Alta Journal is pleased to present the first installment of a five-part serialization of “Trekking to Delta,” a historical essay by acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita. Each week, we’ll publish the next portion of this provocative reconsideration of the internment of Japanese Americans at Topaz within the larger contexts of geology, Indigenous history, the Cold War, and recent examinations of responsible storytelling.
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “Trekking to Delta,” and sign up for email notifications when each new episode is available.
This serial appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Some people drive into Delta, Utah, to find cosmic rays. What are cosmic rays? On 648 West Main Street, there’s the University of Utah Lon and Mary Watson Cosmic Ray Center, where the history of cosmic ray research and the Telescope Array observatory are explained. The observatory is not a great dome on a mountain with a gigantic lens on a roaming tube; instead, it’s a puzzle of hexagonal mirrors, shaped like fly eyes, exposed at night, and focused on an array of what look like rusty procrustean beds with solar-panel headboards spread across the nearby desert. The Cosmic Ray Center describes all this. The center also includes a display about the Topaz internment camp, the remains of which are a square mile, in the middle of the nearby desert and where members from three generations of my family were incarcerated during World War II. What I want to know is this: What do cosmic rays captured in rusty beds have to do with the imprisonment of Japanese Americans?
Delta? I locate it on Google, mapped as a dry delta in the desert landscape, made an alluvial town by the convergence of two Utah national highways, 6 from the north and 50 from the west, a misshapen triangle of refuge and home. I eye the fuzzy satellite overlay of the present crisscross of streets and houses set among plotted fields of rural green. If I continue to pull upward and scan the landscape, maybe I can catch a field of rusty cosmic ray beds and the lonely square of barren land where the slabs of broken foundations of barracks, mess halls, a hospital, warehouses, and latrines, corralled by barbed wire, are the ruined remains of a prison’s wartime existence. Pull away farther, and Delta and everything else gets swallowed up into a big, white, elongated, alkaline amorphous glob that extends 20,000 square miles, covering most of Utah, parts of Idaho and Nevada. This white expanse is the dried-up remains of Lake Bonneville, the largest late Pleistocene lake in the Great Basin of the West. Tens of thousands of years later, the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, and Sevier Lake are the only wet remnants of this vast and ancient sea. And no doubt about it, just like the famous Bonneville Salt Flats, the one square mile of the Topaz concentration camp sits right there in that flat alkaline expanse.
Now, for the moment, zoom back into Topaz and consider that here, in December 1942, a group of Japanese American writers and artists published the first of three issues of a mimeographed magazine titled TREK. In the February 1943 issue, on page 35, there appears a title banner with “Lake Bonneville” inscribed over a sketch of desert mesas, a long, friendly brontosaurus trudging past. This artwork was drawn by Miné Okubo, and the article that follows was written by Jim Yamada.
To picture the extent of Lake Bonneville during its prime, imagine the level of Great Salt Lake rising 1000 feet. Most of Utah would be submerged: Topaz would be under 600 feet of water; the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, under 850 feet.
The length of this vast Pleistocene lake extended from Cache Bay to the south end of Escalante Bay, to a distance of 346 miles. Its extreme width, from the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon to a point on the Shoshone Range near Dendon Pass, measured 145 miles. Its coastline, exclusive of islands, was 2550 miles; and its surface area was 19,750 square miles—only a few hundred miles less than Lake Michigan.
Okubo’s brontosaurus from the late Jurassic period predates Lake Bonneville by possibly 150 million years. Somewhere out there are the dinosaur’s bones, guts turned into petroleum, skin into dust. Time reckoned in millions of years places everything into absurd perspective. Yamada’s geology lesson is an existential reset.
Even if there were only three issues of TREK, in each, the editors included an article or two about this land and its place in time and history. I believe they needed to understand where in the world they’d landed. These articles are about the geographic landmarks of the Pahvant Valley; the 1776 expedition of Father Escalante from Santa Fe into Millard County, Utah; and the fossil science of trilobites in the Antelope Springs area, all penned by Frank A. Beckwith, publisher of the Millard County Chronicle. Beckwith’s Delta-based newspaper published the local news, and so began the association between the Chronicle and the camp paper, Topaz Times, and its literary spin-off, TREK. It turns out that these Trekkies met Beckwith, who was the local scholar, an autodidact with an insatiable curiosity about and passion to know this land and its people.
