Tuesday, October 21, 2014

I’m back to Vernon and the VOC.  At least I’m here in body but my heart is still in Incheon and heaven knows where my head is.  In spite of trying to impose a regular routine on myself, I’m still getting up before 6:00am and feeling muzzy most of the day.  Today I will go on the VOC ramble at 10:00am and see if I can walk the crazies out.  Before leaving for Korea, I programmed the VCR to record the Ken Burns series on three members of the Roosevelt family, Teddy, Eleanor and Franklin.  It was so long that it filled the system, so I have had to watch it right away, which hasn’t been difficult as I am too spaced out to do much more.  The first programs are mostly about Teddy, an asthmatic, hyperactive, depressive complex character.  His father imbued him with a belief in the necessity and virtue of an active life.   Teddy himself once commented,  “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”  As my cares are minor compared to his, I shouldn’t need a horse to outpace them, a brisk hike with friends should do. 

I spent my last week in Korea going to a market in Seoul to buy small gifts for friends, visiting the Blue Ocean jimjillbong for the last time, doing my slow yoga in the mornings while Jay and May did their much more strenuous routines, eating May’s tasty, healthy Filipino lunches, watching at least one episode a night of  “Game of Thrones” with Jay, riding the bike around Song do and returning to Bukhansan National Park on the outskirts of Seoul for one last hike.  The latter turned out to be an over ten-hour excursion, extreme BMW (bus, metro, walk).  I left Jay’s just after 9:00am, spent 1hr. 38min. on the subway (according to the subway app. Jay downloaded for me), took a bus for about forty minutes and finally walked into the park.  I had to walk through the high-end, Whistler-like village at the base of the hill and up a paved road to the parking lot before I was faced with the choice of trails.  When I stood at that point on my first visit to Korea I chose a rather long hike past some temples to a palace, but this time I decided to at least begin on the steeper trail to a summit.  It was under 5km. long but mostly uphill.  The path was well worked through rocks that at times were arranged almost like steps.  There were brilliant red maples at some points and the weather was perfect.  Of course there were other people, but not too many.  I kept urging myself to continue by thinking that I only had to go as far as I wanted to, but as always happens, I got used to going up after about 10 min. and never really contemplated not getting to the top.  I kept a slow and steady pace, let some gung ho young men run past me and  settled in behind a Korean man of about my age for a while.  We shared smiles but very few words.  Near the top it got a bit challenging because the rock face was quite steep, flat and worn smooth by so many hikers’ boots passing over it.  But there were some grooves chipped into it and wire ropes to cling to.  From the top, the view of Seoul below was magnificent. 

I finished Alice Munro’s Dear Life in Korea.  Her mastery of language and perception of people and life is a wonder to me.  I found these stories to be her most complex studies of the human condition so far.  I puzzled over them, but one thing is clear, her wording is spare and masterfully apt.  The title comes up at the very end, and as usual she takes an expression that is so common it’s clichéd and makes it explode with significance. 

Perhaps that daughter, grown and distant, was the one she

was looking for in the baby carriage.  Just after my mother

had grabbed me up, as she said, for dear life.

I have used that expression, ‘for dear life’ a million times without thinking about it.  We run for dear life and hold on for dear life, but never before had I realized its possibilities for interpretation.  Life is ‘dear’, much loved and costly and mostly beyond our control.  We reach for and hold on to what we can, and it’s only the effort that counts because we rarely know what the right thing is.  She ends the book with the words:

                        We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we

                        will never forgive ourselves.  But we do- we do it all the time

And now I will spend the last year alone in this house in Vernon before Jay and his family join me and we see what the future holds and continue to learn by going where we have to go. 

A portion of a temple at Bukhansan

Part of the path up the hill at Bukhansan

Two of the peaks at Bukhansan, the near one is the one you hike and the far one is for climbers

Me at the top, with part of Seoul in the background