Off in the distance, I have just caught sight of some people on this otherwise deserted beach. To my delight there’s a little girl who looks to be around my age. She is standing on a big towel in front of a weathered grey bathhouse. Perhaps she is someone who would like to play with me? As I begin running towards her, she looks familiar. I can see that she is bending over to pick up a T-shirt. Then suddenly I realize that she must be me, since I am the only 10-year-old redhead I’ve ever known who is so easily burned that she has to wear a long-sleeved T-shirt on a hot day like this.
What a wonderful opportunity, then, to watch myself as a child, lost in play on a clear day with such strong reflections from the sea. The trouble is, as I zoom in to observe her more closely, her face dissolves behind a coarse grain of fabric. She seems to be stuck, at a loss to get into or out of her T-shirt, and I awake in a panic. Will I never be able to look back and see her again, up closely? Is this the only way to protect sensitive skin from solar radiation, or to protect one's integrity from exploitation by an intrusive lens. Shame on me and the old woman on the Indian reservation?
Monday, October 13, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
The Suwa Maru
Did we have a special beach in mind? Not even mother Anne seemed to know where we were going, though we could see water everywhere. Groping in broad daylight, I followed a path through the Enen-kio brush toward a bank of the turquoise lagoon. I think I was following mother Anne, hoping that a dip would soon restore me the way it usually did. I was quickly let down. The beach proved to be uninviting, full of pebbles that were hard on my feet, and I had been warned to watch out for the poisonous coral along the waters edge. Even a rusty old diving board, constructed for the recreation of soldiers, did not coax me to play, but served only as a monument of isolation and abandonment to bully and mock whomever might happen to see it. Thus my obligatory descent into the lagoon was not at all refreshing, but tepid as the breeding ground for all sorts of invisible creatures.
I must have been perfectly exhausted that day (or was it really night?), and lost my appetite when I vomited onboard, because I cannot remember any of the meals we ate on the island or attempts to fall asleep in the metal hut.
The next day, dad asked me if I wanted to survey the island with him. Perhaps he asked other family members too, but I was apparently the most eager to join him on this excursion. Given my lingering disappointment from the day before, coupled with the fact that I was feeling better, I wanted to go somewhere else. Dad seemed keen on showing me a place where he had been before, or perhaps he simply wanted to share his innate need to reconnoiter the unfamilar, a war relic, a neglected springboard between the US and the Far East. We were there for a purpose, though it was not a place either of us would have chosen to visit. We were both taking orders. We walked along the outer shores of the atoll, where the waves lapped, and the breeze was more refreshing. A corroded shipwreck rose like the tail end of some giant seabird bent on obtaining some sustenance for survival.
Dad offered an explanation: “Her name was "Suwa Maru".
“Sue was…what?”, I asked.
“Suwa Maru. She was a merchant vessel that tried to pass the American block in 1943, World War II, and was hit by torpedoes. The captain beached her here, before she sank.”
“Oh”.
We continued along the south shore in silence until we arrived at the airstrip, where we turned back toward the huts.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Tomorrow is another day
I have been told since that the reason I had seen flames licking the wings of our propeller plane was not because the engines had caught fire, but because fuel was being dumped to prepare for our unplanned landing on Wake – or Enen-kio as it was called by pre-European travelers after the orange-blossoming shrub which grows on this otherwise rather barren atoll. The Japanese who later occupied the island called it Otori-Shima or "Bird Island" for its birdlike shape.
We landed safely on the Wake airstrip. As we descended the ramp into the suffocating heat, I hoped that just setting foot on land would restore my balance. I could see a low control tower at the end of the strip, and a couple of GIs to the right who were prepared to guide us along the road to our accommodations in a couple of corrugated metal quansit huts. While we walked together as a family, mom, my sister and I were escorted to one hut, and dad and my brothers to the other. In the tumult of our separation, I could tell that dad felt slightly uncomfortable too. His look seemed to say: “be a good sport, tomorrow is another day.”
In rituals of the ancient Marshalles islands, it is claimed that tribal chiefs were installed by carving a mark into their skin with a sharp human bone. The latter required human sacrifice. A man could, however, save himself from being sacrificed if he could brave the journey to the Enen-kio atoll and obtain a wing bone from a large seabird that nested on the atoll. Could that have been the albatross of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Entering the huge metal hut, I was overwhelmed by the pungent odor of all the army green woolen blankets spread neatly over each of the cots. I trudged down the aisle to where mom had laid claim to three. There seemed to be some sort of unwritten code that we should occupy beds at a respectful distance from the other women and children on the flight. Though I was tired, I didn’t feel like lying down on the rough blankets.
When our luggage was deposited alongside our beds, Mom tried to cheer me up by suggesting that we go for a swim. And so I eventually mustered up the energy to rummage through a bag to find my bathing suit. It seemed to take forever to find my suit and change, though perhaps it wouldn’t have been easier had the space felt more intimate.
