The smallest Mount Fuji I saw while I was in Japan was in the backyard of a Shinto shrine that sits next to a Tokyo fire station and across the street from a grocery store where you can buy sake in a box and $18 cantaloupes. The shrine is called Ono-Terusaki, and the little Mount Fuji in its backyard is called Fujizuko, and they are located in Shitaya, an unfancy low-rise neighborhood you would never visit unless you were looking for miniature mountains. I went to see Fujizuko on a blazing hot July Sunday when the sky was the color of cement and the air was so thick it felt woolly. The real Mount Fuji is only 60 miles from Tokyo, but the scrim of smog around the city cut off the view. No one was on the streets of Shitaya that morning, and all the houses were perfectly still except for a few damp kimonos flapping on balcony clotheslines. I wandered around the neighborhood for half an hour before I finally found the shrine, a homely ninth-century building dedicated to a scholar of Chinese classics who died in a.d. 852 and was said to have enjoyed landscapes. I walked around to the back of the shrine, and there I came upon the mountain. It was made of blackish lava chunks and was shaped like a piece of pie propped up on its wide end, exactly like the real Mount Fuji, only this Fuji was about 16 feet high, whereas the real one is 12,388. Someone who really liked Mount Fuji built the mountain in 1828. The mountain was flanked by a pair of stone monkey-faced dog-lions, and there was a sign that said, fujizuko is a miniature mountain that an imitation man made in the image of mount fuji. this precious mound is preserved on good conditions.

I looked at the mountain for a while and rang a doorbell, and after a moment a student priest came out and gave me a look. He was dressed in a snow-white robe and slippers and had kissy lips and a grave handsome face. He didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Japanese, so we just smiled at each other until a middle-aged gentleman who was also visiting the shrine said he would attempt to translate for the priest. The gentleman said that the priest said that there was a time when Japan was not in order and people felt a pain about the abusement of the land, and there were problems, lots of problems, with the gods, or maybe it was problems with the crops, but anyway then a man went climbing Mount Fuji and by climbing he tried to make the world in order and he prayed many crops or gods would come in good condition and then the world of Japan became in order and through his feelings he built the mountain. As the gentleman was translating I felt a profound sense of mystery and confusion in my very own mind but I also sort of understood what he was trying to say. I then asked the gentleman to ask the priest if he had ever climbed the full-scale Mount Fuji. The priest giggled and shook his head, so I asked whether the priest planned to climb it anytime in the future. The two men chatted for a minute. At last the gentleman turned to me and shrugged his shoulders and said, “I believe he says, ‘No way.'”

The reasons people don’t climb mount Fuji are various. Sometimes they just forget to do it. There is approximately one Japanese cab driver in New York City, where I live, and he is one of the people who happens to have forgotten. He also happened to be the cab driver who took me to the airport for my flight to Japan. He was driving a new nice-smelling Honda minivan cab and had a silver Mount Fuji key chain swinging from the ignition. He became excited when I told him I was going to Japan to climb Mount Fuji. He said that he had always planned to do it himself but then he kept forgetting and the next thing he knew he had moved permanently to the United States.

Sometimes the reasons people have for not climbing are more existential than forgetful. When I first got to Tokyo I went to visit Kunio Kaneko, an artist who makes woodblock prints of Mount Fuji. At his studio, every wall was hung with his pictures of the mountain — in indigo blue, in orangy-red, covered with gold leaf, outlined with silver ink. There were drawers full of Fuji prints and racks of note cards of Fujis and one wall with pictures of kimonos and happi coats and those traditional Japanese wooden platform sandals that make you walk like you’re drunk. Kaneko is in his late forties and has longish hair and broad shoulders, and he was wearing beat-up khakis and green Converse sneakers. He spread his pictures out for me to see and told me that he divided his life into two: the years before 1964, when the air was still see-through and Fuji was always visible from his backyard in Tokyo, and the post-1964 years, when pollution got so bad that he almost never saw Fuji except on rare stainless winter days. Kaneko said that he thought about the mountain all the time. Since he seemed slightly outdoorsy and had devoted so much of his work to the mountain, I assumed that he had climbed it, maybe even several times. When I asked him about it, he looked bashful and replied, “No, I have never climbed it.” He shuffled together some of his prints and slid them into a drawer. “I always stay at a distance at the bottom so I have a perfect view,” he said. “I don’t climb it because if I were on the mountain I couldn’t see it.”

There are lots of reasons the Japanese do climb Mount Fuji. They climb it because it’s tall and pretty and has a grand view, because some of them think God lives inside it, because their grandparents climbed it, or because climbing Mount Fuji has been the customary Japanese thing to do for as long as anyone can remember. In a way, the enduring attraction of a Mount Fuji pilgrimage is a remarkable thing. The Japanese have always revered their landscape and scenery, but they seem perfectly at peace with fake nature, too-only in Japan can you can surf at an indoor beach and ski on an indoor slope and stroll through exhaustively manipulated and modulated gardens of groomed pebbles and dwarfed trees and precisely arranged leaves. Sometimes it seems that the man-made Japan has eclipsed the country’s original physical being. Still, the symbolism and reality of Mount Fuji remain. The mountain may have pay phones on the summit and its own brand of beer, but otherwise it persists as a wild and messy and uncontrollable place-big, old-fashioned, and extreme. That is, nothing like what I expected Japan to be. I wanted to go to Mount Fuji because I imagined it would be a trip to the un-Japan, a country I wasn’t sure even existed anymore except in nostalgic dreams.

It was a terrible year to climb Fuji, really. The official climbing season opens July 1 with a ceremony at the base of the mountain in the Sengen Jinja shrine, and usually thousands of climbers would attend the ceremony and ascend the mountain that day. Some would be dressed in traditional pilgrim costumes: white kimonos and pants, straw waraji sandals, a mushroom-shaped hat, a walking stick. Most of the rest would be in Gore-Tex and T-shirts saying mount fuji: the most highest mountain in japan and welcome to mellow village and joyful my scene morning bunny mount fuji. In Tokyo that same day, less ambitious climbers hold another ceremony at the Ono-Terusaki Shrine and scramble up all 16 feet of the miniature Fuji; similar observances would take place at each of the 40 or so other miniature Mount Fujis in greater Tokyo. But this was the summer of ghastly weather in Japan. In the weeks before opening day two typhoons passed through; the first one hit Tokyo and raked across Fuji, covering the climbing routes with snow and filling the access roads with mud and rocks, while the tail end of the second typhoon added to the mess on the mountain. The opening ceremony was held but was sparsely attended, and access to Fuji itself was postponed until July 10, then postponed again for another 24 hours. The day I arrived in Japan the tanker Diamond Grace had run aground and was bleeding crude oil into Tokyo Bay. In the south yet another storm struck, and on the island of Kyushu mud slides killed almost two dozen people. In Tokyo a heat wave jacked the temperature above 100 degrees, and everyone walked around looking broiled and stoic, dabbing their foreheads with washcloths and flapping lacquer fans. I was so hot that I had to hide from the sun every afternoon in my hotel room. I would fall in a heap onto my futon and crack open a Kirin Beer and turn on a Japanese program called Jungle TV, which was hosted by two guys who did things like race each other on rowing machines while wearing business suits and teach themselves to cook bouillabaisse while being harassed by a pet monkey. I started wondering why exactly I wanted to climb Mount Fuji, but I did, and even after an earthquake bounced me around my hotel room I was still good to go.

Mount Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan. Its peak is nearly two and a half miles above sea level, and its base has a circumference of 78 miles and spans both Yamanashi Prefecture and Shizuoka Prefecture. The mountain is a 10,000-year-old volcanic cone that last erupted in 1707. Scientists believe it is dormant rather than extinct. A nearby mountain named Yatsugatake used to be higher than Fuji, but then the jealous and bellicose Fuji goddess Konohanasakuya-hime decided to knock over Yatsugatake so Fuji could be supreme. The first documented ascent of the mountain was made by a Shintoist pilgrim named En no Ozunu in the eighth century; the first Westerner to climb was Sir Rutherford Alcock, the British consul, who ascended in 1860 with his Scottie dog Toby. The world’s oldest mountain-climbing picture, painted in the fifteenth century, depicts monks climbing Mount Fuji. Only religious pilgrims were allowed to climb until the nineteenth century; women were not allowed at all until 1871. Fuji’s six climbing routes are divided into stations; the route I planned to take has ten. The Fuji Subaru highway to the Fifth Station was opened in 1965, and with it came millions of visitors by tour bus and subsequently tons of trash and erosion problems that continue to threaten the mountain. Mount Fuji is so pretty and so weirdly symmetrical that people have always believed it was supernatural and sanctified. The most fervent Fuji worshipers are the members of the Shintoist sect Fuji-ko, whose founder, the sixteenth-century monk Fujiwara no Kakugyo, supposedly climbed Fuji 128 times and lived to be 106 years old. Fuji-ko pilgrims stay in special shrine lodges at the base of the mountain, wash themselves in the purifying water of the five lakes nearby, get blessed by a priest, and then time their ascent so that they arrive at the summit at sunrise. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as many as 10,000 Fuji-ko would climb each year, but these days they are far outnumbered by ordinary Japanese and tourists.

Before I left for Japan I obtained an introduction to a man in Tokyo named Fumiaki Watanabe, who was going to have me over for dinner as part of an official international friendliness program. All I knew about him was that he was recently retired from his position as an internal auditor at an Exxon subsidiary. The minute he heard from our intermediary that I was planning to climb Fuji he proposed skipping the dinner and instead going with me on the climb. This to me was a huge surprise. I kept being told that every year half a million people drive to the Fifth Station of Fuji and 200,000 climb to the summit, but so far I hadn’t managed to find a single person who had done either. I was starting to wonder how much of the Japanese devotion to climbing Mount Fuji is abstract and conceptual and how much of it involves the material experience of putting on shoes and walking. It turned out that Mr. Watanabe was a materially experienced climber. He had climbed Fuji more than ten times, had skied into its crater and down its side, and was 70 percent of the way to his goal of climbing the hundred highest peaks in Japan.

