The next morning, we took a family trip to the shrine. And by 'family trip' I mean the same thing that most parents mean; namely, we wrenched our children out of bed a full five hours earlier than they would have preferred, forced them to fake their way through personal hygiene, and mandated they consume something other than refined sugar and flour covered by liquid refined sugar.
We took a taxi to the shrine. On the way there, the driver was quiet, he drove safely, and he dropped us off right in front of the shrine. After we arrived, he pealed out of there as if suddenly realizing he violated a national ordinance related to Douglasses at holy places. It's possible that the word got out about Lily's destructive tendencies at Awomb, because I did see some pretty nervous monks standing in front of breakable objects on our way in.
The Fushimi Inari Shrine gates.
The shrine has thousands of orange gates leading to the top of the mountain. Many of the gates have beautiful inscriptions written on the sides that I assumed were haiku or philosophical mantras sadly inaccessible to us. This assumption was proven wrong halfway up the hike, when we saw 'oral health' written in English. This led me to conclude that most of the inscriptions are part public service announcement, part advertisement. Bob's Car Wash. Wash Your Hands.
The shrine is dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice and unhappy children. So I sort of assumed our kids would feel right at home and maybe, ironically, less unhappy. But this was naive.
If you find the prospect of hiking up 2000 steps exhausting or the thought of three hours of non-stop complaining even more exhausting, imagine hiking those steps accompanied by a three hour concert of two thirteen-year-olds bemoaning their fate and talking wistfully about how good the kids have it in shrine-free Lewiston.
At a crossroads mid hike. I'm not proud that I was sorely tempted to let my family get a few feet down the right lane and then run down the left. Awkwardly, Amy had the same idea, so we all ended up going down the left.
Parents reading this blog will immediately recognize that the expression on our faces is not smiling, per se, but a form of rigor mortis that comes from gritting your teeth for too long due to a constant barrage of complaints.
Upon reading this section, Lily exclaimed "DAD!
I didn't complain. And that's amazing because that whole day was like waterboarding."
How could I disagree? The hike did have unremitting interrogation. Why are we on this hike anyway? How much longer is this going to take? Daddy, I can hear Tessa breathe. Can you make her stop?
So in retrospect, it was a lot like a group waterboarding, otherwise known as the Last Family Vacation. Every family has one. Ours is just going to last another 10 weeks.
And the hike was not without risk ...
The idea of a roving band of bloodthirsty monkeys made the hike even less appealing to Tessa. She spent the remainder of our time convinced that she would be abducted, and her movements became even more furtive and jumpy than usual. At one point, we heard an odd shushing, sweeping sound (which later proved to be a groundskeeper sweeping the steps) and she squeezed my hand painfully and whispered "was that a monkey?"
By contrast, I suspect Lily would have welcomed the prospect of being held hostage by monkeys. Hey. Better than a forced march on a Sunday morning.
The shrine was lousy with statues of foxes, or messengers of Inari. Amy was primarily interested in the "bibs." We've spent a lot more time than I thought possible speculating on what the bibs might mean, who put them there, and how often they are washed. I have a lot of pictures of bibs.Those questions represented the sum total of Amy's interest in the foxes. She was on a quest to find a few statues of kama inu, or lion dogs. These have proven surprisingly difficult to find. Every time we entered a shop, Amy bustled to the back of the store and rummaged through the inevitable fox-centric statuary and finally, overwhelmed by frustration, she turned to the proprietor and shouted 'kama inu? Inu! Ka-ma I-nu?'
