'Mountains and Rivers Without End' is a name probably best known in the West as the title of a long cycle of poems by the American poet and translator Gary Snyder. But further back in time it is the name of at least two Chinese and one Korean landscape scroll paintings. These are very long horizontal handscrolls, meant to be viewed by slowly unrolling the scroll from right to left, and they reward the viewer's eye with an ever-changing panorama of rocks, trees, water, and clouds, a little universe that seems to go on forever. Of the three that I know about (there are probably others, it was a popular theme) my own favorite is the one by Korean painter Yi In-mun from the late 18th century that hangs in the National Museum of Art in Seoul. Below is one small section from this long scroll:

Such landscape scrolls are complex and involving visual narratives, the equivalent for pre-modern viewers of watching an epic film or travelogue. In places there may be a few fishermen and their boats, huts along the shore, small figures of peasants working, or contemplative scholars perched on crags or lounging in rustic waterside pavilions, gazing out across the landscape. But the dramatic natural features, the mountains and rivers, are overwhelmingly dominant, and the infinite bounty and variability of the natural world are the common themes expressed, linked to ideas from Daoism and Buddhism.

Growing up mostly in Northeastern US suburbs, my youthful imagination was attracted to two extremes– the big city, which for me meant Manhattan, and the mountains, forests, rivers, and lakes out beyond the limits of farm country. In my childhood these were the scrubby patches of broadleaf forest, swamp, ponds, hills, and fallow fields not yet bulldozed for housing tracts at the outer edge of the suburbs, the small lakes and streams in New Jersey where we lived, and in Michigan where we had many relatives. I did a lot of camping, proud of my survival skills learned from the Scout Field Book, and fished for bluegill, perch, pikerel, and the occasional trout from rowboats and canoes. In adolescence, I hiked along the Kittatinny Ridge, the Northern Appalachians, the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Highlands, the Berkshires, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I have to thank my older brother Ed and his circle of friends for first introducing me to many of these places. They reveled in trail hiking and bushwacking, gorge and rockface scrambling, USGS topo maps, heavy leather boots with Vibram soles and rag wool socks, tins of smoked oysters for snacks, and convivial folk music with home-brew and feasting after days spent in the mountains on frequent weekend and summer holidays away from the city.

I loved bows and arrows and rifles and became a decent shot with both, but was never much of a hunter. Live wild animals were far more interesting than dead ones. My brother was a serious naturalist, and besides the usual dogs and cats we always had more exotic creatures around the house like lizards and snakes, crows and screech owls, flying squirrels, raccoons, porcupines, and skunks.

Then, first in the army and later as a migrant hippy, I discovered the West Coast: the chaparral and madrone forest and rocky shoreline of the Los Padres Mts. in California; the Coast Range in Oregon with its many lovely small rivers like the Alsea, the Siuslaw, the Umpqua, and the Rogue; the Columbia Gorge, the Cascades, the Wallowa Mts. I was living in Portland in my early 20s as a semi-serious art student when I first got deeply immersed in looking at many Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings, and although I was only half conscious of it at the time, I can see now that a major theme in my life has been searching for and identifying with the equivalents of the scenery, the lifestyle, and the state of mind I saw in those paintings. A floating life, sauntering among the hills, loitering along the shore, occasionally dashing off a poem or picture or picking out a tune on my lute to reflect the seasonal mood, like a semi-retired wandering scholar, with my toes dipped in the creek and my eyes above the clouds.

However 'wild' and 'natural' many of these places might look to a city dweller, they are largely humanized landscapes with long histories and rich cultural lore attached to the rocky outcrops, the shimmering waterfalls, the trails through green sylvan tunnels. The forests have been cut over, once or many times. In the forests are clearings where even though the houses of homesteaders may be collapsed and overgrown, there may still be a bed of flowers once planted by a settler's wife outside her kitchen, or barely legible moss-covered family gravestones. Where trails exist, it's because people have walked over them many times. Real wilderness is something very different! Wilderness is beautiful and awe-inspiring and overpowering, permeated with palpable and potent biological and spiritual energies... experiencing it is a treasure that everyone should have at least once, maybe many times, like a religious initiation... but by definition it's not a place where most people generally can or should live most of the time. We live in humanized landscapes, whether they are quaint European villages or concrete skyscraper jungles or vast soulless sprawling suburbs of strip malls, parking lots, and housing tracts. As a young romantic I used to want to escape from humanized landscapes to the wilderness, but later I discovered that humanized landscapes could be magical and wonderful and filled with nature and wildlife and adventure, as well as supportive of a generous human livelihood and a rich culture. The problem is that so many of those human landscapes created or transformed by the industrial civilization of the last two centuries aren't.

While I lived in Kyoto I spent a lot of time hiking in the forested hills known as Kitayama that stretched from the northern city limits up almost to the Sea of Japan. The area is crisscrossed with trails. Some are very ancient pilgrimage and trading paths marked by weathered old stone jizo statues or trailside shrines. The Kitayama forests are a mix of plantation cryptomeria (sugi) and cypress (hinoki) that have been more or less sustainably managed for almost a thousand years, interspersed with many patches of the original mixed hardwood and broadleaf evergreen vegetation.

