Ridgeline subscribers —

The first and only memory I have of a teacher of mine performing something resembling a stand-up routine was in eleventh grade. My AP bio teacher, Mr. Abelon, came back from a few sick days and explained, in graphic detail, what his recent passing of a kidney stone had been like. I had never heard of such a thing, this so-called “kidney stone.” Maybe it’s because I have a penis, but the thought of “passing” a “stone” (of any size) that was created in my kidneys (!!), down the ureter, into the bladder, through the urethra, and out that hole at the end of said penis … well, that left an immutable impression.

“Never,” Abelon explained, “get a kidney stone.” As if we had some say in the matter. He described his last few days as “crawling on the floor eating the linoleum,” an image I was never able to shake. I mean, it was funny, his dead-pan dry delivery. Abelon was the funniest adult I had met in my life up until that point. It was like having David Letterman as your teacher. But smarter and more generous than Dave. This guy had gone to Harvard and was oozing brilliance and sensible ambition and his being at my high school was more miraculous and bizarre than you could possibly imagine. It was like an alien descending from the cosmos with knowledge of culture and humor none of us had access to. He was — not effectively, but actually — doing volunteer work, and our shambled public school was where that work was happening. (He could have worked at any school in the country, and yet he chose ours — precisely because it was in a bad way.) In the moment, I don’t think we all fully grokked just how lucky we were to have him, but there was an inkling of magic, of luck, and in hindsight, he may have been one of the most important adults for many of our childhoods.

Fast-forward thirty years. Two weeks ago I was depleted (as usual) by the big move and by my inability to chill when I’m not out on a big walk. I’m terrible at “taking a vacation.” I’m so bad at it, that I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually taken one. Like: truly having taken time off that wasn’t thrust upon me by illness or some external force. So it was, I thought: Huh, why don’t I escape up to Karuizawa for three or four days. I love Karuizawa. Sure, there are some annoying tourist bits, but I love that the homes up there are a mix of derelict cabins, modernist glass and concrete architectural gems, and classic American simulacrums. The zoning is such that you can only build a house on 20-30% of the land, so everyone has giant yards. It feels utterly un-Japan, ur-Americana, the yard-having. Walking the back roads feels like walking in some split-timeline leafy New England. It’s surreal. Even the weather is New Englandy. The area’s history with foreigners and Christianity is fascinating. But most importantly, Karuizawa is at elevation. And because of that, it’s 5-10℃ cooler than Tokyo (and, maybe even more critically, less humid), and us Tokyo folk had been in a tunnel of heat-pain for most of June and all of July.

Up I went on the Shinkansen. Just an hour. Easy-peasy. I checked into my beloved (but now quite overpriced; it was about 1/3 the current price ten years ago (it was probably underpriced then)) Manpei Hotel, and had a great first day walking the woods, marveling at homes, reading books in cafés, and catching up on a bunch of writing. Wow, was this an actual … day off? The plan the next day was to walk up the old Nakasendō which cuts right behind the hotel. Walk up to Usui Pass, straddle the border between Nagano and Gunma, eat some soba looking out at the mountains, read a bit more, and be supremely offline in recharge mode.

Well, my body had other plans. At 5 a.m. I was awoken by what I thought was a muscle spasm. I had done some kettle bell swings the day before and thought: Oh Christ, new middle age pains. But, quickly it became obvious it was not a muscle ache. The pain began to radiate more and more bizarrely, more diffusely, coming out of some lower-back left-hand quadrant of my body. I broke out into a cold sweat. I’ve never broken out into a cold sweat. I thought I was going to throw up. I commando-crawl-rolled (I couldn’t stand, so intense was the pain), phone in hand, into the bathroom. On the cool tile of the floor, curled up around the toilet I furiously … chatted with ChatGPT. It was five in the morning and I wasn’t going to wake someone up; and I wasn’t going to call an ambulance just yet. Sure it felt like am emergency, but I wasn’t yet convinced. Weird pains come with a huge dollop of denial in the beginning. No, no, this can’t be something that might actually kill me.

The pain was so wild and all consuming I was yelping. I had never yelped from anything before. I thought maybe my appendix had ruptured. I thought of all the researchers working on, like, the North Pole, and how they preemptively have their appendices removed precisely to avoid sad deaths at the end of the known earth. But no, ChatGPT assured me the location was off. (I had no idea where an appendix lay, turns out it’s pretty central.) And then I realized I was: On the floor. Eating the linoleum, so to speak. Abelon came back in a flash and … no … it couldn’t be … thirty years later, had the stony chicken finally come to roost? Yes, ChatGPT confirmed, we’re almost 100% sure: It’s a kidney stone.

You might think I’m insane to use ChatGPT in a moment like this, but I think this will be more and more common. (It’s already more common than you think.) It’s like having a “knowledgeable dad” on your team. I know — that sounds unhinged, but it’s true. As we chatted, and I tried not vomit all over the floor, the cold-sweats died down, and the pain subsided, and I was able to crawl back to bed. Whatever had just happened had wiped me out, and I fell back asleep almost instantly, thinking — just as I winked out of consciousness — that it would be nice to not die alone in this fancy hotel room.

