Tutors is Usr
HOW THE BUDDHIST MET THE SEA MONSTER
(In first person)
Teru had gotten himself all excited about a place with a famous lake monster. As he had come all the way to Cambridge from Tokyo, he saw that Lake Champlain was only one more inch distant on his map. I had related to him that as a child I spent my summers there and knew the place pretty well. He got even more worked up. The fact that I had never seen Champ, the lake monster of some fame, failed to dissuade his enthusiasm. Hour by hour, day by day, he went on about the lake monster. He began stuffing printouts of internet articles about it into my mail box.
Teru and Fumiko in Harvard Yard
That one inch on his map turned out to be nearly 300 miles. As we went over the mountains I explained that bad weather had always struck every other time I’d crossed. So that gave us a 50/50 chance crossing and a 100 percent chance all together, since we’d have to cross back in a few days. Nuri, with a pretty good head for math, insisted that the return trip would still be a coin toss. This because upon coming back the math would necessarily start over and so there would again be a 50 percent chance. I suppose she was right mathematically, but I’d made this trip a number of times before and no one was going to tell me that the mountain summer storms were going to simply obey Nuri’s math no matter how many books might agree with her. If we missed it coming north, we’d surely catch it later coming south.
Teru and Fumiko brought passports in case we’d go through customs crossing into New Hampshire and then Vermont. We didn’t, of course.
.
With or without the protection of Nuri’s necklace, Teru—and the rest of us—survived crossing the mountains without further incident and found quiet weather waiting upon our descent.
We were now approaching the lake. Lake Champlain is plenty big by any measure and reportedly some 450 feet deep. It is an ideal abode for any regular sea monster. I suppose the colossal squid from the Antarctic depths is the true sea monster of sailors’ lore. And squid really do eat people as is readily attested to by the Mexican fishers in Baja. There was, however, no reason to suppose that Champ was a squid or that a colossal squid at home miles down in the ocean abyss would survive in 450 feet and without salt in the water.
Lake Champlain separates Vermont from New York and has a few sizable islands. We crossed a long sandbar to get onto South Hero Island. Teru--recovered from the mountain wind scare—hanged halfway out the window, camera in hand, ready to capture Champ on film for the nightly news. In fact he ranted on about CNN vs. NHK for his photographs and which would pay more and so on. I hadn’t really expected a Buddhist priest to be so, well, capitalist about things. Fatigued from the drive, we stopped at a fishing bait shop for coffee and a block of ice (yes, sold together in Vermont) whereupon a state police officer appeared, gun and oversized Batman utility belt around his waist. At once Teru began nervously showing him his and Fumiko’s passports.
Doubtless unsure of how to respond, the officer finally pronounced them acceptable and went about his business. I had explained no passport checks were necessary crossing state lines, but my words had no effect. A couple of miles and a couple of turns later we were at 100 acres of coastal shore and forest—Dickson’s Point. And much to Teru’s surprise, we were somehow still alive and unharmed.
A field above jagged shale cliffs is where a dirt road ended and the big car rolled to a stop. We all got out to stretch from the trip, then began unloading the array of gear, even a cardboard box which contained Nuri’s bedroom lamp. I called for someone to scout up firewood first, because if the rain in the mountains should come down on us—and it might--there’d be nothing with which to make a fire. Teru declined to hunt firewood for fear of bears and lions (or sea monsters?). He sent his wife.
We were pitching our respective tents. I went to a lot of trouble to tie lines to a substantial hundred-year-old cedar tree, even to cut stakes longer than what came with the tents. I’d been down this road before. Teru thought this to be overkill and tossed up his tent in a haphazard fashion. He was done in five minutes. It was though, little more than a sagging sack of nylon.
“Teru, hey, lemme help you put that up better…”
“No, no,” he insisted, “It’s fine… no problem.”
“I can help…”
“No. no. It under control.”
I have no way of knowing whether he really thought he could do it well enough alone or whether Japanese concepts of manliness dictated that accepting help would weaken his bride’s view of his bravado.
Fumiko meanwhile, made a good account of herself in the woods as she returned with a huge armload of branches. The bundle she maneuvered in front of her hid her face and torso so that it looked to be some creature-from-the-black-lagoon ball-of-twigs entity with two legs coming out the bottom. After some brief teasing, we tucked the stash of twigs under a tarp to keep dry. It took all of us to get that big canoe off the damn roof without marking up the car, and then down a rocky incline to the shore. Fumiko, being Japanese, had visions of eating fresh raw fish. The rest of us were too tired to try any fishing. And we needed to get everything set before dark.
Then we all took a hike to round up more firewood. Given that we were surrounded by forest, we soon had all we could carry. In the end, darkness fell upon us as we cooked a terrific meal using supplies we had brought. I suppose they don’t have many campfires in Tokyo since Teru spent all his time in childish awe stoking the fire and tossing things into it. He was simply fascinated. But he still wanted to keep Nuri’s Catholic cross.
Speaking of Nuri, we ate using reusable plastic plates. After eating, Nuri, never having seen plates other than china or paper, tossed them all into the fire. The billowing black chemical smoke drove us all away for 15 minutes. It was worse than a Chinese toy factory. At least the mosquitoes also disliked it. Sometime later she also caught a small fish. She didn’t know how to take it off the hook though, and as it was getting dark, she left it right there on the rocky shore.
