When we showed up at Mr. Yoon’s museum on Monday afternoon, he said, “Let’s go to Kangnung!”  When? In 45 minutes. Kangnung is on the east coast of Korea. It meant a 2-day trip.  Did we say “no”?  Of course not. 

Kangnung is famous for seafood and its annual celebration of Dano, an early summer festival for a good harvest on the land and a good catch at sea. The festival started on the day we arrived in Korea and runs for a week. It’s like a county fair with a semi-religious theme. We set out with Mr. Yoon driving, through the rain on the highway south, and then east through the beautiful mountains of Kangwon Province. 

We got to our hotel on the beach just in time for supper, and made for the nearest beachfront restaurant. Fish tanks were lined up in front of it with a collection of all the types of fish caught along the coast. The ocean there is cold and clear, and drops off quickly, so a lot of them are deep water fish, and the best way to eat them is raw. We chose one big one, about 18 inches long, and a couple of smaller types. A guy wearing rubber boots, a waterproof apron, and rubber gloves fished them out with a net.

As soon as we sat down a small bowl of broth and a lot of little dishes arrived with a variety of foods – highly seasoned veggies, several kinds of kimchi, ddok (like Japanese mochi) stuffed with chunks of potato (surprisingly good), tiny anchovies roasted with soy sauce and sugar, tubu (tofu), raw sliced jalapeños (Wow!), steamed shrimp, crab, and more. The broth, with bits of dark green seaweed and a few clams in it, looked like a tide pool. A delicious tide pool! 

Our three fish arrived, sliced in lovely slivers of sashimi or “hwey” on a bed of white noodle-like things that were chewy and flavorless, and it turned out we weren’t supposed to eat. More bits of hwey were mixed with soy sauce and zingy red pepper sauce. The heaps of whey were intimidating, but the three of us finished them off and moved on to a big pot of stew made from the remains of the three fish. Of course,wherever you are in the world fish heads make the best broth, and Koreans have an old saying, “The fish head’s the best.” The sticky white rice Koreans love showed up, and it tasted great on top of all that rich and spicy seafood.

We staggered back to our hotel in a light rain and I slept long and hard after the finest Korean feast I’ve ever had. Tomorrow, the Dano festival!

I’m on flight 893 to Seoul, Korea, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, after a crazy couple of days.

Thursday. Up til 3 am packing and checking email, and up again before 6am, I was so proud that I had everything beautifully organized and packed. Off to the airport through rush hour traffic, a hug by the curbside check-in counter, breezed into security, and they asked for my ID. My ID? Sure, I had my drivers license, but where was my passport? At home in the file marked Passports, of course. I attempted an instant rewind: out through the security line and out to the curb. No sign of husband’s peacock blue Honda Fit. His cell phone? Never turned it on this morning. 

The only thing to do was to catch a cab and race for home, grab the passport and zip back to the airport. I’d have to take a later flight to San Francisco, and fretted over the cost of changing the schedule. But it was a gorgeous day, the kind people move to Southern California for. Along the PCH surfers bobbed offshore, waiting for a swell. Then we left the coast and followed the winding road up the canyon, where the blooming yucca rising like white flames above the chaparral.

When I finally got back to the airport, I rejoined the security line, feeling like I’d been on a carnival ride, but not a fun one. There was no point agonizing over the extra expense of my mistake. I remembered telling my travel companions that three weeks traveling in Mongolia meant we would have to take flat tires, detours and itinerary changes in stride. Already I needed to take my own advice – go with the flow!

My daughter Morley greeted me with hugs when I got off the BART in Berkeley. We exploded our bags on her living room floor and repacked, weeding out duplications – extra rain pants for the horse trek, too much moleskin for saddle sores, an oversupply of sun block. And we eliminated unacceptable clothing – a blouse that revealed the bra beneath it, and city clothes that were too hot for Korea in the muggy month of June. We each ended up safely under the weight limit of 33 pounds for Mongolian flights.

Friday. We made it to the airport on time this morning, but then we sat on the runway, all 300 or so of us packed in like sardines, while they made a repair. With 12 hours of flight ahead, and empty stomachs, this was another chance for me to practice my own advice. So I got some much-needed sleep.

We finally lifted off, on our way to Seoul! We had a grand view of the coast of Northern California, including Gualala where Morley and her boyfriend paddled the lagoon on surfboards just a couple of weeks ago. Then, the open Pacific. We caught a glimpse of the empty beaches and rugged mountains of the Aleutian Islands a couple of hours later, and, taking a stroll through the aisles of the plane we discovered the Korean flight attendants having kimchi and noodles in the kitchen. It looked a lot better than the packaged lunch they had served us, but they were generous with left over rolls and brownies, and we came back to our seats with our hands full of snacks.