I became intimately familiar with the low mountains, forested paths, and steep waterfall-filled ravines of Kitayama, walking throughout the area at least once a week, through every season of the year, sometimes with a companion but more often alone.

Some of the picturesque rustic mountain villages in Kitayama, among the most beautiful in Japan, still preserved old house patterns and rural ways of life little changed over the last few centuries, and it was an idyllic place to hike.

After spending a day wandering the ridge lines or climbing waterfalls in the ravines, one could saunter down a well-tended path as evening fell to a village on the paved road where there might be a small temple or shrine frequented by just enough tourists so there would be a rustic little restaurant selling hot food, a bus stop for the ride back to Kyoto, and a vending machine with cold beer! No need for a car or a big heavy pack. Very civilized! And yet one could still get deep into the mountains, well away from cars and roads, and if both quiet and lucky, sometimes come across wild monkey bands, foxes, tanuki, bears, or wild boar.

But even Kitayama was rapidly changing before my eyes as more roads got built or paved, city people bought weekend cottages called 'besso' built in dense clusters in the woods, an entire valley was turned into a trash landfill, and more and more concrete got poured along the stream banks. The trails were filled with litter, and people illegally dumped trash along country roads. Bamboo forests around Kyoto City, once abundant, were rapidly disappearing under the bulldozer, transformed into suburban housing tracts. The giant Genji fireflies so celebrated in poems and children's songs were all but extinct.

With my lifelong environmentalist leanings, a background in looking at water problems in East Asian cultures, and my dismay and frustration over the endless concrete pouring going on all over Japan, it was probably inevitable that beginning in the late 80s I got involved in the movement against building an estuary dam at the mouth of the Nagara River in central Honshu. I actually intended at first to be a more-or-less neutral reporter covering the controversy, hoping to publish a few stories. But when I started to understand the issues and met some of the personalities involved I got swept up into the opposition movement as an activist participant.

First, the official rationale for the Nagara dam was flimsy, contradictory, and partly outright dishonest. Second, every other major stream in Honshu, Japan's main island, had already been dammed, and the effects on the biota and water quality of these rivers had been catastrophic. The Nagara was a very special river, with a rich fishery including two wild anadromous species (ayu and satsukimasu) and an old and highly developed river-based folk culture. But an important factor was simply the timing. Environmentalism was on the rise worldwide and even in Japan, and this was the first Japanese issue that potentially had a national audience.

And for me personally? I confess the single biggest factor in my involvement was the quality and style of some of the people at the heart of the 'Save the River' movement. They were unlike any Japanese I had met before– colorful, complex, unique individuals, unafraid of bureaucratic government authority, with a zest for life and outspoken in their love for the outdoors. They were fun to hang out with. There were some world-roving writers and photojournalists with national reputations, some legendary fishermen who knew every riffle and pool the length of the river, artists, magazine publishers, a few movie actors, some prominent opposition politicians, a few unusually brave academics, a lady cartoonist who authored pornographic manga. And then lots of not so prominent but still interesting and genuine people. Camped out in pine groves on the river bank, sitting around a fire drinking sake and singing Japanese folk songs the night before a big river demonstration, there were many gatherings that were part old-fashioned pagan rite, part 60s rock festival in atmosphere. And then the next day thousands of canoes, kayaks, and fishing boats would converge on the dam site to block off the river and provide a telegenic spectacle for the mass media.

As it turns out, despite all the national and international attention and media outcry over seven years, we didn't stop the dam. The money and political interests involved were just too big and powerful, the momentum of the project already too far advanced.. This was a big defeat for both the environment and for fiscal realism in Japan, one of many such discouragements. I think the movement had quite a demonstrable effect nevertheless on subsequent river law and policy. Some local dam projects in other parts of Japan have since been stopped or are scheduled to be removed because of dedicated work by people who nurtured their skills and commitment along the Nagara or drew their inspiration from there. And a whole new subculture spread across Japan.

One of the most prominent and interesting personalities in the anti-dam movement was Noda Tomosuke, an outdoor adventure writer and magazine publisher who had popularized canoeing and kayaking in Japan. Like a lot of other people, I fell under Noda's spell for a while, and we became friendly enough so that I would periodically be invited to hang out with him for a few days or a week camped out on a river bank or seacoast somewhere in Japan, or to tag along on one of his speaking and book-autograph tours. Noda was a celebrity, and he played the role. Comparisons with American equivalents are difficult, but both Hemmingway and Edward Abbey come to mind. He projected a macho, hard-drinking, anarchistic facade, but he showed a sense of humor in his skillful writing, and to those who got close enough he revealed a tender and poetic streak. He and his sidekick 'canoe dog' Gakku were recognized nationwide icons from having appeared in a series of TV advertisements for instant noodles.

