August 3, 2013 Day –twenty-five

Buffalo, WY to Heart Mountain to Cody, WY

We got a fairly early start, headed off into the Big Horn Mountains.  We had been seeing hints of mountains the past couple of days, but they are finally here!  The drive through the mountains was really lovely-lots of trees and great vistas.  The sun peaked in and out, and the ominous clouds kept threatening, but no rain today.  Once we got out of the mountains it was full sun.  Yah!  On a previous trip out of these mountains, Dick had been caught up in a cattle drive right on the road caused by an early season heavy snowfall. It was strange coming down the mountain at the speed of a walking cow.

Around noon we arrived at Heart Mountain Internment Camp, one of the camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII.  We had been hearing about this new, state of the art interpretive center and so were super glad to see it.  They did a really nice job of telling a lot of individual people and family’s stories.  Over 14,000 people were kept against their will in this camp alone, with many of them being small children and women.  The great injustice of the situation is still so hard to understand. 

We were struck today with the fact that they were instructed with only a few days notice to take only what each family member could wear or carry in one suitcase.  What would you bring if you were going to leave with you family and go to an unknown place for an undetermined amount of time, and could only take what you could carry in your hands? Once they were at the camp a whole family would be assigned to a single room with only beds and a stove.  No other furniture was provided.  Over the years, the internees made their own furniture and converted the room into a more livable space.

One of the ways that they tried to bring home the indignities of the camp was in one of the stalls in the ballroom, they placed full-length mirrors on each wall so that as you sat on the toilet, it looked like there were a huge number of people sitting closely alongside you also on toilets.  Eerie! In the camps, there were no partitions between stalls.  And how hard would this be for Japanese-American women so used to having so much privacy in their homes.

This is perhaps the sixth of these camps that we have visited.  All of them are in VERY out of the way places, mostly desolate, dusty, windy and cold and hot.  And most of the internees came from the West Coast, living in areas, which rarely if ever experienced freezing.  It was brutal for them to end up in Wyoming!  But, just as in the other camps we visited, they persevered and worked hard, here especially to make the crops grow.  Many famers in Wyoming credit the Japanese for bringing very innovative and helpful methods of farming here.

This camp is directly underneath a beautiful mountain known as Heart Mountain.  You could see if from far away, and the internees also drew and painted and wrote about this fine mountain.

After the camp, we drove 15 miles to Cody WY where we visited a charming and surprisingly good museum:  The Buffalo Bill Center of the West.  This complex had five different museums as part of it and we especially enjoyed seeing the Museum of the Plains Indian, The Natural History Museum, and the Museum of Western Art.  All of these had so very fine pieces in their collections, and interesting interpretation. We were pleased to see both new artists and some of our long-time favorites.

Our evening was spent in a wonderful campsite in a National Forrest Camp ground right by a river.  We gathered wood (actually Dick played lumberjack and chopped it with an axe). The fire was perfect for the evening.  We so loved hearing the roar of the water.  We were glad to be just 20 miles from Yellowstone Park, where we will head tomorrow.

For people who shake their heads at our travels, we have met people on this trip who have far surpassed us in the art of road trips.  Dick talked to a couple who have driven to Alaska at least 8 times and who travel every summer from mid May until mid September.  They were just in Newfoundland last year. There is ever so much to which to aspire.

“I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.” – Lord Dunsany