Day 3, Leg 3

Today turned out to be a 20K day, not 19K, thus putting the entire route back on track for 403K total. I'm in the city of Miryang (밀양시, literally "Mir/Mil-yang-shi" by spelling but "Mi-ryang-shi" by pronunciation), the town or village of Hanam (하남읍/Hanam-eup, not to be confused with 하남시/Hanam-shi, the city east of Seoul on the south side of the Han—the one I walk to on a 26K route). The walk took about the same amount of time as yesterday's; I rested less but got waylaid by a monk in whatever qualifies as monkish plainclothes. Still, from a distance, I could see his floaty, ethereal walk, so I guessed he was a monk, and a heavy meditator at that. I've seen many monks who have a "secular, normal" walk, but you could see from afar that something was up with this guy. We must have talked for half an hour. Well, he talked while I struggled to understand. More on that in a bit.

I got up later than usual, i.e., a bit after 4 a.m., but I was still out the door before 5. It's been cloudy in the morning for the past few days, and this morning was a few degrees warmer than the previous two. The forecast rain didn't hit with full force until I was done with the walk and safely in my motel, the Hwangtobang (황토방 모텔, W50,000/night, cheaper than last year when I paid W60,000). Tomorrow's forecast no longer calls for all-day rain, but it's going to be annoyingly intermittent all day. Tomorrow's walk will be officially 30K, so I'll finally be enjoying the first of my six allotted rest days in one of my favorite towns, Namji-eup (남지읍). I do plan to go off the chain a bit during this interlude, but not with convenience-store sweets and soft drinks—just my NeNe Chicken on Saturday and my Chinese food on Sunday. Soft drinks will all be diet (okay, maybe one non-diet soft drink each day). 

Today's walk began quietly enough as I left Nakdong-jang yeogwan. There were no bikers at first, then as the sky lightened, a bunch of older ladies appeared, singly and in groups, to walk and to use the exercise equipment. Where were the men? They appeared on bikes later. 

The strangeness of walking the route backward struck me again as I passed landmark after landmark in reverse order. This sort of thing might be easier to do on a bike, where greater speed compresses the distances and the sights you see. (Of course, greater speed also means you miss a lot of the little things I catch as a walker.)

Here are the map and some stats:

today's route: south, west, northwest, north

Today was the Day of the Tree-lined Straightaways, for sure. No dams, either. I did encounter the mean hill at Masa, and despite initially resolving to ascend it, I gave in to my flagging courage (as well as to my curiosity) and finally went through the Masa Tunnel, which turns out to be not only level but absurdly short, taking a slightly curved path out the other side of the mountain to a path down to a familiar drainage gate and on to the Four Rivers path. I felt remarkably less guilty than I'd thought I would for having wussed out; maybe I'll come back later just to do the hill. I know where both ends of the tunnel are now.

The walk took me past plenty of farmland. At present, a ton of rice remains unharvested. I also noticed, to my horror, the utter dominance of park golf on the once-undeveloped land by the river's edge. I've been having a bitter internal dialogue about the activity. On the one hand, I despise golf in all of its forms. Like Carlin, I see it as an elite waste of time that takes up entirely too much room in the country. Park golf is proliferating rapidly, in consonance with the burgeoning senior population as South Korea collectively ages, and young people marry less frequently and have way fewer children, thus fueling a tsunami of a demographic crisis. On the other hand, park golf is a good way to keep seniors active and social while they maintain their hand-eye coordination, balance, and mental faculties (mainly through banter). Park golf is the secular answer to church coffee hour. Throw a few random young people into the mix to keep the old men (and women) invigorated, and it's an undeniably winning combination. Unfortunately, it's also ruining my enjoyment of what used to be a fairly quiet riverside trek across the country. I see it as a cancer, but until the geographic problem is solved, this trend will only continue. 

My stats, as promised before my rant:

about 5000 calories burned (I'm liking the "compare my steps" feature)

And now, today's ten images:

Samnangjin Bridge (삼랑진교)

a long, lonesome road... but no shiny demon

Misa Tunnel

shortcutting through the village outside the tunnel

Hallim Drainage Gate

where I rested a bit

one of many tree-lined straightaways

Fucking park golf!

messy alien crop circles (crap circles?)

