by Tom Robbins
Tule was even less of a lake than Siwash. It had been drained so that land could be “reclaimed” for farming. Reclaimed! Which came first, land or water? Give the wrong answer, you have to sit in a corner with a volcano on your head.
The detention camp had been built on that part of the dry lake bottom that was unsuitable for cultivation. However, the inmates (or “segregees,” as the War Relocation Authority preferred to label them) were put to work on surrounding farmland, building dikes, digging irrigation ditches and producing crops that proved once again that the greenest thumbs are often yellow.
(Perhaps the author is telling you more about Tule Lake than you want to know. But the camp, in Northern California near the Oregon border, still exists, and while time, that ultimate diet pill, has reduced its 1032 buildings to their concrete foundations, the government yet may have plans for them which may someday be your concern.)
Baked in summer, dust-blinded in fall, frozen in winter and mud-up-to-elbows in spring, the Tule Lake camp was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. Soldiers in lookout towers kept constant watch—on kids swimming in ditches, adolescents hunting rattlesnakes, old men playing Go and women shopping for notions in a commissary where the latest issues of True Confessions were always on the racks. It was reported that, even if the guards were removed, the segregees would not try to escape. They were afraid of Tule Lake farmers.
The Chink petitioned to be allowed to join his family in a less restrictive camp. But his FBI check disclosed that he had, over a period of years, pursued such heathen practices as jujitsu, ikebana, Sanskrit mushroom magic and Zen archery; that at UC he had written academic papers that suggested anarchist leanings; and that he had had repeated intimate relations with Caucasian women, including the niece of an admiral in the U.S. Navy. Please to remain at Tule Lake.
In early November of 1943, there was trouble at Tule Lake. A careless GI truck driver accidentally killed a Japanese farmworker. Angered, the segregees refused to complete the harvest. There followed a confrontation that Army spokesmen identified as a “riot.” Among the 155 ringleaders who were beaten and imprisoned in the stockade was the man we now call the Chink. The Chink had not participated in the “riot,” had, in fact, been looking forward to the rhythm of harvest, but camp authorities claimed that his notoriously insubordinate attitude (not to mention the crazed way he had of venerating plants, vegetables and other men's wives) contributed to unrest at the camp.
If he liked the segregation center little, he liked the stockade less. For several days and nights he meditated upon the yam, that tuber that, while remaining sweet to the taste and soft to the touch, is so tough it will thrive on the sides of live volcanos. “Yam” became his mantra. Om mani padme yam. Hare yam-a. Wham, bam, thank you yam. Hellfire and yam nation. Then, like the yam, he went underground. He tunneled out of the stockade, out of the camp.
In wartime America, where even toddlers and lobotomy patients remembered Pearl Harbor, the sneaky little slant-eyed yellow-bellied infidel was on the yam. So to speak.
58.
THERE IS AN ELIZABETHAN MAXIM, “To tend a garden is to be civilized."
Sir Kenneth Clark's boundless love for Western civilization seems to purr most contentedly when he is displayed, tweed-suited, in a landscaped garden.
The formal garden is an outdoor room where Nature is purged of its wildness, or, at least, is held in limbo.
It was in a high-quality garden that the fall of man began. The question is, fall from where into what? Innocence into sin? Substance into form? Primitivism into civilization?
Granting that primitive, unfallen man had access to nourishing psychic processes, which the clipped hedges of civilization have obscured, would it be unfair to conclude that the ecstatic mind degenerates as it begins to contemplate gardening?
Japanese gardening, with its emphasis upon irregular interval, as opposed to European gardening, with its emphasis upon ordered form, generates points of departure rather than sets of conditions . . .
Dr. Robbins, already vicariously affected by the Chink, was eyeballing the clinic garden from new perspectives while Sissy went inside to use the facilities. Suddenly, Miss Waterworth's red Bibanas wedgies appeared among the tulips.
“Excuse me, Dr. Robbins,” Miss Waterworth said, “but Dr. Goldman has asked that you reconsider your request to cancel the rest of your day's appointments.”
