The Way of Wanderlust (14 page)

My sandal slips, and suddenly I'm sprawled on my rump and my foot is wedged between wooden planks. I try to wiggle it out, and the vines claw and cling, lodging it deeper. The woods, the mist, the ghosts of the Heike warriors, all close in on me.

“The people of Iya still believe that gods live in the mountains,” Fumiyaki had said, and now I understand why. I can hear them laughing in the trees.

Finally I find a way to detach my foot from my sandal, scratch and scrape my foot through the planks, and extricate my sandal from the bridge. But I can't leave—how could I face Kuniko's family? With the vines dancing and the wind creaking the boughs, I carefully place my re-sandaled foot and clutch the vine-looped handrails with both hands. Focus, focus. Slowly I step from plank to plank, the bridge bouncing and creaking. After a heart-pounding ten minutes, I jump triumphantly onto the other side. I think of Fumiyaki and raise a silent prayer to the mountain gods.

In the main hall at the Zentsuji temple complex, incense spirals into the air and monks intone a solemn chant while a half dozen elderly visitors bow and pray; outside, another young monk assiduously sweeps the dirt ground with a broom made of twigs. At one end of the complex, Japanese tourists led by a flag-wielding guide admire a soaring five-story pagoda; nearby, a quartet of meticulously coiffed women
ooh
and
aah
before a stupendous camphor tree that looks to be older than the temple itself.

Zentsuji is the birthplace of the beloved Buddhist scholar and high priest Kobo Daishi, who built the temple in the early 9th century. This is the place Kuniko's father, Ojiichan, had said I should see. “To understand Shikoku,” Ojiichan said, “you have to understand the pilgrimage, which follows in the footsteps of Kobo Daishi. There are eighty-eight temples all around Shikoku in the circuit, and pilgrims—
o-henro-san
—walk from temple to temple to gain wisdom and purity. I remember when I was a little boy the pilgrims would approach our door—you could hear the
ting-ting
of the bells they carried—and my mother would tell me to bring them rice and oranges. That's why we welcome strangers on Shikoku.”

A shop displaying books, beads, walking sticks, and other pilgrimage accoutrements entices me, and I lose all sense of time perusing a children's picture book showing the life and legends of Kobo Daishi. When I emerge, pilgrims are everywhere, clad in identical conical bamboo hats and loose, immaculate white jackets and pants, all carrying straight, sturdy staffs. I approach one couple who look to be a father and daughter. Youthful energy radiates from the father's time-lined face. When I ask them about the pilgrimage, the daughter reaches into a shoulder pouch and carefully lifts out a book with a cover of gold and red silk. “At every temple, the priest writes the name of the temple on a page and then stamps it with the temple's stamp,” the father says. They turn the pages for me. “Every time I make the pilgrimage, my steps become lighter and my vision becomes clearer. I feel like I can do anything after I've finished the journey,” he says.

“Of course,” the daughter says, “this is only our 4th circuit. That
o-henro-san
there”—and she points to a wizened man draped in colorful sashes and dressed all in black—“is doing the route for the 333rd time!”

As I watch the pilgrims pray and pose for pictures, I realize that they are a benedictory presence on Shikoku. In their fervent, plodding path, they remind us to slow down and keep a higher spiritual purpose in mind. And I realize too the deep truth of Ojiichan's words, that the tradition of hospitality, kindness, and openness on the island must trace its roots to the pilgrim's own openhearted quest.

I tour the island for two more days, stopping to feel the texture of old straw-and-clay farmhouses, idling in serene fishing villages, bowing to pilgrims I pass. At a hot spring spa, a half dozen middle-aged women befriend me and insist on paying for my dinner. When I'm lost at a coastal intersection, a truck driver goes a half hour out of his way to deliver me to the right highway. At a roadside snack stand, the proprietress asks me if I'm doing the pilgrimage and when I tell her no, that I'm looking for the heart of Shikoku, she exclaims, “Then you're a pilgrim, too!” and presents me with a strawberry shaved ice.

On the fifth day, I arrive back at Johen just as dusk is falling. The family is waiting for me with a feast of fresh-from-the-harbor
katsuo
sashimi and grilled
aji
, and fresh-from-the-garden mushrooms, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

As we sit on tatami mats around a low table, Obaachan fastens me with her bright eyes. “Well,” she says, “did you find the heart of Shikoku?”

“I did,” I say, and they all look at me expectantly. “But it's not one particular place. I found it in farmers' fields and fishermen's villages, and in the pilgrims who give a sense of the sacred to daily life. And I found it over and over in everyday people who greeted me with a wide spirit and heartfelt hospitality.”

For a second I'm not sure if anyone has understood my mangled Japanese. Then they all nod and smile.

Ojiichan ceremoniously pours beer for everyone and raises his glass. “Don-san, it's good to have you home.
Kanpai!”

