Skykomish.
The town of your birth.
Like Snohomish, Issaquah
And Snoqualmie.
Now mostly names on cemetery gates or shopping mall marquees
But not really anyone’s hometown or ancestral land anymore.
Even the reservations have long since been sold.
I am fifteen and the most interesting thing about your class is your little finger that juts out from your hand at a horrific angle. Trying to break free or being held apart, I can’t tell.
Broken a long time ago, I guess. An instant snap and crack and its life is forever different. No longer part of the hand but still a finger. It is the first thing we see. For many of us suburban kids of the 80’s, it’s the only thing we see.
I broke my leg that year playing football.
A skinny white boy facing down the only real dangers any of us face as skinny white boys.
A full-length cast isn’t a cage or a trail of tears, but to a spotty-faced freshman, it is a tragedy of the cruelest kind.
The experience of tragedy is still an experience for any writer, you tell me.
You asked me to explore my feelings. I didn’t know that I had any to find but you sent me looking.
It was so very long ago.
I am forever looking these days.
Tule Lake, Block 18.
A toddler relocated.
Did you push your fingers unbroken through the chain link fence?
Did the guard smile at you as any man should smile upon a child?
Tule Lake, Manzanar
Heart Mountain.
They are mere points of interest now
Enough buildings have been preserved to hold up a few National Park Service plaques.
Without a living memory and with no audio tour to bore the teenagers
There is only dust.
CoreCivic Processing Center, Upbring Hope
Heartland Human Services.
The camps have corporate sponsors now.
Investor relations staff
Quarterly filings.
Toddlers separated,
Caged, and given Mylar blankets and photo opportunities and despair.
You and I, we haven’t spoken in thirty years.
I am nearing fifty. My leg has long since healed and I rarely think about it these days.
You are facing eighty.
I suppose your finger has never straightened. Never part of the hand.
I can only imagine.
You are still Nisei.
I am still just a white suburban kid.
I can only imagine.
One hundred and forty characters cannot carry enough pain or joy or empathy or sadness
Unless they are the sweeps and curves and slashes of Japanese characters
Not patiently carved down long scrolls of parchment in squid ink with horse hair
But tightly blocked on scraps of newsprint
Sewn into the hems of trousers and secreted past the guard to Block 18 at Tule Lake.
Or if they are words spoken from generation
To dwindling generation
In the creaky, sonorous Lushootseed words of the Snoqualmie
Or the Snohomish.
But not the Skykomish.
They have long since disappeared.
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