Republic of Korea (2)
The old Seoul wall rings a central slice of the city that looks modest on the map and anywhere else would count as a large city in itself. Its lower courses tend to be buried under modern streets, but wherever there’s a hill, files of white stone will appear to climb it—rectangular with pointed cornices and small square openings, and winding back and forth like a dragon’s backbone. Threads of park run alongside it, and walking trails that can be hard to locate because pine and cypress groves hide them from the streets below. I enter twisted streets with that sewer-garbage smell of Barcelona (unusual in this generally clean city), pass between a park and hospital, and suddenly I’ve found my entrance and am lifted out of the city into slopes of pale purple wildflowers, with the wall on my left and magpies chattering everywhere, scruffier and with sharper beaks than the Euro-American kind, wings an especially brilliant blue.
The wall runs right over the mountain summits and my path takes me up Inwangsan, where after a point the trees give out and you find yourself scrambling up the glaring peaks of the moon. It might be the early sun that makes this mountain feel so much more strenuous than others I’ve climbed of late; it might be that the grade simply doesn’t let up. By this time there are a good many other hikers, lots of them with Republic of Korea flags stuck in their packs, which gives our procession a sense of endeavor and purpose. We're discovering the moon together.
The summit is a lone sun-blasted boulder. I reach and acknowledge it, and dizzy and thirsty, find the nearest trees in the lee of the wall. In my pack I have a protein bar and the Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, which includes a magisterial prose poem by Cheong Chiyong about a climb up Paengnokdam. I am not meeting that standard. But I sit on a square rock in the pine grove, and make these notes in mind of some far away.
