Dad nailed blankets over the sheer curtains on the living room and kitchen windows for my third birthday party so men in Japanese planes wouldn’t see the candles on my cake. Mom, who’d recorded little in my “Baby’s First Five Years” book, wrote “December 8, 1941–Janet’s third birthday . . . our country declared war upon Japan today . . . I’m pleased we can celebrate for we might not be together a year from now.”
In truth, she didn’t expect us to be alive.
Our Brownsville, Washington home, situated at the edge of a healthy stand of Douglas fir and Western red cedar, was inland from Puget Sound a quarter mile or so, six air miles from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, three and a half miles from the Naval Torpedo Station at Keyport. The entire area was in Blackout, the old plank road that ran along the Sound from Brownsville to Gilberton – the road we used to drive to Grandma’s – closed after dark. I went along with Dad to collect Grandma for my party. He drove without lights across that stretch. The dull thud of every plank excited and scared me, and echoes in my ears at odd moments.
Children measure the emotions of adults around them and develop beliefs and behaviors based on their interpretation of those emotions. Dad, though outwardly calm, exuded tension in the way he held the car’s steering wheel and his darting glances seaward. Grandma, who thought in Swedish, said “My,” a word that spoke volumes to those who knew her. I picked up their vibes and stored them.
Over the next few years, I recorded the drone of small planes in my memory bank and had recurring dreams of them appearing over a stand of evergreens between our family home and the Sound. Though I was frightened in these dreams, I stood outside on our front porch, looking up at the planes’ underbellies, searching for faces of unknown enemies to make them real. I wakened, legs paralyzed with fear, and wondered why the dream visited.
The planes I saw in my dreams bore the rising sun insignia I’d studied in photographs, not those American owned and manned that I saw flying over Puget Sound.
Several of Dad’s brothers came to live with us after Pearl Harbor so they could work in the shipyard. One slept in our basement, another in an unfinished upstairs bedroom that years later became mine. One or two may have stayed with another uncle, a bachelor who lived in a cabin across the highway from our home. Mom prepared breakfasts and dinners, and packed their black lunch buckets with sandwiches, home baked cookies, a thermos of coffee. I served as Mom’s helper and had the privilege of walking Uncle Fred, the bachelor, to the Navy Yard bus stop. He worked swing shift, noon to 8 p.m., as a machinist. Dad worked day, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. as a carpenter; other uncles served as electricians, boiler-makers, pipe-fitters. One worked graveyard, midnight to 8a.m. Their schedules kept Mom cooking hearty meals around the clock on a cast iron wood burning stove that overheated the kitchen. At the same time, she tended my baby sister Joyce, born in late October
Dad, the youngest brother of the group, turned thirty-three less than a month after Pearl Harbor. The others were in their forties, too old to join the war effort in uniform, but I knew they served the war effort, too, refitting battle ships. They came home with skin itching from working with fiberglass, eyes burning and often with hacking coughs
Rosie the Riveter gained fame during the war years for doing jobs left vacant by men who went overseas to fight. Mom, and countless women like her, served too, though they gained no collective fame for their role. Dad and his brothers were skilled laborers in high demand in the Yard, Mom a former school teacher with two children. She returned to teaching in the winter of 1944 when the grades one-to-four teacher died suddenly. Joyce, then three, played and napped in a curtained corner of the classroom. A path through the woods behind our house connected to the Brownsville Grade School playground, a convenience for Mom who had a hard-working husband and several brothers-in-law who still needed to be fed. She could get home minutes after school let out, tie an apron over her dress and take up her position at the stove.
As a child I didn’t understand how war times and U.S. military presence around the world influenced our family’s economic well-being, but I did know war meant having uncles available to entertain me when Mom and Dad were busy. One uncle made me madrona bark cigarettes so we could smoke together on walks along paths through the woods. He peeled the reddish bark from a tree shading our breakfast nook, rolled it into a tight cylinder and poked it between my lips.
“Puffing on that will grow you some big bazooms,” he said.
I puffed and sucked to no avail. While he smoked, we used the toe end of our shoes to rearrange dry needles so bare earth showed. He called those places ‘cogitating spots,’ where he struggled to answer my troublesome questions.
“What is war?”
“What are battleships?”
“What happens to soldiers’ children?”
He would grind out the last of a smoked cigarette on the cogitating spot, carry the remains to the kitchen and toss it into the wood burning stove. He, like Dad and the other uncles, were clean and careful men. I remember them taking basins of water outside to the woodshed where they scrubbed with harsh brushes and Lava soap, and cleaned under their fingernails with blades of their pocket knives. Such washing up, they said, didn’t belong in a woman’s bathroom.
Mom used their cleanliness as leverage for my own cleaning up before meals. In my case, the ritual often began with a glob of bacon grease rubbed on pitch I’d collected on my forays in the woods. Intense scrubbing with Boraxo followed the bacon grease treatment, and left my hands and arms red and sensitive to hot water. (We saved bacon drippings in those years to use for frying potatoes, seasoning green beans, brushing on cast iron fry pans for Swedish pancakes and other wonders that came from Mom’s kitchen, not just for removing pitch.
“The Olsen men are vain about their appearance,” Mom said. “They bathe regularly.”
Over the years, I encountered several men who didn’t bother with such personal hygiene, most of them bachelors living in what I’d now term shacks. Mom must have worried more about their diet than their cleanliness, for it seemed we stopped by their dwelling to deliver vegetables and fruits from our huge garden and fresh eggs from Mom’s chickens. Mom referred to them as old family friends. She explained that they, too, were involved in the war effort.
Mom called me a worry-wart for my fixation with the war. She didn’t know how many adult conversations I overheard. I knew ammunition was buried under grass-covered mounds a that would look like rolling hills to enemies in planes overhead. We passed those mounds often on trips to a post office or to visit friends. I knew there were times we couldn’t be out on the bay in rowboats, or on the beach at Grandma’s, because the navy fired practice torpedoes along those stretch of Puget Sound.
I helped Dad and the uncles collect bits of scrap metal for the war effort and, with bravery and patriotism, gave up my slide when an old flatbed truck stopped by to collect our offerings. My slide was a sheet metal lined truck bed built of wood and long since removed from an old car Dad and my uncles had been reconfigured as a pickup truck. The closed end of the bed perched on stacked wood arranged as steps.
Fifty-five years after my third birthday, I met a Japanese American man on Kailua Beach on Windward Oahu. We met by chance, two people walking at water’s edge. We struck up a conversation that led to his telling me he’d heard the planes over Pearl Harbor, looked up at them as they climbed to clear the Koolau Mountains above Honolulu, and felt his breakfast churn in his stomach. His description matched the picture in my dream. He was seventeen at the time and needed his parents’ signature to join the military. He served in Italy, far from the Pacific Theater where his ethnicity would have placed him in danger.
There’s no rational explanation for our meeting, or for our conversation. To Hawaiian residents, I’m a mainland haole, another tourist. Perhaps he recognized me as such and asked me where I lived, and I answered, “On the west side of Puget Sound, across from Seattle.” I know we spoke of Bremerton and the shipyard.
He carried an apple, savoring it’s shape and smooth skin before taking a bite. He’d eaten his first apple aboard a troop ship bound from Honolulu to San Francisco. “My part in the war,” he said, “gave me apples and freedom.”
Meeting and talking with him brought an end to my dreams of enemy planes over my childhood home. I could explain that in psychological terms, but I prefer to believe our meeting was predestined.
© 2011 Jan Walker