It was decided that Mr. Watanabe and I would climb together but that our dinner would go ahead as planned, and one evening I rode the subway to the southern edge of Tokyo, where he and his wife and son live. He met me at the station and almost without a word gestured toward the exit. He walked quickly, pushing his bicycle, which like every Japanese bicycle I saw was low-built and sturdy, like a fifties Schwinn, and had a plastic bag wrapped around its seat. Mr. Watanabe was low-built and sturdy himself, with a baldish head and bright eyes and a small, solid body. In the very best possible way he looked a little like Jiminy Cricket. That night we spoke about the beautiful dinner Mrs. Watanabe had made for us, about the differences between Americans and Japanese, about how tradition in both countries is melting away. Mrs. Watanabe was wearing Western-style casual clothes, but she decided to show me the formal kimono that she said she hardly ever wears anymore. Once she brought it out she decided to dress me in it. The kimono was cool and silky and as heavy as water. It required special underwear with multiple belts and bows, and had a wide sash tied over a pillow that sits in the small of your back. It took about 15 minutes to get the whole thing on. Then, as I sat there trussed up like a fancy turkey, Mr. Watanabe began laying out his plans for our climb.

We left two days later on a bus that threaded through the steep hills and rice fields between Tokyo and Fujiyoshida, the town at the base of the mountain where we were going to spend our first night. The bus was full of vacationers carrying take-out bento-box lunches and overnight bags. Mr. Watanabe brought a big rucksack and was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, a gray pinstriped vest, wool knickers, and hiking boots with bright red laces. The boots looked well-worn. He said that he managed to go climbing about ten times a year. I wondered whether he was going more often now that he had retired. “Yes, I have had the opportunity,” he said. He shifted in his seat. Everything he said sounded measured and elegant. “My plan is to now climb the highest peak on each continent. I would begin with Kilimanjaro, then Aconcagua, and then, of course, McKinley.”

“Will you start soon?”

He lifted an eyebrow and said, “Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, I believe alone,” he said. “To tell the truth, Mrs. Watanabe has a problem because she becomes very…tired. She also walks a bit slower than a…normal person.” He paused again and then added, “I believe I should learn to be more patient.”

Entering Fujiyoshida, you pass a McDonald’s and a pachinko gambling parlor and then a Mount Fuji made of flowers-a mound of red salvia and impatiens in pink and white. Just beyond it was the famous Fuji Sengen Jinja shrine. The long pathway to the shrine was dim and unearthly and lined with stone lanterns and tall red trees. Mr. Watanabe said the trees were called fujitarosugi, which translates as “boy cedar tree of Fuji.” There are thousands of cedars encircling the mountain, forming what people call the Sea of Trees or the Forest of No Return. This forest is one of the most popular places in Japan to commit suicide — every year several dozen bodies are recovered in it — and it is one of the most popular places to headquarter a religion. There are almost 2,000 officially registered religious organizations located around the base of the mountain, including a number of Nichiren Buddhist sects, the faith-healing Ho no Hana Sanpogyo group, and the ancestor-revering Fumyokai Kyodan religion. Until it was evicted recently, the subway-gassing Aum Shinri Kyo cult had its headquarters here, too.

We stopped at the Fuji Sengen Jinja shrine and walked under the boy cedar trees to the main structure, an ornate building made of reddish wood that had been slicked to a dull shine by the drizzle. The place was deserted except for a little boy who was studying his reflection in a puddle and a priest who was padding around in his white tabi socks, closing up for the day. The priest was in a hurry to leave but he agreed to give us a condensed version of the traditional Shinto preclimb blessing. He motioned for us to stand in front of the shrine. As he chanted and banged on a small brass drum, the rain began to patter and a gust flicked the water in the trees onto the ground.

We finally arrived at our hotel, a Western-style high-rise building that had its own amusement park, called Fujikyu Highland, whose attractions included a Ferris wheel and the highest roller coaster in Japan. On the hotel grounds there is a perfect 1:200 scale model of Mount Fuji and the five lakes to the north; guests can climb the small mountain and also visit the Mount Fuji museum located inside the artificial peak. The enormous picture windows in the hotel lobby would have offered a staggering view of the real Fuji if the weather had been clear, but it wasn’t, so that night after dinner we sat in the lobby and gazed in the direction of the rain-shrouded Fuji, over the top of the scale-model Fuji, to an outline of Fuji made of neon glowing in the spokes of the Ferris wheel. You can walk up Mount Fuji, or you can run up (the Mount Fuji Climbing Race has been held every year since 1948), or you can roll up in a wheelchair (first done in 1978), or you can wait to go up until you’re really old (as old as Ichijiro “Super Grandpa” Araya, who climbed it when he was 100, or Hulda “Grandma Whitney” Crooks, who did it at 91). Or you can ride a horse to the Seventh Station, the rental horse drop-off point, and then walk the rest of the way. The next morning, as Mr. Watanabe and I were sitting in a cold mist at the Fifth Station getting ready for the climb, a horse rental guy walked over and introduced me to his pony, Nice Child. The guy was wearing a Budweiser hat and rubber boots that had articulated toes. Nice Child looked like a four-legged easy chair, and I was really tempted to take the man up on his suggestion that I ride rather than walk. It was a lousy day to climb a mountain. Many of the pilgrims at the trailhead were wearing garbage bags, and the only scenery we could see was the Fifth Station gift shop and a cigarette vending machine that had the phrase today i smoke printed on it at least a hundred times. “I believe only crazies will be climbing today,” Mr. Watanabe said, looking at a group of climbers who were eating rice balls and hot dogs and shouting at one another.

After Mr. Watanabe talked me out of renting Nice Child, I put on my pack and tightened my laces and went into the gift shop and bought a traditional pilgrim’s walking stick — plain and squared-off, with jingle bells hanging from the top to ward off evil spirits and plenty of room for yakiin, the brands you can get burned onto your stick at each station along the way to the top. I also wanted to buy the Fuji-shaped cookies or cheesecakes or bean-paste patties or jellies, or the Milk Pie biscuits in a box that said, fujisan: nature is a great existence. if you become angry or nervous hold communion with nature. The trouble was I’d already picked up some eel jerky and some octopus jerky at a 7-Eleven near the hotel.

We planned to climb to the Eighth Station by sunset, spend the evening in a mountain hut, and wake up at 2 a.m. to finish the climb so we would reach the summit by sunrise. We had reserved space at a hut called Fuji-san Hotel. From the sound of the name I thought maybe it was a luxury hut, but Mr. Watanabe rolled his eyes and assured me that all the accommodations on the mountain were more hut than hotel. “Do you know how silkworms live?” he asked. “They live on wooden shelves. That is what the huts are like — silkworm shelves.”

I was taken aback. “You mean the huts are infested?”

“No,” Mr. Watanabe replied, “the huts have shelves, and we are the worms.”

I walked a few feet behind him, stepping on and around nubbly black lava rocks and loose pebbles of red pumice. The terrain was sheer and treeless. On a sunny day it would have been beastly. Rock larks flitted around, and green weeds grew under some of the overhangs, but otherwise the mountainside was blank. After about an hour I started wondering where one would relieve oneself in such a lunar landscape. “We will be at the Sixth Station in just a few more minutes,” Mr. Watanabe said. He hesitated for a moment, pressed his finger to his lips and then said, “There you will find a cozy adjacent hut.” In a few minutes we did in fact reach the station, a big wooden lean-to hut with a cozy adjacent unisex hut beside it, both clinging to the mountainside like barnacles. Inside the big hut you could get your walking stick branded and buy crackers and souvenirs and any one of a dozen brands of beer, as well as a $12 canister of Mount Fuji Congratulations Do It Now Oxygen. About 40 climbers were milling around, dripping and sweating and gobbling snacks. One delicate-looking older woman dressed in what looked like pajamas was taking gulps from a canister of oxygen, and the man with her alternated gulps of oxygen with swigs of beer. Four U.S. Navy enlisted men came into the hut. They seemed quite excited. “Hey!” one of them hollered. “Anyone got any sake?” I went outside on the deck, where a bunch of Chinese students were eating dried fish and cookies and taking snapshots of one another. Two of them were speaking to each other on their cellular phones and were shrieking ecstatically. One of the Chinese girls came over to me and gasped,”We are wanting to speak Japanese! We are wanting to speak English! But our heads are filled with Japanese!”

Mr. Watanabe wanted to push ahead, so we soon left and plodded up the jagged trail for another hour. By then the clouds had broken up, and below them we could see a big green patch that Mr. Watanabe said was a Japanese Self-Defense Forces training ground and some of the 117 golf courses that lie at the base of the mountain. I wanted to look at the view for a while, but the trail was getting clogged with other climbers, so we turned and continued. We beat the Chinese students to the Seventh Station and went in to get my walking stick branded. The stationmaster was a young man with bristly black hair and bright-red cheeks. He motioned me over to a fire that was burning in the center of the hut and then pulled out a branding iron that had been heating in it. After I paid $2, he branded my stick with his symbol — some Japanese characters and a drawing of Fuji. Then he told me he’d been working at the hut for 20 years and that he was the sixth generation of his family to run it. In the winter he works at a gas station. During the two-month-long climbing season he leaves his wife and children in the flatlands and comes to the Seventh Station with his mother, and they don’t go back down until after the Yoshida Fire Festival, which marks the season’s close. On a busy day he brands the sticks of 600 climbers. On a slow day, he said, he gets lonely. Mr. Watanabe and I reached the Eighth Station two hours later. That is, we got to the first of the seven Eighth Stations. The seven Eighth Stations are strung out along about an hour’s worth of trail. All of the stations on Fuji are family businesses that have had the same owners for a hundred years or more, and they enjoy the spirited competition of the free-market system. The first Eighth Station calls itself The Authentic Eighth Station; the second one calls itself Originator of the Eighth Station; the third is The Real Eighth Station. As it happened, our Eighth Station, the nonluxurious Fuji-san Hotel, was the seventh of the Eighth Stations. By the time we wended our way past the preceding six stations it was dusky, and I was eager for dinner and the use of a cozy adjacent hut. The Fuji-san stationmaster was a jolly guy with a mustache and tobacco-stained fingers. When we arrived he and a few friends were sitting inside the hut watching the Yankees game in which Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu made his debut. The television and a fire were the hut’s sole amenities. Otherwise it was outfitted with a couple of wooden benches in the main room and, in another, two levels of wooden platforms that formed a communal bunk bed — the silkworm shelves. Mr. Watanabe grinned when he saw me surveying the quarters. “On the mountain for women it is very… harsh,” he said. “I believe the goddess of Fuji was said to be very jealous and did not favor women climbers.”

