Yellowstone Memories

by Spinola, Jennifer Rogers

  The distant dock shimmered in Yellowstone Lake under a thick stand of green pines, and Jersey watched as they pulled close to the land. A thin stretch of sand extended along the endless shore until it curved out of sight, and back in the dense woods she could spot a corner of the dilapidated old ranger’s cabin. Nothing else, as far as she turned in all directions.

  Zack maneuvered the boat close enough so that Jersey could jump to the dock and help passengers down one at a time and then help haul the food locker and bear-safe storage Dumpsters to the dock. They passed the bags and gear assembly style, and then Jersey jerked a thumb toward the cabin. “This is us, folks. Let’s go. We’ll set up your tents over here and start making lunch.”

  “We’ve got rotating duty schedules.” Masao crossed his arms over his chest. “Cook duty and clean-up duty for every meal while we’re here. Everyone else can do prep work for our first job.”

  “Tomorrow, right? You’ll probably want to rest a bit before we get started.”

  “Rest?” Masao laughed and put his hands on his shoulders. “We’ve been sitting on a plane for hours and then a tour bus. The last thing we want to do is rest.”

  Wow. The last college group Jersey had worked with hadn’t gotten their tents and gear set up until nearly nightfall. “Okay then. Let’s clear the grounds of twigs and branches to prepare for tomorrow’s work.”

  Masao nodded and barked a translation.

  Jersey led the way off the dock and onto a patch of green grass, and then she gave a mock bow. “Welcome to the Lake Yellowstone Hilton.”

  An ancient wooden shutter that had been hanging by a rusted hinge suddenly crashed and fell into a tangle of old weeds, as if on cue.

  To her surprise, the whole group chuckled and dug into their backpacks, snapping photos with their thousand-dollar Fuji and Sony cameras.

  The first thing Jersey heard when she turned over in her sleeping bag at dawn was the sharp sound of shouts. Rhythmic shouts, punctuated by short grunts.

  Bears? She rolled out of her sleeping bag, still in her thick flannel pajamas and long woven underwear, and dug frantically for her canister of bear spray. She jerked the zipper of her tent down and poked her head out.

  And as soon as she did, her mouth dropped. There in the clearing by the cabin stood all thirteen volunteers in orderly rows—already dressed in hiking clothes and boots. Stretching their arms and leaning side to side first then over at the waist in cadenced beats.

  Of course. Morning calisthenics. The kind millions of Japanese practiced at Toyota shops and via the daily national news channel NHK.

  Jersey felt like an idiot as she zipped her tent closed and felt around for clothes in her backpack. After all, the sun wasn’t even up yet. Her back ached, and the muscles in her arms throbbed from hours of heavy work. Yes, work. No trash pickup or litter crews—not that rangers didn’t bend over backward in grateful appreciation for those.

  But these Japanese people.

  Jersey fought the urge to flop back down in her sleeping bag from sheer exhaustion. Not only had they prepared a scrumptious lunch of Japanese noodles and vegetables, complete with hot green tea, but they’d picked the entire grounds clean of pinecones and branches in … oh, less than two hours.

  For the remainder of the day Jersey had jumped ahead of them from task to task: tearing out a heavy log horse fence, leveling a patch of uneven ground in backbreaking wheelbarrows, and stripping all the rotting wood trim from the old cabin.

  Jersey had dozed off around the campfire.

  “I’m a ski instructor,” one of the sixty-something women had said in a chipper voice as she poured Jersey another cup of steaming green tea. “Too bad it isn’t ski season in Wyoming.”

  And now they stood with their arms up, shouting the calls for group calisthenics before the sun had even risen through the pines.

  Before Jersey could pull on her jeans, she heard the rattle of dishes and food lockers, and the scent of propane wafted across the pine-scented air. They were already making breakfast—and Ranger Jersey wasn’t even out of bed yet.

  Jersey groaned and covered her head with her pillow, determined to throttle Taka next time she saw him.

  She needn’t have worried. Just before noon on the third day he sauntered over in hiking gear, piled to the brim with bags of research stuff. A tin cup dangled from his backpack, and he’d wrapped a bandanna around his sweaty forehead.

