The Great Fuji Fiasco

They say that right before you die, you “see the light at the end of the tunnel”.  I saw that light.  And I was able to see it and not die.  Permanently.  But I was dead for a few seconds.

This is the story of the most extreme circumstances I’ve ever been faced with.  Yes, extreme.  Picture this:  a guy doing a triple backflip out of an exploding helicopter and swan diving through a hula-hoop at the center of an erupting volcano; that’s what i mean when I say “extreme.”  And that’s basically what I did.  Sort of.  Well—it did involve a volcano.

When I was a junior in college, I left Chicago to study a half-year in a place called Nagoya, the fourth largest city in Japan.  When the school year at Nagoya Gakuin University ended, I was supposed to stop terrorizing the local women and hurry along back to my home country.  But I couldn’t allow myself to leave such a beautiful place without going on one last massive adventure.

And so one weekend, me and three other Chicago guys (Garret, Charlie, and Pdubs) left the bustling city of Nagoya for the small, antiquated town called Gotemba.   We couldn’t have given two shits about the town.  It was the 12,389 foot tall volcano that the town sat at the base of that interested us.

Much like thousands of tourists do each year, we were intent on climbing Mount Fuji.  But unlike all of those amateurs, we wanted to do it the “right way.”  We planned on taking the steepest and most difficult route up the mountain and to reach the summit, from where we would have it timed perfectly so that we could watch the famous “rising sun” in all of it’s glory.  I mean, considering that’s all their flag is, I would expect that thing to look mighty pretty.

We arrived in Gotemba via bullet train.  As the train doors opened, and we stepped into Gotemba for the very first time, we saw… jack shit.  The fog was so thick you couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of you.  It was nearly impossible to differentiate the neon 7-11 sign from a traffic light.  And we could hardly make out the addresses of buildings, making our search for the accommodation Charlie booked us an arduous task.

At last, when we found the right address, we stood out front and surveyed the place.  It was dark, dingy, had no windows, hookers swarming the place, and the only way into the building was a single elevator.

As we boarded the cramped elevator, two hookers slithered in just before the doors closed.  As my team awkwardly tried to fend them off, I looked at the building directory mounted in front of me.

FLOOR 4 = Bar Snatch

Wat.

FLOOR 5 = Boom Boom Sexy Time OK!

FLOOR 7 = Peanut Butter Sucking on Balls

“GODDAMNIT CHARLIE!”

So, it appeared that we had ourselves a reservation booked at a whore house.  We spent a few minutes outside the door deliberating over how we could strike a bargain with the Mama-San of the brothel so that we could sleep after our long hike—and not be slept with.  And then we collectively took a deep breath and opened the door… to a completely normal apartment.  False alarm.

We threw our bags on the tatami-matted floor and went right back out the door.  A quick stop at 7-11 to get bread, energy drinks, graham crackers—all the essentials.  One photo was taken for posterity, and then we managed to find the lone taxi driver mental enough to drive in the fog.   We went barreling up the mountain until we arrived at station 5, the halfway point to the top.  At the very bottom of the mountain there is a forest called Aokigahara where people frequently go to commit suicide, so it’s better to start from 5 than 1.

Our cab drove away and we were left there in nearly perfect darkness, minus a small dimly-lit shack guarded by a couple of loudly buzzing vending machines. Each of the 10 stations on the mountain are more or less equal distance apart, so if need be, we could rest at each point, every couple hours.  Well, in theory.

The fog, coupled with the fact that Mt. Fuji doesn’t have any greenery or vegetation, and is composed of nothing but tiny little black rocks, meant that we could see even less than before.  We had a crappy headlamp which probably would’ve been a lot more effective in normal weather, but at least provided enough light to give us a very general sense of where we were headed.

We made it to station 6 in an hour and a half.  Ahead of schedule.

We pushed on, feeling good about ourselves, and paying little heed to the light drizzle that began falling from the sky.  The wind picked up a bit too, but that was normal for these heights, right?  I was well equipped in my black Under Armor, headband, and light jacket.  Not to mention, I looked like a total badass.