Because of the lousy weather, the mountain was unusually quiet that night. Typically there would have been about a hundred people at the hotel, but instead there were only two young Sony employees from Nagasaki and three of the stationmaster’s friends. The Sony men went to sleep almost immediately. The rest of us ate a dinner of rice and then tried to warm up by the fire next to the television set. I stepped outside to see what I could see from 11,000 feet up. It was a cold, black night, and the cloud cover was still cracked open; below I could see the little lights of Fujiyoshida and the carnival neon of the Fujikyu Highland Ferris wheel.

After I went back inside, Mr. Watanabe offered everyone refreshments: banana chips and cocktails of Johnnie Walker Black and Takara Multi-Vitamin Water. “Very healthy,” he said to me, holding up a can of Takara Water and a plastic cup. “It has many important minerals. Please, allow me to give you some.” The stationmaster’s friends introduced themselves as Boss-o Guide-o, Guide-o Carpenter-o, and Mr. Shinto Priest. Boss-o explained that he was in charge of all the guides working on Mount Fuji. After his second scotch and Multi-Vitamin Water he offered to make me an assistant guide next summer. Guide-o Carpenter-o was an assistant mountain guide in the summer and a carpenter in Fujiyoshida during the winter. He was the brother of Mr. Shinto Priest, who was a Shinto priest and also a part-time carpenter. Mr. Priest was a wild-eyed semibald-headed man who chain-smoked Virginia Slims Menthols and was wearing a padded coat, a terry-cloth towel around his neck, a wool beanie, and knee-high rubber boots, which had the combined effect of making him look like a cross-dressing Tibetan heavyweight boxer. He kept lighting his cigarettes with one of the station branding irons and then whipping off his beanie and rubbing his remaining hair while growling something crusty-sounding in Japanese. “That’s a joke!” Guide-o Carpenter-o yelled to me, pointing at Mr. Priest. “That’s a Japanese joke!” Even Mr. Watanabe, who may be the most gracious and proper human on earth, was roaring at the priest. “To tell you the truth, I believe he’s quite crazy,” he whispered to me. By then we had all had lots and lots of multivitamins. Mr. Priest was getting sort of sentimental, and when he was done with his hair routine he wanted me to sit on his lap or next to him and look at snapshots. I had my doubts, but they turned out to be pictures he’d taken of the shadow thrown by Mount Fuji at sunrise — a perfect sheer-gray triangle cast across an ocean of clouds, as amazing a sight as I’ve ever seen.

At that point there was no real point in going to sleep, since we were going to wake up in an hour to finish the climb. I lay down on my shelf and listened to the Sony men snoring and the rain as it started to dribble, then pour, then slam down on the tin roof of the Fuji-san Hotel. At about two in the morning, I heard the rustling of ponchos. Some two dozen climbers had arrived at the hotel, rain running off them in rivers, and outside on the trail I could see a dotted line of lights zigzagging up the mountainside. Most of the climbers wore their lights on their heads, so for a moment the scene looked like a subterranean mining expedition rather than the final stretch of a mountain climb. We dressed in a rush, and then Mr. Watanabe warned me about the end of the climb. “What we have left is the heart-attacking final 800 meters,” he said, looking at me solemnly. “You must inform me before you become completely exhausted.” Climbers were materializing all around us in the dark mist, each with a Cyclops headlamp shining in the middle of his forehead. We took our places on the trail and began trudging up the final steep stretch.

The line of climbers’ lights now reached up to the summit and down to the seventh Eighth Station, where it vanished into the fog. The rain was falling in gobs, coming down harder and harder, and the fog was building up into a solid white wall; I would never have known we’d reached the summit except that Mr. Watanabe said we’d reached the summit and should stop under a shelter and have something to eat. The crater was there but I couldn’t see it, and the whole of Japan was spread out underneath us but you’d never know it, and there were scores of people all around us but I couldn’t make them out even though they were probably just a few feet away. I didn’t really care. I was completely thrilled just to be on the summit. I was the highest thing in Japan! I wanted to run around the crater, but the wind had picked up to about 60 miles an hour, which would have meant running sideways if at all.

It is traditional for climbers to mail a letter at the Mount Fuji post office on the summit and to hike around the crater to each of the two shrines on the rim before descending. Mr. Watanabe suggested we should skip the post office and the shrines and simply head down right away. I wanted to stay. We held a vote and it was a tie, but then the wind punched me so hard that I changed my mind. I got the official summit brand burned into my walking stick and then started down into the fog, sliding heel-first into the loose pumice, the sheets of rain in my face.

For a while, everyone who saw Mount Fuji wanted to write a poem about it or tell a story about it or make pictures of it. It was described by a writer in the eighth century as “a lovely form capped with the purest white snow…reminding one of a well-dressed woman in a luxuriously dyed garment with her pure white undergarment showing around the edge of her collar” — in other words, like a lady with her bra straps showing. Unquestionably the consummate Fuji artist was the nineteenth-century printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, who made pictures of the peak for 70 years. Hokusai often called himself a crazed art addict and sometimes used the name Hokusai the Madman. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a collection of his prints, was published around 1823 and was a huge hit in Japan. Hokusai depicted Fuji covered with snow, half-covered with snow, bare, hidden by mist, capped by an umbrella cloud, in nice weather, with pilgrims climbing, with storks bathing in front of it, as seen from the bow of a boat, and viewed from a bridge in Tokyo. In some of the pictures the mountain fills up most of the space, whereas in others it is just a pucker on the horizon while the foreground is dominated by geisha girls loafing around or a guy building a barrel or someone trying to talk his horse into walking over a bridge. A few years later, when Hokusai was 74 and worried about his career, he recharged it by publishing a new collection, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. It was another huge hit. Hokusai was an inconstant man who moved 93 times in his life and changed his name 20 times, but for the 70 years he made pictures of Fuji, his image of the mountain never changed; it was always steep-sided, narrow-peaked, wide-bottomed, solitary, and simply the loveliest mountain you could ever hope to see.

When we got to the bottom of the mountain, Mr. Watanabe apologized for the weather and said he very much wanted me to come back so I could see Mount Fuji on a good day — that is, so I could see Mount Fuji at all. I told him that I wasn’t the least bit disappointed and that anyway this seemed like the Japanese way of seeing the mountain, less with my eyes than with my mind’s eye. I was a material climber but I had been won over to the conceptual side.

If we wanted a view, I told him, we could always go back to the Ferris wheel at Fujikyu Highland. “I suppose,” Mr. Watanabe said. “However, I do not believe we will have the time or opportunity to ride such a vehicle.” He was right, so we just blotted our soaked clothes and kicked the pebbles out of our boots and caught the next bus back to Tokyo, and before I left Japan I bought myself a copy of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

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The Maui surfer girls love each other’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it—yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits. Not long ago I was on the beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean, and each girl took the hair of the girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and crisscrossed it into braids.

The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, 14 or so—they love that wild, knotty, bright hair, as big and stiff as carpet, the most un-straight, un-sleek, un-ordinary hair you could imagine, and they can love it, I suppose, because when you are young and on top of the world you can love anything you want, and just the fact that you love it makes it cool and fabulous. A Maui surfer girl named Gloria Madden has that kind of hair—thick red corkscrews striped orange and silver from the sun, hair that if you weren’t beautiful and fearless you’d consider an affliction that you would try to iron flat or stuff under a hat.

One afternoon I was driving two of the girls to Blockbuster Video in Kahului. It was the day before a surfing competition, and the girls were going to spend the night at their coach’s house up the coast so they’d be ready for the contest at dawn. On contest nights, they fill their time by eating a lot of food and watching hours of surf videos, but on this particular occasion they decided they needed to rent a movie, too, in case they found themselves with 10 or 20 seconds of unoccupied time. On our way to the video store, the girls told me they admired my rental car and said that they thought rental cars totally ripped and that they each wanted to get one. My car, which until then I had sort of hated, suddenly took on a glow. I asked what else they would have if they could have anything in the world. They thought for a moment, and then the girl in the backseat said, “A moped and thousands of new clothes. You know, stuff like thousands of bathing suits and thousands of new board shorts.”

“I’d want a Baby-G watch and new flip-flops, and one of those cool sports bras like the one Iris just got,” the other said. She was in the front passenger seat, barefoot, sand-caked, twirling her hair into a French knot. It was a half-cloudy day with weird light that made the green Hawaiian hills look black and the ocean look like zinc. It was also, in fact, a school day, but these were the luckiest of all the surfer girls because they are home-schooled so that they can surf any time at all.

The girl making the French knot stopped knotting. “Oh, and also,” she said, “I’d really definitely want crazy hair like Gloria’s.”

The girl in the backseat leaned forward and said, “Yeah, and hair like Gloria’s, for sure.”

A lot of the Maui surfer girls live in Hana, the little town at the end of the Hana Highway, a fraying thread of a road that winds from Kahului, Maui’s primary city, over a dozen deep gulches and dead-drop waterfalls and around the backside of the Haleakala Crater to the village. Hana is far away and feels even farther. It is only 55 miles from Kahului, but the biggest maniac in the world couldn’t make the drive in less than two hours.

There is nothing much to do in Hana except wander through the screw pines and the candlenut trees or go surfing. There is no mall in Hana, no Starbucks, no shoe store, no Hello Kitty store, no movie theater—just trees, bushes, flowers, and gnarly surf that breaks rough at the bottom of the rocky beach. Before women were encouraged to surf, the girls in Hana must have been unbelievably bored. Lucky for these Hana girls, surfing has changed. In the ’60s, Joyce Hoffman became one of the first female surf aces, and she was followed by Rell Sunn and Jericho Poppler in the seventies and Frieda Zamba in the ’80s and Lisa Andersen in this decade, and thousands of girls and women followed by example. In fact, the surfer girls of this generation have never known a time in their lives when some woman champion wasn’t ripping surf.

