It was quite an emotional roller coaster for me today. It started out on a relatively even keel, getting to see the sunrise, then going for a 3 mile loop at the ridge, but in the late morning I went for a meditative walk around the labyrinth, and for some reason thoughts about my body kept coming up. As I thought about my body, I found myself tugging my clothes over my stomach to hide it, even though no one else was around. My body is often something that I’m ashamed of but at the same time I know I’m healthy – when I had blood tests done all my different levels came out excellent or good. I walk and hike every day, I’m getting enough sleep, doing good things for my body. So why do I hate it so much? Why do I feel embarrassed by how I look and I want it to be different? Part of it is shame over having lost a lot of weight 12-13 years ago and then slowly it’s all come back, and now with menopause I’m getting more weight around my middle. I’m more active than I was when I was last this weight and I’m eating better but I’m still unhappy with how I look and I’m even more unhappy that I feel this way. I feel like I shouldn’t care about how I look. I’ve happily adjusted to not wearing makeup except in a very rare occasion. Over the last few years I have been decreasing the amount of makeup I’ve worn, but most of the time I felt I had to at least have on mascara and a little bit of eyeliner before I went out. During this time off I’ve noticed that it’s like when I was home by myself before, then I never put on makeup, it wasn’t part of my daily routine like brushing my teeth and journaling and walking. I only did it for other people and to make myself look good. So I stopped wearing it as much, still putting it on when I was going out with friends I know in a more professional capacity, but then I stopped wearing it even then. And it’s now been weeks, maybe months, since I’ve worn makeup, and I don’t miss it at all. I think having colorful glasses on helps as they give my face a little more color, because of my light complexion and blond hair everything my face feels a bit washed out and makeup used to help to brighten up the area around my eyes. But I don’t care about that as much now. Unfortunately, I still really care about what my body looks like, in particular my hips, thighs, butt, and stomach. It doesn’t feel curvy, it feels lumpy and ugly. I don’t want to feel this way about my body, so how can I change it? I see pictures of larger women wearing bikinis and baring so much of their body and I’m so impressed, but somehow their bodies seem more acceptable than mine, I don’t think mine looks that good.
After letting all these thoughts whirl through my head, I headed over to do my work for the day, which involved babysitting the directors adorable six-month-old daughter, Abigail, for an hour and a half. This swung my emotional pendulum to the other end, as Abigail is a happy, easy-going baby with those lovely Gerber Baby cheeks, and roly-poly arms and legs. Playing with her took me back to when my kids were that age. It was so lovely to have a happy baby to carry around and snuggle after battling my emotions about my body.
Later I went out for a drive, passing signs for firearms places, a chocolate shop and a billboard advertising a wealth management company with the slogan ‘Always drink upstream from the herd’. Definitely not something I would likely see in the Bay Area!
My emotions were ramped up even further when I arrived at my destination, the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. It’s a challenging place to visit, but I’m so glad I did. Though it’s a small visitor center, it packs a powerful punch. I was there for two hours, and probably would’ve stayed longer except for a noisy group that came in later and made it hard to concentrate. I feel like in places like that there needs to be a certain level of respectful silence. The tour starts with a short introductory area, and then a film where several people who had been relocated, or more honestly, imprisoned, spoke about their experiences at Heart Mountain. Because it’s a relatively recent film, most of the people interviewed were children or teenagers when they lived at Heart Mountain. When the film concludes, the exhibit starts with impact of the negative feelings against the Japanese resulting from Pearl Harbor, the relocation order, and families having to decide what to bring with them, trying to sell their home, businesses, everything. Even though I had read and learned about what happened to Japanese-Americans during World War II, there were many details that I was unaware of, or hadn’t crossed my mind. One of the short videos featured an older man talking about having to leave his two dogs with a friend and finding out later that one of the dogs refused to eat and drink, just wandered around the house looking for him, and he soon passed away. Another story was about a family whose dog chased their bus for a long time trying to catch up with them. It brought tears to my eyes thinking about that. I can’t imagine how hard all of this was especially for the Issei who had left Japan to provide a better life for their family and worked so hard, and then it was all taken away. To add insult to injury, in the camps they weren’t respected because they weren’t considered as American as the Nisei, so their whole worlds were turned upside down. Then, being taken to a place like a Wyoming with such hard winters, when they only ever lived in more temperate climates like California, Oregon, and Washington added more pain to the many hardships they faced. It was amazing how people made the best of a horrible situation. One exhibit included yearbooks from the high school and there were drawings and pictures of all kinds of life activities in the camp.
I think the way the exhibits were worded was important, they weren’t written from a third person perspective as exhibits often are, they were written in second person, so you heard the voices of the people who were there and had experienced it. There was an area where you could see what their “apartments“ look like when they arrived – a small room with a potbelly stove, a single bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling and metal cots with mattresses. Next to that there was an example of what the rooms looked like a year or so later after people had had the opportunity to scavenge materials to create a more livable environment. Even the restrooms were an example of what life was like at Heart Mountain – one of the stalls in the women’s room had mirrors on either side, so you could see what it was like to use the bathroom without any privacy at all. Whew.
One of the most touching parts of the center was in the contemplation room, where there was a section of wire fence like the one that surrounded the camp on which were hung numbered identity tags just like the ones that had been attached to the people who were relocated. On these tags visitors wrote messages about their experiences at the relocation center. Some of the tags had messages from family and friends of people who had lived there, often expressing the wish that they could have visited together.
There was also a side exhibit about a young man who had been at Heart Mountain, then was drafted into the 442 Regiment, the Japanese American Regiment that fought in World War II. His group helped save some of the Dachau prisoners, one of which he ended up meeting with again 50 years later. The exhibit was set up so that it told the story of each of the men on opposite walls of the room, and then their stories came together in the connecting wall and talked about how they met when the Japanese-American soldier gave food and chocolate to the Lithuanian man. On the opposite wall was information about what happened in each of their lives after that time, and how they came to be reunited decades later. Seeing the parallels between how Jewish people in Europe and Japanese-Americans in the US were treated was very powerful.
After learning more about this shameful part of our history I needed to have some quiet space to think so took a walk on the path outside the visitor center where there are benches and one of the original guard towers. The visitor center and other structures are not actually in the exact place where the camp was located. The original relocation center was up on top of the nearby hill but that area was converted to grazing land long ago. I was grateful that I had time to just be and think about everything I’d learned. I am grateful that as a country we’ve at least learned a little from this period in our history, since we did not do the same thing to Muslim families after 9-11. Not that there weren’t horrible instances of racism and persecution toward anyone who appeared to be from the Middle East during that time and long afterwards, but at least we didn’t try to imprison them.