I think of TREK as a creative and intellectual convergence. Through their writing, the contributors reveal their personal interests and characters. There is Toshio Mori’s earnestness, the terse realism of Yamada, Okubo’s keen wit, Toyo Suyemoto’s gentle lyrics, and the linguistic jabberwocky of Globularius Schraubi, pen name for Jim Oki. These were writers and artists at a juncture, honing skills, critically expectant of an uncertain future. Finally, TREK is a curious document, an eclectic mix of art, poetry, fiction, linguistic satire, essay, history, geography, ethnography, and information. You get a sense of a temporary endeavor to mark the time and place. The creators refer to themselves as zombies consumed with their tasks, but their writing and thinking seems to be in preparation to propel themselves eventually away. Thus, TREK’s articles advise about jobs, schooling, military service, and reports between camps and from out there. This interim activity is a trek in time.
Sometime after Beckwith published his TREK article “Trilobite Fossils of Antelope Springs” in 1943, the Topaz Slate Club was founded, its workplace equipped with grindstone and cutting tools. Topaz residents organized gatherings at Antelope Springs where they camped and hiked on expeditions to find trilobite fossils. Trilobites were marine arthropods existing in the oceans for nearly 300 million years starting in the early Cambrian period. A trilobite fossil, which might be one of 22,000 species, looks like a beetle with a wavy, row-like carapace and many spindly legs.
I had first read about the convergence of Lake Bonneville and the Topaz camp in Borderwaters, by Brian Russell Roberts, an English professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, who, while writing about the archipelagic world of oceans and islands, discovered that his own home was once under an ancient sea. Among the artifacts club members carved from slate were suzuri, or inkstones, on which an ink block is ground with water to make sumi ink for calligraphy and painting. Visiting the Topaz Museum, Roberts became fascinated with the Topaz suzuri, which were embedded with trilobites. On one carving, a frog, sculpted to encase a trilobite fossil, is set to jump into the stone’s ink pond, reminding the calligrapher of Bashō’s iconic haiku. Roberts speculates that while the stone may date back 2 billion years, the once-living trilobite, who marks the beginnings of life on Earth, has a biological evolution going back 3.5 billion years. For Roberts, there is the leap of the Cambrian trilobite fused into the Devonian amphibian into the Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, the slurry of black in a slate pond, and the sudden epiphany of the imprisoned poet onto paper. Or perhaps the quick and precise sumi-e brushstrokes of the imprisoned artist Chiura Obata, looking beyond the barbed-wire fence, his constant moon rising in the twilight sky.
Over time, the barbed-wire fence around Topaz became, if not porous, less confining, and people were free to leave to explore the terrain, gather tiny shells abandoned by ancient lake mollusks, search for geodes with hidden gemstones, identify limestone and shale with trilobite fossils.
In December 1942, just before Christmas, on a group excursion to Topaz Mountain to search for topaz and gather branches of evergreen cedar for holiday decorations, Kozo Fukugai lost his way. The Topaz Times reported:
More than a thousand residents, assisted by airplanes, horsemen, sheepherders, and a score of administrative staff including school teachers have gone over the entire area.… Beacon fires lit the whole mountain area Sunday and Monday nights and buglers drawn from the Boy Scout troops have been on duty regularly in the hope that either by sight or by sound the missing man could be directed to the searching party.
Three days later, trackers on horseback found Fukugai on the desert sand 10 miles west of Topaz Mountain, prostrate but alive.
Four months after Fukugai’s near death in the desert, James Hatsuaki Wakasa, while walking near the western border of the barbed-wire fence, was shot and killed by a military sentry stationed in a guard tower. Wakasa, biding his time after dinner, strolled alone. Perhaps a stray dog followed, free to pass beneath the wire, back and forth, but the man would not hear the warning, defenseless, death cast into his twilight.
Even if Wakasa had jumped the fence, escaped, where would he have gone, and how would he have survived in that alkaline desert? There was the psychological barrier of the fence itself. Fear. The incarcerated could apply to leave, wrestle with bureaucratic processing and the loyalty questionnaire for release, and then expect to face, beyond, the open ostracism of being the enemy. And yet, if only for short periods, to wander near the streams and mountains, to sit among the trees, to lie in the earth and look up into the night sky, to be free.
