Return to Manzanar - Saturday 9/20/2008 (Part 1)

We visit the Manzanar National Historic Site every time we're in the Owens Valley, which is once or twice a year for the past eight years or more. They've been slowing adding information and restorations, including a really wonderful interpretive center.

If you're traveling through you really must stop and explore.

This is the entrance to the graveyard. People have hung origami figures all around it.


The central monument in the graveyard.


People put mementos on the monument. This apple came from one of the trees in the orchard here. Manzanar means orchard in Spanish. There was a very small town here by that name around the turn of the 19th Century.


One of the baby graves.


The ranger at the interpretive center told us that they'd made progress in excavating Peace Park, one of several gardens built by the Japanese-American internees during their time at Manzanar. We'd seen the standing stones before, but the painted writing had worn away.

This is amazing! This was taken from the newly excavated basin of one of the intricately constructed ponds. Dirt used to come almost all the way up to the rocks and covered many of them. The site's much bigger than we realized from what used to protrude.

The ranger told us they'd removed as much as four feet of sand!


Elk tracks near Peace Park. They have the run of the place and it seemd like they might actually have been frolicking here earlier in the day!

Whoo Hoo! - Wednesday 10/31/2007

When I checked my e-mail this morning, I found a small honorarium waiting for me from the online journal Raving Dove. They bought a photograph I took some years ago of barracks being moved back into the Manzanar National Historical Site! (Although I also placed photographs in the Acton/Agua Dulce Country Journal and Houston Literary Review this year, this is my first paid photography publication.)

I'm proud of this one... Raving Dove is all about promoting peace and humanitarian actions. And they advertise in the classified pages of Poets & Writers magazine which for some reason adds a little cache in my mind.

I'm really pleased to have found a home for this lucky photograph. It was taken a few years ago with my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix with something like 3.1 megapixel capacity. It probably couldn't have gone anywhere but to a website like this because the resolution is low. The light was amazing on that mid-November day.

Thanks to all of you who read and especially those of you who comment. I started this blog a little over two years ago to see if I had the discipline and interest I thought I needed in order to warrant buying myself my beautiful Nikon D80. (You can hum "Give Me That Old Time Religion" while you read this because, yes, that's got something to do with a Midewest version of the Puritan work ethic.)

It's turned out to be a much more interesting and rewarding journey than I ever could have imagined.

Manzanar Revisited - Saturday 9/22/2007

We went out to Manzanar National Historic Site (World War II internment camp) late Saturday, after the interpretive center had closed. If you've followed the blog, you know we've been here before.

I don't know why we're so drawn to it. Maybe it's just the idea that 10,000 people lived here in barracks like these for a couple of years while their businesses languished and their former communities moved on without them.

Maybe it's also partly that when we first visited about 10 years ago, there was just a little sheet of paper noting various landmarks you could pick out, but which weren't very well marked. Now there's a wonderful interpretive center, a reconstructed guard tower (important, because there was actually a book available at the Lone Pine Drug Store that denied that anyone was kept here against their will or that there were even guard towers,) and signs that they are working to restore some of the water gardens created by the people who lived here.



We've been visiting this spot for years. Last year there was no sidewalk and some of the deepest pool was filled with dirt. I climbed all around it, because I suspect that by next time this will be fenced off. It looks like they're going to move the barracks over here, too, because there were unearthed (or recreated?) blocks of foundation concrete on either side.



Looking south past monument at the graveyard. Most of the bodies were moved to other locations when the camp was closed.


One of the interesting tributes left on the monument.



The grave marker of Baby Jerry Ogata.

Here's a link to the photos Ansel Adams took there, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

A Much Needed Day Outdoors - Saturday 9/30/2006

We ventured into the Alabama Hills again on Saturday. Hydra was busy with his metal detector, while I trundled up into one of the many spaces between rocks with my camera, notebook and a desert guidebook that was written in 1969. Some beautiful writing in the introduction, etc.



It was shady and cool between the rocks, and the loudest sound was my fountain pen gliding across the page.



This granite is so decomposed that you can actually crumble bits of the edges away with your bare fingertips.


We drove deeper into the hills in search of Gene Autry Rock. The road was quite narrow in some places. See how the side mirrors are folded back?



I hiked up a ways and did some rock-hopping. Love this boulder that dropped down and filled in the gap. I did get a bit of a feeling of not knowing where I was when I'd hit a few dead ends in a row, but it's easy to keep your bearings with the Eastern Sierras on one side.


Hydra played a song in the shadow of Gene Autry Rock. Sounded great out there!



Leap of faith... We just believed that the road was down there below the hood. And it turned out that it was.



Finished up the day at an event at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Took the photo below on our way into a panel discussion about the Owens Valley, partly in relationship to the Manzanar internment camp, which involved a panel of old-timers (some in their 80s and 90s) and audience responses to questions. It was an amazing evening partly in support of the publication of Voices From This Long Brown Valley by Jane Wehry.