In October of 1568, a Spanish explorer, Álvaro de Mendaña de Neyra discovered "a low barren island, judged to be eight leagues circumference," to which he gave the name of "San Francisco”. While it is believed that the island that he discovered was today’s Wake, named after the British trader William Wake who visited the atoll in 1796, the land that I set foot on at age 10, in August 1957, was nothing even remotely like the San Francisco, much less the Ocean Beach, that I had just left.
We landed safely on the Wake airstrip. As we descended the ramp into the suffocating heat, I hoped that just setting foot on land would restore my balance. I could see a low control tower at the end of the strip, and a couple of GIs to the right who were prepared to guide us along the road to our accommodations in a couple of corrugated metal quansit huts. While we walked together as a family, mom, my sister and I were escorted to one hut, and dad and my brothers to the other. In the tumult of our separation, I could tell that dad felt slightly uncomfortable too. His look seemed to say: “be a good sport, tomorrow is another day.”
In rituals of the ancient Marshalles islands, it is claimed that tribal chiefs were installed by carving a mark into their skin with a sharp human bone. The latter required human sacrifice. A man could, however, save himself from being sacrificed if he could brave the journey to the Enen-kio atoll and obtain a wing bone from a large seabird that nested on the atoll. Could that have been the albatross of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Entering the huge metal hut, I was overwhelmed by the pungent odor of all the army green woolen blankets spread neatly over each of the cots. I trudged down the aisle to where mom had laid claim to three. There seemed to be some sort of unwritten code that we should occupy beds at a respectful distance from the other women and children on the flight. Though I was tired, I didn’t feel like lying down on the rough blankets.
When our luggage was deposited alongside our beds, Mom tried to cheer me up by suggesting that we go for a swim. And so I eventually mustered up the energy to rummage through a bag to find my bathing suit. It seemed to take forever to find my suit and change, though perhaps it wouldn’t have been easier had the space felt more intimate.
In October of 1568, a Spanish explorer, Álvaro de Mendaña de Neyra discovered "a low barren island, judged to be eight leagues circumference," to which he gave the name of "San Francisco”. While it is believed that the island that he discovered was today’s Wake, named after the British trader William Wake who visited the atoll in 1796, the land that I set foot on at age 10, in August 1957, was nothing even remotely like the San Francisco, much less the Ocean Beach, that I had just left.
Wake Island
I’m being told that I should dig, deeper, try to recall where I came from. How can anyone be asked to dig in the air? To hold on, by grabbing at a piece of sky? To see anything by crossing an imaginary line, by plunging to the depths of the Pacific, by dropping a bomb?
I keep returning to Wake (see entry on March 5, 2007…)
” I can still recall the pleasant voice of the stewardess as I gaze out the oval window and watch the flames licking the wings – the closest I can get to the calm of an open hearth. I am focusing on the horizon to still the nauseating turbulence of travel, in the hope that it will give me a clue as to the time of day, of year. As we cross the International Date Line, I'd rather be back on the mainland with my friends, the up-and-coming global generation, watching the Howdy Doody show, or with my grandmother.”
Mother Anne has caught sight of the atoll where we are headed. From the air, Wake Island looks like the cross section of an eyeball filled with a luminous emerald green liquid. The airstrip is at the inner, southeastern end of the lagoon, where the albatross once nested or so I'm told. When the hatch door is opened there will be no refreshing breeze or fragrant leis to greet us here, just the stifling humidity of this abandonned incubator.”
This is an emergency landing, no vacation in paradise. People whom I must trust have brought me here, even though we’ve evidently had to skip my 10th birthday to get here.
“Dad, what day is it? “
“It’s August 7th.”
“Why? What happened to August 6th?”
“We lost it when we crossed the International Date Line.”
“That’s a bummer. How can you just skip over someone's birthday? Does that mean that I could just as well have not been born? Or maybe it's like being born on April 29th? What is the International Date Line anyway?”
“Hold your horses, one question at a time." Dad often said "Hold your horses." "The International Date Line is an imaginary line where one day ends and the next begins, because the Earth is round. You see, just before we crossed the line, it was 12 noon on August 6th, and just after it was noon on August 7th," dad said and took out a piece of paper and drew a circle to help explain. He pointed to one spot on the circle and wrote 11 p.m., and 3 a.m. alongside another. " When we left San Francisco at 11 p.m. on August 5th, it was already 3 a.m. at the Date Line, and since it took us 8 hours to get to the Date Line it was already 11 a.m. on the 7th when we crossed it. "
He didn't answer my other questions, which were actually more important to me, because even if I could understand the logic of the Date Line math, I didn’t like the aftermath.
When we took off from Travis Air Force Base a few hours earlier, I had been told that I should be particularly excited because I was returning to the country where I was born, and that the plan was to celebrate my birthday when we arrived in Tokyo.
