Manzanar…

Yesterday came and went with a whisper.  D-Day.  6 June.  The day our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Coasties saved civilization back in 1944.  It was the beginning of the end for the Axis powers.

Ordinarily, I’d get out on the rifle range with the Garand or the Springfield (I almost always do that on D-day and Memorial Day), but it was too nice a day to punch holes in paper.

Nope, yesterday it was time for a one-day road trip.   And that’s just what I did.   Points north.   The Three Flags Highway.   That’s US Highway 395, which runs from the border with Mexico all the way up to Canada.   Get it?  Three Flags (Mexico, the US, and Canada).   It hit 104 degrees out there yesterday, and I loved every minute of it.

Highway 395 is magnificent, but I wanted to scoot up there quickly and do a bit of exploring in and around Manzanar, which is a cool 210 miles north of Casa Berk.

I’ll tell you more about Manzanar in a bit, but first, any road trip through this region wouldn’t be complete without a peek at the Cottonwood charcoal kilns (and, as you’ll see below, a peek from within)…

The Cottonwood charcoal kilns are about 10 miles south of Manzanar and about a mile to the east of Highway 395.   It’s soft sand, but it’s doable on a bike.

Ah, Manzanar.  It’s a free National Park, and it’s worth a trip.   If you don’t know the story, it goes like this:   When World War II broke out, Franklin Roosevelt had Americans of Japanese descent rounded up from the three western states on the Pacific and put into what were basically concentration camps.   It was a national disgrace, it’s hard to believe such things occurred in this country, and if I had to choose a single word to describe my visit, it would be “disturbing.”  On the one hand, it’s hard to believe such a thing could have happened in the United States.  On the other hand, while I believe that people are basically good, the potential for abominations such Manzanar could happen anywhere.   Hell, it happened here.

The camp was just to the right of the guard tower you see above.   Even though it was 104 degrees down on the Mojave floor when I shot this photo, you can still see snow in the eastern Sierras.

There were 10,000 Japanese-American internees kept at Manzanar.   This is what the inside of one of their barracks looked like…

One of the Japanese-American internees was a kid named Bob Uragami.   When I was a big wheel in the Aerojet corporation (in another life a few decades ago), Bob worked with me in the cluster bomb business.   He was a test engineer.

There was a list of all the internees inside the museum at Manzanar, and I found Bob’s name…he was rounded up with the rest of his family when he was just a boy…

Here’s a view looking out the door of one of the barracks toward the Sierras…

This is the Manzanar cemetery.  It’s about a mile away from the barracks on a dirt road, but the road is hard pack and it’s easily doable on a motorcycle…

And the exit…the camp was guarded by US Army MPs…

I had my Nikon with me, and I made a bunch of stops to take photos.   Check out this unusual house, guarded by a rusty old T-rex…

You see a lot of unusual things out in the Mojave, not the least of which was an interesting collection of iron art.   Someone was very good with a torch…

One final shot, folks…and of course, it’s my signature selfie…

So that’s all for now, folks. I’ll be in the plant tomorrow, and things are gearing up for the China expedition. I’ll be posting more about that in the near future, so keep an eye on the blog!