A Season Change: Reflecting on Accomplishment, Loss, and Family

We made it home to Massachusetts and the fall colors are out.  We have been away for a whole season and then some.  We started on June 17^th right before summer officially began and now it is well into autumn.  A lot has happened in one short season: we made it across the country on our bicycles; Peter (one of my best friends, my ex-husband, and the father of my daughter) was murdered; I turned fifty-one; I met David’s family for the first time in the seven plus years we have been together; I visited the site of the Topaz Internment Camp; and we completed our road trip back to the east coast. 

All of it is hard to process and fathom. 

Picture from our last day of touring

We made it to Washington State!

I am proud that we made it across the country.  It was the hardest thing we have ever done physically and there were times it challenged us emotionally and spiritually as well.  Overall, it was the heat at the beginning of the tour that challenged us and the climbing and smoke from the fires in the middle.  Yet it was truly wonderful to experience the country so immediately, and at a pace that allowed for new experiences every day. 

We have many, many wonderful memories – especially of the people that made us feel connected and part of a bigger plan even as we were travelers and strangers.  We loved the little towns that hosted cyclists in their pavilions and parks; the strangers who became friends who opened their homes to host us; and the out of the ordinary kindness shown by those who helped us along the way.  I know the trip has changed me, yet I have not yet had the time to figure out exactly how.

I do think that it has given me more faith in people.  Despite our differences and our issues and our political views, people can be compassionate and kind to each other.  It happened to us many a time.  The bicycle touring slows life down too and really makes living in the present moment a reality, which is another lesson I hope to remember in my day to day busy life. 

Peter's typical response to a camera.  RIP 

The sudden ending of the tour was a shock and horror.  The murder of my ex is still unfathomable and perplexing.  His death on the heels of my father’s death in May made the past season on of extreme loss.  What these losses mean to me will unfold in time.  At this point, my grief comes in waves as I remember these important men in my life.  I can’t count how many times in the last week that something – a funny remark on the radio or an odd tie in the thrift store or traveling through Utah (the site of our first vacation) that I have thought I should call Peter, only to realize that I could not.  He is missed by so many people and in so many ways.  I am also aware that Thanksgiving is approaching.  It will be the first set of holidays without my dad, or Peter for that matter.  I have a slight dread about the holidays – about the grief they will bring.  I am aware that death is part of the cycle of life, but this only provides a small comfort in what is otherwise overwhelming loss.

Somewhere in all of the pain and confusion of Peter’s death, I had a fifty-first birthday.  I have friends who are going to celebrate this event when I get back as it was not the time when I was in Baltimore dealing with Peter’s death.  Fifty-one feels uninspired in some ways.  I have crossed the fifty threshold but still at the beginning of this decade.  I am securely middle-age, “old” according to my eighteen year old daughter.   But I still feel that I am learning and growing, which is one definition of living.  I am in better shape than at other times in my life.  So, fifty-one is not that bad really. 

After staying in Baltimore for a week and a half, I flew back to the West coast to meet David and finish our road trip in the car to visit his extensive family.  We bought a car in Portland where David had landed after I left him in Dayton, Washington.  Joe, an old friend from high school, picked him up from Dayton and brought him to Portland where he lived. 

When I rejoined David, we went down the pacific coast first to Folsom to meet Sarah and Kent and ride the bike trails, then to Santa Barbara, where I met David’s sisters Annie and Becky, and Annie’s  partner Robert.  At Annie’s, Rosie the Bear was an honored guest and was invited to sit at the dinner table.  (Even I don’t invite Rosie to dinner, after all she has no tummy, but she was honored.)  We then went to David’s mother’s home in El Segundo.  While we were there a gathering of his family occurred.  I met his brother’s Jon and Paul, and Jon’s partner Diana.  Annie and Robert also came down because it was Annie’s and Paul’s birthdays (They are twins.) It was a week of dinners out, family conversations, and late nights.  I was glad to finally meet David’s family.  I have heard about them but hadn’t met any of them.  They made me feel part of their family which was very kind. 