Rain does not fall everywhere at once
As I sift through memorabilia, things are slowly coming back:
Dear Mago,
It’s July 1957 and we have been traveling for over a week from Topeka (Remember: “We don’t live in Kansas anymore, do we Toto? From the Wizard of Oz) to visit you in San Francisco on our way to Tokyo. I am sure this summer will be memorable.
I remember, for example, exactly when I discovered that rain does not fall on everyone at the same time. As I looked straight ahead – to keep from becoming carsick – I could see the rain pouring cats and dogs down on the road ahead, though it was not hitting the windshield of our Pontiac. A warm glow filled me as I prepared for the spattering and blur, and the monotony of the windshield wipers, that I knew was soon to come. Still, I felt nauseated when it did.
We have been to Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, and a Pueblo Indian reservation on the way. I first learned about stalactites and stalagmites from our tour of the Caverns, though I must admit I have never been able to remember which grow from the floor and which from the ceiling. Mom was terribly upset when the energy we had pent up after hours in the car was released at the Grand Canyon, fearing that we would fall off the rim. I thought she was hysterical, though I’m not sure I know what that means. My strongest memory from the Pueblo Indian reservation was not the from the buildings (we have been building clay pueblos in school last year), but from the embarrassment and shame I felt when an old Indian woman waved her arms in front of her face to avoid being photographed by my new Brownie camera. We talked about it later, but I was still sad.
I can’t wait to get to San Francisco. No one can make tuna sandwiches like you. And since mom doesn’t let us drink Coke, Fanta, and 7up, I look forward Uncle Bert’s soda stash in the garage (not to mention his collection of organ music). Dad says he’ll be to have a (about to turn) 10-year-old girl around so he can put on a record and teach me to waltz.
Two weeks later…
I liked it when you said I looked so freckly and cute, that I’d just swallowed a dollar that had broken out in pennies. Since your house is full we’re staying at the Pink Flamingo motel on Lombard Street, between the Presidio and Fort Mason.
You know that the night before we were supposed to leave Steve got very sick and dad had to rush him off to Letterman Army Hospital where he was operated on for acute appendicitis. Since we have to stay on for at least another week, we will be moving to a motel along Ocean Beach, so that the rest of us can visit the zoo and go to the beach. We are enjoying our days here, visiting Steve at the ward at the Fort Mason Dispensary where we can race wheelchairs, go swimming everyday despite mom’s fear of our crossing the Upper Great Highway and of the undertow. Hopefully we can also see more of you and Jon and Chris [our cousins]!.
Your loving ganddaughter
Dear Mago,
It’s July 1957 and we have been traveling for over a week from Topeka (Remember: “We don’t live in Kansas anymore, do we Toto? From the Wizard of Oz) to visit you in San Francisco on our way to Tokyo. I am sure this summer will be memorable.
I remember, for example, exactly when I discovered that rain does not fall on everyone at the same time. As I looked straight ahead – to keep from becoming carsick – I could see the rain pouring cats and dogs down on the road ahead, though it was not hitting the windshield of our Pontiac. A warm glow filled me as I prepared for the spattering and blur, and the monotony of the windshield wipers, that I knew was soon to come. Still, I felt nauseated when it did.
We have been to Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, and a Pueblo Indian reservation on the way. I first learned about stalactites and stalagmites from our tour of the Caverns, though I must admit I have never been able to remember which grow from the floor and which from the ceiling. Mom was terribly upset when the energy we had pent up after hours in the car was released at the Grand Canyon, fearing that we would fall off the rim. I thought she was hysterical, though I’m not sure I know what that means. My strongest memory from the Pueblo Indian reservation was not the from the buildings (we have been building clay pueblos in school last year), but from the embarrassment and shame I felt when an old Indian woman waved her arms in front of her face to avoid being photographed by my new Brownie camera. We talked about it later, but I was still sad.
I can’t wait to get to San Francisco. No one can make tuna sandwiches like you. And since mom doesn’t let us drink Coke, Fanta, and 7up, I look forward Uncle Bert’s soda stash in the garage (not to mention his collection of organ music). Dad says he’ll be to have a (about to turn) 10-year-old girl around so he can put on a record and teach me to waltz.
Two weeks later…
I liked it when you said I looked so freckly and cute, that I’d just swallowed a dollar that had broken out in pennies. Since your house is full we’re staying at the Pink Flamingo motel on Lombard Street, between the Presidio and Fort Mason.
You know that the night before we were supposed to leave Steve got very sick and dad had to rush him off to Letterman Army Hospital where he was operated on for acute appendicitis. Since we have to stay on for at least another week, we will be moving to a motel along Ocean Beach, so that the rest of us can visit the zoo and go to the beach. We are enjoying our days here, visiting Steve at the ward at the Fort Mason Dispensary where we can race wheelchairs, go swimming everyday despite mom’s fear of our crossing the Upper Great Highway and of the undertow. Hopefully we can also see more of you and Jon and Chris [our cousins]!.
Your loving ganddaughter
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