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Show The Q&ity Hsrald Sunday, April 2, 1995 Traveling, a search for home By JM IISOLMAR Seattle Times Writer There's an aphorism that we travel writers trot cut from time to time for speeches or lectures or workshops. All travel, the saying goes, is in some way a search for home. It's simple enough to draw nods of affirmation from the people who hear it. It sounds reasonable and sage, weighty with inspired wisdom. Still, it's cryptic enough to keep everybody wondering what it could possibly mean. But that's only it's public use: as a punch line that helps us earn our keep. But I find myself thinking about it sometimes when I'm sitting alone in my studio, at my writing desk, sodden with melancholy, wandering aim- -' lessiy among thoughts like a beggar at a bazaar. I remember places I've been and people I've met. And I struggle to understand what those experiences have meant to me what they mean to me now, at this moment, when I'm at home instead of traveling. On some days, like this one, when it's been so long since I've been anywhere except in this studio, at this writing desk, thoughts of home and other places begin to blend and blur. Neither seems real or immediate. Home the context in which I spend a seemingly unremarkable, deeply habituatfeels far removed ed life from who I am or strive to become. It's as if I'm slogging about in a fog of objects, people, preoccupations and responsibilities so familiar that they've lost much of their substance and meaning. I lose myself in the fog, become as insubstantial as it is: a fiction hoping that some unexpected plot turn will give me direction. The places I've traveled feel distant, too more distant than my work writing about them may suggest. And then I find myself staring at the photographs that hang on the wall here: of the young, bearded monk in his hermitage in Greece, his face lit only by candlelight and his confidence in salvation. Of Transyl-vania- n the shepherd standing in a mountain pasture, leaning on the staff with which he'd fought off a bear that had attacked his village's flocks. Of the Hungarian peasant woman with a gold tooth, cradling a rooster for that evening's soup... I remember them and their stories, their voices, even the odors of incense and pine forest and garden soil in which they stood. On days like this, h can be hard to picture myself standing in those places with them. But the photos help. They prove that I was there, that those lives and mine touched for a moment. The images affirm that and still exist mere existed links between those people and me. That, in effect, their homes and mine have overlapped. That our homes did and do somehow occupy the same dimensions of time and space. The photos help make people and places come crashing through the fog. And all of a sudden, I seem to come close to figuring out what that aphorism about home and travel might mean. Traveling, for me, has never felt like recreation. It's not that I don't enjoy travel, or that I don't feel refreshed and renewed and energized when I return from a trip. To the contrary, the more eventful, ; even difficult, a trip lu been, the more my spirits are raised when I finally return home. But I tend to not use the word "travel" to describe going on vacation. Again, it's not that I don't go on vacation or that I disparage vacations. wool-wrapp- ed . just-pluck- (Se HOME, Page DIO) Photo courtesy of UPI6atimann Ground Zero in Nagasaki, Japan in September of 1S45. This photograph shows how the heavily- - populated city appeared after an atomic bomb flattened three square miles of the city. thriving 50 years after bomb By JON KRAKAUER Nothing about the place seems particularly remarkable. A small oasis of open space I called Hypocenter Park, it sits inconspicuously beside the main thoroughfare a few minutes north of downtown Nagasaki. Shade trees arch gracefully above neatly trimmed hedgerows, offering a welcome respite from the clatter and congestion of the surrounding city. It is a place of peace and quiet. But at the northern margin of the park stands a slender column of stark black stone that commemorates an event of great and terrible significance to the course of human history. on Aug. Fifty summers ago an atomic bomb fell 9, 1945 from the belly of an American surviKatsuji Yoshida, the Bock's Car, and was detovor: no Acnericans. "I hate longer nated 1,650 feet directly above what is now Hypocenter Park. The I only hate war." bomb was dropped to hasten the end of World War II. It did. But pan, Nagasaki has received scant the citizens of Nagasaki paid an attention it has become the "forappalling price. gotten" Ground Zero. Because In the blink of an eye, three Hiroshima was bombed three days earlier than Nagasaki, the former square miles of the city were obliterated. of the 240,000 has always eclipsed the latter in the residents were killed outright or minds of most Americans. But the hideously injured. Half a century destruction of Nagasaki was no after the fact, the mind balks at less tragic or portentous. 