My rampant enthusiasm for snow days has become a running joke at school; few things–if any, really–fire me up more than a couple inches of snow blanketing town. There’s an aesthetic aspect of this, as crunching through the flakes in the deadened muffle of a snowy night is unlike anything else. There’s the joy of routine disrupted as well, with something out of the ordinary scrapping the familiar. If I’m being honest, though, the sweetest part is having a free day, with school closed and no threat of a compensatory day later in summer. If it’s exciting as a kid, it’s exhilarating as an adult.
This last winter, though, I found myself reckoning with the other side of snow days. The night before an anticipated “snowmageddon,” I picked up a falafel and spoke briefly with the restaurant owner. She was downcast. If you’re a small business, she explained, your margins are already slim; a few days of snowy conditions means a huge loss of revenue. Businesses all across the city would suffer. Meanwhile, Portland’s extensive homeless population faced the severe health crisis of the deep freeze. Emergency shelters would be opened to help close the gap, but some people would be exposed and it’s not unheard of for deaths to occur. My dad actually slipped and fell when the snow was at its worst and couldn’t get up until a neighbor saw him and was able to assist; until then, he was stuck outside.
All of this generated a great deal of ambivalence for me. Objectively speaking, my love of snow days is a mark of privilege and selfishness; I’m among a very small group that purely benefits from snow days, after all. It’s not just that some people are disadvantages or inconvenienced by them; in extreme cases, they pose life-threatening situations.
Is it possible to still feel excited for a snow day, despite all of that, without being a bad person?
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From Holly, Colorado, the ADT proceeds northward for a few miles, before heading due west for the rest of the day, en route to Lamar. In so doing, it bypasses the town of Granada, and that’s a huge missed opportunity, as it’s the location of a tremendously important site.
The “Granada War Relocation Center,” aka “Camp Amache,” was a Japanese internment/concentration camp established in World War 2. While this was the lone camp established on private land, it happens to be the best preserved, as no subsequent development occurred here. That said, it gives me pause to see that it has that “best preserved” label, as pretty much all that survives are cement foundations and dirt roads. A historical society has installed some interpretive signs, and an audio-guide can be downloaded for visitors, but for the most part it’s scrub brush with the occasional tree mixed in.
The camp was established on a small hill, overlooking the river valley. While that protected it from flooding, it’s easy to imagine how rough life was in the hastily-constructed and poorly-insulated barracks. Even on a mild day, the wind rips through here, and the dry earth causes dust to blow everywhere. Little shade exists. Short cacti lurk beneath the bushes, ready to rip a foot open (I came much closer than comfortable to this fate).
This was the smallest internment camp, with over 7000 people packed into 2.6-km2, with barbed wire lining the exterior. Once again, this detail forces me to re-read it a couple of times, as my prevailing thought when circulating the camp centered on its immensity. What do the largest camps feel like? Or what would they feel like, had they been preserved?
Most of Amache’s inmates were transported from California. Aside from two camps in Arkansas (Arkansas?!), this was the easternmost “relocation center.” Somehow, irrational as it reads as I translate the thought into printed words, it felt like a particular offense to not only forcibly relocate people and unjustly strip them of their freedom, but then to also ship them so far from home, into such a barren environment. In truth, Colorado proved to be one of the better states in which to have one’s human rights so grossly abused. The town of Granada, if not explicitly welcoming the inmates, made some gestures of kindness or acknowledgement, including making desired goods available in stores and offering employment to some. Colorado’s governor actually welcomed the Japanese Americans to Granada (in contrast to many states that outright refused their presence anywhere within their borders). The Amache high school established a football team and the nearby Holly High School’s team actually came to the camp to play a game on their “home field.” Those are not mitigating factors that should make us feel better about internment, but they are small signs of the persistence of humanity in bleak times.
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Whether explicitly stated or not, one goal of the American Discovery Trail, I’m sure, is to make its travelers feel more connected to America. And it’s hard to spend weeks and months walking across this country and not come out of it feeling a sense of awe for this place–for its staggering scope, its stunning beauty, and the relentlessly welcoming people encountered along the way. If, in the process, one also revisits the country’s history of expansion and growth, there is also ample grist for the inspiration mill, marked first and foremost by the boldness and resilience of our predecessors.
There is the dark side of that history as well, of course, and in few places is that more apparent than in a former Japanese-American concentration camp. As a country, we have made some remarkably positive contributions to the world, and we’ve also fallen well short of our professed ideals on countless occasions.
And there, again, is the ambivalence, the challenge of reconciling the angels and demons on our collective shoulders, of struggling to determine if pride can exist hand-in-hand with shame, or if well-earned shame can ever be justifiably relinquished.
From the outside looking in, I have been struck by how definitively Germany has collectively wrestled with its Nazi past, denouncing it in absolute terms and working resolutely to prevent any sort of recurrence. Perhaps a pushback moment will come in the years ahead, but to this point it has taken responsibility for what many regard as the quintessential example of evil wreaked upon this world in an unflinching and unequivocal manner. Again, as an outsider, I can (and do) admire this; I can hold it up as a model example of how countries should respond to national shame. Would it be appropriate for a German to do that? A husband who cheated on his wife can’t exactly go back and brag to her if he makes it for the next ten years without a recurrence. How many decades need to pass before a country can feel proud of not allowing the conditions to arise in which a genocide could occur? Perhaps all of that is irrelevant, though the tension feels salient to me. We all need to feel good about who we are.
Perhaps the most memorable element of Amache, for me, was a quote from Milton Eisenhower, the first director of the War Relocation Authority (the group responsible for managing Japanese-American internment), something he said in 1974: “I have brooded about this whole episode on and off the past three decades for it is illustrative of how an entire society can somehow plunge off course.”
The challenge to those who come later is to manage their unfortunate, unwanted inheritance without resentment, to face the past with blunt honesty and the optimism that its legacy can be shifted, and that it need never recur. Have we done that?
