May 15 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about nonviolence, and how, in an ultraviolent place and time—with the U.S. government committing so much of that violence—nonviolent strategies can sometimes take people by surprise in useful ways. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Today’s Friday note will be a quick one. There’s a lot going on right now! But I wanted to write about another kind of surprise, one I’ve come to rely on in my writing—if it’s possible to rely on surprises.

The closest I’ve come to dying that I know of was a decade ago, while I was researching my history of concentration camps. To see current and former camp sites, and to meet people who had lived through this history, I went all around the world, from Myanmar to Chile, Germany, Poland, Guantanamo, and the West Coast of the United States.

I’ve had some close calls since, with a few weird moments on Arctic expeditions. But I’ve never been as aware of my possible imminent contingency as I was in December 2015.

It was important to me to visit at least one concentration camp site in the U.S. that had held Japanese Americans during World War II. After promising my one of my kids that I would return in time for Christmas, I flew out to the Tule Lake camp and prison in California on December 21.

The national park tours of the area had ended for the season, but I made arrangements to meet with a park staffer who said he would come out and give me a personal tour before I looked around on my own.

I flew into Oregon and reserved a rental car to drive to California. It being winter, I had checked the temperatures for where I would land, in Eugene, and in the town of Tulelake. The forecast called for temperatures in the forties, with rain.

I didn’t have much of my book advance left, and I usually rent the tiniest cheapest car I can anyway. If you’re like me, that usually means you end up driving something that has all the power of suburban lawn mower. So when the woman at the rental car desk learned I was headed to California and asked didn’t I want a bigger car, I just assumed it was the usual upsell that I’d long ago learned to deflect.

A half an hour or so into the drive, I got a call from the park ranger, who asked if I was still coming, since the weather wasn’t going to be ideal. Did I ask what he meant by that? No, I did not.

“I’ve already landed and am on the way there. See you this afternoon!” I said.

Not long after that, it began to flurry. Then I noticed the road was gradually going uphill, and then up some more. The snow fell more heavily for a bit, and I noticed permanent road signs that indicated chains were required.

“It’s good they make trucks carry chains out here,” I thought to myself, without somehow thinking any further than that.

About an hour into the trip, the snowfall turned into a snowstorm. At that point, I remembered that California has mountains that run up into Oregon. Not only was I in a storm, but I was crossing a mountain pass in a snowstorm in an underpowered car. Checking the weather in Eugene and Tulelake, I had completely discounted the fact that I would have to go over a mountain pass to get from one to the other.

Just as I came to that realization, the road started going up and down at steep angles over and over. I couldn’t go slowly, or I would never get up the subsequent hill. By this point, there were several inches on the ground. How much had just fallen and how much was fresh? I had no idea, but nothing was plowed, and there were no side roads visible. My cell phone no longer had any signal at all.

I considered turning back but remembered the route I was taking had gone east and then south. The whole trip was only supposed to take four hours. Surely I was halfway through the mountainous part already. If I turned around, it would only take longer to get through the pass going that way.

No car appeared anywhere, coming or going. I realized the sign about chains had surely been meant to include me, too. Then it struck me that if I went off the road, the odds were that the car would careen into a snowdrift, and it might be a long time before anyone found me.

I somehow made it to Tule Lake and met up with the park ranger. After spending the afternoon together, amid the calmer weather that the forecast had promised me there, I checked into my little room that I thought had been a hotel but was just a room someone was letting out.

Stopping in at the only diner in town for dinner, I found that it was about to close. Come back in the morning, the cook told me, everybody will be here in the morning. So I got up early to get some food and ask people at a diner what they knew and thought about detention of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

It was perhaps a little early to process the question, though some did answer. One farmer asked where I had driven in from. When I told him I had come in yesterday from Eugene, his eyes grew big. “In that little green toaster?” he asked, pointing out the window at my rental car.

Others sitting with him said since I was a journalist, I should write about the plans for the Klamath River Dam removal. But a guy at the next table called out: “Brodie will be here in a little bit, and when he gets here, ask him about the camps.”

So I sat and waited for Brodie to show up. When he did, I collared him, and he told me that after the Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake camp had been released, the barracks for the camp had been broken into halves.

Postwar homesteads had been made available around Tulelake (the town), and his father had become a homesteader. They were allowed to haul away a half a former barracks to use however they liked. Brodie lived on the homestead himself now, and still used the building.

The interesting about it, he noted, was that the inside wall was covered with graffiti from those years of detention. It was still all there, he said. Did I want to come out and see it?

Yes, I did. So I went out later that day, and went into the old barn-garage that was still getting good use, its walls covered with historical relics that were invaluable to me. Standing there looking at the penciled characters, I saw that most of the writing ran in vertical columns.

I could read none of it, but the surprise of the discovery made the wartime concentration camp experience real for me in a new way. I thought of the bits of lives preserved on those walls, the lives of the incarcerated ticking by with with little idea when it would all end and when they might leave. I thought of the universal aspects of detention. I thought of one American community losing its homes and being locked up, and a different community given a chance to make a fresh start after the war.

Later that night, Brodie called me to say there was another snowstorm coming that would hit the next day before I would be able to get across the mountains. He didn’t think it was safe to try to navigate the pass a second time in snow in that car.

I looked at driving south and changing my plane ticket to leave from San Francisco. But there was not going to be a clear path over the Cascades anywhere by the time I needed to cross them. I had promised to be home for Christmas, but the likelihood of that was dropping by the minute.

A little bit later, Brodie called me back. He was taking his heavy truck over into Oregon to see his daughter for Christmas. If I could find a place to turn my rental car in, he would give me a ride to the Eugene airport.

Owing me nothing at all, he met me at the rental car outpost the next town over the following morning. And Brodie, who had driven that route for two decades as trucker, safely delivered me to Eugene.

***

Even as the snowstorm was unfolding, I realized it was a dangerous situation. But it was the guys in the diner alarmed by the sight of my little car who underlined my foolishness for me.

Yet the graffiti is what I think about most from that trip. Sometimes when you’re sure you know a story or a piece of history, another part that’s new to you will show up. I’ve learned as a writer to wait for those surprises—because the surprise is the part that pierces you, so that you can let in what you thought you already knew.

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