0 Within five years, at least taking measure of the suffering and devastation that ensued; it is impeople died. Six weeks after some the bomb was dropped possible to picture this park, this five weeks after the Japanese surverdant plot of earth, at the epicenan American military rendered ter of a scorched and lifeless landin the occupaofficer participating scape. More than a million Japanese a tion of Nagasaki reported that the year visit Hypocenter Park and the "smell of death and corruption" that "nothadjacent Atomic Bomb Museum, remained pervasive wheie they stare at graphic photoing has escaped its touch. In most ruined cities, you can bury the graphs of the destruction and consteel as relics a such dead, clean up the rubble, rebuild template grim helmet cradling fragments of a the houses and have a living city skull, or the remains of a human again. One feels that it is not so here. Like the ancient Sodom and hand fused inside a blob of glass. But beyond the borders of Ja- - Gomorrah, its site has been sown i' " L B-2- 9, Two-thir- ds 140.-00- J SeacfJspsn Tokyo . f - - "Himmirrmr nil iiim iniiiii - -f- esM Schoolgirls at Hypocenter Park pass out handwritten messages that read, "Peace I'm hoping for. I don't want war to come again." They were wrong. Seasonal rains and powerful tides cleansed the land and harbor of fallout much faster than anyone predicted. Within two months of the holocaust, the first seedlings began to sprout from beneath the rubble. Five decades later, the obelisk marking Ground Zero is shaded by a copse of tall, robust trees. Aside from a handful of prominent arti- a wrecked stone arch d known as the eerie fragments of religious statuary; a famous church bell, rung morning and night, that somehow emerged from the devasthere is little to tation unscathed alert the casual observer that not so very long ago Nagasaki lay in radioactive ruins. The most obvious reminder of the tragic past is the preponderance of ugly concrete architecture throughout the northern and central quadrants of the city, the result of hastily rebuilding everything from the ground up in the 1950s facts "One-Legge- I O To-rii- "; : 'C AW'- si. -' and "60s. Nagasaki manages to project considerable appeal despite a blight of drab, modern buildings. Although curiosity about the bomb is what brings most visitors here, one soon discovers that the resurrected city of 450,000 is a worthy destination in its own right. Nagasaki is blessed with an extraordinary natural setting that rivals Hong Kong or San Francisco. Steep hills and ridges overlook a fjordlike harbor. Besides providing stunning views and backdrops, the convolutions of the local topography shielded many neighborhoods from the atomic blast in 1945, thereby preserving an array of ancient Zen, Shinto and Confu- - J 4 oak Photo courtesy o Jon KraKa jer Hiking trails crisscross steaming hot springs and alpine woodlands of Unzen National Park, 20 miles outside of Nagasaki, Japan. as well as the oldest Christian cathedral in Japan, the Oura Catholic Church. As these religious institutions suggests, the city has a rich cultur- al history. In 1542. upon the acci- dental arrival of a Portuguese ship cian shrines that had sailed off-cours- e, Naga- - saki became the principal link be- tween intensely xenophobic Japan and the outside world. Dutch, Chinese and Scottish traders and missionaries arrived soon after the Portuguese, trans-- , iiMinw S Japan (See JAPAN, Page D10) . miia- 5 6 mites 200 .1 I G Photo courtMy of Jon Krakuar With steep hills snd ridges that overtook a fjordiiks harbor, the city of Nagasaki today rivals , trie ports of Hong Kong end San Francisco for its natural beauty. ; ; ! I'" y ; urn iiniiinn Photo courtesy of Jon KraKauer ( ViftfffffOcasn ; with salt." After measuring levels of residual radiation throughout the city, technicians from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined that much of Nagasaki would remain barren of plant and animal life for 75 years. EWVr- T- -" . ....... ! |