From where he lay in the barbered grass, cradling the one-third-empty bottle of Chablis, Dr. Robbins did not look up, but continued to focus upon the red shoes. He was reminded of the skinned knees of our betrayed Savior kneeling in Gethsemane's dew, of the speedy flick-flick of the Serpent's tongue, of the blood that oozed in pain and pleasure in King Louis's Deer Park, of cleverly disguised microphones blossoming among the roses on the White House lawn—and other ominous scenes from past issues of Better Homes and Gardens. “One moment, Miss Waterworth,” said Dr. Robbins.
Sissy was returning.
“Sissy, you do have more to relate about the Chink, do you not?”
“Oh my yes,” she said. “I haven't even told you how he came to live with the Clock People. Or anything. But if my time is up . . .”
“Never mind. Miss Waterworth, you are interrupting the only interesting sentences I have ever heard uttered by a patient—or, I might add, a staff member—in the three months that I've been an asset to this institution. Convey to Dr. Goldman my regrets. Now, Sissy. Another thimble of wine? Do go on.”
“Let's see. Where was I?”
“The Chink was so unhappy at the Tule Lake Segregation Center that he dared to escape.”
“No,” said Sissy. “I've given the wrong impression. The Chink wasn't charmed with the camp, but he was not unhappy there. The soil around Tule Lake grows the finest horseradishes in the world. It grew big white onions and tons of lettuce. He planted, cultivated, harvested and venerated. He wasn't really unhappy.”
“Okay,” said Dr. Robbins. “I get it. He wasn't unhappy but neither was he free. And freedom is more important than happiness. Right?”
Sipping her wine, Sissy thought it much too dry. The Countess had cursed her with a taste for the Ripple. “No, that's not exactly right, either,” she said. “Even though the Chink was still in the early stages of his development, he was advanced enough to know that freedom—for humans—is largely an internal condition. He was free enough in his own head, even then, to endure Tule Lake without undue frustration.”
“What made him split, then?” With the top of the bottle, Dr. Robbins prodded his caterpillar mustache. As if trained for just such a function, it undulated until it formed a shaggy question mark.
“You're not yet aware of the Chink's peculiar fascination with the science of the particular, with laws governing exceptions.”
The caterpillar repeated its question mark routine.
“You see,” explained Sissy, “there were three categories of Japanese-Americans in the country during the war. There were those in detention camps, including Tule Lake; there were those who had been released to perform menial labor in remote, rural areas of the interior; and there were those serving in the U.S. Army. Each member or each category was carefully watched over and supervised by the government. The Chink busted out of Tule Lake because he believed there ought to be an exception. After enough provocation, he took it upon himself to enact the singular as opposed to the general, to embody the exception rather than the rule.”
59.
HE HEADED FOR THE PROVERBIAL HILLS. The Cascade Mountains lay to the west, across twenty or more miles of lava beds. The lava felt sharply familiar. Each rip in his shoes brought him closer to his childhood. All night, he jogged, walked, rested, jogged. At sunrise, Mt. Shasta, a cone of diamond ice cream, a volcano on a sabbatical, adorned (like the whooping cranes) with the power of white, was waiting. Encouraging him. An hour after dawn he was in tree-cover.
His plan was to follow the crest trail through the Cascades, down the full length of the Sierra Nev
ada and into Mexico. In the spring, perhaps, he would wetback into the U.S. again and work the crops. There weren't many farmers who could distinguish a Nip from a Spic, not under a straw hat, not with spine bent to the rutabagas. Alas, Mexico was a thousand miles away, the month was November, there was already snow at the higher altitudes, flop flap was the song of his shoes.
