A Sacred Road

Part of being unemployed is being able to tag along with the spouse when he goes places, wherever those places are, since two can live almost as cheaply as one.  That meant that Japan wasn’t the only place I tagged along to this summer, but also Wyoming and Kansas, a week in either place.  You might argue that these are hardly as exotic as Japan and so hardly worth bothering with… or are you too sensible to argue such nonsense?

To me, they are still new places, and every new place is fraught with learnings, no matter how mundane they appear on the surface:  yes, you see many of the same chain restaurants, on the periphery of the towns, as you see anywhere in the States, but then there are the local businesses with their myriad new names, and even the local chains, ubiquitous to the natives but puzzling to the outsider.  We can see the same patterns played out in different ways.  And the landscapes – oh, this will be a long blog, pondered over the last month and more, hence its lateness in coming…

After long miles of occasional habitations and hamlets – all guarded by long ranks of snow-fence that argue for ferocious winter winds -- Casper looms up out of the prairie like Athena from Zeus’ head, fully-armed: a perfect model of a small American city.  Seen from the mountain that rises behind it, it can all be seen at a glance:  the tiny, still-living downtown, clustered around the railroad station and boasting large civic buildings; the array of numbered streets acting as latitudes of wealth, progressing through bands of businesses, churches, and schools from downtown up the slope to the college; the mirror-image array of lettered streets progressing into the low-income floodplain of the gorgeous North Platte River with its trailers and simple, respectable houses.  A miniature trailer, just yards from the river-bend is for sale…  Surrounding the part of the town mostly built at the beginning of the last century is a classic periphery of suburban and indeed edge-city development, yet it is still healthy in its expansion:  no dead areas, yet.

Casper is not an ironic place; it is in earnest. The man at the indie bookstore will speak passionately about the lousy drivers and at length about where to find bike-trails; the young city librarian explains to interested new users of all ages the many services their library can provide; the guy at the bike-shop will build you a new bike in a day if you’d like to rent a different model; the staff at the hotel chaff familiarly with the oil-workers far from home, and put out board games when kids are on the guest roster, and popcorn and veggies, every afternoon at 4:00. The boy in the college production of “Gypsy” speaks frankly about falling in love with dancing and with theater, and his certainty of landing a theater job in the big leagues.  I am reminded that this is the West.  Here “seldom is heard a discouraging word.”

But I am also being consciously blind to its history:  to the tragedy of the Great Indian War and Fort Caspar (sic)’s role in that, to the lynchings and shootings of the range wars, to the business of turning wild horses into whatever products might be saleable, after the oil bust of the Great Depression…

Manhattan, KS is so much more a mid-western place, a callous and sophomoric place, a college town as ever was, with its bar-saturated Aggieville and its big professorial houses arranged neatly around its Central Park.  But there is cosmopolis here, too, in modest doses:  a great café, a great bookstore, a pretty campus full of trees.  And it is surrounded by Kansas. Let’s talk about landscapes, and leave urban things behind.  Let’s talk about the harp-shaped hills of the Kansas prairies, and the rich, beautiful river-valleys filled with soybeans and tall trees, and let’s consider trails, for example the trails leading west from Council Grove.

The thin topsoil of Wyoming scars easily, and marks of the wagon-wheels of the pre-railroad emigrants are still clearly to be seen at the base of the mountains, skirting the river-valleys.  We wonder how they could be just two wheels wide, why everyone seems to have travelled in single-file along this one trail, for though it may branch into different trails, each trail is a single trail.  We discover that there is a very good reason for this:  if a wagon strayed from that trail, it was breaking a treaty.  In the slim space of time after peace councils with local tribes like those made at Council Grove and Council Bluffs, and before the treaties were broken – often escalated when whites took revenge disproportionately to an attack and on the wrong tribe – these trails were considered by at least some of the tribes through whose territories they went to be sacred, to be “base,” so that as long as the emigrants – as many as 1000 wagons a day, in high season for a brief stretch of years -- kept moving towards California or Oregon or Utah and did not stop to settle along the way, they were safe from attack.  But then came the massacres, and the railroad, and the killing of the buffalo and all-out war, and it was clear that nothing was sacred.

