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.