I woke up a few hours later, a bit freaked out but not in pain. Chatted with some friends, not robots. They sensibly told me to go to the hospital. (To be fair, so did ChatGPT.) So much for a vacation. I grabbed a cab to the local emergency room and within about ninety minutes had been CT scanned and blood drawn and tested. Sure enough, a 2.5mm stone was working its way down my ureter from the left kidney. The doctor chuckled. There was nothing to be done. You’d just have to pee it out, eventually. “You might not even notice!” he said with unexpected cheer.

The hospital scans and tests cost me a whopping seventy-five bucks. The hospital was efficient and put my mind at ease. I walked back to town. I was feeling good, alive, I wanted to move my body. Just a kidney stone! Ha! Far better than internal organs exploding or a suddenly terrible terminal diagnosis. I walked back into town and holed up on the balcony of a café and read and read wondering what would happen if the thing moved again while I was outdoors. In that moment, it wasn’t moving. I was hoping the moving was done.

Well, the moving wasn’t done. The next morning Benji moved some more (I had named it Benji by this point). If I was yelping the other day, I was screaming now. Women who’ve had children and kidney stones report that pushing a watermelon out of their crotch is the less painful of the two activities. I felt honored to commiserate on some cosmic pain scale with women. Off I was, crawling once again, to try and get some water. Crawling, eating the linoleum, and yelping and screaming and also laughing. It was just so absurd. The waves of all-consuming pain. I started to go into “vipassanna mode” — to, you know, man, just observe the pain with equanimity. Screw equanimity. Equanimity can eat a kidney stone. As nutty as it sounds, because I knew it was “just” a kidney stone, it was, dare I say … possible to “enjoy” the experience. Just in the sense of knowing it wasn’t going to kill me, and it wasn’t portentous of something else terrible. And it would eventually pass. OK! This is a lot of pain! Wow! This is an intriguing amount of pain! That sort of thing, while yelping.

In the end, the pain stopped. Banji made it to my bladder. And then for four days I felt like a little troll was constantly punching me in the gut. I had to pee all the time. Banji was irritating the bladder. I could deal with that. It meant progress. It meant we were beyond the linoleum phase. Then, suddenly, without much warning, out he popped, like a cork. A penis cork with a name. I fished the spiny nugget — the little mineral chunk of doom (my GP wants to analyze it) — out of the toilet and marveled at how such a small thing could be the harbinger of so much suffering. It felt like a shard of glass between the fingers, and shattered into three tinier pieces when I put it into a ziplock baggie.

So, did I “take a break” or “take a vacation” in the end? Not really. But I did remember Abelon, a guy I miss. He died of pancreatic cancer a few years after we graduated. This whole episode got me to go back and dig through our emails. I wish I had sent him more (it’s telling that he’s the only teacher I’ve ever emailed; clearly I was proud of the work I was doing and wanted to share it with him as a kind of thanks).

He had this very bizarre, no-caps style of emailing with deliberately wacky grammar. He asked me to “remind me why you be in japan,” and on his cancer treatments, “i go to new york every other week for the magic bullet and during the off-weeks i get poisoned by hartford hospital.” Complaining about health insurance feels like such a contemporary protest, but here he is back in 2004: “how can people do this without insurance? we are so screwed in this country. and no one cares. at all! and i feel so powerless about it. well…so it goes.” He ended almost every email with “so it goes,” which makes sense since he felt like a spiritual brother of Vonnegut as much as anyone could. He was planning on retiring in 2005, moving to San Diego, about which he described his future condo: “urban, actually. so, unlike most californians, i will not need my car to go buy a cigarette.” He was one of those teachers who smoked (and often got in trouble for smoking indoors), pack in his breast pocket, giant glasses, huge flop of a comb over that was forever falling down and had to be thrust back up and over his bright pate. He was a constellation of no-shits given about the usual boring things (haircuts, for example), and all the shits given about students, education, equity, and honor. Of course, it’s the people like this that get pancreatic cancer. So it goes.

We only emailed for about a year before he passed. “i take a lot of percodan or something for the pain..doesn’t do anything for the hurt, but makes me feel just fine, thank you.” He had a cat, Max, who for some reason was a recurring character in our classes. He bowled (the cat), as recurring joke lore. Max had recently passed. On that he wrote: “it’s quiet here without max, but i manage. his bowling buddies had a really nice memorial service for him at south windsor bowl after his passing. cats came from all over, so to speak.”

As I read my own emails to him (often written at two in the morning), I can see a young guy really trying to be the best version of himself still at the start (and thinking I was leaving soon) of what has turned into a twenty-five-year adventure. It’s weirdly moving.

I think the kidney stone actually took root during my move last month. No AC, sweating my brains out for days on end. Not drinking nearly enough water. High stress. Sounds like a fine environment for a little piece of pain to get made.

Anyway, you should go to Karuizawa and walk around. (This is the “walking newsletter” after all.) It’s lovely up there, in the summer and maybe even better in the winter (no leeches). As long as it isn’t snowing, you can walk down the eastern side of the mountain range, past Usui Pass, down to Yokokawa Station. Next door, Oginoya serves a great ekiben served in a ceramic bowl which you can take home. I have a few. They’re perfect for eating yogurt out of. And along the whole route (until you get to Oginoya): not a patch of linoleum in sight.

C