Fortunately, the Chink knew which plants to chomp, which nuts and mushrooms to toast over tiny minimum-smoke fires. As best he could he patched his shoes with bark. His journey went well for a week or more. Then, out of the mysterious dwelling place of weather, there rode an abrupt and burly storm. For a while it toyed with him, blowing in his ears, aging his normally black hair, hanging flakes artfully from the tip of his nose. But the storm was on serious business, and soon the Chink, crouched though he was in the lee of a cliff, realized that, by comparison, the passion of this storm to storm made puny his own desire to reach Mexico. Snow snow snow snow snow snow. The last thing a person sees before he dies he will be obliged to carry with him through all the baggage rooms of lasting death. The Chink strained to squint a sequoia or at least a huckleberry bush, but all his freezing eyes saw was snow. And the snow wanted to lie atop him as badly as any male ever wanted to lie on female.
The storm had its way with him. He lost consciousness trying to think of God, but thinking instead of a radiant woman cooking yams.
Of course, he was rescued. He was rescued by the only people who possibly could have rescued him. He was discovered, hauled in, bedded down and thawed out by members of an American Indian culture that, for several reasons, cannot be identified beyond this fanciful description: the Clock People.
It is not easy, perhaps, to accept the fact of the Clock People's existence. You might read through every issue of National Geographic since the Year One and not find an exact parallel to the Clock People's particular distinctions. However, if you think about it for a while—the way Sissy did, the way the author has—it becomes obvious that the civilizing process has left pockets of vacuum that only Clock People could have filled.
60.
THE ROOM in which the fugitive regained consciousness was large and well heated, draped with crude blankets and the skins of animals. Whether it was a cave, a camouflaged cabin or an elaborate tipi/hogan-type dwelling the Chink would not say. He was careful not to disclose any details that might aid in pinpointing the location of his hosts. Sissy, moreover, would never have mentioned the Clock People to Dr. Robbins had she not been assured that conversation between psychiatrist and patient is privileged and confidential, immune, even, from governmental subpoena. That Dr. Robbins was someday to violate that privilege . . . well, let's pass over that for now.
As had been written, the Clock People are of an American Indian culture. Ethnically speaking, however, they are not a tribe. Rather, they are a gathering of Indians from various tribes. They have lived together since 1906.
At the dawning of April 18, 1906, the city of San Francisco awakened to a terrible roar, mounting in intensity. For sixty-five seconds the city shook like a rubber meatball in the jaws of Teddy Roosevelt. There followed a silence almost as terrible as the roar. The heart of San Francisco lay in ruins. Buildings had tumbled into creviced streets; twisted bodies of humans and horses colored the rubble; gas hissed like the Snake of All Bad Dreams from dozens of broken mains. During the next three days, flames enveloped 490 blocks, unquenched by the teardrops of the homeless and lame.
History knows the catastrophe as the Great San Francisco Earthquake. That is not how the Clock People know it, but, then, the Clock People don't believe in earthquakes.
Among the crowds who watched the blazing devastation from surrounding hills was a scattering of American Indians. Largely from California tribes, though including folk from Nevada and Oregon, and in whose midst there moved representatives of the few but notorious Siwash, they were the first of the urbanized Indians. Poor, generally, they held jobs of menial or disreputable stature along the Barbary Coast (It should be emphasized, however, that they had been drawn into the city, each and every of them, not by desire for money—they needed no money where they came from—but by curiosity alone). The white San Franciscans camping on the smoky hilltops surveyed the ruins in a state of shock. Perhaps the Indians, too, were overwhelmed by the spectacle, but they, as always, appeared as inscrutable as the other side of a nickel. Yet the Indians were to display shock aplenty. It was when the fires were at last controlled and the citizens began to rush back into the still-warm ashes, singing, praising the Lord, and shouting to one another their plans for rebuilding their metropolis, that Indian eyes widened in disbelief. They simply could not comprehend what they were witnessing. They realized that the white man lacked wisdom, but was he completely goofy? Couldn't he read the largest and most lurid of signs? Even those Indians who had grown to trust the white man were grievously disappointed. Rebuild the city? They shook their heads and muttered.
For several weeks they remained on the hill, strangers united by shock and disappointment as well as by a common cultural comprehension of what had happened below. Then, through communications the nature of which is known best to them, several of the Indians led a migration of a small band of souls into the Sierras, where, in a period of thirteen full moons, they generated the stalk of a new culture. (Or, should we say, under their impetus, the ancient stalk of Life Religion put forth unexpected and portentous shoots.)
