Chapter 19 Present Day
PRESENT DAY
JULIA
Julia had found a cozy outdoor patio in downtown Missoula to have a burger and a glass of wine.
Friendly diners attempted to chat with her, but she didn’t feel like socializing after learning about the one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans who had their lives totally upended, including her own family.
What disturbed her most was the fact that by some estimates, children made up half of those—especially since Grandmama was one of the displaced.
Julia had excused herself and found a hotel for the night.
The drive the next day to southern Idaho was uneventful but pulling up to Minidoka, the hair on the back of her neck stood erect once again.
The place appeared more desolate and bleaker than her imagination could have conjured.
On the barren high desert outside of Twin Falls, it was no wonder the occupants had complained.
During the drive, her mind sorted through all the images and stories of the Fort Missoula Internment Camp. Two positives stood out, learning where her grandmother had been sent with her parents and meeting the guy who changed her tire.
What a gentleman. Although, she felt bad for being so skittish, but deserted and alone at a cemetery at night seemed like an appropriate place and time to be wary.
Pulling through the front gate of the Minidoka National Historical Site did not bring any more comfort. A great shadow of sadness and isolation fell over Julia.
The website Julia read last night stated that the U.S.
government built the Minidoka War Relocation Center, one of ten around the country, on thirty thousand acres.
Over four hundred and thirty, one-hundred-twenty-foot by twenty-foot barracks were constructed on nine hundred of those acres.
The War Relocation Authority divided each barrack into six units.
Each four-hundred-square-foot unit housed an entire family.
Now surrounded by farmland, the government had erased all but the front gate, one sentry post, one reconstructed barrack and one other building containing a small museum. All operated by the National Park Service.
Julia stopped her SUV in front of a building marked with a sign: MINIDOKA VISITOR CENTER.
An American flag whipped in the dry wind from a flagpole cemented in place in a large truck tire.
Without the signage, she would have wondered if she was in the right place.
Like Fort Missoula, it seemed strangely abandoned.
As she cracked her car door open, the wind caught it, jerking it to its limit with a loud crunch, almost snapping the hinge.
Great, just what I need is to be stranded out in this godforsaken place.
She slammed the door closed, and the wind howled in fury around her.
She squinted against the blowing dust and blazing sun.
In the very far distance, past miles of deserted sage brush, mountains rose.
Julia had seen on the map that Sun Valley Ski Resort resided there.
While she stood in this triple digit heat, it was hard to imagine winter and snow and skiing at the resort.
She pulled at the front door of the building, struggling against the wind, trying to make sure, it too, didn’t snap open.
She slipped inside, breathed a sigh of relief to be out of the wind, and smoothed down her hair that had blown into a tangled mess.
The air-conditioning of the room and the groan of the wind through the door frame had given her a chill.
“A little windy out there,” a stout woman in a park ranger uniform standing behind a desk said without irony. “Welcome to Minidoka.”
Julia smiled at the ranger and wondered what she had done wrong to be assigned such a deserted post. “A little,” Julia laughed, blinking her eyes and smoothing her hair. She had taken only a few steps from her car when dust infiltrated everywhere. “Is it always like this?”
“Oh, it can get worse, believe me.”
Julia had no doubt.
“Are you here with the rest of the group?”
Julia almost laughed, looking around the deserted museum. “Eh…”
“The Minidoka Pilgrimage group?” the woman asked.
Julia was just about to think the woman had spent too many days in the blowing dust when she followed her gaze out the front windows.
“Here they are now.”
Julia could not believe her eyes as seven large Greyhound buses pulled through the parking lot.
The park ranger must have read the confusion on her face.
“They come every year in July…people formerly incarcerated, family members, friends, and allies…to remember.”
Julia stepped toward the window, watching the caravan drive by.
“They’re headed up to the barracks. You should go up there. They’re a super friendly group.”
* * *
Julia hesitated, but curiosity won, and she got back into her car and followed the path of the buses down a narrow road. A dust whirlwind spun across what looked to be an old, abandoned baseball diamond.
