I did my monthly 100K today, Centennial Trail Run. It's not a huge challenged and I was going pretty well. It started off a little rocky. I left my first aid kit and emergency inhaler on my desk. Yes, that made me nervous. I like the Centennial Trail Run, I do it fairly often. There are fewer other users, and once you get away from Snohomish and Arlington you're all by your lonesome pretty often. That suits me pretty well. Pedal, contemplate the world around me and enjoy the activity.
Pretty much smack dab in the middle of the ride is Nakashima Barn though. It's an attractive location, a nice place to stop and in a part of the state that I feel a familial attachment to. It's also a window into an ugly part of our nations past. This beautiful location is a memorial to Executive Order 9066. The Nakashima family were forced to sell their farm and sent to Internment camps with 120,000 other Japanese Americans. History Link has a good account of the history of the farm and the lives of the Nakashimas before and after the war.
This occurred before I was born and my family was not in Washington State at the time. My grandparents told me about the event though. The local families being shipped out, the meager belongings they could carry with them, and other people in town looking to profit from their forced removal. I felt they believed it to be shameful. Years later my father not always a paragon of racial equality, said that as a child he thought the people who claimed one old Japanese man was signaling submarines with his laundry were crazy.
I look at this barn and this photograph and wonder how we let this happen to us, but then I recall that we're doing something not all that different today. I can see how it happened then, and I fear what it happening now means for us all.