The Hana girls dominate Maui surfing these days. Theory has it that they grow up riding such mangy waves that they’re ready for anything. Also, they are exposed to few distractions and can practically live in the water. Crazy-haired Gloria is not one of the Hana girls. She grew up near the city, in Haiku, where there were high-school race riots—Samoans beating on Filipinos, Hawaiians beating on Anglos—and the mighty pull of the mall at Kaahumanu Center. By contrast, a Hana girl can have herself an almost pure surf adolescence.

One afternoon I went to Hana to meet Theresa McGregor, one of the best surfers in town. I missed our rendezvous and was despairing because Theresa lived with her mother, two brothers, and sister in a one-room shack with no phone and I couldn’t think of how I’d find her. There is one store in Hana, amazingly enough called the General Store, where you can buy milk and barbecue sauce and snack bags of dried cuttlefish; once I realized I’d missed Theresa I went into the store because there was no other place to go. The cashier looked kindly, so I asked whether by any wild chance she knew a surfer girl named Theresa McGregor. I had not yet come to appreciate what a small town Hana really was. “She was just in here a minute ago,” the cashier said. “Usually around this time of the day she’s on her way to the beach to go surfing.” She dialed the McGregors’s neighbor—she knew the number by heart—to find out which beach Theresa had gone to. A customer overheard the cashier talking to me, and she came over and added that she’d just seen Theresa down at Ko’ki beach and that Theresa’s mom, Angie, was there too, and that some of the other Hana surfer girls would probably be down any minute but they had a History Day project due at the end of the week so they might not be done yet at school.

I went down to Ko’ki. Angie McGregor was indeed there, and she pointed out Theresa bobbing in the swells. There were about a dozen other people in the water, kids mostly. A few other surfer parents were up on the grass with Angie—fathers with hairy chests and ponytails and saddle-leather sandals, and mothers wearing board shorts and bikini tops, passing around snacks of unpeeled carrots and whole-wheat cookies and sour cream Pringles—and even as they spoke to one another, they had their eyes fixed on the ocean, watching their kids, who seemed like they were a thousand miles away, taking quick rides on the tattered waves.

After a few minutes, Theresa appeared up on dry land. She was a big, broad-shouldered girl, 16 years old, fierce-faced, somewhat feline, and quite beautiful. Water was streaming off of her, out of her shorts, out of her long hair, which was plastered to her shoulders. The water made it look inky, but you could still tell that an inch from her scalp her hair had been stripped of all color by the sun.

In Haiku, where the McGregors lived until four years ago, Theresa had been a superstar soccer player, but Hana was too small to support a soccer league, so after they moved Theresa first devoted herself to becoming something of a juvenile delinquent and then gave that up for surfing. Her first triumph came right away, in 1996, when she won the open women’s division at the Maui Hana Mango competition. She was one of the few fortunate amateur surfer girls who had sponsors. She got free boards from Matt Kinoshita, her coach, who owns and designs Kazuma Surfboards; clothes from Honolua Surf Company; board leashes and bags from Da Kine Hawaii; skateboards from Flexdex. Boys who surfed got a lot more for free.

Even a little bit of sponsorship made the difference between surfing and not surfing. As rich a life as it seemed, among the bougainvillea and the green hills and the passionflowers of Hana, there was hardly any money. In the past few years the Hawaiian economy had sagged terribly, and Hana had never had much of an economy to begin with. Last year, the surfer moms in town held a fund-raiser bake sale to send Theresa and two Hana boys to the national surfing competition in California.

Theresa said she was done surfing for the day. “The waves totally suck now,” she said to Angie. “They’re just real trash.” They talked for a moment and agreed that Theresa should leave in the morning and spend the next day or two with her coach Matt at his house in Haiku, to prepare for the Hawaiian Amateur Surf Association contest that weekend at Ho’okipa Beach near Kahului.

Logistics became the topic. One of the biggest riddles facing a surfer girl, especially a surfer girl in far-removed Hana, is how to get from point A to point B, particularly when carrying a large surfboard. The legal driving age in Hawaii is 15, but the probable car-ownership age, unless you’re rich, is much beyond that; also, it seemed that nearly every surfer kid I met in Maui lived in a single-parent, single- or no-car household in which spare drivers and vehicles were rare. I was planning to go back around the volcano anyway to see the contest, so I said I’d take Theresa and another surfer, Lilia Boerner, with me, and someone else would make it from Hana to Haiku with their boards.

That night I met Theresa, Angie, and Lilia and a few of their surfer friends at a take-out shop in town, and then I went to the room I’d rented at Joe’s Rooming House. I stayed up late reading about how Christian missionaries had banned surfing when they got to Hawaii in the late 1800s, but how by 1908 general longing for the sport overrode spiritual censure and surfing resumed. I dozed off with the history book in my lap and the hotel television tuned to a Sprint ad showing a Hawaiian man and his granddaughter running hand-in-hand into the waves.

The next morning I met Lilia and Theresa at Ko’ki beach at 8:00, after they’d had a short session on the waves. When I arrived they were standing under a monkeypod tree beside a stack of backpacks. Both of them were soaking wet, and I realized then that a surfer is always in one of two conditions: wet or about to be wet. Also, they are almost always dressed in something that can go directly into the water: halter tops, board shorts, bikini tops, jeans.

Lilia was 12 and a squirt, with a sweet, powdery face and round hazel eyes and golden fuzz on her arms and legs. She was younger and much smaller than Theresa, less plainly athletic but very game. Like Theresa, she was home-schooled, so she could surf all the time. So far Lilia was sponsored by a surf shop and by Matt Kinoshita’s Kazuma surfboards. She had a twin brother who was also a crafty surfer, but a year ago the two of them came upon their grandfather after he suffered a fatal tractor accident, and the boy hadn’t competed since. Their family owned a large and prosperous organic fruit farm in Hana. I once asked Lilia if it was fun to live on a farm. “No,” she said abruptly. “Too much fruit.”

We took a back road from Hana to Haiku, as if the main road weren’t bad enough. The road edged around the back of the volcano, through sere yellow hills. The girls talked about surfing and about one surfer girl’s mom, whom they described as a full bitch, and a surfer’s dad, who according to Theresa “was a freak and a half because he took too much acid and he tweaked.” I wondered if they had any other hobbies besides surfing. Lilia said she used to study hula.

“Is it fun?”

“Not if you have a witch for a teacher, like I did,” she said. “Just screaming and yelling at us all the time. I’ll never do hula again. Surfing’s cooler, anyway.”

“You’re the man, Lilia,” Theresa said, tartly. “Hey, how close are we to Grandma’s Coffee Shop? I’m starving.” Surfers are always starving. They had eaten breakfast before they surfed; it was now only an hour or two later, and they were hungry again. They favor breakfast cereal, teriyaki chicken, french fries, rice, ice cream, candy, and a Hawaiian specialty called Spam Masubi, which is a rice ball topped with a hunk of Spam and seaweed. If they suffered from the typical teenage girl obsession with their weight, they didn’t talk about it and they didn’t act like it. They were so active that whatever they ate probably melted away.

“We love staying at Matt’s,” Lilia said, “because he always takes us to Taco Bell.” We came around the side of a long hill and stopped at Grandma’s. Lilia ordered a garden burger and Theresa had an “I’m Hungry” sandwich with turkey, ham, and avocado. It was 10:30 a.m. As she was eating, Lilia said, “You know, the Olympics are going to have surfing, either in the year 2000 or 2004, for sure.”

“I’m so on that, dude,” Theresa said. “If I can do well in the nationals this year, then …” She swallowed the last of her sandwich. She told me that eventually she wanted to become an ambulance driver, and I could picture her doing it, riding on dry land the same waves of adrenaline that she rides now.

I spent a lot of time trying to picture where these girls might be in 10 years. Hardly any are likely to make it as pro surfers—even though women have made a place for themselves in pro surfing, the number who really make it is still small, and even though the Hana girls rule Maui surfing, the island’s soft-shell waves and easygoing competitions have produced very few world-class surfers in recent years.

It doesn’t seem to matter to them. At various cultural moments, surfing has appeared as the embodiment of everything cool and wild and free; this is one of those moments. To be a girl surfer is even cooler, wilder, and more modern than being a guy surfer: Surfing has always been such a male sport that for a man to do it doesn’t defy any received ideas; to be a girl surfer is to be all that surfing represents, plus the extra charge of being a girl in a tough guy’s domain. To be a surfer girl in a cool place like Hawaii is perhaps the apogee of all that is cool and wild and modern and sexy and defiant. The Hana girls, therefore, exist at that highest point—the point where being brave, tan, capable, and independent, and having a real reason to wear all those surf-inspired clothes that other girls wear for fashion, is what matters completely.

It is, though, just a moment. It must be hard to imagine an ordinary future and something other than a lunar calendar to consider if you’ve grown up in a small town in Hawaii, surfing all day and night, spending half your time on sand, thinking in terms of point breaks and barrels and roundhouse cutbacks. Or maybe they don’t think about it at all. Maybe these girls are still young enough and in love enough with their lives that they have no special foreboding about their futures, no uneasy presentiment that the kind of life they are leading now might eventually have to end.

Matt Kinoshita lives in a fresh, sunny ranch at the top of a hill in Haiku. The house has a big living room with a fold-out couch and plenty of floor space. Often, one or two or 10 surfer girls camp in his living room because they are in a competition that starts at 7:00 the next morning, or because they are practicing intensively and it is too far to go back and forth from Hana, or because they want to plow through Matt’s stacks of surfing magazines and Matt’s library of surfing videos and Matt’s piles of water-sports clothing catalogs. Many of the surfer girls I met didn’t live with their fathers, or in some cases didn’t even have relationships with their fathers, so sometimes, maybe, they stayed at Matt’s just because they were in the mood to be around a concerned older male.

Matt was in his late twenties. As a surfer he was talented enough to compete on the world tour but had decided to skip it in favor of an actual life with his wife, Annie, and their baby son, Chaz. Now he was one of the best surfboard shapers on Maui, a coach, and head of a construction company with his dad. He sponsored a few grown-up surfers and still competed himself, but his preoccupation was with kids. Surfing magazine once asked him what he liked most about being a surfboard shaper, and he answered, “Always being around stoked groms!” He coached a stoked-grom boys’ team as well as a stoked-grom girls’ team. The girls’ team was an innovation. There had been no girls’ surfing team on Maui before Matt established his three years ago. There was no money in it for him—it actually cost him many thousands of dollars each year—but he loved to do it. He thought the girls were the greatest. The girls thought he was the greatest, too.