Then, the wind started to get loud.  Like, really loud.  Garret gave a timely “hot damn” in response, and hearing his voice all muffled in the wind made me realize that it was getting harder and harder to hear each other.  I decided this would be the perfect time to slip out my iPod and rock out to some death metal for some bonus fuel.

I took the device out and tried pressing every combination of it’s three buttons before realizing that it was soaked, and exposure to the rain had killed it off forever.

It would be the first casualty of our journey.

By the time we reached station 7, we were now behind schedule.  We needed to get our shit together, stat.  There was no break to be awarded here.  We needed to make up for lost time.

The weather only continued to worsen.  Much like the iPod, we were now drenched.  There was a waterfall running off the top of my head.  I started entertaining the idea of how we would have to go inside station 8 to dry off, even if it came at the expense of seeing the sun rise from the top of the mountain.

And then “bad weather” became “dangerous weather.”  The wind started to assail us.  The sharp, tiny rocks of the mountain turned into airborne projectiles that relentlessly pelted our skin.  Whenever we heard the hawk-like shriek of the wind, we knew that we had less than a second to hit the deck and cover any exposed skin.  I tried to fight it and stand upright through these moments; that is, until a big ass rock hit me square in the eye.  This would later result in a voluptuous black eye.

Incredibly, as much as we were suffering, we were no less determined.  We would make it to that summit, damnit.  But how much more shit would we have to put up with?  We had been stuck in a freakin’ rock storm for ages now.  I felt like I had just jumped into an Antarctic river.  My nose was a running faucet of mucus.  I was losing vision in my right eye.  Blood oozed out of my knuckles.  This would be the perfect time for, gee, I don’t know, STATION 8!?

And to make matters worse, the sun had already begun to set.  There was no chance in hell we were watching the sun rise from the summit.  Or from anywhere near it.

A few minutes later, Pdubs pointed at something ahead.  I had to squint to see it: a little house-like thing… STATION 8!

I don’t think I’ve ever ran harder in my life.  I sprinted all the way there, letting rocks bounce off my teeth and punching my way through the wind.  Nothing else mattered except shelter.  As I put my hands on its walls I realized that we made it.  We would live to fight another day…  right after this looong, cozy intermission.  I turned to flash my friends a gigantic smile.

Instead, I turned to see Garret with his leg stuck in a ring of barbed wire.  Somehow I failed to notice that the whole shack was surrounded by a perimeter of barbed wire.  I must’ve hopped right over it.  And then I looked back at the house and came to the shocking realization that it was completely boarded up.  The windows.  The door.  Everything.

Everyone took turns trying to kick the door down, but it was sealed for good.  Nobody was getting inside.

At this point, I was now colder than I have ever been in my life.  I pushed my back up against the shack and tried to use it as a shield against the storm, to no avail.  Everyone joined me at the wall and we had to address the situation at hand.

“What’ll we do?” Pdubs screamed.

“Let’s take a vote,” Charlie suggested.

And then Garret got all gung-ho on us.  “A vote?  A VOTE!??  Fine, let’s vote.  There’s only two ways we can go here: up, or down.  We can finish what we started and reach the top of this bitch like WARRIORS, or we can go crying to our mommies and tell them that we’re a pathetic bunch of losers who got defeated by a mountain… and have that hanging over our heads for the rest of our lives…  so what’ll it be?”

Somehow the vote came down to me.  My vote was… incessant chattering.  Seriously.  That’s all I could do.  I had lost my ability to speak, and I was rapidly losing my ability to think.  I needed someone to decide for me, and do it fast, because I was starting to resemble a human icicle.

Apparently I voted to keep climbing.

As we pushed off from the shelter and reemerged into the eye of the storm, we were immediately sprayed with hundreds of pebbles, instantaneously splitting our skin.  I looked down at my bloodied forearms and wondered at what expense of blood I would have to shed to be able to make it to the top.

I couldn’t imagine any Japanese people attempting this feat; or really anyone other than four fat-ass Americans.  Luckily for us, we were big, and strong, and heavy, and—just at that moment, I looked to my right and saw Charlie tumbling down the mountain.  The wind just literally ripped him from the earth and tossed him twenty feet.  He continued rolling downhill.

