A Detour

I went out for a walk today, headed for the activity center on the other side of the island. About halfway there, I ran into an older man getting into his truck. He says hello and I, of course, reply. We strike up a conversation, since I'm want for English conversation anyway and he appears as if he wants to sharpen his speaking skills.

We talk about his grandkids and how long he's lived on the island. He was born around 1935 and was alive when the Americans invaded the island. He reaches into his pickup and pulls out a folder. He hands it to me and I tentatively look inside to find photos of the island from 1945. There are pictures of scared looking children, an American G.I. holding a canteen to a little girl's mouth as she drinks greedily and a photo of the junior high school, decimated from canon shells from minna-shima, the island a few kilometers away.

"Wow, these are amazing," I say. Suddenly I feel very small and guilty.

"Would you like to see some more?"

"Sure."

We jump in his truck and he takes me to his house. He leads me inside and begins pulling out photo albums and pointing to pictures. "Here's Ernie Pyle the day before he died." He pulls out a map and points to the southwest shore of the island. "Here's where the American ships came to shore," pointing at the map and again to another picture, this time of an entrenched shoreline. "And here," he said, pulling out another album and flipping to the middle, "Is a paper dropped a month before the Americans came."

The 60-some year-old paper, pressed between the album pages, had Japanese writing on one side and a drawing of the Pacific theater on the other. Moving toward Japan were simply drawn American ships and planes, filling up the entire Pacific ocean.

"The Americans dropped it?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

"Yes."

"Wow." I said this a lot. I can be quite the conversationalist.

"Come on, I'll show you something else."

We got up and jumped in his truck again. We didn't drive very far before he pulled into a yard. He pointed at a large gajumaru tree between two houses.

"Two Japanese soldiers lived in that tree when the Americans came. They hid during the day and looked for food at night. Americans never saw them."

I'd heard this story before; the elementary school students perform a play for the surviving Japanese soldier every year. I had been slightly incredulous, but seeing the tree, massive and overgrown, I could believe it.

"Was it the same size in the 1940s?"

"Yes. About the same."

We admired it for a moment before we jumped back into the truck. He took me past a cave, where 20,000 year-old fossils from an extinct deer had been found and where people hid during WWII. Then he took me past a large airstrip.

"The bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. It refueled here before heading back to the U.S." He said this nonchalantly, more interested in the history. A tingle zigged-zagged down my spine.

Satisfied he'd shown me enough, he took me to the activity center and we exchanged phone numbers.

"Next week, you can come to dinner. I'll give my grandson a note to give you at school."

"That sounds great," I said. We shook hands and he got in his truck and drove off.

I went inside for a swim.