61.
ON BEHALF OF THE SUSQUEHANNA, the Winnebago, the Kickapoo, the Chickasaw, the Kwakiutl, the Potawatomi and all the other splendidly appellated aborigines who came to be labeled “Indians” through the ignorance of an Italian sailor with a taste for oranges, it is only fitting that “Indians” misnamed our Japanese-American hero “Chink."
There were very few Japanese in San Francisco in 1906, but Chinese were plentiful. Already there was a Chinatown, and its exotic trappings were a lure to tourists. Drugs, gambling and prostitution abounded in the Chinese quarter, just as they did on the Barbary Coast, and the Indians often had overheard their employers speaking of the competition from the “Chinks.”
In the years between 1906 and 1943, the Clock People had, naturally, discussed on many occasions the circumstances of their Sierra migration. More than once, they had wondered aloud why the yellow people had been so unenlightened as to join the whites in resurrecting San Francisco. It had been astonishing enough to watch the white man set about to repeat his mistake, but to watch the Orientals follow him . . . !
Their curiosity about yellow men probably had influenced their decision to rescue this near-frozen outsider. During his days of recuperation, the storm victim had heard several of his hosts inquire about the condition of the “the Chink.” His sense of irony was not so frostbitten that he could refrain from perpetuating, once he had recovered, the misnomer.
Eventually, perhaps, he confessed to his Japanese ancestry. Certainly and soon, he confessed to being a fugitive. The Clock People elected to harbor him, and were never to regret it. In the years that followed, the Chink performed many services for them. In return, he was accepted as one of them, and gained privity to all of the secrets of the clockworks.
The pivotal function of the Clock People is the keeping and observing of the clockworks. The clockworks is a real thing. It is kept at the center, at the soul, of the Great Burrow.
The Great Burrow is a maze or labyrinthine sequence of tunnels, partly manmade, partly of geological origin. To be more specific: a natural network of narrow caves, lying beneath a large knoll in the Sierra wilderness, was lengthened and elaborated upon by the Indians who exiled themselves from San Francisco in 1906. Many, if not most, of the tunnels are deadends.
The Clock People, as we now know them, divided themselves into thirteen families, not necessarily along tribal lines. (What is the numerical significance of the Clock People's taking thirteen months to structure their ritual, then separating into thirteen families? Well, briefly, they consider thirteen a more natural number tha
n twelve. To the Babylonians, thirteen was unlucky. That is why, when they invented astrology, they willfully overlooked a major constellation, erroneously assigning to the zodiac only twelve houses. The Clock People knew nothing of Babylonian superstition, but they knew the stars, and it was partly in an effort to override the unnatural twelve-mindedness of Western culture that they chose to give thirteen its due.) To each family was assigned the responsibility for one section of the Great Burrow. Each family knows one section inch by inch, but is completely ignorant of the other twelve sections. So no one family nor individual knows the Way. The Way, of course, being the true path that takes one through the Great Burrow maze to the clockworks. Moreover, it is not possible for the families to compile a map of the Way, for each family holds as a sacred secret its knowledge of its burrow or section of the Way.
(In naming these tunnel sections “burrows,” the Clock People were not particularly identifying with animals—no more so than were the Indians in whose culture totems played such a large and vivid role. Totemically oriented Indians utilized the characteristics of certain animals metaphorically. It was simply a form of poetic symbolism. They used animals to think with.)
Okay. Who gets to the clockworks, how and when? Each morning at sunrise that day's designated guides—one from each of the thirteen families—gather at the portal of the Great Burrow. Then they are all blindfolded, except for the guide representing the Family of the First Burrow. The blindfolded twelve link hands and are led by the first guide through any of several routes he or she may take to reach the beginning of the Second Burrow. A guide will purposefully attempt never to use the same route twice. Often a guide will backtrack, and sometimes he or she will instruct the others in the party to let go of each other's hands and spin. Since, by this date, there are around twenty members in each family, an individual acts as guide only about thirteen times a year.