Charlie was the lightest of our crew, but he also had metal plates in each of his heels.  I vaguely remembered hearing something about him once falling off a cliff and shattering both of his feet, and having to be airlifted off a mountain by a helicopter.  That wasn’t doing him any favors at this moment.  We fetched his body and tried to keep him in front of us so that we could catch him if he went tumbling by us.

…which would’ve been fine if it was only Charlie that was in danger of being blown off the mountain.  But no—the wind wanted a piece of all of us.  If we weren’t careful enough, we could lose ten minutes of progress in ten seconds.  And we did.  Over and over again.

And then things got weird.  I started to smell sound.  See feelings.  All five of my senses became one—one middle finger from my brain to my body.  Everything was shutting down, and I was powerless to stop it.

I was dying.

I glanced up at the sun.  It was massive.  Blinding.  It completely engulfed me.  It grew bigger and bigger until it completely flooded my entire vision.

Even when I closed my eyes, it was there, alluring me into its sweet presence.  It was the light at the end of the tunnel.

I planted my face into the earth.  And then I died.

…

…

…

“RUN AWAY!!”

I picked my head up just in time to catch a large shadowy figure flying—literally, flying—over me.  It landed behind me, crashing to the surface with a mighty impact.  And then another figure.  And one more.  The last one of them came right up to me, put his face in mine, and said, “WE ARE GETTING THE FUCK OUTTA HERE.  MOVE!”  Although my vision was hazy, I recognized the voice as Pdubs’.   And then he turned, leapt into the air, and rode the wind down the mountain, gliding for several seconds until his feet touched the ground again.

I pushed myself to my feet, looked downhill, and leapt into the air.  I was weightless.  With 130 mile per hour winds at my back, I soared through the sky like a human paraglider.  A couple seconds later I felt the earth under my feet.

We spent the next two hours doing exactly this: hopping, flying, and landing.

By the time we made it back to our point of entry, we took a moment to appreciate life.  I hugged the vending machines and then opened up my backpack.  There was a loaf of bread floating in a small pool of water.  I dumped the water out and stuffed a wet piece of bread in my mouth.  That sweet soggy taste of glory.  Mmm.

We had a problem getting a taxi, due to the phone lines being all wonky from the storm, but about an hour later a lone taxi approached, and the self-opening door to the taxi popped open.  I caught a look at the driver’s face as I got in, and it struck me as kind of odd.  Maybe he had never seen a foreigner before, but this guy had a look of utter bewilderment on his face.

We all got in, told the driver our destination, and began the long winding drive back down the mountain.

Everyone was quiet.  Uncomfortably so.  Charlie tried to initiate conversation with the taxi driver.  Just some general questions.  He answered in short yes or no responses.  Not too talkative.  It seemed like he had something else on his mind.  So we inquired further.  And then at last he asked us this:

“What were you doing on this mountain?”

“Well, we wanted to climb Mount Fuji, of course.”

“What—now??  But… right now, in Japan, we have taifuu!!”

Taifuu?  A semester abroad in japan, and I was speaking pretty good Japanese.  But that word… I had heard it before, but couldn’t quite remember what it meant.  I asked the other guys and they didn’t know either.  We started sounding it out.  It sounded extremely familiar.  Tye-foo? Ty-phoo…

TYPHOON.  The Asian name for a hurricane.

The taxi driver continued: “Right now, people are evacuating their houses.  People are dying.  Look.”  He turned on the radio and sure enough, there was an emergency bulletin urging people to leave the area immediately.

So people didn’t even want to be in their HOUSES, the storm was so dangerous.  Where were we?  Not just outside, but on the tallest piece of land in the entire country.  We were bonafide storm chasers, but we didn’t use cars or planes or anything; we used our bodies.

I have no doubt that if we had climbed up another 5 minutes, one of us would be dead.

I never returned to Fuji after that experience.  It still haunts me to this day.  I will climb it again, you can bet your ass on that.  But next time, I’ll make sure to do one thing differently before attempting it.  One very simple thing, that could be the difference between life and death.  And that is…

Check.

The.

Fucking.

Weather.