves, over several waterfalls, through a fairly deep gorge, and there are places where we can stop to picnic or, like this last weekend, stop to eat a sweet potato that has been baked over hot stones. To get to the hiking path, we have to pass several stalls that sell freshly harvested vegetables. The last one sells the baked yaki imo potatoes when the weather gets cold, and the skins are crisp and crunchy and the inside is soft and sweet. Next time we’ll remember to bring salt.