Andrew VillalobosDivision led us to this place and when we arrived nothing was recognizable; not even the faces of our fathers. This is a place where black hot oily rain falls from the darkness soaking the ground in the death of radiation. Even life giving water, for a time, has succumbed to the will of humanity. A raindrop to sooth our seared lips or a sip from a stream to cool our burnt bodies were driven like nails into our feet and hands. Our strongest steel and reinforced concrete buildings reduced to rubble; twisted, contorted, shattered and broken. Wood and glass weren’t left splintered and broken they simply weren’t left, there was nothing left.
We had found our way here through a mixture of hate, anger, revenge and resolve. A mixture as disorienting as the blinding white light of the blast that unleashed the devil’s trinity of heat, pressure and radiation. Heat so white-hot that it incinerated nearly everything within 2 kilometers. Pressure so great that as all things turned to dust they were swept into the wind to join the mountainous cloud that stood as a symbol of suffering. Radiation so insidious, that the few who escaped the initial blast were inescapably caught in its web to struggle for the short time they had left. In that moment generations of families were destroyed and many more generations have gone on to suffer. Some of us were left with ugly and painful scars, others with scars much less visible but no less painful. Burnt, blinded, maimed and poisoned. A fertile land for the proliferation of cancers for our bodies and hopelessness for our souls. It’s hard to imagine a scarier place than this, Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. Division led us here.
We listened to account after account of survivors. Stories of incomprehensible pain and suffering but never the less survival. We learned that children clawed themselves out of the rubble, walking on skinless feet through streets of fire. People often didn’t know how they survived and some wished they hadn’t. One father resolved to kill himself and his family to free them of their suffering but when he wrapped his hands around his child’s neck he was unable to find the strength. Family members simply disappeared and many that remained were unrecognizable in person and personality.
78 years later we stood on the banks of the Motoyasu River and gazed at the A-Bomb dome through the final flowers of the Sakura bloom. The rain fell on our umbrellas and though we had been shocked at what we had witnessed we were filled with hope for humanity. Hiroshima is a wonderful city that has been rebuilt in just one lifetime. So quick was their reconstruction that we walked through parks of mature trees and along river banks lined with stunning cherry blossoms. The 500 year old castle that was mostly destroyed in the bombing was rebuilt in 1958 so the people of the city would remember their heritage while they constructed new lives and a new city.
Inside the castle walls was a Eucalyptus tree unlike any I had ever seen. When we walked across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago we saw thousands of Eucalyptus, we walked through forests of them growing tall and strong. Their canopies high above us filtering the light through thin, crescent moon shaped leaves. This eucalyptus was different. It’s trunk was gnarly, wide and squat with branches reaching to its sides and hung low to the ground. It was hunched over as if crushed under the weight of an invisible force. The branches grew twisted in all directions and though its shape was strange it had created a canopy of which you could walk into, like that of a willow tree. I found this inviting and enjoyed standing within its branches where I could appreciate this unique tree. It had survived the 1945 bombing and then found a way to live on radiation-soaked soil. There was a single branch hung low at eye level and as I approached it I saw the bright green stem and wide leafed shoot of precious young growth.
