A Roadside Attraction

I was about 20 when I went with my boyfriend and his mother to the Sacramento Delta region in California to buy asparagus. Asparagus was very much a seasonal treat back in the day and, every summer, his mother would buy and freeze as much of the vegetable as she could. We went to a roadside stand manned by an elderly, blind Japanese man. The mother said his asparagus was the best, and well-worth the drive from Turlock. I found out that the lush agricultural land behind the levees and the house had once belonged to the old man. The present owners were kind enough to let him live on the property when he  had returned. "Returned from where?" I asked. I was horrified to learn of the internment camps that had been created in 1942 for Japanese people living in the United States. Even the children who were born in the country were forced into camps, sometimes with only the clothes on their backs. The more questions I asked, the more annoyed the mother became. I don't know if she was shocked by my ignorance, (no surprise given my family dynamics and the Vallejo school system) or, as I strongly suspect, she was embarrassed by what our government and its citizens had done to our Japanese citizens.

After being locked up, the Japanese weren't given their lands and homes back. Some had been given the chance to sell off their homes and businesses with only a few days to do so. You can imagine how badly they were ripped off.

There are plenty of books that go into the subject. It's an important part of our country's history and shouldn't be hidden away.

 "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki is usually the first book read by young people.

Camp Amache in Colorado is now a National Historic Site. All that's there now is the cemetery, foundations of some buildings, and a sign.

Wyoming had the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. This camp now has an interpretive center.

Throughout all of this, the men were subject to being drafted into the military to fight for the U.S.

Saturday Grinds to a Start

Woke up at 5:30 with a headache. Not a good way to begin a lovely day. I watched the sky become golden while waiting for the Advil to kick in. I uncovered the parakeets' cage so they could start singing and squawking their homage to the sun. Parakeets are messy little creatures but so damn cheerful.

Going to be a warm day, by November standards. The fence is partially painted with primer and needs to be finished. There will be very few days warm enough to paint outside, so time is of the essence. But, besides the torture of sitting on the cold ground slapping paint on little boards, I hope to do some more writing today. I've been trying to rewrite my crudely finished book, but haven't been able to get enthused about it. A new story has been ricocheting around my brain for a few days, so I got off to a good start on it yesterday. 

My new muse

Such a beautiful fall day will require some time to be spent outside just for sheer pleasure. Plus I need the Vitamin D. Since it's early, I think I'll go out in the chilly morning and resign myself to paint for a couple of hours this afternoon. 

Not bad for November

As I Read at Que's

"But you can't change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process. "

-D. H. Lawrence

Happy Halloween, Y'all!

Putting Myself in Time-Out

I've gotten quite a few inquiries wondering if my trip to Laramie was "successful".  I put that in quotes because success is such a chameleon of a word. My trip was successful in that I wasn't in a car accident, I didn't get food poisoning, or kidnapped, and I even returned home despite having a credit card.

The schism, in my mind, is that I had a dangerous case of expectations, and what the trip was like didn't meet my imagination head-on. Some of it was in the ball park because I certainly know what the drive to Wyoming is like, and I am all too familiar with the inside of a hotel room, but I couldn't settle down and write for hours in the room like I had hoped. Just hated sitting there at that little desk. It also didn't help that hotels use cleaning products that give me an allergic reaction. Benadryl apparently cannot be overpowered by caffeine, but I tried.

My mistake was thinking I could move writing to the forefront, after a lifetime of writing snippets and pages whenever and wherever I could. My writing time has always been so fragmented that it's hard to write anything that requires development. It took this attempt at a writing retreat to clarify the problem. Even in Laramie, I wrote in coffee places, in my car in the parking lots of parks, and while sitting in a picnic ground in a national forest. Occasionally I wrote in the room while on the bed surrounded by books and paper but I read more than I wrote.

Trying to write a novel this way is like trying to row a trawler.

I ended up feeling like I had banished myself to a long time-out. Go to your room, old lady, and think about what you just did. I did my thinking and will do things differently next time. For instance, send the rest of the household to Disneyland while I stay home and write.

A nice place to write.

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Sunday is a quiet day in Laramie, so I started out early with good coffee at the Coal Creek Coffee place in Laramie's historic downtown. After that, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. When life is moving at a slower, less stressful pace, (like a dying turtle) the minutes seem to last longer and there are so many more hours in a day. Laramie could market itself as a town where time is as vast as the valley it inhabits. Or maybe it's not just the reduction in stress, but a touch of boredom mixed in too. Hotel rooms are boring, and not conducive to working even when it's writing disguised as work. I've written, but mostly in coffee places and while sitting at a couple of parks.

I wanted to check out the Happy Jack Road that runs from the summit in the Medicine Bow National Forest, to Cheyenne. It turned out to be a beautiful area. I could see the fabulous rock formations of Vedauwoo, the plains to the southeast, pinon pines and vast meadows. The Curt Dowdy State Park looked like a great place to camp.

It didn't take too long to get to Cheyenne. There are several nice parks with lakes in the town and the downtown has some new construction going on. My overall impression of Cheyenne is that it's much nicer than I previously thought. Not that anyone in Cheyenne ever cared what I believed.

I can't complain about the weather even though the renowned Wyoming wind hit 45 mph gusts today, which ain't nothing for Wyoming wind. However, I'm heading for home tomorrow and there are clouds building up in the north. Rumors of snow are being whispered, but none of the weather people seem to agree on their guessing about tomorrow's atmospheric mood up here. I've had my share of weather surprises in this state so I'm feeling a bit paranoid.

Speaking of weather, it was 16 years ago today that Colorado was hit by the blizzard of 1997. It was a bad one.

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Wyoming

Wyoming is Fossiliferous!