In build, Matt looked a lot like the men in those old Hawaiian surfing prints—small, chesty, gravity-bound. He had perfect features and hair as shiny as an otter’s. When he listened to the girls he kept his head tilted, eyebrows slightly raised, jaw set in a grin. Not like a brother, exactly—more like the cutest, nicest teacher at school, who could say stern, urgent things without them stinging. When I pulled into the driveway with the girls, Matt was in the yard loading surfboards into a pickup. “Hey, dudes,” he called to Lilia and Theresa. “Where are your boards?”

“Someone’s going to bring them tonight from Hana,” Theresa said. She jiggled her foot. “Matt, come on, let’s go surfing already.”

“Hey, Lilia,” Matt said. He squeezed her shoulders. “How’re you doing, champ? Is your dad going to surf in the contest this weekend?”

Lilia shrugged and looked up at him solemnly. “Come on, Matt,” she said. “Let’s go surfing already.”

They went down to surf at Ho’okipa, to a section that is called Pavilles because it is across from the concrete picnic pavilions on the beach. Ho’okipa is not a lot like Hana. People with drinking problems like to hang out in the pavilions. Windsurfers abound. Cars park up to the edge of the sand. The landing pattern for the Kahului Airport is immediately overhead. The next break over, the beach is prettier; the water there is called Girlie Bowls, because the waves get cut down by the reef and are more manageable, presumably, for girlies.

A few years ago, some of the Hana surfer girls met their idol Lisa Andersen when she was on Maui. She was very shy and hardly said a word to them, they told me, except to suggest they go surf Girlie Bowls. I thought it sounded mildly insulting, but they weren’t exactly sure what she was implying and they didn’t brood about it. They hardly talked about her. She was like some unassailable force.

We walked past the pavilions. “The men at this beach are so sexist,” Lilia said, glaring at a guy swinging a boombox. “It’s really different from Hana. Here they’re always, you know, staring, and saying, ‘Oh, here come the giiiirls,’ and ‘Oh, hello, ladies,’ and stuff. For us white girls, us haoles, I think they really like to be gross. So gross. I’m serious.”

“Hey, the waves look pretty sick,” Theresa said. She watched a man drop in on one and then whip around against it. She whistled and said, “Whoooa, look at that sick snap! That was so rad, dude! That was the sickest snap I’ve seen in ages! Did you see that?”

They were gone in an instant. A moment later, two blond heads popped up in the black swells, and then they were up on their boards and away.
Dinner at Matt’s: tons of barbecued chicken, loaves of garlic bread, more loaves of garlic bread. Annie Kinoshita brought four quarts of ice cream out of the freezer, lined them up on the kitchen counter, and watched them disappear. Annie was fair, fine-boned, and imperturbable. She used to be a surfer “with hair down to her frickin’ butt,” according to Theresa. Now she was busy with her baby and with overseeing the open-door policy she and Matt maintained in their house.

That night, another surfer girl, Elise Garrigue, and a 14-year-old boy, Cheyne Magnusson, had come over for dinner and were going to sleep over, too. Cheyne was one of the best young surfers on the island. His father, Tony, was a professional skateboarder. Cheyne was the only boy who regularly crashed at Matt and Annie’s. He and the girls had the Platonic ideal of a Platonic relationship. “Hell, these wenches are virgins,” Annie said to me, cracking up. “These wenches don’t want anything to do with that kind of nastiness.”

“Shut up, haole,” Theresa said.

“I was going to show these virgins a picture of Chaz’s head coming out when I was in labor,” Annie yelled, “and they’re all, ‘No, no, no, don’t!'”

“Yeah, she’s all, ‘Look at this grossness!'” Theresa said. “And we’re all, ‘Shut up, fool.'”

“Duh,” Lilia said. “Like we’d even want to see a picture like that.”

The next day was the preliminary round of the Quicksilver HASA Competition, the fourth of eight HASA competitions on Maui leading to the state championships and then the nationals. It was a two-day competition—preliminaries on Saturday, finals on Sunday.

In theory, the girls should have gone to bed early because they had to get up at five, but that was just a theory. They pillow-fought for an hour, watched “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” and “Boy Meets World” and another episode of “Sabrina,” then watched a couple of Kelly Slater surfing videos, had another pillow fight, ate a few bowls of cereal, then watched Fear of a Black Hat, a movie spoofing the rap-music world that they had seen so many times that they could recite most of the dialogue by heart. Only Elise fell asleep at a decent hour. She happened to be French and perhaps had overdosed on American pop culture earlier than the rest.

Elise sort of blew in to Hawaii with the trade winds: She and her mother had left France and were planning to move to Tahiti, stopped on Maui en route, and never left. It was a classic Hawaiian tale. No one comes here for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways. They run away to Maui from places like Maryland or Nevada or anyplace they picture themselves earthbound, landlocked, stuck. They live in salvaged boxcars or huts or sagging shacks just to be near the waves. Here, they can see watery boundlessness everywhere they turn, and all things are fluid and impermanent.

I don’t know what time it was when the kids finally went to sleep because I was on the living room floor with my jacket over my head for insulation. When I woke up a few hours later, the girls were dressed for the water, eating bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honey Bunches of Oats, and watching Fear of a Black Hat again. It was a lovely morning and they were definitely ready to show Hana surfing to the world. Theresa was the first to head out the door. “Hey, losers,” she yelled over her shoulder, “let’s go.”
The first heats of the contest had right-handed waves, three or four feet high, silky but soft on the ends so that they collapsed into whitewash as they broke. You couldn’t make much of an impression riding something like that, and one after another the Hana girls came out of the water scowling. “I couldn’t get any kind of footing,” Theresa said to Matt. “I was, like, so on it, but I looked like some kind of kook sliding around.”

“My last wave was a full-out closeout,” Lilia said. She looked exasperated. “Hey, someone bust me a towel.” She blotted her face. “I really blew it,” she groaned. “I’m lucky if I even got five waves.”

The girls were on the beach below the judges’ stand, under Matt’s cabana, along with Matt’s boys’ team and a number of kids he didn’t sponsor but who liked hanging out with him more than with their own sponsors. The kids spun like atoms. They ran up and down the beach and stuffed sand in each others’ shorts and fought over pieces of last night’s chicken that Annie had packed for them in a cooler.

During a break between heats, Gloria with the crazy hair strolled over and suddenly the incessant motion paused. This was like an imperial visitation. After all, Gloria was a seasoned-seeming 19-year-old who had just spent the year surfing the monstrous waves on Oahu’s North Shore, plus she did occasional work for Rodney Kilborn, the contest promoter, plus she had a sea turtle tattooed on her ankle, and most important, according to the Hana girls, she was an absolutely dauntless bodyboarder who would paddle out into wall-size waves, even farther out than a lot of guys would go.

“Hey, haoles!” Gloria called out. She hopped into the shade of the cabana. That day, her famous hair was woven into a long red braid that hung over her left shoulder. Even with her hair tamed, Gloria was an amazing-looking person. She had a hardy build, melon-colored skin, and a wide, round face speckled with light-brown freckles. Her voice was light and tinkly, and had that arched, rising-up, quizzical inflection that made everything she said sound like a jokey, good-natured question.

“Hey, Theresa?” she said. “Hey, girl, you got it going on? You’ve got great wave strategy? Just keep it up, yeah? Oh, Elise? You should paddle out harder? OK? You’re doing great, yeah? And Christie?” She looked around for a surfer girl named Christie Wickey, who got a ride in at four that morning from Hana. “Hey, Christie?” Gloria said when she spotted her. “You should go out further, yeah? That way you’ll be in better position for your wave, OK? You guys are the greatest, seriously? You rule, yeah? You totally rule, yeah?”

At last the junior women’s division preliminary results were posted. Theresa, Elise, and two other girls on Matt’s team made the cut, as well as a girl whom Matt knew but didn’t coach. Lilia had not made it. As soon as she heard, she tucked her blond head in the crook of her elbow and cried. Matt sat with her and talked quietly for a while, and then one by one the other girls drifted up to her and murmured consoling things, but she was inconsolable. She hardly spoke for the rest of the afternoon until the open men’s division, which Matt had entered. When his heat was announced, she lifted her head and brushed her hand across her swollen eyes. “Hey, Matt!” she called as he headed for the water. “Rip it for the girls!”

That night, a whole pack of them slept at Matt’s—Theresa, Lilia, Christie, Elise, Monica Cardoza from Lahaina, and sisters from Hana named Iris Moon and Lily Morningstar, who had arrived too late to surf in the junior women’s preliminaries. There hadn’t been enough entrants in the open women’s division to require preliminaries, so the competition was going to be held entirely on Sunday and Iris would be able to enter. Lily wasn’t planning to surf at all, but as long as she was able to get a ride out of Hana she took it.

This added up to too many girls at Matt’s for Cheyne’s liking, so he had fled to another boy’s house for the night. Lilia was still blue. She was quiet through dinner, and then as soon as she finished she slid into her sleeping bag and pulled it over her head. The other girls stayed up for hours, watching videos and slamming each other with pillows and talking about the contest. At some point someone asked where Lilia was. Theresa shot a glance at her sleeping bag and said quietly, “Did you guys see how upset she got today? I’m like, ‘Take it easy, Lilia!’ and she’s all ‘Leave me alone, bitch.’ So I’m like, ‘Whatever.'”

They whispered for a while about how sensitive Lilia was, about how hard she took it if she didn’t win, about how she thought one of them had wrecked a bathing suit she’d loaned her, about how funny it was that she even cared since she had so many bathing suits and for that matter always had money for snacks, which most of them did not.

When I said a Hana girl could have a pure surfing adolescence, I knew it was part daydream, because no matter how sweet the position of a beautiful, groovy Hawaiian teenager might be in the world of perceptions, the mean measures of the human world don’t ever go away. There would always be something else to want and be denied. More snack money, even.

Lilia hadn’t been sleeping. Suddenly she bolted out of her sleeping bag and screamed, “Fuck you, I hate you stupid bitches!” and stormed toward the bathroom, slugging Theresa on the way.