So perhaps folks joined a geological club like the Topaz Lapidary School that might give them the opportunity to explore the world outside. On September 24, 1944, two lapidary enthusiasts, Yoshio Nishimoto and Akio Ujihara, set out on an expedition to find chalcedony in the Drum Mountains 16 miles northwest of Topaz. There they discovered a strange rock, the size of a “potato sack” and the color of “burnt siena,” with “thumbprints” called regmaglypts patterning its surface. When they struck the thing with a hammer, it sounded like metal. In fact, it was an iron-nickel meteorite weighing 1,164 pounds, the largest meteorite ever found in Utah.
Over the years, Beckwith corresponded with the Smithsonian Institution and contributed research articles and thousands of fossils to its collection. As noted in TREK, the Smithsonian gave a fossil of the phylum Arthropoda the family name Beckwithia in his honor. Likely it was Beckwith who connected Nishimoto and Ujihara with the institution. Correspondence back and forth reveals the precarity of the two men imprisoned by wartime racism and queries the possibility of a fair settlement. Ujihara wrote:
The pleasure is mine to communicate with a great scientist like Mr. Henderson through our finding which was merely an accident. As for myself, I lost my home, business, and major part of my savings due to the evacuation. But it is only infinitesimal compared to the millions of people of war zones. My only desire is that by this incident it may benefit to the scientific world and in some way it may open a way to establish a better world for the coming generations.
Nishimoto and Ujihara received a total of $700 from the institution’s endowment fund, and years later, in 1950, each received a six-ounce polished and etched slice of the meteorite, which today is displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
I think about this meteorite, a space rock that penetrated Earth’s surface, managing to get through the atmosphere without burning up into a shooting star. This space rock made it to Earth. The Smithsonian’s report estimated that the Drum Mountains meteorite sat in place for a century before two Japanese Americans from the Topaz Lapidary School came along to find it.
At this juncture, I return to cosmic rays. I imagine magical traveling light, particles of iridescence, light-time travelers, X-rays that see what can’t be seen. According to Space.com, “cosmic rays are atom fragments that rain down on the Earth from outside of the solar system. They blaze at nearly the speed of light and have been blamed for electronic problems in satellites and other machinery.” The energy of one of those cosmic rays has been measured as equivalent to a Shohei Ohtani fastball. I’m no physicist, but I imagine harnessing such energy. The original High Resolution Fly’s Eye fluorescence telescope, created to help find these particles, was developed in the 1980s at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Tooele County, Utah, about 100 miles north of Delta. Founded during the war, in 1942, Dugway continues to be a test center for chemical and biological defense. Today, removed from military oversight, Delta’s Cosmic Ray Center is the headquarters of the Telescope Array project—the coordinated effort of the University of Utah, Utah State University, and the University of Denver; 19 Japanese and 4 Korean universities and institutions; and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Now I understand the relationship of cosmic rays to Topaz, where, as the poster in the center states, “history and science meet.”
Topaz is the connection between this largely Japanese research endeavor and America, a reminder of the complicated history of technology, war, and peace. Beyond the emergent possibilities of cosmic energy, whether militarized or peaceful, I still ponder the convergence of cosmic rays and Japanese American incarceration, suggesting alternate universes, the great and indifferent distance between supernovas and the human concerns of social justice. Can we be in two places, two universes at the same time, honor the immensity of space and the insignificance of our living existence?
My job might be to roll a giant rock out of the desert and return it to its mountain home. Repatriate it, so to speak. I stand with the rock at the precipice of Topaz Mountain and marvel at the view, but the rock tumbles back down the mountainside, and so forth, like the myth. So it begins again because I need to climb again to the precipice, craving that brief moment when I can see and marvel. This is my zombie dreaming with the fossilized TREK crew, submerged under 600 feet of prehistoric water, captured in rusty cosmic beds, scintillating protons waiting to be beamed up.•
Next Week: “People and Land”
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “Trekking to Delta” by Karen Tei Yamashita and sign up for email notifications when each new installment is available.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of eight books, including I Hotel, a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a professor emerita of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.
