Haunted by memories of a night walk up Snowdon in 1989, the prospect of climbing Mount Fuji petrified me. Flashbacks of walking up the mountain riddled with food poisoning from a reheated Sayers pasty and will-ing off my Sega Megadrive and my Barry Venison autographed post-it to friends, convinced I was going to die, had put me off climbing anything. Apart from stairs.
Years ago, a storm on Fuji had beaten my brother and he had vowed to go back to try again. Driven by my own failure I agreed to go with him. After seven hours snaking upwards in a single file of hundreds of walkers, we made it to the summit. We sat and watched the sun rise. A sight that was greeted by a sprawling mass of onlookers who collectively drew breath in unison at the beauty of what they were seeing. I sat and thought about the mistakes I'd made during the 28 years prior to this moment and said a few words to the important people that had shaped the journey of my life so far. To some I apologised, others I thanked.
Before heading back down I wandered around the summit and stumbled across the figure above. He was perfectly still. A side of me felt it was wrong to take his photograph but I did. As I took it he moved slightly but stayed as he was. I'll never know what he looked like and in a way it'll always bug me. Much like when you go on holiday and wonder whether you've left the light / grill / or tap on. What's interesting about this photo, for me anyway, is that whenever I look at it I wonder where he is at that moment and think how odd it is that 5814.60ish miles away I have a photo of him on my wall and he'll never know.
1 comment:
This is beautiful, Huw. It's also amazing to think that he'll never realise his significance to someone else's world in that isolated moment of time.
It reminds me of an extract from Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha:
'We human beings are part of something much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle, or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up somewhere it may never have been otherwise. And if we are to think of the same example but with ourselves as the insect and the larger universe in the role we have just played, it's perfectly clear..'
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