  Jersey was up to her knees in dirt and sawdust, helping two of the volunteers saw an enormous pine trunk into a flat surface for a table, when she spotted him coming up the wooden trail.

  “Well, well, well.” She wiped her dirty hands smugly against her pants and strode over. “More research?”

  “No, I’m here to help. Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

  “What e-mail?”

  “You sent me the numbers you copied from Jeremiah Wilde’s logbook, and I wrote you back.”

  “Wait a second.” Jersey stared at Taka then at the lake. “How did you get here? Did you walk?” She shielded her eyes but saw no boat.

  “Sure. Following the elk routes.” He took off his glasses and wiped them. “So how’s it going?”

  “Going?” Jersey repeated, not sure how to answer his question. “Taka, they’re machines. I’ve run out of building supplies twice. I’m not even sure we have enough work for them.” She leaned back against a tree, letting the breeze cool her sweaty neck. “I’ll tell you one thing. It’s sure changed my perception of what senior groups can do.”

  “Why, you didn’t think they were capable?” Taka squatted down and picked at something on a piece of pine bark with his fingernail.

  “Of course not. It’s just … wow. They’re amazing.” She tucked her hair back up in its bun. Which, by the way, she’d actually braided neatly first—rather than stuffing it in its usual messy knot with strands flying everywhere.

  Taka must have seen it because his eyes traveled briefly to the nape of her neck with a quick flicker of approval before darting back to the tree bark. He lifted the shaggy chunk ever so carefully and then dug for a magnifying glass. “Look. Dendroctonus ponderosae larvae.”

  “Gross. No.” Jersey wrinkled her nose and stepped away. “Well, thanks anyway for inviting this group. We really needed this work done, you know.”

  “I know.” Taka poked his eye close to the magnifying glass. “Although I guess Japanese volunteers weren’t your first pick, huh?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I hear through the grapevine that you weren’t crazy about dealing with a Japanese tour group. Why, do we send you bad tourists?” He looked up briefly.

  “No, Taka. It’s not that.” She sighed and squatted down on her heels next to him.

  “Then what is it?” He scraped at the bark again with a blade of grass.

  “You want to know?”

  “Yes.” He put the magnifying glass down and faced her.

  “Fine.” She crossed her arms. “My grandfather was a POW during World War II, and he almost didn’t make it.” Her eyes filled with tears as she looked away. “You should have seen him when he returned. A skeleton. Sunken eyes and torture wounds.” She snapped a pine needle between her fingers. “My family says he was never the same after that.”

  Taka studied her a moment with gentle eyes. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, folding up his magnifying glass and dropping it back in his bag. A cool breeze from the lake rustled his hair, making it fall in his eyes. “I’m truly very sorry, Jersey.”

  He plucked at some blades of grass. “I remember when I first understood about the war. Years ago.” He let out his breath and sat in quiet silence a long while as if remembering. “My grandfather used to build model planes with me back in Fukushima. Very good ones. I loved to help him.”

  “Hence your knowledge of taxidermied squirrel repair.” A light came on. “Like airplane models.”

  “Exactly. I asked my grandfather about the war. About the planes we were building. Japanese war planes.” Tak
a swallowed. A mosquito floated through the air, ghostlike, and he barely moved to swat it away. “ ‘Japan didn’t really do that, did they?’ ” I asked him. “ ‘We didn’t really try to take over the nations of the world one by one, did we? It’s a lie. I don’t believe we would do something so evil as that.’ ”

  Taka shifted on the grass, his face still downturned. “Every time we built planes I asked him. Until one day he smashed our plane in anger, leaving broken splinters all over the low table where we knelt.”

  He stayed silent a long time, playing with the grass that tickled his jeans. “He apologized and offered to help me build a new plane, but I’d lost interest. I refused as politely as I could—always giving some excuse or other. For I’d lost my heart.”

  Jersey bit her lips. “So you see where I’m coming from?”

  “Yes.” Taka raised his face slowly. “But you’re not the only one who suffered unjustly from the war, Jersey. Nor your grandfather.”

  She tipped her head and waited for him to continue.

  “My mother was a prisoner here.”

  “Here?”

  “Right here, as a matter of fact.”

