Bainbridge Island
 Fort Ward State Park
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Maria had a full day planned at her conference on Saturday, so I decided to spend the day riding a bike around Bainbridge Island. It’s about the size of Manhattan, and it’s a 30 minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. What I didn’t know is that the entire island is just one steep hill after another. The leisurely bike ride I pictured in my mind was instead an intense workout. I still had fun – the weather was perfect and it’s a beautiful place (I just learned from its Wikipedia page that Money magazine named it the second-best place to live in the United States a few years ago). I was completely wiped out by the time I got back to Seattle. I’m in decent shape but I don’t do much cycling – I was actually dizzy by the end. I was silently cursing the (better informed) tourists who sped past me on the hills, on their rented scooters.
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My main destination for the day was Fort Ward State Park. A few unexpected discoveries along the way were the Blakely cemetery, where I learned about the Dix disaster, a cool Buddhist prayer wheel that was literally on the side of a lonely road, and the very moving Japanese-American Exclusion Memorial, dedicated to the Japanese members of the community who were all removed from the island by gunpoint, not knowing where they were being taken, and sent to live in barbed-wire internment camps in Idaho after the Pearl Harbor attack. What it mainly made me think of is all the same ugliness, paranoia and hate that’s been stirred up in this country since 9/11, and how prominent it is in our politics and culture now. The packaging and marketing of it is certainly more subtle than in decades past, but it all springs from the same fears. I grew up with the naive notion we had, for the most part, left that ugliness behind us, but instead it’s resurgent.
Last month The Atlantic published an amazing set of photographs from the internment camps. It turns out Maria has 3 degrees of separation from T.Z. Shiota, whose letter is posted in photo #9 (he was the father of a friend’s friend). There are a few photos of people from Bainbridge island as well, including the strawberry farmer who lost his farm after being “evacuated” (photo #16). According to what I read at the memorial, his crop that summer would have earned him enough to make the final payment on the farm, but instead he lost it. I wonder if he knew the fate of his farm when the photo was taken.
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