Away from City Life

Waking up at 4:30 am on the first day of spring break was not my ideal way to start the morning. My family rushed to the San Diego airport to get on our flight to Seattle, and from there we drove our rental car another hour to get to Bainbridge Island. The story of Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson plays out against the backdrop of an island off Puget Sound based on Bainbridge.

Why would I choose a novel with such an inconvenient setting? I have lived in California my whole life, and I saw this Bookpacking project as an opportunity to experience something new and get out of my comfort zone of familiarity. Usually when my family goes on vacations, we choose somewhere for the tourist activities; typically national parks for the scenery and hiking. But I’ve never returned from a vacation really feeling like I know the place I visited. I barely even skim the surface of it, seeing only the most popular trails and restaurants, but hardly being able to imagine what it means to actually live in that community. Bookpacking offered my family a different style of vacation, an excuse to visit somewhere that likely would’ve never crossed our radar.

Snow Falling on Cedars painted a vivid image in my mind of Bainbridge Island that shaped my expectations. This novel centers around the trial of a local Japanese American fisherman, Kabuo Miyamoto, who is accused of murdering Carl, a white American fisherman, around ten years after the end of the second World War.

This is a novel about the interplay between history and community, and Guterson illustrates this through the novel’s characters. He alternates between the murder trial in the present and characters’ flashbacks to growing up on the island, serving in the war, or being sent to the Japanese American internment camps. The story’s perspective isn’t consistently told through any single character, instead giving readers a glimpse of the island through the eyes of the community.

As my family drove to Bainbridge, I recalled the island depicted by the novel. In my mind, it was a small community upheld by the fishing and strawberry picking industry. While people usually use “tight-knit” and “small” in the same breath to describe communities, I didn’t get a strong impression of this from the novel, at least not like I had felt from Olive Kitteridge. While there was certainly a sense of familiarity between characters, the strong fishing culture facilitated a more solitary lifestyle, where fishermen were often “all alone at night and had no one, even, to argue with”. There was little more than small talk and unspoken acknowledgement between the fishermen, who were all essentially competing on the waters.

When my family arrived in Bainbridge, I barely noticed that we had transitioned from the verdant, dense Pacific Northwest forest to an island town. There was an eerie sense of quiet to the place, like everyone had sheltered inside from the cold and rainy weather. However, this weather wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for the region, so I expected at least a bit more activity. We stopped for lunch by some ship docks at an old gas station-turned poke restaurant, and the Japanese American influence on the island became immediately apparent. The store counter was selling items I’ve only remembered seeing in markets of LA’s Little Tokyo, and the poke we got was some of the best I’ve ever had. Yet in the time we were there, only about three other customers showed up to order in the height of lunch hour.

The influence of and interactions with Japanese Americans on the island community was an integral part of Snow Falling on Cedars. The novel depicted the tensions between white and Japanese Americans in a more nuanced and different way from many other novels I’ve read. Most of the white characters seemed to engage with Japanese Americans in their community with minimal sense of separation; they were respected and known community members. However, racial tensions would only arise in the case where it involved a decision between loyalty to white America or loyalty to these known community members. This was most apparent through the characters’ responses to the Japanese American internment camps, most feeling that “this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do” because “there was a war on and that changed everything”. While it may not have manifested as outright racial hate crimes and aggression, the prejudice against Japanese Americans exposed itself in other ways.

To learn more about the island’s history, my family and I visited the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. A ranger spoke to us about how Bainbridge Island was the first site for the Japanese American relocation to internment camps, but after this relocation about 60% of the original residents eventually returned. We walked quietly through the cedar trees and towards the centerpiece of the memorial: a long, winding wall depicting carved images of Japanese Americans’ experiences during the war and real quotations from these citizens.

This wall led to metal figures of silhouettes overlooking a harbor, and as we walked this way, we noticed the metal footprints that eventually dissipated at the edge of the hill. This reflected the journey of many Japanese Americans who had to leave their homes on the island into a future of complete uncertainty.

