In transit

I was literally in an old-time storybook adventure. A choo-choo train had carried me deep into rural Japan, where I was now in search of a bus that would take me into a village unheard of to many Japanese people.

The ticket man at the Funehiki train station lit up when I told him hello, his incredible friendliness matched only by the bitterness of the coffee he gave me and my companion Andrea. Four sugar sticks tempered the coffee as we waited for the bus that would take us to Kawauchi, a forested mountain village surrounded by radiation.

Google Maps told me that public transit could get the two of us to Kawauchi in just two more hours. With any luck, that would actually happen and we wouldn’t end up stranded. I adopted a confident, optimistic facade. Internally, I was terrified that our group leaders would discover that the most solid part of my plan was that I was pretty sure the village existed. Other than that, I was flying by the seat of my pants, and I hoped that my pants would take me great places. Or at least, to Kawauchi.

The ticket man rushed over to where Andrea and I waited inside the station, frantically indicating that we should make our way outside. The bus would arrive in nine minutes, after all, and there was a chance that a last minute surge of people would fill the empty stop outside.

Two older women joined us at the stop, and the bus arrived right on time.

Stale smoke hung in the air of the rickety vehicle as Andrea and I lumbered aboard with our luggage. The two other women watched, bemused, as I fit all of my belongings into one seat. After I settled, one woman wryly told Andrea in Japanese that we could have put our things in a different seat. No one takes this bus, she said.

Oh, well. I settled in for 54 stops on the oldest, slowest, stick-shift-iest bus in all of Japan.

Small towns and tiered rice paddies crawled past the window. I bet I could jog faster than this bus, I thought just before the rain started. Through water-streaked windows, I decided maybe the bus was a fine place to be.

The bus wound through the mountains, clunking and lurching with each gear shift. Every few minutes, it would slow to allow a car to pass. The middle-aged driver nodded to each car that passed.

I settled in with a warm jacket and a notebook full of hastily scattered observations.

Perfect, I thought. A perfect adventure.

But imperfections just outside the window caught my attention: a radiation detector tucked between abandoned buildings; piles of blue- and salmon-colored bags, filled with radioactive soil and debris; the dense green forest, full of radioactive cesium.

Sobered and nervous under the weight of my task, Andrea and I missed the first bus stop in Kawauchi, the one closest to our hotel (I hoped). We hastily caught the next stop just down the road and stood in the pouring rain as our bus drove away. Where had I brought us? Where do we go from here? We walked 10 minutes through the pouring rain, disparaging the bus that brought us to Kawauchi.

But a warm room at the Business Hotel and the promise of after-dinner ice cream lifted my spirits, even if it didn’t dry my shoes. I clung to optimism. Fake it ‘til you make it, they say, and I was veritably drenched in positivity.

With the serendipity that only helps open hearts, Andrea and I found story after story in the little mountain village. The kindness of villagers floored me, and the facade began to fall away to reveal genuine optimism and gratitude that lay just beneath the surface. No faking, no pretending. Just genuine connection.

By the time we left Kawauchi, I felt at ease in the small village, but I was looking forward to rejoining my group. I greeted the bus like an old friend, anxious to make the return trip on a sunny day.

And here, the optimism finally ran out, as both Andrea and I got very carsick on the clunky ride out of the mountains. But that’s another story.