The buses had stopped in the grass field in front of two rectangular, decrepit buildings.
Both built on cinder blocks, the smaller of the two had at one time been painted white, but the wind and dust had removed most of the color.
People of all ages filed from the buses into the other building, painted brown, that appeared less likely to collapse against the weather.
Julia pulled her SUV in front of the building and a sign that wobbled in the wind that read: BLOCK 22.
The placard brought a pain to her chest, and she pressed her fingers into her sternum.
Her junior year of high school, Julia had researched and reported on the Nazi concentration camps.
The Nazis also arranged their camps into blocks.
She pressed her back into the seat and a loud pop snapped mid spine.
A woman’s hat had blown off, and two young teenagers chased after it.
It danced along the top of the grass, just staying out of the boys’ reach, and Julia thought the woman would never see it again.
Everyone else hugged their clothing as they hustled into the building.
The bus driver unloaded three wheelchairs and an assortment of walkers, and Julia wondered how in the world the occupants of each could make their way off the bus, through the wind and up the stairs of the building.
But she watched in amazement as young people carried them on specialized transit chairs.
I guess where there’s a will, there’s a way. They had come prepared.
A knock on Julia’s passenger window made her jump, and she glanced over to see a smiling girl with neon blue hair.
“You coming in?” the girl shouted through the window and wind.
“I’m not sure.”
The girl put her hand behind her ear and then unexpectedly, opened Julia’s car door, jumped into the passenger seat, and slammed the door closed.
“What a hellhole. I never understood how they survived this place.” She said and wiped the dust from her eyes.
“I’m Zoey,” she said and reached out her hand.
“Julia.” She returned the girl’s firm handshake.
“That’s my great-grandma,” Zoey said and pointed to a frail-looking woman carried in by two middle-aged men.
“She’s Nisei…she was here from age fourteen to seventeen.
Can you imagine…in this cesspool? Well, better run.
She’s the keynote speaker, and I’m translating.
” She grabbed the door handle and turned. “You coming?”
“Eh…” Julia wasn’t so sure. “I’m not signed up or anything.” Still not sure about the purpose of the group.
“You a Mindoka..ian?” Zoey added the ‘ian’ in a squeak.
“Well…my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother and grandmother were all here…but I’m--”
“That makes you one of us,” Zoey interrupted. “Believe me, you didn’t have to live here to be affected by it. Look at me,” she said and clowned with a crazed face.
This made Julia laugh.
“When did you find out about this purgatory?”
“Uh…like, yesterday.”
Zoey again clowned with a fake shocked face. “See what I mean? So much shame was bred here. Healing is a lot easier when you’re not doing it alone. At least that’s what they say. Truly, come on. The people are great, and besides, there’s cake.”
* * *
The building where the group of over two hundred people had gathered groaned against the wind.
A skeleton of a shelter, the dust and heat filtered through every crack in the wooden slate walls.
Julia worried the whole thing would collapse, but because it had survived the last hundred years, she figured it would stand for another few hours.
The man sitting next to Julia said that nothing had changed—the dirty particle board floors, unfinished walls with no insulation or drywall, and bare wood rafters that creaked against the wind.
The park service had arranged rows of folding chairs and a handful of large wooden picnic tables for the gathering.
A large banner with the words, WE WILL REMEMBER, hung behind the panel of elders.
It swayed with the wind pushing on the walls of what one panelist described as the mess hall for Block 22.
Thirteen thousand people crammed in forty-four blocks of communities, each block with communal bathrooms, laundry, and a mess hall.
“My father said that the worst part of Minidoka was that the construction wasn’t complete when they arrived,” commented an older man on the panel. “Many of the lavatory facilities were holes in the ground; the government made us build our own prison.”
He passed the microphone to Zoey’s great-grandmother.
Julia sweated. She looked around the room and worried for the older folks, but it was only the younger generations that seemed to mind the heat.
Her perspiration also came from the information the panel shared.
Most spoke in English, but Zoey’s great-grandmother said in this place she refused to and only spoke Japanese.
It surprised Julia how well Zoey translated.