Both this memorial and Snow Falling on Cedars serve as solemn reminders of this shameful history. At the memorial, I felt a keen sense of the importance of learning about our history as a nation: so we don’t end up repeating the same mistakes and unjust prejudices. The novel depicts how easy it is to fall into these same patterns of prejudice through Kabuo Miyamoto’s trial.

To continue to understand the history of Bainbridge Island, my family and I visited the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum. Almost a third of the space was taken up by the featured exhibits about Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island, including a video playing a short documentary and a collection of artifacts.

This exhibit really brought the novel to life. It’s one thing to read and imagine a family burying their treasured cultural belongings before relocating or being labeled as “Jap Number 1 [...] names of this sort instead of real names”, but it’s another thing entirely to see this reality with my own eyes. Just before we left, I talked to the man who was working at the front desk of the museum. He mentioned that he had been in the 6th grade when his Japanese American friends had been forced to relocate to the internment camps. He was in high school when they returned.

The weather had worsened at this point. I remembered how weather had played a pivotal role in the book, something that “in the hearts of his fellow islanders [...] overwhelmed absolutely everything”. To try to accomplish one more thing, my family asked about strawberry fields, which were an iconic fixture of the novel. I imagined that they represented the “American Dream” for Kabuo Miyamoto, who had hoped to own his own land and fields one day rather than being a fisherman.

But we were quickly told that the strawberry industry had been largely replaced with grapes for wine, which was more profitable, and the only strawberry “field” was a small plot of land outside the museum. This small patch of green felt to me more like a relic of the past than anything else.

At this point, I was beginning to feel disappointed that the Bainbridge Island of the present was not exactly reflecting the Bainbridge Island of the novel. But maybe I was doing Bookpacking incorrectly. While I’m reading books, I don’t try to impose my own assumptions on the author’s writing. But while I was visiting Bainbridge, I was trying to force my own idea of the place into reality, instead of just trying to understand the island as it is now.

I went into the next day with a much more open mind. Instead of diving into the history, we explored the nature that Bainbridge Island had to offer. This was the main thing that I felt hadn’t changed since the novel’s portrayal.

After living in Los Angeles for a while, I had started to think that Runyon Canyon and Malibu were scenic nature spots. But as we hiked alone along the rocky coast in blustering winds, I realized just how sheltered I had become as I braced myself against the cold. Nature was not always a sunlit walk among a crowd of people to a beach cafe. Nature was often more intense, but also more breathtaking.

We got some respite from the winds as we entered a dense forest of cedars, which eventually led us to an overlook of the bay. This brought to my mind a quote from the novel describing the “brand of verdant beauty [of the island] that inclined its residents toward the poetical”. The vast ocean and amount of untouched, forested land took my breath away, and I felt for the first time that I was beginning to understand what the island had to offer.

I’ve never lived in an environment where nature really impacted my daily life. Going from a suburban southern California home to an urban Los Angeles college, the biggest inconvenience from nature was the traffic caused by rain storms.

But on Bainbridge, I realized how nature plays a much bigger role. People’s livelihoods are at the whims of the weather: the island “lived and breathed by the salmon”, and a rain storm could make or break the success of strawberry fields. It’s also an unfamiliar feeling for me to accept these natural elements as completely beyond control. Even during a harsh winter storm, the characters in Snow Falling on Cedars have an unspoken understanding that “if disaster, so be it”, rather than trying to battle against these elements and dominate nature. The nature of Bainbridge brought me face to face with my own complacency about nature. The carve-out natural settings in urban Southern California are tame compared with vast forests and wind-whipped coastlines of Bainbridge. The contrast was marvelous but also menacing.