So I too acquired several collapsible kayaks and over the next few years paddled leisurely down a number of rivers in Japan, from Hokkaido to Kyushu (and a few in North America, Australia, and France during long vacations). I never owned a car in Japan– the wonderful thing was that one could go almost anywhere in the country by a combination of train, ferry boat, bus, and taxi, and send the collapsed kayak on ahead by the very cheap and efficient package express services. I'd take a train and then bus or taxi to up near the headwaters of a river, put the boat together, and shove off with everything I needed packed in the boat. Several days or a week later, after camping out along the banks, I'd be down at the mouth of the river. And at the mouth of almost every river in Japan (except in Hokkaido) there's a town with a train station. I'd collapse the boat, pack away the tent and camping gear, and send them all back to Kyoto for $15 or $20, then enjoy the local town for a while and hop a train home carrying just a day pack. Once again, the perfect mix of wild and civilized!

Except that every river was in trouble and getting worse. Dams, weirs, concrete beds and embankments, channelization, bridge construction, trash dumps, water diversions, PCB and dioxin pollution. They were all happening relentlessly, and they were all getting much worse across the country. Wetlands were in even more dire straits. And even Japan's extremely long and indented seacoast had reached the point where it was more than 50% concrete. In the 1950s and 1960s a lot of this kind of construction had been justifiable, but by the 80s it was a vicious circle of padded budgets, political bribes, and kickbacks. Many unneeded and destructive projects were promoted whose only real reason was to perpetuate the power and budgets of the Construction Ministry and general contractors, and to provide rural employment.

As I saw more and more of Japan and what was happening to it, it made me angry and depressed. So many places of incredible beauty were being destroyed by a combination of greed, ignorance, and cynicism. On the other hand, my circle of contacts and awareness broadened, I published articles, I was interviewed by the press, I got free dinners and drinks. Partly through my environmental involvement and travels I found a Japanese girlfriend who was very sympatico as a hiking, camping, and canoeing companion whenever she could get time off from work.

Coincidentally, after years of hustling as a poorly paid part-time contract teacher at multiple colleges, I got hired in a 'real' job with tenure, substantial pay, a nice office, fewer classroom hours, and more free time than I'd had before. This meant I could travel fairly freely in Japan, and take two to three overseas vacations a year. At the same time, currency fluctuations meant that my Japanese yen was worth more than ever before in the US, Europe, or Australia. Suddenly at 45 I found myself mobile, solvent, connected, and 'legit'. I had a credit card for the first time in my life! And so I proceeded to get a very modest little taste of a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and I confess it went to my head.

I hiked across the Dauphine Alps in France, staying in country inns, went to clan reunions in Scotland fully outfitted in my own custom-tailored regalia, rode horses and learned to paraglide in Australia, stayed in moderately upscale hotels in Paris, Amsterdam, and Sydney, flew business class around the world several times, drove around Tasmania. Each summer I'd fly in for a visit somewhere into the deep backwoods of Idaho or Montana where my old Moscow buddy Jim was camped out doing ecological surveys for the Forest Service. Everywhere I went I bought boxes of books and maps and shipped them back to Japan. I bought multiple sets of camping and mountaineering gear and kayaks to stash in different locations on separate continents so I could jet in, rent a car, and then head straight for the hills or the river.

My greedy imagination became inflated: The Three Gorges Dam? Palau Coral Reefs? New Zealand? The Andaman Islands? The Brooks Range? Kerala? Madagascar? Nepal? Why not go everywhere, see everything? Before it is too late, before it is spoiled...! And maybe make a career out of writing and photographing it, the way some of my Nagara River acquaintances were doing!

Well, this lifestyle didn't last long. I looked in the mirror, and what I saw was a bloated ecotourist making a 'fashion statement' rather than an environmentalist setting a positive example... an urban consumer from a rich developed nation with a huge carbon footprint who spent a lot of time sleeping outdoors in tents, getting his feet wet, taking slightly-above-average amateur photographs, and writing preachy environmental propaganda. There was something shallow as well as hypocritical in all this eco-consumption. I was tired of listening to the sound of my own voice falling mostly on the deaf or bewildered ears of bored Japanese college students. Things had reached a point for me in Japan where I was waking up angry every day. I got in fights with smokers on the subway line. My long-distance Japanese girlfriend and I had talked about, then postponed, then talked about, and then postponed marriage for six years. As soon as one vacation ended, I would start marking off the days on the calendar until the next one. If this sounds like a bad sugar overdose, that's what it felt like! Maybe I needed to 'go to ground' somewhere... stop flying around the world so much, find a place where I could focus locally, become part of a community, maybe live a little more sustainably, at least cut down my overhead. With enough trees and water and open space around so I wouldn't have to jet off somewhere every few months just to chill out from the stress of packed commuter trains, noisy consumer madness, and infantile pop culture in urban Japan's concrete-steel-and-glass jungle.

Clearly it was time for me to leave Japan, even though it meant giving up a tenured college job, good money, long vacations, and a privileged status. The question was, where to go from here at age 50? At the time I felt drawn to three places in terms of 'going to ground' and 'making a life'... Australia, France, or back to the Pacific Northwest? Ten years later, I have no regrets that I finally decided against Australia. But I'll never really be sure that France might not have been a better choice than where I ended up...