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.