  Jersey looked at him as if he’d lost his marbles. “I don’t follow.”

  “In one of the Civilian Conversation Corps buildings here in Yellowstone National Park.”

  Jersey rocked forward and put her hand on the grass to steady herself. “Wait a second. You mean your mom was held here?” She dropped her voice. “During the war?” She squinted at Taka in disbelief. “Was she an American citizen?”

  “I’m an American citizen.” Taka’s head came up, and his voice sounded harsh in her ears. “I’m both Japanese and American. I have dual citizenship. But I chose to stay in Fukushima after I heard how Americans treated my mother.” His eyes snapped. “She was a child then, Jersey. No more than three or four years old. But because she was Japanese, she and her family were rounded up and jailed like prisoners just a few miles from here.” A muscle in his jaw tightened. “Believe me, Yellowstone was the last place I wanted to come to do my research. But it was the only place left after I applied to all the others. So you’ll pardon me if I harbor a few prejudices of my own.”

  Jersey opened her mouth to reply, in pity and in indignation, when Masao spotted Taka through the pines. He put down his saw and threw up both hands in delight, grinning and waving a handkerchief for Taka to see.

  Taka stood up abruptly and strode over to Masao, greeting him in effusive Japanese and bowing repeatedly.

  She crouched there among the pines, watching him go. Picturing Taka’s mother as a little tear-streaked toddler, boarding a ship bound for Fukushima. Leaving the snowcapped mountains of Yellowstone behind her as a dark and frightening dream.

  Between the hauling and the machete whacking and sanding, Jersey didn’t have a single moment to speak to Taka until nightfall of the following day. He’d politely refilled her teacup, and she’d equally politely thanked him in front of the group for organizing the volunteer team.

  They’d fished and fried cutthroat trout—ahem, Oncorhynchus clarkii—and Jersey was elbow-deep in dirty plastic bowls when Taka tapped her arm with the blunt end of a chopstick.

  “Taka.” Jersey looked up. “Thanks for the fish tutorial.” She said it partially in jest, as he’d rattled on for nearly twenty minutes about some special predator-prey relationship with the bull trout that was supposedly key to “ecosystem integrity”—and how the species name “clarki” came from Lewis and Clark’s 1804–1806 expedition into the Northwest.

  He’d translated it of course, into Japanese, which took another twenty minutes.

  “Fish tutorial?” Taka blinked rapidly. “Oh that.” He gave a hint of a smile. “No problem. Can you walk with me?”

  “Now? I’m finishing dishes.”

  “Ah.” Taka shrugged. “You’ve done enough. Come on.” And he started down toward the dock.

  Jersey dried her hands on a towel and followed him. The sun was setting, slipping below the horizon in a blaze of orange. It sank like a dying fire, glittering on the lake water, until it disappeared in a wash of starry deep blue. They sat down on the dock, not speaking, and watched fish jump in the dark lake waters.

  “You’re doing great with the team, Jersey.” Taka spoke without looking up.

  She turned, wrinkling her nose at the stench of bug spray that wafted from his direction. He reeked of DEET and chemical repellant.

  “I didn’t know if you’d be able to deal with the language barrier, but you’re doing just fine.” He flicked a bug off his shirt. “Even if you have been avoiding me.”

  “No I haven’t.”

  “Yes you have. And it’s probably my fault. I’m sorry.” Taka reached up to smack a whiny mosquito. “There’s no excuse for prejudice of any kind—regardless of what happened to my mother. You didn’t do it to her.”

  “No.” Jersey didn’t know what to say. If only it were so simple to release years of mistrust.

  Jersey crossed her blue-jeaned legs on the dock, gazing up at a strip of frosty green sky on the horizon. Instead of darkening with the setting sun, it shimmered there, stretching pale arms the length of the black, pine-studded horizon.

  Taka was looking at it, too. “Aurora borealis?” he gasped, jerking his glasses straight to see better. “I can’t believe it. Our latitude isn’t exactly conducive to sightings, is it? Most aurorae occur in the auroral zone, typically three to six degrees in latitudinal extent—normally ten to twenty degrees from the earth’s magnetic pole. The pole, that is, defined by the axis of the magnetic dipole.”