The waves on Sunday came from the left, and they were stiff and smallish, with crisp, curling lips. The men’s and boys’ heats were narrated over the PA system, but during the girls’ and women’s heats the announcer was silent, and the biggest racket was the cheering of Matt’s team. Lilia had toughened up since last night. Now she seemed grudgeless but remote. Her composure made her look more grown-up than 12. When I first got down to the beach she was staring out at the waves, chewing a hunk of dried papaya and sucking on a candy pacifier.

A few of the girls were far off to the right of the break where the beach disappeared and lustrous black rocks stretched into the water. Christie told me later that they hated being bored more than anything in the world and between heats they were afraid they might be getting a little weary, so they decided to perk themselves up by playing on the rocks. It had worked. They charged back from the rocks shrieking and panting. “We got all dangerous,” she said. “We jumped off this huge rock into the water. We almost got killed, which was great.”

Sometimes watching them I couldn’t believe that they could head out so offhandedly into the ocean—this ocean, which had rolls of white water coming in as fast as you could count them, and had a razor-blade reef hidden just below the surface, and was full of sharks. The girls, on the other hand, couldn’t believe I’d never surfed—never ridden a wave standing up or lying down, never cut back across the whitewash and sent up a lacy veil of spray, never felt a longboard slip out from under me and then felt myself pitched forward and under for that immaculate, quiet, black instant when all the weight in the world presses you down toward the ocean bottom until the moment passes and you get spat up on the beach.

I explained I’d grown up in Ohio, where there is no surf, but that didn’t satisfy them; what I didn’t say was that I’m not sure that at 15 I had the abandon or the indomitable sense of myself that you seem to need in order to look at this wild water and think, I will glide on top of those waves. Theresa made me promise I’d try to surf at least once someday. I promised, but this Sunday was not going to be that day. I wanted to sit on the sand and watch the end of the contest, to see the Hana girls take their divisions, including Lilia, who placed third in the open women’s division, and Theresa, who won the open women’s and the junior women’s division that day. Even if it was just a moment, it was a perfect one, and who wouldn’t choose it over never having the moment at all? When I left Maui that afternoon, my plane circled over Ho’okipa, and I wanted to believe I could still see them down there and always would see them down there, snapping back and forth across the waves.

This article appeared in the Fall 1998 edition of Women șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

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I went to Spain not long ago to, but she had gotten tossed by one during a performance in the village of Ejea de los Caballeros and was convalescing when I arrived. Getting tossed sounds sort of merry, but I saw a matador tossed once, and he looked like a saggy bale of hay flung by a pitchfork, and when he landed on his back he looked busted and terrified. Cristina got tossed by accidentally hooking a horn with her elbow during a pass with the cape, and the joint was wrenched so hard that her doctor said it would need at least three or four days to heal. It probably hurt like hell, and the timing was terrible. She had fights scheduled each of the nights she was supposed to rest and every night until October—every night, with no breaks in between. It had been like this for her since May, when she was elevated from the status of a novice to a full matador de toros. The title is conferred in a formal ceremony called “taking the alternativa,” and it implies that you are experienced and talented and that other matadors have recognized you as a top-drawer bullfighter. You will now fight the biggest, toughest bulls and will probably be hired to fight often and in the most prestigious arenas. Bullfighting becomes your whole life, your everyday life—so routine that “sometimes after you’ve fought and killed the bull you feel as if you hadn’t done a thing all day,” as Cristina once told me. ‹‹When Cristina Sánchez took her alternativa, it caused a sensation. Other women before her have fought bulls in Spain. Many have only fought little bulls, but some did advance to big animals and become accomplished and famous, and a few of the best have been declared full matadors de toros. Juanita Cruz became a matador in 1940, and Morenita del Quindio did in 1968, and Raquel Martinez and Maribel Atienzar did in the eighties, but they all took their alternativas in Mexico, where the standards are a little less exacting. Cristina is the first woman to have taken her alternativa in Europe and made her debut as a matador in Spain.

There was a fight program of three matadors—a corrida—scheduled for the Madrid bullring the day after I got to Spain, and I decided to go so I could see some other toreadors while Cristina was laid up with her bad arm. One of the three scheduled to perform was the bastard son of El Cordobes. El Cordobes had been a matador superstar in the sixties and a breeder of several illegitimate children and a prideful man who was so possessive of his nickname that he had once sued this kid—the one I was going to see—because the kid wanted to fight bulls under the name El Cordobes, too. In the end, the judge let each and every El Cordobes continue to be known professionally as El Cordobes.

The kid El Cordobes is a scrubbed, cute blonde with a crinkly smile. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the rings where he is fighting, vendors sell fan photos of him alongside postcards and little bags of sunflower seeds and stuffed-bull souvenirs. In the photos, El Cordobes is dressed in a plaid camp shirt and acid-washed blue jeans and is hugging a good-looking white horse. In the ring, he does some flashy moves on his knees in front of the bull, including a frog-hop that he times to make it look like he’s going to get skewered. These tricks, plus the renown of his name, have gotten him a lot of attention, but El Cordobes is just one of many cute young male matadors working these days. If his knees give out, he might have nothing.

On the other hand, there is just one Cristina, and everyone in Spain knows her and is following her rise. She has gotten attention far outside of Spain and on television and in newspapers and even in fashion magazines; other matadors, even very good ones, fuse in the collective mind as man-against-bull, but every time Cristina kills a bull she forms part of a singular and unforgettable tableau—that of an attractive, self-possessed young woman elegantly slaying a large animal in a somber and ancient masculine ritual—and regardless of gender she is a really good matador, and she is being painstakingly managed and promoted, so there is no saying where her celebrity will stop. This is only her first season as a full matador, but it has been a big event. Lately El Cordobes or his publicist or his accountant has been igniting and fanning the rumor that he and Cristina Sánchez are madly in love, with the hope that her fame will rub off on him. She will probably be more and more acclaimed in the four or so years she plans to fight, and she will probably be credited with many more putative love affairs before her career is through.

Before the fight in Madrid, I walked around to the back of the bullring and through the patio de caballos, the dirt-floored courtyard and stable where the picadors’ horses and the donkeys that drag away the dead bull after the fight relax in their stalls and get their hair combed and get fed and get saddled. I was on my way to the bullfighting museum—the Museo Taurino—which is in a gallery next to the stalls. It was a brilliant day with just a whiff of wind. In the courtyard, muscle men were tossing equipment back and forth and unloading a horse trailer. Another 20 or so men were idling in the courtyard in the few pockets of shade or near the locked door of the matadors’ chapel, which is opened before the fight so the matadors can stop in and pray. The idlers were older men with bellies that began at their chins and trousers hiked up to their nipples, and they were hanging around just so they could take a look at the bulls for tonight’s fight and see how they were going to be divvied up among the three matadors. Really, there isn’t a crumb of any piece of bullfighting that goes unexamined by aficionados like these men. I lingered for a minute and then went into the museum. I wandered past the oil portraits of Manolete and Joselito and of dozens of other revered bullfighters, and past six stuffed and mounted heads of bulls whose names were Paisano, Landejo, Mediaonza, Jocinero, Hermano, and Perdigon—they were chosen for the museum because they had been particularly mean or unusual-looking or because they had killed someone famous. Then I stopped at a glass display case that had in it a picture of the matador Juanita Cruz. The picture was an eight-by-ten and looked like it had been shot in a studio. Juanita Cruz’s pearly face and her wedge of a chin and her pitch-black hair with its tiny standing waves were blurred along the edges, movie-star style. She looked solemn, and her eyes were focused on middle space. In the case next to the picture were her pink matador knee socks and her mouse-eared matador hat and one of her bullfighter suits. These are called traje de luces, “suit of lights,” and all toreadors wear them and like to change them often; Cristina has half a dozen, and Juanita Cruz probably owned 20 or so in the course of her bullfighting career. This one was blush-pink with beautiful gold piping and sparkly black sequins. It had the classic short, stiff, big-shouldered, box-shaped toreador jacket but not the capri-like trousers that all matadors wear, because Juanita Cruz fought in a skirt. There is no such thing as a matador skirt anymore—Cristina, of course, wears trousers. I looked at the skirt for a while and decided that even though it looked unwieldy it might actually have been an advantage—in a skirt, you can bend and stretch and lunge with a sword unconstrained. On the other hand, a skirt would have exposed so much fabric to the bull that in a fight it would have gotten awfully splashed and smeared with blood. Every matador has an assistant who is assigned to clean his suit with soap and a toothbrush after every fight. Juanita Cruz was popular and well accepted even though she was an anomaly, but late at night, as her assistant was scrubbing her big bloody skirt, I bet he cursed the fact that she had been wearing so much fabric while sticking swords into bulls.

I went to visit Cristina at home the morning before she was going to be fighting in a corrida in a town called MĂłstoles. It was now a week since her injury, and her elbow apparently had healed. Two days earlier, she had tested it in a fight in Cordobes and another the following day in JaĂ©n, and a friend of mine who reads Madrid’s bullfight newspaper told me Cristina had gotten very good reviews. It turns out that I was lucky to catch her at home, because she is hardly there during the bullfighting season—usually she keeps a rock star schedule, leaving whatever town she’s in with her crew right after she fights, driving all night to the next place on her schedule, checking into a hotel, sleeping until noon, eating lunch, watching some television, suiting up, fighting, and then leaving again. She was going to be at home this particular morning because MĂłstoles is only a few miles from Parla, the town where she and her parents and sisters live. She had come home the night before, after the fight in JaĂ©n, and was planning to spend the day in Parla doing errands. The corrida in MĂłstoles would start at six. The assistant who helps her dress—he is called the sword boy, because he also takes care of all her cutlery—was going to come to the apartment at five so she could get prepared and then just drive over to the bullring already dressed and ready to go in her suit of lights. Parla is an unglamorous place about 40 minutes south of Madrid; it is a kernel of an old village that had been alone on the wide open plains but is now hemmed in by incredibly ugly high-rise apartment buildings put up in the midsixties for workers overflowing the available housing in Madrid. The SĂĄnchez apartment is in a slightly less ugly and somewhat shorter brick building on a busy street, on a block with a driving school, a bra shop, and a bank. There is no name on the doorbell, but Cristina’s father’s initials are barely scratched into a metal plate beside it. These days it is next to impossible to find Cristina. The nearly unmarked doorbell is the least of it. Cristina has a magician press agent who can make himself disappear and a very powerful and self-confident manager—a former French bullfighter named Simon Casas—who is credited with having gotten her into the biggest bullrings and the best corridas in the country but is also impossible to find and even if he were findable he would tell you that his answer to your request to speak to Cristina is no. He is especially watchful of her international exposure. Simon Casas didn’t know I was coming to see Cristina in Parla and he might have disapproved simply to be disapproving, and after I saw him later that afternoon in MĂłstoles, prowling the perimeter of the bullring like an irritable wild animal, I was that much gladder I’d stayed out of his way.

