Precarious
Please hang on safety bar.
I started getting nervous on the freeway about seven years ago.
Not when I would drive, mind you. When I’m behind the wheel, I go a casual 85 with all the other Texas drivers. In big cities like Houston I might start out on the right but am all six lanes over in no time, ceding only begrudgingly for the 100 mph+ crowd.
But when my husband would drive us in those days, dread reached a cold hand from behind the passenger seat. Aren’t we too close to that car? What if a car six lengths ahead of us that we can’t even see has to slam on the brakes and then no one else is paying attention and then we die here in Indiana of all places?
I knew from the first that it was straight up irrational. Paul is a conscientious driver - a college friend gave him the unironic nickname “Mr. Safety” - and I never thought he was doing anything dangerous. But from where I sat, the rest of the traffic seemed to converge ever closer to our little car, too fast, malevolent, arrogantly filling their lanes like puffer fish and threatening to edge carelessly, disastrously into ours. I would sometimes actually begin to cry, craven little tears welling from my eyes as I silently willed the semi next to us to look in his fucking rearview and not murder us.
Every exit ramp, relief flooded in, my breath deepened. We made it, I’d think as we turned onto local roads, these apparently not covered in hot lava. This time.
I look back on 2017 me with compassion. That year of terrible personal loss and major career disappointment, all against the backdrop of newly flagrant American cruelty, birthed in me an intractable, selfish terror. Our then-new RAV4 became a theater of vulnerability where I sat trembling at the center of the universe, secretly saving my own life as my husband drove us toward his dying parents.
Last week, my friend Tara invited me along on a trip to Hakone and my first experience at an onsen. There are somewhere around 3,000 hot springs bathing facilities in Japan, so they’re a regular part of life here. I wanted to go but felt trepidation too, on account of having to be naked. I already have a good healthy dose of body shame (thanks, patriarchy), and being taller and wider than nearly every person in the whole country doesn’t exactly dial that back. I said yes, though, due in no small part to the fact that I was dying to get out of my apartment.
It’s a great apartment, a by-the-month corporate affair, 300 square feet of efficient perfection. I have loved pretending to live in Tokyo, doing my daily grocery shopping, separating my garbage, using the powerful ventilation fan for the teensy kitchen and drying my clothes in the mysterious bath unit where I soak every night in water up to my shoulders (please replace all apartment tubs in America immediately kthx). I have also experienced an increasing need in the few weeks I’ve been here to get out of this apartment. It’s hard to work, relax, shower, eat, and sleep in this same little space. Again, I know this is irrational. It makes no sense to chafe at the narrow walls of this earthquake-safe haven while accepting so readily the confines of my own thoughts or the barriers of my body.
We headed to Shinjuku Station with hundreds of others bound for a weekend in the mountains, and somehow no one in that thick swarm walked into us, no bags bumped, no elbows jabbed. Then the train, whose service is always kind of a psychedelic experience for me, just taking you somewhere, baby, as you sit back and enjoy the ride. In an hour and change we were in smaller streets with cooler air, and soon after that were walking our soft white selves down the wooden walkways into the steaming water.
I parked myself at the long marble bath’s edge, turning my face up into the faint noon drizzle and the green scent of the trees, surrounded by women of every age, every body made to be there. In the heated water, my muscles relaxed and then relaxed again, like my cells were making room for each other. I’d read about onsen and was curious, but left to my own devices I’d have missed the whole thing. Selfishness and shame, a whole-ass body drama in the private theater of my brain, might have kept me from that experience.
Thanks, Tara.
I resolved to do it again before going home.
Home.
That’s a whole situation, right?
Thursday night in the US saw the longest, weirdest nomination acceptance speech in history - the first by a convicted felon! - which Pravda the New York Times would later term an attempt at “unity,” and I have never been so happy to be not only in another country but, blessedly, in a completely different day. Friday for me, my last free day in Tokyo, I put me on a train heading down to the Jogasaki coast.
Japan is experiencing historic heat (it’s fine), and I thought I’d found the perfect spot, a defunct volcano called Mount Omuro. There is a paved path around the old crater. You aren’t allowed to climb the mountain, covered now in soft grass; instead, you take a chairlift to the top. Google said the chairlift was about two miles from the train station. Just the thing, thought I, an easy walk before the afternoon heat, a good view and some pictures before another onsen and the trip home. Boarding the train at Shinjuku, I was proud of my ability to just wing it on a solo trip to the ocean.
I should have done a bit more homework. It turns out there was a 1000 foot elevation gain in those two miles. Sooooo desu ne.
After obstinately sticking to my hiking plan, I stood in the chairlift ticket line with people fresh off the city bus I’d eschewed. They fanned themselves with traditional fans or held small battery-powered versions to their faces, studiously not staring at my matted hair and the rivulets of sweat running down my neck. It was at this humbling moment that I started to worry about the chairlift, just at the point I rounded the corner and a nice employee in a crisp uniform said “Dozo” and pointed me toward the two little red footprints painted on the ground. My choice was to stand on them and be scooped forward by the oncoming seat, or bail through the long line behind me. Already ashamed, I chose the scoop.
“Please hang on safety bar,” said the smiling employee.
Up I went.
The old worry surprised me.
It’s been a couple of years since I last felt afraid in a car, and I’ve even done well on planes recently (I slept for a few hours on the way over to Tokyo this last time, leaving the pilots to fly without my psychic assistance, a big step). But there I was, holding on safety bar, calculating my chances of survival in case of an extremely likely event like the cable snapping, or an earthquake causing the mountain to collapse, or the safety bar suddenly dematerializing, or me suddenly slipping out from underneath it, plunging toward the soft grass. The people passing in the other direction held up their phones, taking pictures, laughing and chatting, or silently taking in the view.
I gripped the safety bar with both hands and looked to the right through the tears welling in my eyes, towards the mountains and the impossibly white clouds. The Pacific breeze patiently ruffled my drying hair.
I knew then - clearly, quietly, suddenly - that I was in no hot water. It was only my heart startling at age’s slow creep, the daily small increase in vulnerability, the ever-clearer knowledge that most of my life rests on countless actions that have nothing to do with me. I imagine starring in a play that no one is writing.
Izu-Kogen fell away behind me, me sitting in this chair in the sky, me brought here by planes, trains, and my own two feet, me scared to death despite the kind winds and skillful pilots and considerate pedestrians at every turn.
Up top, it was like this.
Later, I sprang for the private onsen so I could take pictures (you can’t take photos in the public bath, obviously). The irony is that the view from the public bath is much nicer, unobstructed by partitions.
I sat in my little private space reflecting on what I’ve been taught about ownership and boundaries, about “mine” and “yours.”
About how easy and understandable it is to become afraid in one small car, apartment, mind, heart.
About the effort it takes to step outside of your little space to get a bigger view.
About how that effort gets harder.
About how it’s a practice.
That I know how to do.
Nothing really changes in those little light-filled moments. Everything is still scary, outside and in.
Precarious.
But hold tight, because everything is also, still, so beautiful.
Thanks to Tara, Masa, and the artists of the New National Theater Tokyo Opera Studio.
As Jean and I navigate completely unknown waters and harbors on our way to Georgian Bay in Lake Ontario, these words were incredibly helpful:
“About how easy and understandable it is to become afraid in one small car, apartment, mind, heart.
About the effort it takes to step outside of your little space to get a bigger view.
About how that effort gets harder.
About how it’s a practice.
That I know how to do.”
Thanks!
Love your insights, love your writing.