Late that night, the storm ripped down the mountains and struck us. Surely this is the storm that didn’t finish us off coming through the mountains. The wind was back and the amount of rain reminded of a monsoon. It hammered us without mercy. Below the steep cliff, the canoe began crashing against the rocks. The unnerving sound woke me. Despite the comfort of my sleeping bag, the thought of the canoe in a thousand pieces motivated me.
We had tied both ends well, but apparently one of the ropes had broken. Although the ropes were plenty strong, the movement of the boat may have rubbed one rope against a rock or root which would have functioned as a saw. The only way to it was by climbing down exposed tree roots, made slippery by the rain, above and along the cliff. The lowest four feet had no roots so I had to pretty much jump down into the canoe. The problem was that it was writhing in the stormy waves and if I missed, I’d be in the drink—in the dark. Fortunately, I did land in the canoe and in 20 minutes had it retied.
Upon my return, wet but unharmed, Nuri and I enjoyed the captivating sound of the rain on the tent and the coziness of being secure from it…at least until the violent thunder and lightning began. We didn’t know it at the time, but Teru’s quickly-assembled tent had its roof become concave under the rain. And the more rain that fell, the more water filled its concave roof and the more acutely concave it became. When it reached several hundred pounds, it simply squashed the tent right on top of them. Soaked to the bone, they ran for the car and stayed there shivering all night. We, however, slept like proverbial babies.
The morning light showed clear skies, but gooey mud, broken branches, and sizable puddles lay everywhere. Smells of wet ashes and, pleasantly, of cedar found our nostrils. Apparently Teru’s necklaces didn’t help much, and we teased him about it endlessly. The pagan elements of Japanese Buddhism and Catholicism are not, it seems, mutually exclusive.
We rebuilt his tent—properly this time--and he paddled my canoe all around searching for the infamous lake monster. He even had two cameras around his neck. Several times he thought he’d spotted it and paddled around to catch the thing. But in the end, not a single photo did he take.
Instead, although the water was like glass, on our second evening, I could imagine Teruma standing to get a camera shot. In any case, Teru and Fumiko spilled the canoe. One of them must have been standing up. I could imagine Teru standing up and leaning out in an ill-fated attempt to get a shot of some distant ripple in the water. Sound travels very far when the water is calm and we heard them calling desperately for help. They were so far out we couldn’t see them even from atop the cliff. I grabbed my hand-held CB radio and called a Mayday for the Coast Guard. I couldn’t reach any Coast Guard vessel, but I did reach a speed boat which I promptly sent after them. I had to guesstimate their distance—by only their screams for help—from landmarks the boaters could see. Forty minutes later, two cold and beaten souls slumped off the boat.
They decompressed in the big car with the heater blowing on maximum until they were thawed and dried enough to change into fresh clothes. After that, they felt quite recovered—and quite happy to be on solid ground. Teru, obsessed with fire, wanted to build the evening fire by himself. Post-it notes are perhaps the simplest of all American inventions, certainly simpler, I am assured, than transistors. Academics, students, and office workers use them every day. Thus it was that Teru carefully placed fine kindling, then course kindling, then heavier sticks. It took him considerable time, but the result was, I think, a Boy Scout-perfect campfire ready to happen. From his pocket out came a pad of purple Postit notes. He peeled one off and lit the end of it on fire with a lighter and dropped it uncaringly into the pile of crossed twigs. A second later he screamed so loud it echoed from the mountains. He jumped around shaking his left hand, That burning paper had stuck to him and was in the process of lighting him on fire. Although anything but funny to him, the rest of us were on the naked ground laughing.
The three boaters joined us for an ad hoc but nevertheless great meal over the fire (and quite a few sarcastic jabs at Teru). They had caught a sizable pike while fishing and it too, to the delight of our Japanese friends, found its way over the fire. Canoes tip over if you move about haphazardly. But Teru insisted that Champ himself had attacked the canoe. Thus, he was an intrepid survivor and should be considered nothing less than a celebrity.
It was actually quite interesting to observe the conversation between the three of them. Just as with any ESL class, when students are from different countries, that is, of various foreign languages, their only way to converse is by using some common language—typically English, sometimes French. This naturally facilitates learning in the classroom. Here, however, it seemed almost a contest of who could cut through the other’s accent.
“Watch you out forrrdr the slippery rhddddrrocks,” said Nuri.
“For rlocks, lrooks to watch out,” translated Teru to Fumiko.
Around the evening campfire, while unendingly poking a stick into the coals, Teru complained to Nuri, that her Catholic cross was worthless in terms of magic power, and handed it back.
“If Cathoricism were wrleal, this Cathoric cross would have saved me flom the drlink!”
She took it back and through her thick accent replied, “No, not at all. Had it failed to work, you’d be not just in the ddrrrrink, but on the bottom of the lake right now.”
I guess it all depends upon how one looks at it. Oh, and by the way, the next morning Nutty Nuri and Fumiko went to retrieve the fish and it was gone. A later search, involving no small effort, revealed that the fishing pole was a good 40 feet up a fat oak tree which marked the point at which the shore met the forest. Some raccoon, doing what raccoons do, had grabbed it and being that it was still attached to the line, when it ran up the tree, so did my pole. For all I know, it’s still up there to this day.