Anyway, Cristina wasn’t even home when I got there. I had driven to Parla with my translator, Muriel, and her bullfighter husband, Pedro, who both know Cristina and Cristina’s father, Antonio, who himself used to be a bullfighter—if it sounds like just about everyone I encountered in Spain was or is a bullfighter, it’s true. We needed to see Cristina for my interview and then get right back, because Pedro had a bullfight that night in a town on the other side of Madrid. No one answered the doorbell at the apartment. Cristina’s car wasn’t around, so it looked like she really was gone. A car is the first thing matadors seem to buy themselves when they start making big money—that is, when they start getting sometimes as much as tens of thousands of dollars for a major fight. The bullfighter car of choice is a Mercedes, but Cristina bought herself a bright red Ford Probe, which is much sportier. She also bought her mother a small business, a gift store. We decided to wait a bit longer. Pedro killed time by making some bullfight business calls on his cellular phone. Just as we were debating whether to go looking for Cristina at her mother’s store, Mrs. Sánchez came around the corner, carrying a load of groceries; she said Cristina was at the bank and that in the meantime we could come upstairs. We climbed a few flights. The apartment was tidy and fresh-looking and furnished with modern things in pastel tones, and in the living room there were a life-size oil painting of Cristina looking beautiful in her suit of lights, two huge photographs of Cristina in bullfights, one of her as a civilian, a large photograph of the older Sánchez daughter getting married, and a big-screen TV. On almost every horizontal surface there was a bronze or brass or pewter statuette of a bull, usually bucking, its withers bristling with three or four barbed harpoons called banderillas, which are stuck in to aggravate him before he is killed. These were all trophies from different corridas and from Cristina’s stint as a star pupil at the Madrid bullfighting school. Lots of Cristina’s stuff was lying around the room. On the dining table were stacks of fresh laundry, mostly white dress shirts and white T-shirts and pink socks. On the floor were a four-foot-long leather sword case, three hatboxes, and a piece of luggage that looked like a giant bowling-ball bag, which is a specially designed case for a matador’s $20,000 suit jacket. Also, there was a small black Kipling backpack of Cristina’s, which cracked me up because it was the exact same backpack that I was carrying.

Mrs. Sánchez was clattering around in the kitchen, making Cristina’s lunch. A few minutes later, I heard the front door scrape open, and then Cristina stepped into the room, out of breath and flustered about being late. She is 25 years old, and has chemically assisted blond hair, long eyelashes, high cheekbones, and a tiny nose. She looks really pretty when she smiles and almost regal when she doesn’t, but she’s not so beautiful that she’s scary. This day, she was wearing blue jeans, a denim shirt with some flower embroidery, and white slip-on shoes with chunky heels, and her hair was held in a ponytail by a sunflower barrette. She is not unusually big or small. Her shoulders are square and her legs are sturdy, and she’s solid and athletic-looking, like a forward on a field hockey team. Her strength is a matter of public debate in Spain. The weakest part of her performance is the very end of the fight, when she’s supposed to kill the bull with one perfect jam of her sword, but she often doesn’t go deep enough or in the right place. It is said in certain quarters that she simply isn’t strong enough, but the fact is that most matadors mess up with the sword. Later, when we were talking, I brought it up, and she shook her head and said, “People who don’t understand the bullfighting world think you have to be extremely strong, but that’s not the case. What is important is technique and experience. You have to be in good shape, but you don’t have to match a man’s strength. Besides, your real opponent is the bull, and you can never match it in strength.”

Her mother came in and out of the room a few times. When she was out, Cristina said in a low voice, “I’m very happy with my family, but the time comes when you have to be independent.” The tabloids have reported that she has just bought a castle on millions of enchanted acres. “I bought a small piece of property right near here,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m having a house built. I think when I come back from my winter tour in South America I’ll be able to move in.”

What I really wanted to know was why in the world she decided to become a bullfighter. I knew she’d grown up watching her father fight, so it had always been a profession that seemed normal to her, even though at the ring she didn’t see many girls. Plus she doesn’t like to sit still. Before she started training to be a matador, she had worked in a beauty parlor and then as a typist at a fire-extinguisher factory, and both jobs drove her crazy. She is a very girly girl—she wears makeup, she wants children, she has boyfriends—but she says she could only imagine doing jobs which would keep her on her feet, and coincidentally those were jobs that were mostly filled by men. If she hadn’t become a matador, she thinks she would have become a trainer at a gym, or a police officer, or perhaps a firefighter, which used to be her father’s backup job when he was a bullfighter, in the years before he started advising her and became a full-time part of her six-person crew. She didn’t become a woman matador to be shocking or make a feminist point, although along the way she has been shunned by some of her male colleagues and there are still a few who refuse to appear in a corrida with her. Once, in protest, she went to Toledo and instead of having a corrida in which three matadors each killed two bulls, she took on all six bulls herself, one by one. She said she wants to be known as a great matador and not an oddity or anecdote in the history of bullfighting. She simply loves the art and craft of fighting bulls. Later that day, when I saw her in the ring, I also realized that besides loving the bullfight itself she is that sort of person who is illuminated by the attention of a crowd. I asked her what she’ll do after she retires from the ring in three or four years. “I want to have earned a lot of money and invested it wisely,” she said. “And then I want to do something in the movies or on TV.”

She mentioned that she was eating early today because she had a stomachache. With a fight every night for months, I suppose there would be nights when she felt crummy or wasn’t in the mood. Cristina laughed and said, “Yeah, sometimes you do feel like, oh God, I don’t have the slightest desire to face a bull this afternoon!” Personally, I’m not a huge coward, but the phrase “desire to face a bull” will never be part of my life, any afternoon, ever. I figured that nothing must scare her. She shook her head and said, “Failure. My greatest fear is failure. I’m a woman who is a fighter and I always think about trying to surpass myself, so what I most fear is to fail.”

Just then, Mrs. Sánchez came into the room and said the sandwiches were ready, so Cristina started to get up. She paused for a moment and said, “You know, people think that because I kill bulls I have to be really brave, but I’m not. I’m a sensitive person, and I can get super-terrified. I’m afraid of staying home by myself, and I get hysterical if I see a spider.” I asked if bulls ever haunted her dreams, and she said, “I don’t dream much at all, but a few times I’ve dreamed that a bull was pursuing me in the ring, up into the stands. And the night before my debut in Madrid, I did dream of bulls with huge, twisted horns.”

I had seen the first bullfight of my life a few days earlier, on that night in Madrid, and it was a profound education. I learned that I should not eat for several hours beforehand and to start looking away the minute the picadors ride in on their stoic-looking blindfolded horses, because their arrival signaled that the blood and torment would begin. At first, in Madrid, I had been excited because the Plaza de Toros is so dramatic and beautiful, and also the pageantry that began the corrida was very nice, and when the first bull galloped in, I liked watching it bolt around the ring and chase the matador and his assistants until they retreated behind the small fences around the ring that are there for their protection. The small fences had targets—bull’s-eyes, actually—painted on them. The bull would ram into them with its horns and the fence would rock. The more furious bulls would ram again and again, until the matador teased them away with a flourish of his cape. The bulls were homely, with little heads and huge briskets and tapered hips, and they cornered like schoolbuses and sometimes skidded to their knees, but they had fantastic energy and single-mindedness and thick muscles that flickered under their skin and faces that didn’t look vicious at all and were interesting to watch. Some of the fight was wonderful. The matador’s flourishes with the shocking pink and bright yellow big cape and his elegance with the small triangular red one; the sound of thousands of people gasping when the bull got very close to the cape; the plain thrilling danger of it and the fascination of watching a bull be slowly hypnotized; the bravery of the picadors’ horses, which stood stock-still as the bull pounded them broadside, the flags along the rim of the ring flashing in the late-afternoon light; the resplendence of the matador’s suit in that angling light, especially when the matador inched one foot forward and squared his hips and arched his back so that he was a bright new moon against a sky of sand with the black cloud of a bull racing by. I loved the ancientness and majesty and excitement of it, the way bullfighting could be at once precious and refined yet absolutely primal and raw. But beyond that I was lost and nauseous and knew I didn’t understand how so many people, a whole nation of people, weren’t shaken by the gore and the idea of watching a ballet that always, absolutely, unfailingly ends with a gradual and deliberate death. I didn’t understand it then, and I doubt I ever will.

In the little brick bullring in MĂłstoles, Cristina killed two bulls well but not exceptionally—for the first kill the judge awarded her one of the bull’s ears, but for the second she got no award at all. A once-in-a-lifetime sort of performance would have earned two ears, a tail, and a hoof. After that second fight Cristina looked a little disgusted with herself, and she hung back and talked for several minutes with her father, who was standing in the crew area, before she came out and took the traditional victory walk around the ring. She was clearly the crowd favorite. People wave white handkerchiefs at bullfights to indicate their support; in MĂłstoles it looked like it was snowing. As she circled the ring, men and women and little kids yelled, “Matadora! Matadora!” and “OlĂ©, Cristina!” and tossed congratulatory sweaters and flowers and shoes and blazers and sandwiches and a Levi’s jacket and a crutch and a cane, and then a representative of a social club in MĂłstoles stepped into the ring and presented her with an enormous watermelon.

