Super Cub Volume 1 Chapter 46 - Mountain Pass

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After leaving Gotemba, Koguma looked at the digital watch on her left wrist.

She left her home in Hokuto just before noon and drove here, fixing a flat tire on someone else’s Cub along the way, but it wasn’t even three o’clock yet.

As far as she could see from the map, once she crossed Hakone, reached the prefectural border and went out to Odawara, all she had to do was to drive on the straight road along the sea.

Thanks to riding her Cub to all kinds of places while relying on a map of the country and a road map she got from a highway, she was able to predict the approximate riding time just by looking at the map.

Even anticipating the time to spare, she estimated that it would take about two hours to get to the school trip accommodations, and thought a little about what she would do once she got there.

She wondered if the ryokan that was scheduled to host the students on the school trip would welcome a student who arrived on a scooter a few hours earlier than that. 

It would be nice if she could be let into her room a step early and get into the bath after taking a break with the ryokan’s teacakes, but since it was still before check-in time, she might be curtly turned away.

If that happened, she would have to kill time somewhere. It wasn’t very pleasant to waste time with no purpose or enjoyment when you had taken the trouble to go on a long ride on a Cub. 

The distance from the gas station nearest to her home in Hokuto to this point was a little over 100km. She still had almost half of the gas that she thought she would use up on the way to Kamakura.

Originally, the purpose of this Cub touring was to follow the school trip bus and join it on the way. While her classmates were doing the scheduled tour of the temples of Kamakura on the first day of the trip, Koguma wanted to enjoy a solo trip in her own way.

As she was riding around, she wondered if there was anywhere she could go that would be interesting to her, and she saw signs for several museums in the Hakone area.

She was not in the mood to enjoy looking at art, and she didn’t want to spend a lot of money. Koguma turned off the engine of her Cub that had stopped at a red light, pulled it over to the side of the road, pushed it across the crosswalk by hand, and then rode right into the opposite lane.

Koguma turned back in the opposite direction of the road she had been riding on just a moment ago. Her destination was the large mountain she could see just out of the corner of her eye.

It took her about thirty minutes to reach her destination, heading north on Route 138, which was straight and easy to ride on with no inclines, but very congested.

This was the Subashiri trailhead for Mount Fuji. If you drove straight on this road, you would reach the 5th Station.

This was the path Reiko attempted this summer, and then used up all her strength before she could reach the peak. Since Koguma had said she could climb it on her Cub, she wanted to know at least one part of the mountain Reiko had climbed, even if it was just a side trip. 

The new 5th Station at Fujinomiya was higher in altitude, but it was at the end of the Fuji Skyline, so there was a fee and mopeds weren’t allowed to enter. This one was free.

Passing through Subashiri’s small urban area, Koguma began to take on the trail.

She climbed an incline with the JGSDF’s Fuji school on her left.

The Cub stalled due to the resistance of the incline, and she was only able to travel a little over 50km, but the pavement was neat and flat and she was able to ride smoothly on a road where she didn’t see many other vehicles.

Koguma had thought that this would be a cakewalk for a Cub, but then she noticed she was going slower and slower.

Unlike the steep slopes in the city, on a mountain road where everything was sloping and there was nothing to compare it to, she didn’t notice the slope of the road she was riding on, but it seemed to be very steep. As the speed of her bike dropped to 30km/h, she dropped the third gear from the top to second gear.

The road sign announced that she had reached the 3rd Station, and the road almost became a straight road with only turns. The engine of her Cub, which had been loud noises in second gear, screamed and began to stall again.

Right before the 4th Station, Koguma changed to first gear, which was only used when starting out. The Cub was barely moving forward at a speed that would make a human jog. 

Before she knew it, Koguma was gasping for breath in sync with the engine. Sweat poured down her face even though she was only twisting the accelerator in the cool highlands.

She wondered if she would finally reach her limit even at first gear, or if she would turn tail and run away. Koguma recalled Reiko’s words. The first gear on a Cub was for climbing every slope in Japan.

Reiko had told her a story where when she had been traversing a severe mountain road on an off-road bike, there had been an old man who came on his Cub to pick wild plants there. Apparently in hilly cities like Onomichi and Nagasaki, delivery Cubs came every day to the houses at the end of slopes that cars couldn’t climb.

Koguma rode at a crawl, trusting in her Cub’s engine, body, and the first gear. Finally, the end was in sight.

The forest on either side of her opened up and became brighter, and the Cub reached the end of the Subashiri Trail.

Koguma parked her Cub in the parking lot, took off her helmet, and took in deep breaths. She got off her Cub and walked around. She tried to look down at the landscape below her, but couldn’t see anything with all the clouds. But more than that, when she saw that the ground was covered in fine dark grey stones, she really felt that she had arrived at the heights, as she was used to seeing the red clay of the Kanto Koshin’etsu region.

After taking a break with some tea, Koguma started the engine of the Cub and headed back the way she came.

Before leaving the parking lot, Koguma looked back. The entrance to the hiking trail and the bulldozer trail next to it. The paths that reached all the way to the top of Mount Fuji. 

While staring at the path Reiko had taken, Koguma thought that the next time she came here, she would climb higher.

“I’ll let you go for today.”

She laughed to herself at the bluffing words that came out of her mouth.

She swallowed down her saliva many times to suppress the pain in her ears caused by the difference in air pressure as she descended the comfortable downward slope that was completely different from the uphill journey.

After returning to the national highway, Koguma headed for the mountains of Hakone via Gotemba City once again.

She was no longer afraid to traverse the mountain pass that had made her so nervous earlier.

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