We all drain our glasses, then Obaachan raises hers again. “And I'm glad you missed the ditch this time!”

I have been going to my childhood home in Connecticut to spend Thanksgiving with my parents since the mid-2000s, when travel across country became too difficult for them. Before then, my family had visited Connecticut for a number of summer and Christmas vacations, and I had written numerous essays about these trips and the meaning of Connecticut for me. But this particular essay was especially poignant: I wrote it for a series on AOL Travel that was focused on the theme of going home for the holidays, and so it propelled me to assess and celebrate the meaning of my Connecticut pilgrimages within the larger context of home. Where was home for me now? What did “home” mean? Writing often helps me make sense of life, and sometimes it produces something even greater. In the process of writing this piece, I embraced family and friends, present and past, near and far, landscape, emotion, and memory, in a new and deeper way, and the interweaving threads of Connecticut, Thanksgiving, and home took on a completing clarity.

IN MY FAMILY, AS IN MANY FAMILIES
around the U.S., Thanksgiving has always been a day to gather with loved ones and celebrate family and home. So when I moved from Connecticut and began to raise a family in California three decades ago, my parents would often cross the country to celebrate the holiday with us. Eight years ago, when this trip became too difficult for them, I reversed the route to celebrate with them in Connecticut.

My dad passed away two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2007, and since then, this journey has become an even more precious rite. One trip in particular, in 2011, crystallized the meaning of this pilgrimage for me.

That Thanksgiving was special for a couple of reasons. My daughter, Jenny, had been studying in graduate school on Long Island and had been able to join my mom and me for the previous two holidays. But she would be graduating in June and moving back to California, so this would be her last East Coast Thanksgiving, at least for a while. In addition, my best friend from childhood, Philip Porter, had invited us all to join his family's celebration.

Jenny picked me up at the airport in New York the day before Thanksgiving, and as we drove into the rolling hills of west-central Connecticut, I felt like a puzzle piece clicking naturally into place. I marveled at how deeply the landscape—forests and ponds and round town greens, high-steepled churches and white clapboard houses with manicured lawns and sheltering trees—had become a part of me.

I had grown up in just such a setting in Middlebury, and when we moved my mom and dad to an assisted-living facility in 2007, we found a similarly situated place in neighboring Southbury. That afternoon, as Mom and Jenny admired the woods and pond outside her new home, I discovered a passage I'd written in my journal twenty Thanksgivings before:

This is not the tourist's New England of blazing fall foliage. It's the native's New England of stark brown branches tinged with the barest tips of red against a pewter sky. A cold, dry wind slices through the trees. The grass emanates a shaggy, melancholy gray-green. The sun casts a threadbare shawl over the bony branches in the last light of day, and the sky streaks at sunset with icy rose and purple tatters like some wind-torn medieval banner. Darkness falls at 4:00
p.m
.

And yet somehow it exhilarates me. Mom and Dad and I take long walks through these winter-tinged afternoons, and the longer we look, the more we find a profoundly moving beauty in that stark bareness, an amazing range of colors in those grays and browns.

Jenny and my mom began to relive summer visits to Middlebury. Jenny remembered how Grandma and Grandpa would toss Frisbees around our basketball court-sized backyard for her and her brother, Jeremy, to run after. Mom recalled the picnics they'd impetuously concoct on the weathered picnic table under the massive oak tree—plopping fresh-shucked corn into boiling water as Jenny and Jeremy raced down to the bee-buzzing raspberry bushes, returning breathless with overflowing baskets just as the tuna salad sandwiches, corn, and lemonade appeared. I remembered how Dad would pretend to chase his giggling grandkids and how his eyes would glitter as he watched them fly.

Mom laughingly reminded me of how, when I was young, we were all supposed to help with Thanksgiving dinner, but somehow she always ended up creating and choreographing the cranberry sauce and stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, peas, gravy, crisp-skinned turkey, and pumpkin pie while my brother and I joined the throng of neighborhood kids playing football at the Porters' house up the street.

The Porters didn't live up the street anymore, but when we arrived at Phil's house the next day, we found that his mom and dad were there, as were his brother and sister and their clans. It was a time-travel tableau and a boisterous, bustling, laugh-filled family feast just as Thanksgivings should be, with many a childhood misadventure related.

“Remember,” Phil's dad guffawed at one point, “the time the boys fell through the ice into the swimming pool and thought they were going to drown?”

“Oh, yes!” my mom exclaimed, her voice skipping with delight. “When they came dripping back to our house, they dumped half your pool into our kitchen, right in the middle of our holiday party!”

Later that night, as we drove Mom home, her face was glowing. “What a perfect Thanksgiving!” she said. “I haven't laughed that much in years,”

The following day, Jenny drove us to Middlebury. Our former neighbors had recently moved and their house was for sale, so we parked in their driveway and gazed at our old house. After a while, Mom urged Jenny and me to wander into the woods while she waited in the car.