After the fight, Cristina left immediately for Zaragoza, where she would have her next fight. I went back to Madrid to have dinner with Muriel and Pedro. Pedro had just finished his fight, and he looked very relaxed and his face was pink and bright. The restaurant, Vina P, was practically wallpapered with old and new fight posters and photographs of bullfighters and some mounted bulls’ heads. Its specialty was slabs of beef—since the animals killed in bullfights are butchered and are highly sought after for dining, the specialty of the house might occasionally be straight from the bullring. Pedro said Vina P was a bullfighters’ restaurant, which means it is the rough equivalent of a sports bar frequented by real athletes in the United States. Before I got to Spain I imagined that bullfighting was an old and colorful tradition that was preserved but isolated, a fragile antique. Cristina SĂĄnchez would be honored, but she would be in the margins—it would be as if she were the very best square dancer in America. Instead, she looms, and bullfighting looms. There are tons of restaurants in every city that are bullfighter- and bullfight-aficionado hangouts, and there are pictures and posters of bullfights even in the restaurants that aren’t, and there is the bullfight newspaper and regular television coverage, and every time I turned around I was in front of the headquarters of some bullfight association. At a gas station in a nowhere place called Otero de Herreros the only bit of decoration I saw was a poster for an upcoming fight; it happened to have a picture of Cristina on it. The biggest billboards in Madrid were ads for Pepe Jeans, modeled by Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, Matador de Toros. Mostly because of Cristina, bullfight attendance is up and applications to the Madrid bullfighting school are up, especially with girls. The Spanish tabloids are fat with bullfighter gossip, and they are really keen on Cristina. That night while we were eating dinner, Pedro noticed a gorgeous young man at another table and whispered that he was a Mexican pop singer and also Cristina’s old boyfriend, whom she’d recently broken up with because he’d sold the story of their relationship to the celebrity press.

I had planned to leave Spain after the fight in Móstoles, but when I heard that Cristina was going to fight soon in a town that was easy to get to, I decided to stay a few more days. The town was called Nava de la Asunción, and to get there you head north from Madrid over the raggedy gray Sierra de Guadarrama and then onto the high golden plain where many fighting bulls are raised. The occasion for the fight was the Nava town fair. According to the local paper, “peculiar and small amateur bullfights used to be done in the fenced yards of local houses until for reasons of security it was recommended to do away with these customs.” The bulls were always chased through the fields in the morning so the townspeople can see what they were like. The paper said, “Traditionally there are accidents because there is always a bull that escapes. There is maximum effort put out to be sure that this does not occur, even though it is part of the tradition.” It also said, “To have Cristina Sánchez in Nava is special.” “The Party of the Bulls—Cristina Sánchez will be the star of the program!” “Cristina Sánchez will show her bullfighting together with the gifted Antonio Borrero Chamaco and Antonio Cutino—a great bill in which the star is, without a doubt, Cristina Sánchez.”

Nava is the prettiest little town, and on the afternoon of the fight there was a marching band zigzagging around and strings of candy-colored banners hanging along the streets, popping and flapping in the wind. Just outside the bullring a few vendors had set up booths. One was selling soft drinks, one had candy and nuts, one had every manner of bullfighter souvenir: T-shirts with matador photos, pins with matador photos, photo cigarette lighters and key chains, autographed photos themselves, and white hankies for waving at the end of the fights. Of the nine photo T-shirts, seven were of Cristina. Six were different pictures of her either posing in her suit of lights or actually fighting. The other one was a casual portrait. She was dressed in a blue blouse trimmed with white daisy embroidery, and her blond hair was loose and she appeared to be sitting in a park. A nun came over to the souvenir booth and bought a Cristina photo-hankie. Big-bodied women with spindly little daughters were starting to gather around the booth and hold up first one Cristina T-shirt and then another and finally, sighing, indicate that they would take both. Skittery little boys, sometimes with a bigger boy or their fathers, darted up and poked through the stuff on the table and lingered. After a while, a couple of men pushed past the throng, lugging a trunk marked C. SÁNCHEZ toward the area under the bleachers where the matadors and picadors were getting ready. Now and then, if you looked in that direction, you could catch a glimpse of someone in a short sequined jacket, and until the band came thundering by you could hear the hollow clunking of hooves and the heavy rustling of horses and donkeys.

The tickets were expensive whether you bought one for the sunny side or the shade, but every row was packed and every standing-room spot was taken. The men around me were smoking cigars and women were snacking on honey-roasted peanuts, and every few minutes a guy would come through hawking shots of Cutty Sark and cans of beer. Young kids were in shorts and American basketball-team T-shirts, but everyone else was dressed up, as if they were going to a dinner party at a friend’s. At 5:30, in slanting sunlight, the parade of the matadors and their assistants began. Each of them was dressed in a different color, and they were dazzling and glinting in the sun. In a box seat across the ring from the entrance gate were the sober-looking judge and three girls who were queens of the fair, wearing lacy white crowns in their hair. Antonio Borrero “Chamaco” fought first, and then came Cristina. She was wearing a fuchsia suit and had her hair in a braid and had a look of dark focus on her face. When she and her assistants entered the ring, a man stood up in the stands and hollered about how much he admired her and then an old woman called out that she wanted Cristina to bless a little brooch she had pinned on her shawl.

The bull came out. He was brownish-black, small-chested, wide-horned, and branded with the number 36. Cristina, the other two matadors of the day, and Cristina’s picadors and banderilleros spread out around the ring holding hot-pink capes, and each one in turn would catch the bull’s attention, tease him into charging, and then the next person would step forward and do the same. It was like a shoot-around before a basketball game. Meanwhile, the matadors had a chance to assess the bull and figure out how fast he moved and if he faked right and passed left or if he seemed crazy. This bull was a sprinter, and all around the ring the capes were blooming. Then two picadors rode out and positioned their horses at either end of the ring, and as soon as the bull noticed one, he roared toward it, head down, and slammed into the padding that protected the horse’s flank. The picadors stabbed the bull with long spears as he tangled with the horse. After he was speared several times by each picador, he was lured away by the big capes again. A few moments later, the ring cleared, and a banderillero sprinted into the ring carrying a pair of short, nicely decorated harpoons. He held them high and wide. Eventually the bull lunged toward the banderillero, who ducked out of the way of the horns and planted the banderillas into the bull’s withers. Then a second banderillero did the same thing. The bull was panting. The band burst into a fanfare, and then Cristina came out alone, carrying a small red heart-shaped cape. She stood at attention and tipped her hat to the judge—asking permission to kill the bull—and then turned and glanced just slightly toward her father, who was standing between the seats and the ring. The bull stood motionless and stared at her. For ten minutes or so she seduced him toward her, and just as he thought he was about to kill her, she diverted him with dizzying, rippling, precise swings of her cape—first a windmill, then a circle, then a chest pass, where the bull rushes straight toward and then under the cape. As the bull passed her, Cristina’s back was as arched as a scythe. When the bull was swooning, she stood right in front of him, rubbed his forehead lightly with the flat of her sword, and then spread her arms, yelled something, and dropped down on one knee. The bull looked like he might faint.

Then she started getting ready to kill him. She walked over to her sword boy and traded him for her longest, sharpest blade. The band was toodling away on some brassy song, and after a moment she glowered and thrust her hand up to stop it. She drew the bull toward and past her a few more times. On one pass, she lost her grip on her cape and her father shot up from his seat and the crew raced in to help her, but without even looking up she waved them away. Then the bull squared up and she squared up. His fat beige tongue was now hanging out, and a saddle-blanket of blood was spreading from the cuts that the picadors and the banderilleros had made. Cristina’s eyes were fixed with a look of concentration and command, and her arm was outstretched, and she lined up the bull, her arm, and her sword. She and the bull had not seen each other before the fight—matadors and bulls never do, the way grooms avoid brides on their wedding day—but she now stared so hard at him and he at her that it looked as if each was examining the other through and through.

When it was over, she got flowers, wineskins, berets, bags of olives, loafers, crutches, more wineskins, hundreds of things shoved at her to autograph, and both of the bull’s black ears. The bull got two recumbent laps of the ring, hauled around by a team of donkeys, and there was a butcher with a five-o’clock shadow and black rubber hip boots waiting for him as soon as the team dragged him through the door. When the whole corrida was finally over, a leftover bull was let loose in the ring, and anyone with nerve could hop in with him and fool around. Most people passed on that and instead filed out of the stands, beaming and chatting and slapping backs and shaking hands. Just outside the front gate was a clean white Peugot van with CRISTINA SÁNCHEZ stenciled in script on the front and the back, and in it were a driver and Cristina and Cristina’s father and her crew, still dressed in their sumptuous fight clothes, still damp and pink-faced from the fight. Cristina looked tremendously happy. The van couldn’t move, because the crowd had closed in around it, and everyone was waving and throwing kisses and pushing papers to autograph through the van’s windows, and for ten minutes or so Cristina signed stuff and waved at people and smiled genuinely and touched scores of outstretched hands. It was such a familiar picture of success and adoration and fame, but it had a scramble of contradictory details: Here was an ancient village with a brand-new bullring, and here was a modern new car filled with young and able people wearing the uniforms of a sport so unchanging and so ritualized that except for the fresh concrete and the new car and the flushed blond face of Cristina it all could have been taking place a hundred years in the future or a hundred years ago.

At last Cristina whispered “no mas” to the driver, and he began inching the van down the driveway and then out toward the highway, and soon you could only see a speck in the shape of the van. The town of Nava then returned to normal. Cristina was going on to fight and fight and fight until the end of the European season, and then she planned to fly to South America and fight and then to Mexico and fight and then to return to Spain and start the season again. Once someone suggested that she try to get a Nike contract, and once she told me that she would love to bring bullfighting to America. But it seems that bullfighting is such a strange pursuit and the life bullfighters lead is so peculiar and the sight and the sound and the smell of the whole thing is so powerful and so deadly that it could only exist where strangeness is expected and treasured and long-standing and even a familiar part of every day.

It was now deep evening in Nava, and the road out had not a single streetlight. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű town the road cut through huge unlit pastures, so everything in all directions was pure black. No one was on the road, so it felt even more spooky. Then a car pulled up behind me, and after a moment it sped up and passed. It was a medium-size station wagon driven by a harried-looking man, and there was a shaggy dappled-gray pony standing in the back. The man had the interior lamp turned on, maybe for the pony, and it made a trail of light I could follow the whole way back to Madrid.

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