Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

Years ago, I went camping with a guy I was dating. We were meeting his friends in the Eastern Sierra of California. We left LA in the morning, went north through the Valley, and headed east before going north again through Lancaster towards Independence.

I was startled when we hit the town of Manzanar. I hadn’t expected the highway to go right through town. I pointed this out to my boyfriend, and he told me he didn’t understand the significance of the place. This startled me even more.

Manzanar, today, is a national historic site operated by the National Parks Service. It was one of the camps established by Executive Order 9066, signed by FDR in 1942, in which the federal government mass incarcerated more than 100,000 Japanese Americans simply on the basis of race.

I learned about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII at every level of public education in Seattle — elementary, middle, and high school. It’s a part of the narrative of the West Coast’s twentieth century. These camps completely changed the life course of thousands upon thousands of Americans, who were uprooted from their homes, from their livelihoods and from their communities.

My then-boyfriend’s blindspot wasn’t exactly a fault of his own — he’s a smart, empathetic journalist. He just grew up in New Jersey. This stain on our country’s albeit very imperfect history was a part of my state-sanctioned education. I was surprised to find out that other states didn’t mandate it.

As state governments continue to battle over what books are taught in schools, this memory reminds me of how critical that battle is in deciding whose histories are told. It also tells me about how we can continue to look, to listen, to ask questions and to pay close attention to the untold or unheard histories in our own backyards. How that process is critical to being a citizen today and tomorrow.

Today’s poem takes me to another specificity of a Washington State public school education: learning the intricacies of salmon, sturgeon, dams, ecology, and electricity. What I didn’t see then, that I see now, is the tension between control and appreciation of the natural world. That our modern lives rely on a system built by lionizing the will of man. The speaker, here, wonders: At what cost?

Visitor’s Center
by T Bambrick

I feel her loosen grip on me,
moving, fingers pressed
to cool Plexiglas.
We stare into an exposed hatchery pond,
watching as the 10-foot
sturgeon slides through a shoal
of hovering Coho, 
snapping into sight with elongated
upper-tail lobes.
It’s all bone plates,
smooth scutes
catching like knives
in shafts of light. 
It turns to suck on the side of the tank.
Toothless mouth level
with our faces
fleshy barbels
hanging over gums. 
I imagine it gnawing
on the muscular hinges
of clam shells—opening
to swallow salmon whole.
It’s called thunder, 
when sturgeon slap their swim
bladders to attract
each other, small sounds
reverberating in a river.
I wonder if the impulse fades here:
echoing alone in a pool of concrete—
like how could you wait, still reach after
every time you’ve strained, 
bent your body’s length
to communicate.

“Visitor’s Center” by T Bambrick, from VANTAGE © 2019 T Bambrick. Used by permission of the poet.