Another crucial part of Snow Falling on Cedars is the importance of moving forward from the past. Many islanders had served in the war, including many Japanese Americans. But there was an unspoken sense that Japanese Americans still “had the face of America’s enemy”. This conflict is especially illustrated through the character of Ishmael Chambers, the town’s local reporter for the San Piedro Review. He had served in the war, lost his arm in battle, and witnessed his fellow soldiers gunned down and killed. Even more, he had been in love with Kabuou’s wife, Hatsue, before she was forcibly relocated to the internment camps. While covering the trial, Ishmael’s personal prejudices incline him to doubt Kabuou’s innocence. But as he grapples with his own history, a crucial piece of evidence emerges that would give proof that Kabuou was not a murderer.

While learning about Bainbridge Island, I came across the history of the Bainbridge Island Review, which is the local newspaper. I found parallels between this publication and the San Piedro Review publication, especially through the journalist Walt Woodward. Woodward was known for publishing one of the “only newspapers on the coast to repeatedly remind its readers that the Bill of Rights had been violated for some of its neighbors” after the Japanese American residents were removed for internment camps. He repeatedly defended Japanese Americans and reported updates about their lives through camp correspondents, even if many people opposed this perspective as anti-American at the time. In the novel, Ishmael’s father, Arthur, and the San Piedro Review seem to be modeled after Walt Woodward. Arthur exposes the injustices towards Japanese Americans, even at the expense of being called an “insult to white Americans who have pledged themselves to purge this menace from our midst” and losing fifteen subscribers in a month.

Remembering his father’s legacy, Ishmael ultimately puts his resentment aside and shares the new piece of information that gets the murder charges dismissed. I appreciated the novel’s subtle reference to Woodward’s legacy in the community, so one of our final destinations was visiting the office of the Bainbridge Island Review. But as we pulled into the lot, it was immediately obvious that all stores in the area were closed for the day, and there was no evidence of life except for a sign outside one door to indicate this was, in fact, where to find Bainbridge Island Review.

My family spent the rest of the day wandering through local stores and restaurants, but the town never lost its sleepy, quiet feeling. Before we left, I climbed up the stairs to the inside of a flag tower which was supposedly the “highest point in town”. This was even more obvious from the inside. Looking out the windows, I could see from the empty streets all the way out to the bay where ships were docked. But there were barely any people walking around, nor was there anybody out sailing the waters. The only people we encountered while we were out and about seemed more like they had settled in Bainbridge to retire.

One waitress who was serving us mentioned how it was in “off season”, and it started to make more sense to me how the island had changed. While the strawberry fields and fishing industry may not be thriving, Bainbridge offered a peaceful escape for summer tourists from nearby cities. This was reflected in the pamphlets inside our hotel advertising whale watching excursions and kayaking among the “best activities in Bainbridge!” and even in the ships docked on the water, which looked more for recreation than for actual salmon fishing.

Bainbridge had changed a lot from the island described in Snow Falling on Cedars. Yet, the memorial and historical museum were still top attractions on the island. After getting to know it better, I think Bainbridge represents a place that is moving itself forward from its history without forgetting that history; it is preserving its past without feeling stuck in it.

The one thing that I wished I had gotten to know more about Bainbridge was the community. I think it’s hard to get a strong sense of this when I only stay in the place for a few days, and this was made even harder by the weather that kept most people inside. In all honesty, I felt like if people weren’t staying in Bainbridge as a place to peacefully retire, then they were only going there as temporary tourists. And besides the one poke restaurant, the historical museums, and a few Buddhist temples, I didn’t get the impression of a huge Japanese American community on the island.

Even though the character and economy of the island may have changed, I could still see how at its core Bainbridge reflects some of the key ideas from the novel. The sense of appreciation for history and the intensity of the natural elements were very much apparent on my trip. This Bookpacking experience gave me a glimpse into a very different way of life than I would’ve ever experienced in Los Angeles, and I realize that, while I can appreciate it, I don’t think that is a way of life I would ever personally feel at home in. It made me crave the chaos and vibrancy of the city, something that I never imagined I would’ve missed. While bookpacking helped me learn more about a place and community, I think I also learned more about myself.