The Dark Mountain Project.The landscape of the Owens Valley, east of the California Sierras, is both vast and enclosed.The long desert valley is held by great ranges the Sierras a white wall of granite and ice to the west, the Inyos and White Mountains a subtler but equally awesome wall to the east, all rising precipitously more than 1.On the floor of the valley are the remnants of a once vast lake Owens Lake, now reduced to alkali flats.And beyond the Inyo Mountains, Death Valley, drier, vaster still.My first visit to the Owens Valley was in late May 2.I drove north from the roar of Los Angeles into an emptier, emptier, and still emptier landscape, my heart growing happier mile by mile.When I got to the tiny town of Lone Pine and turned west into the high desert, towards the jagged 1.Mount Whitney, lit by the light of an early summer sunset, I thought I might explode with joy at the beauty there.I found a campground out on the tilted, open plateau of the upper valley, and settled in.Over the next few days, I learned a little of the history of the place.Before 1.Paiute country desert, mountains, and at the southern end of the valley a great alkaline lake, rich with birds and fish and tule beds.Then white settlers started moving in, and for the first few years the Paiutes and the settlers co existed with some peacefulness.Then, as settlement continued, there was increasing concern by the new settlers about the presence of the Paiutes.Free John Knowles A Separate Peace papers, essays, and research papers.After a few skirmishes, a military force was dispatched to the valley.At first the Paiutes fought back, but their resistance was broken when the military herded a group of 4.Initiation By Sylvia Plath Activities For Teenagers' title='Initiation By Sylvia Plath Activities For Teenagers' />Paiute women and children into the lake, deeper and deeper, until they drowned.The remaining Paiutes were then forcibly relocated from the valley.I sat with that story, and the almost unimaginable images it evoked, up in my campsite overlooking the lakebed where it had happened the armed men on horseback, the children crying, the inexorable push into the water, and the end, after the struggle.I considered how this story is woven into the fabric of this place, many places a part of the history of my own country that I can barely stand to see or know.The history goes on.After the Paiute were removed, the valley was irrigated by the waters of the Owens River, and became known for its rich fields and orchards.And after that, in the early years of the 2.Initiation By Sylvia Plath Activities For Teenagers' title='Initiation By Sylvia Plath Activities For Teenagers' />Los Angeles showed up, quietly, and began buying land and water rights.A huge aqueduct was built, an artery from the valley to Los Angeles, and the waters of the Owens Valley were sent south.The lake was emptied, the farmers bankrupted, and the valley returned to desert.Later, there was another little boom when Hollywood discovered the rocky hills above the valley as a setting for Westerns, but even that has dried up now.The alkaline sediments that blow from the empty lakebed promise to keep the Owens Valley mostly empty for a long time to come.Now there are just a few handfuls of eccentrics, ranchers, retirees, Paiute and Shoshone descendants of those who did not die in the lake, and who came back, years later, and tourists like me, wandering through.As I watched the light at dusk over the dry lakebed, I was struck by the piercing ironies in its history.The lake that once nourished the original people of the valley becomes their grave. Edit Binary File Using Coffee . How To Install Rain Shower Head From Wall here.Then the water is taken to fuel the dreams of those who displaced them, before they are displaced in their turn, casualties of the continuing gold rush of Los Angeles.A few days later, when I headed north in the mid afternoon heat, I discovered another part of the history of the Owens Valley.A small sign on the highway pointed left towards what appeared to be a landscape much like the rest of the valley, except for one large building that was about the size of an airplane hangar.The sign said, Manzanar National Historic Monument.At the entrance was a small, beautifully constructed stone gatehouse.On both sides of the road were concrete slabs, cracked pavement, and weeds all that is left of the most famous of the Japanese internment camps or concentration camps, as they were known at the time Manzanar.In the weeks after Pearl Harbour, when the Roosevelt administration chose to round up every person of Japanese descent in the Pacific states, I imagine some bureaucrats were given the task of finding suitable places to put them for an undetermined length of time.Maybe there were requirements like far from habitation, inexpensive land, easy to defend.As is still true, when the US government needs a place to put a military installation, a prison, a nuclear waste site, or other secret and unpleasant institutions, it looks to the American deserts, otherwise mostly the abode of light and rock, jackrabbits and roadrunners.The Owens Valley hadnt been a desert a few years before, but now land was once again inexpensive, far from habitation and easy to defend.Anyone trying to escape from Manzanar would have to cross miles of open desert, and then the highest portion of the Sierras.No one ever tried.Ten thousand men, women and children two thirds of them American citizens were interned at Manzanar, beginning in March 1.Most of them lived there for more than three years, in 5.The large building Id seen from the highway was what remained of the high school gymnasium, now the National Park Service interpretive centre.The barbed wire and barracks were gone, bulldozed after the war, during the time when the Japanese internment was a largely hidden part of American history.Manzanar was made a national monument after decades of lobbying by the survivors, who were determined not to allow their history to be buried and forgotten.I went into the small museum inside the former school gymnasium.It was hard to look at the large photos, at the shock on peoples faces old men, old women, children in the first days of internment, at the photos of barbed wire and armed guards in the towers.It was hard to read the hate filled editorials in newspapers around the country, on display in glass topped cabinets.It was hard to look at the rage in the faces of the young men in the camp.In one corner of the exhibit there was a large blank book where people could write their responses and reactions.Over and over again, sometimes in childish handwriting, sometimes in graceful cursive or in quick scrawls, visitors wrote, in various ways never again, this should never happen again.I was moved by the responses, but I also thought some of us remember, and some of us forget, and even now there are innocent people waiting in our immigration prisons and secret overseas interrogation rooms.It seems to be so tempting to do what was done here to the Paiute, to the Japanese and to think, This time its justified.This time these people really need to be treated this way, for our protection, or for theirs.Only afterwards is there some larger realisation of going astray.I thought, what a world it would be if we could all remember and truly put into practice, never again.There was an auditorium where a film was being shown footage from the time of the camp, and interviews with internees still alive today.Thats where I first heard shikataganai.An old man was trying to explain how he had survived the experience of being an internee.Shikataganai, he said.What is, is.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |