To Each His Own, Together: Cycling the Chikuma River

 

As a thoughtful, likeable human being, my son is way ahead of me. I don’t know where he gets it, but I love when it’s on display. Take one recent Sunday.

The morning skies were cloudy and uncertain. I looked around at my kids, full of breakfast and lethargy, and felt a familiar dull ache. An ache borne of a persistent and pesky awareness that my days are numbered, both with my kids and in this body as I walk this good beautiful Earth.

Standing in the living room, looking at my kids on the couch and at those skies outside my door, I am torn between giving the next few hours to my kids or keeping them all to myself.

As usual, I give in to my compulsion to at least try to be a decent dad.

“You guys want to get outside for a while? Go for a bike ride, or an easy hike somewhere?” They remain entirely unfazed. What dad can compete with a video game? “Maybe stop somewhere for ice cream after?”

The kids have clearly reached the age when soft-serve is no longer as interesting as Fortnite.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear my oldest say that yeah, he’d be up for a bike ride. I must be one cynical father because I wasn’t sure if his expressed interest was genuine or if he was simply humoring me out of the goodness of his heart. If it was the latter, I thought, then (a) what a good actor, and (b) what a phenomenal kid.

Then he added a perfect dose of honesty. “I don’t really want to go hiking.”

We threw our bikes in the van and took off for the Chikuma valley, an hour and a bit away.

My Own Addiction

I have this thing about maps. Having them around makes me feel like I am always just a bike or car or train ride away from the next exploratory fix. One or two or maybe five years ago I picked up this map somewhere highlighting a bunch of bike routes emanating from a place called Togura, in an area of the sort-of nearby town of Chikuma. Knowing nothing about Togura, I nevertheless suddenly wanted to visit because hey, there’s a map!

Togura lies near the mouth of the long, fork-tongued Chikuma Valley. The Chikuma-gawa River originates on the northern slopes of 8,000-foot Kobushi-ga-take, fifty miles to the southwest. Past Togura and the city of Chikuma the river spills into the Zenkoji Daira basin. There between two mountain ranges it joins the Sai-gawa, at a confluence of historical importance.

Between 1553 and 1564 this land saw a series of battles between the regional Uesugi clan and the invading Takeda clan. Takeda had moved steadily north from the Kai region, conquering with relative ease the armies of the lords whose lands he desired. Then he ran into Uesugi, and over the next ten years the two sides engaged in the Battle of Kawanakajima which, like much of Japan’s history, is wildly convoluted.

The Chikuma-gawa meanders north from Kawanakajima, through the city of Nagano and into rice-rich Niigata Prefecture. Along the way the Chikuma becomes the Shinano, and by the time it empties into the Sea of Japan that rain and snowmelt from Kobushi-yama has covered 367 kilometers, making this Japan’s longest river. 

We wouldn’t be riding that far, although I did muse out loud, and with fair sincerity, about how cool it would be to make that kind of multi-day trip together. My son chuckled and agreed and rode off, leaving me to wonder if he was just humoring me again.

Taking the Low Road

The map that lured us here laid out nine different cycling routes. Three were short loops through town. Four involved hill climbs. (“I’d rather not,” my son said, quite predictably.) The riverside bike path would take us a flat five miles downstream to the Awasa-bashi Bridge. There, on the other side of the river, began the four-mile Mori Apricot Village Route. And who in their right mind would pass on apricots?

The land below our left pedals lay rich with farms and fields. In the distance a brown path snaked up the mountainside, through the terraced rice fields of Obasute. Below us to the right more gardens and groves of trees filled this side of the quarter-mile-wide riverbed. The mud left from the recent deluge remained on the long grass, still washed flat. On a bed of rocks in the middle of the river, where the valley began giving way to the flats of the Zenkoji Daira, a flock of at least twenty white herons stood in quiet refuge. The sky hovered in a hundred shades of gray. I felt lighter for my son being out there with me.

Across the Awasa-bashi and away from the river the road remained flat. The official route led down Route 392, through an area with plenty of urban lots and no apricots. When we stopped for a red light I turned to my son. “There must be a better way.”

My words can be spontaneous and meaningful. Rarely are they both. “Let’s try this way,” I said, and led him down the road to the left. Squinting at the rice fields in the distance, I was hoping for two things: for this not to be a dead end, and for my son to recognize the inadvertent meaning in his dad’s narrow-minded spontaneity.

We did find a better way, down quiet, empty roads, through the rice fields fronting the gentle slopes of the valley of apricots up ahead.

“There’s a lookout up there somewhere,” I said.

My son offered up not one plaintive word as I led him slowly uphill, lost among the roads that wound and twisted past the aging farmhouses and compact fields of apricot trees.

We ate lunch in the shade, in the small park overlooking the land we’d just traversed. My other son would have enjoyed this, I thought. He is stubborn in his individualism and rarely accepts my invitations to play. Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about it. He’s a highly introspective kid; he gives thought to what he does or doesn’t like to do in general, then applies it to the moment he finds himself in. I think this will serve him well as he finds his way in life. Yet I wish he’d open up once in a while to the thoughts and ideas of other people. Like his dad.

We followed the main road as we began heading back downhill. We couldn’t have retraced our snaking uphill route if we had tried, but whether going back across town or back across the country the inclination is always to go – and to see – a different way.

The road dipped and curved, revealing a path of dirt and rocks along a cement-lined stream. “Slow down,” I said over my shoulder. “Let’s stop up here.” I squeezed my brakes, gently, giving my kid the opportunity to not crash into my back tire.

I pointed down the road and over to the trail. “Which way?”

He seemed a bit surprised that I’d asked. For this, I blame myself. It’s an easy trap to fall into, always offering your guiding advice to a kid who needs to learn to figure things out on his own, even if it means letting him screw things up. Taking the main road or a dirt path was a choice of little consequence. If he was hesitant to decide on this, how could I expect him to have confidence in the more meaningful decisions he is surely already having to make when his dad isn’t around?

“Either way is fine,” he said.

I had no doubt he was fine with whichever way we went. God bless him for that. I wanted to take the trail. But I wasn’t about to say it. He had to make the call. I’d go happily along with it.

The trail was a little bumpy and loads of fun and ended way too soon, spitting us like two apricot pits back out onto the main road.

We stopped at a couple of places along our way back down toward the rice fields at the bottom of the hill. First was a small shop that sold apricot ice cream and apricot jam and three dozen other kinds of apricot-based temptation. The two women working had plenty of time to talk about the area and our lives and the harsh effects of the pandemic. “Not many people coming through these days,” they lamented, smiling. They invited us to come back in the Spring, when the sloping valley will once again be awash in apricot blossoms.

For some reason, or maybe a few reasons, I really did want to come back.

The other place, a brooding cement monstrosity sitting where the land began to level off, sold a variety of souvenirs along with the same three dozen versions of apricot indulgence, many of them, my son found upon inspection, made with apricots from Turkey.

We did retrace, more or less, our route back through the fields of rice and some green things neither of us could identify and up Route 392. Across the Awasa-bashi and back upriver to Togura there were really no choices to make. And that was fine. We’d found, thanks to one of the countless maps I’ve managed to accumulate, a new place to explore and enjoy. And by bicycle no less.

But more than that – better than that – I’d managed to stumble my way into an afternoon with my oldest son, thanks to his beautiful willingness to give his day to his dad.

Now if only he could convince his little brother to come along...