The landscapes between Caspar and Denver these trails traverse – or just between Caspar and Steamboat Springs, for starters – are just astounding.  I had thought that Arizona had the greatest variety of scenery with its ever-changing horizons of mountains and plains, but Wyoming!  Mountains the likes of which are no-where else, with formations like multi-colored gelato, and mountains diving into a vast reservoir with such stark stratigraphy that it seems they were invented by illustrators of outer-space fantasies... Between Wyoming and Colorado is a mysterious inland basin, falling between two curves of the Continental Divide, a landscape from which no river escapes, on the high center of the landmass.  It has a feeling of timelessness along with its centrality, like being a pole from which all directions are out.  Descending into the real, lush river-valleys of Colorado is like exhaling after holding a long breath.

And the sublimity of the road between Steamboat Springs and Estes Park, taking the Trail Ridge Road, and again between Estes Park and Loveland, taking Hwy 34 along the Big Thompson River – this has been described over and over and here I can only say that, taken on a day of mixed rain and sunshine, the Trail Ridge, at 11,000 feet, is beyond sublime, and tips into the realm of stupendous, with grey masses of rain falling into deep, deep valleys filled with pines (many of them – as all across Colorado – dead), making slick and terrifying a road innocent of guard-rails and just plastered in places alongside the ancient highland Ute trail that gives it its name.

We came to rest for a night at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, lingering into a sunny, timeless morning, looking out over the lake surrounded by mountains, from under a pine branch full of chickadees.  And there we will leave us, as in a sense we are there, still.

Stepping Onto the Boat

It is June, and we are on the ferryboat from Shiogama to Matsushima, surging across what has been described as the most beautiful place in Japan, a land of beautiful places: Matsushima Bay, “Pine-Island” Bay, a shallow inlet of the deep Pacific, on the long, smooth curve of Sendai Bay.  We have walked to Shiogama from Taga-jo, where the iris beds are once again riotous with bloom.  It is a gorgeous summer afternoon:  clear, cool and sunny, with a gentle breeze.  The water sparkles, and all the perfect islands gleam.

Happy vacationers feed shrimp-chips to the seagulls as they always have, and the seagulls never nip a finger or otherwise fail to delight.

Yet if you know where to look, you will see the heaps of wreckage in Shiogama harbor, gathered from all the vanished communities of Tohoku, waiting to be loaded up and shipped to Kyushu, where sympathetic folk have donated landfill space to accept it.  You will also notice a few shattered pleasure boats, still littering a small section of shore, and the seaside promenade you passed on the way to the ship is still undermined and unsafe for walking, its stone markers tilted at crazy angles, and, mysteriously, the three tall smokestacks of the power plant are nowhere to be seen.

As the shore slips away, I wonder: how to express the sameness-yet-radical-difference of Tohoku, just over a year after the March 11, 2011 earthquake/tsunami?  The novelty of the disaster is long over, the voyeurs have gone home, yet the comfort and normalcy of March 10, 2011 is still irrevocably lost. 

Sorrow hangs in the bright air of Tohoku like the tones of a temple-bell, and like the repeated tolling of a bell it is renewed around each corner when a stretch of grass-grown field comes into view, with a shattered house in the center of it, or when we catch sight of an impossible stack of automobiles, rapidly to become rusted and dated, their masters lost to the sea.

People are still struggling to know how best to move forward:  should they tear down that damaged house or rebuild it?  Should they put down roots in a new place or return to a changed old place?  Should they keep on with a family business when the family is nearly all gone, or to start over with an entirely new venture?  When familiar landscapes are gone, along with the comforting routines that filled them, who can say what is right?

Tragedy changes us, and people suffer tragedies everyday, on a small scale:  a lost parent here, a sick child there; a fire destroys a house; a business goes bankrupt.  Friends and faith can help us absorb the shock; we adjust our lives in small increments, each day.  But when so many lose so much over such a short period, who is to comfort them, and how are they to adjust? 

It seems to me that we board a ship each morning, but when we return to the same port at night, the place has subtly changed, as have we.  Since we left port, there have been numerous small tragedies, but then again, people have fallen in love, people have married, children have been conceived, children born; ideas have been hatched, projects completed, boats launched.  Things are not just always dying, they are always growing, too, if perhaps in an unfamiliar, unexpected form. 

And when they do become familiar – if we let them become familiar – perhaps our grief will finally fade.