About half the passengers on our flight appear to be Korean, mostly families on vacation. Of the rest, 91 are new Peace Corps volunteers on their way to Mongolia, including one girl from our hometown outside Los Angeles. I told her I was in the Peace Corps in Korea in the 70’s. It was an amazing, difficult, rewarding and life-changing experience. 

We’ll arrive about 5 pm on Saturday, May 30, having skipped a day by crossing the International Date Line. We have a Korean friend meeting us at the airport, and a reservation at a small inn in Seoul. We’ll make up for the airplane food with a Korean meal at a real sit-on-the floor Korean restaurant, followed by a big sleep in the inn. Then, tomorrow morning, we’ll be off on our first adventure in Seoul!

It’s hard to say when it all started.

I remember hiking across the plain to a long mountain. It was 1971, our second year in Korea. We lived in a small village called Hak-song-gol, “Crane-Pine Valley,” and we had been looking at this jagged mountain on our eastern horizon for months. We climbed its northern slope, and came upon a cottage of mud brick with a thatched roof, like most Korean country houses in those days, but it was strangely isolated. A young woman peered out the door at us, and we greeted her, but without a word she turned her back and hurried inside. We followed the trail past the cottage and around the side of an outcropping to a ledge of bare, flat earth.

I didn’t know what to make of the place. A few tall poles stood, with strips of cloth tied to them, fluttering in the breeze. Bowls with bits of food were arranged on a flat rock before a cleft in the cliff. Before we could snap a picture or get a closer look, a middle-aged woman came hurrying after us. Were we missionaries, she wanted to know. No, we were English teachers in the town on the plain below. She glared at us, not friendly, so we moved on and followed the mountain’s long crestline from north to south. In those days, firewood was precious, and the slopes were bare, providing unobstructed views of the farmland below, our village, and the western range of far, blue hills.

It was only later that I understood what I had seen that day. The woman was a shaman, and the ledge with the poles and offerings was her shrine where she reached out to the spirits. In those days, shamans kept out of sight for fear of persecution by local officials and the growing ranks of converts to foreign religions. No wonder the woman looked at my husband and me, two nosy foreigners, so suspiciously!

There was something about the woman that I couldn’t put from my mind. She radiated a kind of energy. It was a little scary, but it drew me. I would have liked to talk with her and try to understand what that energy was. A couple of years later, we brought a friend back to photograph the rock carvings and formations we had found on the mountain, and, sadly, the cottage was empty and the altar bare.

If I could go back to that mountain now, I would find it heavily forested. Nowadays South Korea’s mountains are green, thanks to a government reforestation program that started in the 1960’s. With the trees the wildlife have come back—deer and foxes, if not tigers, and the slopes echo with bird-calls. Maybe a new shaman has rebuilt the cottage and the altar, and people from the villages below make the climb to seek her help with their troubles and fears.

After that day, my journey carried me to Seoul, where I lived and translated publications on Korean folkways. There, I received the gift of a book containing the Korean story of the first shaman, the one who made a shamanic quest to the Other World and brought back the secrets of healing. An anthropologist in the 1930’s recorded it when a shaman sang the story for him. It was beautiful, and so I translated it. I loved the story’s hero, a young woman who bravely challenged the patriarchal society she was born into, and who risked everything to reach her goal. But for years other things occupied my thoughts—graduate school, work, children, and more work.

Then, a day came when my kids were in high school and I had time to myself. It was 2001, thirty years after my first sighting of a shaman shrine. I wanted to write, and I had several stories in mind, but the first shaman’s tale would give me no rest until I found a way to share it. So I began to piece it together. The recorded version was powerful, but brief. To bring the story to life as a novel, I needed to research old Korea, to develop a setting and more characters, to put flesh to the story’s bones. So, thirteen years ago, I started my new journey, writing the 10,000 Spirits trilogy. 

What does a Korean shaman look like? I found pictures of them from the old days in Buddhist temples, like the shaman dancing with her drum in the painting above. This one was painted on a high ceiling panel, some time in the 19th Century. But the old pictures weren’t enough. I went back to Korea to meet modern shamans and see them at work. (More about that in my next blog!)

This fall, we’ll see volume 1, The River and the Pine, thanks to my wonderful publisher, Water Street Press. Next year, volume 2, Guardian, will come out. I’m working on volume 3, and it will take us from Korea into Mongolia—that is, Mongolia roughly 2,000 years ago. And so, this summer I’ll make another journey, this time to Korea and through northern Mongolia by jeep and by horse, for the month of June.

I hope you’ll travel with me: you can follow my blog and travel pictures here.