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We arrived in Las Vegas late in the afternoon. We checked into a motel a good distance from the Strip, but drove back in for the evening. After spending the last few days visiting Tule Lake and Manzanar, and driving for hours through remote rural areas, downtown Las Vegas seemed completely unreal.

We walked into the MIRAGE, and I remember seeing a re-modeling sign that read “Pardon our Dust: We are Improving the Mirage.” Large crowds of tourists wandered around with Big Gulp containers filled with margarita slush.  We walked through carpeted caverns of slot machines, row upon row of restaurants and shops.

Then it was off to the craps tables. I had no idea what I was doing, but John came out ahead — enough ahead to splurge on a nice dinner and return the winnings back to the casino. After four days of canned soup, eating a nice dinner seemed like a really appealing idea. I remember eating at a French restaurant, and having a nice glass of red wine.

I didn’t feel any need to take pictures in Las Vegas. There must be millions, (billions?) of pictures of the Strip in all its extravagant absurdity. On this trip, Las Vegas wasn’t a destination; we were just passing through, and we’d be back on the road by morning.

Nuclear waste repository = Good sign that you’re REALLY far away from any major population center:

Pictures 1-4: Western approach to Death Valley.

Picture 5: Death Valley Floor

Pictures 6 and 7: Visitors Center and Gas Station (we thought it best to be on the safe side). In this area, John and I observed the first of what would become many German tourists in the U.S. Southwest.

Pictures 8 and 9: On the road again. I think at this point we were listening to “Mars” from Gustav Holt’s Planets Suite at full volume. Given the landscape, it seemed appropriate at the time.

If these pictures above are any evidence, early in the morning we felt a little euphoric. That might explain the two pictures above with their slightly whimsical framing and our goofy smiles.  We’d just managed to go four days into our trip without any major problem, and, as if in response to the seriousness of visiting Manzanar the day before, something switched on and seemed to say — okay now, relax a little and enjoy the beauty around you.

That said, an hour or two later, we got lost, missed the turnoff into Death Valley National Park by something like three miles, and the pictures of us on the edge of Death Valley proper reveal that we came off our early morning highs. (See below for priceless neutral/grumpy expressions).

Sunrise in the Alabama Hills.

If these landscapes look familiar, it might be because (according to a curator at the Eastern California Museum) lots of Hollywood Westerns were filmed around here.

Please read the following article in the Rafu Shimpo:

http://www.rafu.com/en/2008/0813/news.html

Manzanar is in the Owens Valley (the deepest valley in the Americas). It is flanked on two sides by two massive mountain ranges. The Sierras to the west, and the Inyo/White mountains to the east.

After visiting Tule Lake, and the small exhibition space of the Eastern California Museum, walking into the large, air-conditioned Manzanar National Historic Site Interpretive Center was a shock. There were National Park Service rangers, large audio-visual displays, and a host of interactive exhibits.

The interpretive center even has a small exhibit in the men’s room of bath-related prose and tanka poetry.

There were two auditorium spaces, one in the open central hall showing a loop of “home movies” of camp life, and another, enclosed theater, showing a documentary film: “Remembering Manzanar.”

The home movies of children playing in a camp schoolyard and for a Thanksgiving pageant were particularly haunting. I had seen black and white stills of some of the films before, but I wasn’t prepared to see them colorized and in movement. Many of the children are very young. They smile and laugh as if they were in any other elementary school playground. In some frames, you can see barbed wire in the distance.

By the exit to the interpretive center, there is a gift shop.

While I recognize the need to have a gift shop to help defray the costs of maintaining the site, there were a number of moments when I felt uncomfortable with some of the items for sale in the shop. I had no problem at all with the gift shop providing postcards or prints of internee artwork, or books about internment or regional history or Japanese-American culture. (In fact, I bought several of these). However, keychains, refrigerator magnets, polished semi-precious stones, replicas of 40’s era wooden children’s toys, etc. seem like inappropriate objects to sell at the site of a former internment camp. While these kinds of souvenirs seem like perfectly fine things to buy and sell at an ordinary National Park Service gift shop, Manzanar is not an ordinary site.

Ryan Yokota wrote an excellent op-ed for Rafu Shimpo that describes how visiting Manzanar has changed after the federal government recognized it as a national historic site.

Manzanar was the first, and only, camp we went to that had an “auto tour” — a marked set of roads with helpful signs to guide us along our way.  The idea of treating Manzanar like a “drive-through” experience seemed, and still seems wrong to me. On the other hand, the idea of wishing that one could stay longer also seems wrong, given how many people who lived there wished they had never been there at all.

In the end, we made an absurd set of compromises — half driving, half walking, doubling back, starting up the car and stopping it again, driving at a crawl, etc.  We wanted to give each place the respect and consideration it deserved, and at the same time, make it out of the camp before dark.

Manzanar, like all the camps, is a big place, more than 800 acres.  All of the war relocation camps were large towns; each camp had more than 10,000 ”residents.”

How many internees drove on these streets? Except for internees who drove trucks for the camp farms, or brought supplies to the kitchens, hospital, or other camp facilities, the only other people who drove on a regular basis along these roads were guards and administrative staff. Yet another reason to walk.

The old roadways, arranged on a grid, now surround lots with stands of trees and sagebrush, the occasional exposed foundation, the remains of a rock garden. In a way, the roads are the exposed skeleton of Manzanar — bones that bear witness to the city that used to be here.

Drive or walk.

The crunching sound of tire on gravel seemed like an affront to the stillness outside.  We walked as much as we could.