  “Aurorae?” Jersey scrunched an eyebrow. “You’re making this up as you go, aren’t you?”

  “Of course not. That’s the plural from the Latin. You studied Latin, correct? During a geomagnetic storm, however, this auroral zone may expand to lower latitudes, including the one represented here, no?”

  Jersey sank her head into her knees in exasperation. “How am I supposed to answer that?” she mumbled, rocking her head back and forth.

  They lapsed into momentary silence on the creaking dock, interrupted only by the lapping of water on the pilings and the occasional whine of a mosquito and subsequent slap.

  Jersey watched as the glow misted and spread, rippling around the edges like an enormous gauze curtain of filmy ghost-green. Lances of palest green, nearly white, pierced the starry sky like a searchlight, stretching over the black lake waters and shimmering, dancing, on their darkened surfaces.

  A fish jumped, sending out sparkling black rings dappled with green.

  “What does the T stand for?” Taka turned to Jersey suddenly and without warning, his whole face a wash of palest green.

  “What T?” Jersey glanced at him uncomfortably.

  “The wooden T you used to wear around your neck on a chain.” Taka gestured, his voice uncharacteristically soft. “Where is it?”

  Jersey didn’t answer. She looked out over the lake and drew her feet up, stiffening a bit in the night breeze. “My son’s name,” she finally said, drawing the delicate cord from her pocket. “The cord broke, but … I had a son once.”

  She waited for Taka to grimace in displeasure or scoot away, but he said nothing. Didn’t move. Black eyes fixed gently on her face.

  Jersey started to put the necklace back in her pocket, but Taka reached out instead.

  “Let me fix your necklace,” he said softly. “I’m good at fixing things.”

  Jersey hesitated then handed him the necklace in a crumpled pile. Almost afraid to release it into someone else’s hand.

  “I was seventeen. My boyfriend was nineteen, and …” Jersey looked down at the dock, stroking a weather-worn crack in the wood with her thumbnail. “My family’s a bunch of prominent designers in Chicago, and they didn’t approve. They told me to … to get rid of my child.”

  “Designers?”

  “Fashion designers. Haven’t you ever heard of the Ana Peterson line?”

  “Of co
urse, but you can’t mean …” Taka’s mouth wobbled open.

  “Yes. The same.” Jersey scratched at a spot on the knee of her pants. “Ana’s my mom. A famous runway model for years. My dad was her tailor, and now my twin sisters and younger brother are all models and designers. My dad makes a fortune in bespoke suits that cost tens of thousands of dollars each—all imported thread and fancy stitching. A hand-carved button in his shop on the Magnificent Mile costs two hundred bucks.”

  Taka leaned back on his hands, sizing her up. “You didn’t care for their way of life?”

  “Cocktail parties and fashion shows and inflated egos? No thanks.” Jersey shook her head. “One of my sisters is still struggling with anorexia, last I heard, and my brother’s trying to hide his drug habit. I don’t look like them, all perfect and thin and creamy-complexioned, and they let me know it.”

  She looked down at her hands, her nails clipped close and clean. The thin coat of sheer polish she’d swiped on before the trip already beginning to chip along the edges.

  “So what if you don’t look like them? You say it as if you regret it. But you don’t need to. You’re you, Jersey. There’s nothing wrong with that, and you don’t need to apologize.”

  “I’m not apologizing.” Jersey’s voice came out a little more snappishly than she intended. “But I didn’t exactly enjoy being called ‘the ugly duckling’ or told to suck in my gut so I could fit in something frilly like my two dainty sisters. My mom wanted me to get a nose job when I turned fourteen. I refused.”

  “Good for you.” Taka lifted his chin.

  “Yeah, well. That’s easy for you to say.”

  Taka didn’t speak for a second, and Jersey thought the conversation was over. But when she glanced over at him again, his look had darkened.

  “It’s not easy for me to say,” he said stiffly, sitting up straight and crossing his arms. “You don’t know my past.”

  “And you don’t know mine.” Jersey faced him, feeling anger flare up. “It’s always easy to judge someone else from the outside of a situation, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not judging you.” Taka raised his voice slightly—a first for him.