About five kilometers from my destination, I  walked into Bongeun sunim, a local monk based at the nearby temple of Seoweon-sa (서원사). As I mentioned above, the monk had a floaty, ethereal walk, seeming to cruise above the ground like Baron Harkonnen while his legs merely pretended to be walking. The monk first tried English with me, but it rapidly became clear that Korean was going to work better for him. I did most of my talking at the beginning, explaining my walk project and talking about previous walks I've done. Bongeun sunim took over after that, congratulating me on my mindset after I told him I liked these walks for how they simplified and focused my life. He then launched into a discourse on Buddhist metaphysics, some of which I halfway caught thanks to my studies, e.g., the notion of the six sense-related siddhi, or special powers acquired through Buddhist practice. He referred specifically to the yukshintong/육신통, which I had to look up. Basically, imagine being able to hear every cry of misery in the world, or to see light years into space, etc. I've heard this sort of talk before (even from the American Hyongak sunim), and frankly, I'm a scientific skeptic (this monk failed to hear, for example, the altered sound of blood flowing through my new stent), but I wasn't in a mood to argue with Bongeun sunim, nor did I really have the language to do so, anyway. So I did a lot of nodding and "mm-hmm"ing and "Oh, really?"ing. Bongeun sunim also reviewed how properly walking by using a certain part of the sole can bring strength into your danjeon/단전 area (danjeon = the ki-meridian convergence point about three finger-widths beneath your navel—an extra-Buddhist Chinese concept incorporated into East Asian Mahayana Buddhism... I can hear Father Cenkner in grad school rasping that "It's all syncretism!"), eventually leading to the acquisition of the aforementioned siddhi. If the monk's abstract point is that walking can be a form of meditation, well, I've got nothing against that. 

Bongeun sunim did also cover a very Buddhist idea: the nearly solipsistic notion that I myself am creating the universe because my mind is all there is. I don't know enough about Korean Buddhist denominations to know which branch Bongeun sunim belongs to (and I forgot to ask), but I have to wonder how Seon/선/禪/Zen he is. Most of the Zennies I've encountered, monastic and not, have generally been pragmatists who don't subscribe to all-there-is-is-mind Greek idealism. But here was Bongeun sunim, telling me the world ceases to exist when he dies. This kind of thinking is nevertheless consistent with the Mahayana notion that we are all metaphysically connected and thus morally responsible for each other—at least, those of us in the chain of being who are evolved enough to have consciousnesses that can sense such a responsibility. After all, if I'm creating the world (making me the Buddha, God, or Jesus, as sunim contended), and you're suffering inside my creation, am I not to some degree responsible for your suffering? 

Well, this is all too much of a tangle for me to write at length about it, and I'm just an idiot on a walk. I did a lot of listening and nodding, but not a lot of agreeing. The monk asked me how old I was and whether I was married; I said I was 55 and still single, and he enthusiastically suggested that I become a monk. Ha! If only he knew what a shit I can be, and how attached I am to mortal comforts like good food, and how I don't think I have much time left for the discipline I'd need to train (he thought I could become a monk in my 60s), he'd probably run screaming. We said our cordial goodbyes, during which I snapped the image below (he's in mid-speech). We shook hands several times, Western-style. While I did feel a slight twinge of impatience while the metaphysical lecture was going on, I could also see that the holy man thought this was important, and that he saw my potential as a possible kindred spirit, even if I do disappear when he dies.

I heard the monk talking loudly about me to a random female cyclist as we walked away from each other—him back to his temple and me to Hanam-eup. As his voice faded in the distance, I could hear adjectives like "great" and "wonderful" as he gushed about our "conversation." A few minutes later, the woman rode past me and said a deliberate "hello" as she passed. To my relief, she didn't try to engage me in metaphysical conversation; she'd have been disappointed by how ineptly pedestrian I really am.

The rest of the walk involved no more monastic interlocutors, but there were a couple of cats and one dog, all of whom stared at me meaningfully, each for its own reasons. Before I'd met the monk, I'd killed a large wasp, so I had that on my conscience for a while. 

Crossing the bridge into town took forever, but here I am, ensconced in my motel. I need to be up early for tomorrow's walk, and I'm looking forward to stuffing my gullet with fried chicken and Korean-style Chinese food. Does the universe disappear every time a chicken dies?

ADDENDUM: forgot to mention that today was the segment where I passed by the supposedly famous hackberry tree that commenter Paul had mentioned a year or so ago. The area downhill from the tree was filled with park golfers. Goddammit.

PHOTO ESSAY