Five Minutes and Thirty Feet Later

In 2010, the last time I posted regularly on this blog, I wrote of leaving Sendai that April: of my fondness for it and of its beauty and character.  Less than a year after stepping onto the flight at Natori Airport which took us away from Sendai, a wave from the sea washed away the village of Natori, and over the landing strip of the airport, changing everything.

This summer we returned to Japan.  Natori airport seems as usual, but in that short stretch between the airport and the sea there is just one abandoned house.  The same emptiness stretches miles and miles, northward and southward of there, to a distance of about five miles inland, depending on the shape of the coast.

I was reminded at lunch today that the seafloor under the coast of northeastern Japan fell by ten meters on March 11 of 2011, the day of the tsunami that killed ten thousand people and has left untold hectares of land a wasteland.  My friend Miki says that the temblor, a nine-plus on the Richter scale, lasted for five minutes. 

Ever lived through a fifteen-second earthquake?  Seemed way too long, didn’t it?

These are both facts to boggle the mind: imagining an area the size of Texas suddenly falling thirty feet over a period of just five minutes.  The volume of displaced water, splashing back from such a vast, sudden movement, was correspondingly enormous, of course, and all of you have seen some sort of footage of the result.

Surviving friends tell us they were on the coast, but needed to run inland to the gas station, or that they were far from their coastal home, safely stuck in freeway traffic, or that they were at the Institute office, foolishly clinging to computer terminals as the computers themselves slammed to the floor, glass from the windows raining all around.  People walked forty minutes across town to their houses, gathered up belongings, took a four-hour bus-ride to a city on the west coast, and thence a train to Tokyo.  People called their husbands, moments after the shock, and got through, only to lose contact twenty minutes later, as the tsunami took out the telephone towers. 

For a month or more afterwards there was electricity but no natural gas, meaning no hot-water heaters in chilly March, so no bathing for the world’s cleanest people.  Businesses stopped requiring workers to wear their good black suits; people wore hats a lot, and flu-masks; “it was like just after the War,” people said.  These are also the world’s most self-reliant people, who scorn assistance and would rather starve than admit to their neighbors they lost their job, now needing help. 

These are people who carefully plan what to do in case of disaster, and just where in the neighborhood to meet…only to have those meeting places washed way, and themselves along with them; people who built seawalls of reasonable size, only to have the walls themselves sink and the wave itself rise unimaginably high to overwhelm them.

What will we see, when we go back? we wondered, wanting to see and know, but not wanting to look or ask.  Would the places we were fond of still exist?  What would be different? In Shiogama and Matsushima, though there were subtle changes, nearly every place we knew had cleaned up and kept on going, but then again, on shallow Matsushima Bay, they had only had chest-high water.  Only chest-high!  A year later, the worst-hit were still shuttered.  But Ishinomaki, right on the Pacific Ocean, was a different story, one for later pondering in this blog.

Picking Up the Threads

All us Lord of the Rings fans will recall Frodo, wandering through the halls of Bag End after his terrible adventure, wondering how to take up his life where he had left it, just over a year before.  I am surprised to find how much my post-Head of School time resembles that wandering and wondering.  It is more than a month since I was officially done with my job there and yet I am still shilly-shallying, napping, thinking about getting back to writing, and not actually doing it.

For two years I have been working at full stretch, keeping despair and sloth to one side, slogging along one day at a time.  Perhaps not at full stretch, really, since I preserved my energies for each coming week by licking my wounds on the weekends, losing myself in novel revisions, and doing anything but school-work – if possible – unless it was artwork or other creative stuff.

Instead of blogging ponderings about places and their meaning, I wrote a weekly essay for the school newsletter reflecting on the importance of good education, good faith, hard work, common goals, and the like, and kept the rest very private.  Facebook proved a false friend for sharing worries about my work, and I shut down all communication unless in my official capacity on the official school site.

Now, God willing, that the academic glory of Saint Michael’s has been restored and, reduced to a much trimmer form, has not only weathered the worst of its financial storms but should also weather the years to come, and now that it has been handed off to capable and fresher leadership, perhaps now, after a month’s dozing and traveling and reflecting and scribbling, I can open the dusty binders of research, still stacked on my desk, gather up the sheafs of notes and photographs and poetical squibs, reconnect with whatever it was they were trying to say and pump fresh ink into them, and start again to produce something spatial.