After the family whirlwind, we set out in the car to go back across the country to home.  We drove to Las Vegas where we had intended to stay.  So, we went to a small motel a bit outside the main casinos, thinking it would be quieter.  However, as it became evening, it got seedier and seedier.  When walked across the street to get a toothbrush at the Walgreen’s, I got motioned to by a Harley rider who thought I was a hooker.  (A hooker in a bicycle cap??)  Anyway that was a rather strong hint that we were not particularly safe.  In fact, all of Las Vegas feels creepy to me – a lot of indulgence with little thought.  (I am not particularly moralistic about it; it just feels like a lot of people waste a lot of their money and lives there.)  So we left the motel and ride another sixty miles or so to a small town in Nevada at the border of Utah.  We slept better there than we would have worrying about the safety of our car and persons.

Topaz

The next day we traveled through Utah to the site of the Topaz Internment Camp.  Riding through Utah brought back memories of that first vacation I took with Peter.  We had flown into Las Vegas then drove to Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, Kodachrome Valley, and Canyon lands.  We camped and hiked.  It was a wonderful vacation.  There is a great picture of me lying on a red sand dune.  Driving though that area reminded me of that time so long ago.  However, on this trip we didn’t take the time to visit the national parks, and instead went for a more somber visit to the site of the internment camp.

I wanted to visit because the internment camp had a huge impact on my father.  About fifteen years ago, my father and step-mother went to a reunion of his junior high school class at Topaz. It was in San Francisco where I was living at the time.  My dad invited me to attend with him.  I was the only sansei present and I felt honored to meet these people from my father’s past.  I loved hearing the stories about him – about how he was a school leader and led his class on a walkout after a teacher made a racist remark.  His peers talked about how smart and good looking he was in junior high as well as at the time of the reunion.  My step-mother was told by more than one woman that she “had got the best one.” 

However, when my dad got out of the camp there racism in the country was rampant.  He and his family moved eastward to Cincinnati, Ohio where he went to high school.  He was told by a math teacher that he would never amount to anything.  He went on to finish a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Cincinnati.  However, the man I knew as my father was very quiet, reserved, and understated.  He was not the activist he was as a youth.  I attribute this to the racist atmosphere he had to negotiate when he got out of the camp.  This is all to say that the internment camp experience and the years afterward shaped my father.  Given this, I felt it was important for me to see the site of the camp.  I wanted to experience the place.

So we drove the forty miles out of our way to the site of the camp.  It was outside of Delta, Utah.  Delta, Utah is in the middle of nowhere and the camp is in the middle of the middle of nowhere.  David said there is an evil spirit there.  It could be.  I felt an energy of pain, grief, and longing – perhaps spirits who hold the history of the place.  The site has been reduced to two plaques, an American flag, and the remnants of gravel roads, cement foundations, desert plants and dust.  The only sign of life I saw was a huge jackrabbit hopping across the landscape.  I was struck by how desolate a place it was and tried to image it filled with people of Japanese descent – filled with my people; my family.  I am glad I made that pilgrimage, although it was emotion filled and difficult.  We were glad to leave and move on.  However, I won’t forget it and what it meant to my father and our nation.

After Utah we drove through Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York State, and then came into Massachusetts over the course of a few days.  In Iowa we revisited a town in which we stayed on the bicycle tour.  We stayed at a small “mom and pop” motel called the Wilton Motel.  The owner, Lois, remembered us from our first visit.  It was odd to drive the car around town when before all I had to get around was my bike.  It was funny; I did basically the same things I did during the first visit – I went the Candy Kitchen and got a chocolate malt, then I did a load of wash at the laundry mat, and got a few groceries.  It was a fun flashback which highlighted how far we rode our bikes. 

Pata on the road . . . She'll be back there soon.

The driving portion of the trip was 4460 miles in the car (starting from Portland driving down the coast (971 miles) and then back across the country (3489 miles)).   We rode our bicycles approximately 3760 miles from Bedford, MA to Dayton, WA.  As I have said before, as we drive back it makes me realize that traveling across the country is a long trip, anyway you travel. 

A lot has happened in one short season, yet we know there is nothing constant but change anyway.  The leaves are changing colors and will soon fall and the snow will fly again and then the buds will return.  Cycles of nature continue as do the cycles of my life.  Tomorrow I will get on my bicycle (a road bike to boot) again and ride in the glorious fall weather and be grateful for this moment and what blesses me each day.