Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

Cautionary Tale

August 1997 was a bad time for me. I was as suicidally unhappy as I've ever been in my life. Eventually it came down to slashing my wrists or cutting my hair. The hair lost. I shaved my head.

My image in the mirror shocked me. I kept thinking: This is what I'll look like in ten years, my hair thin and short, after I've taken chemo for breast cancer. Not that anyone in my family has had breast cancer (touch wood), but I looked nothing like myself. The break had been made with my unhappiness. With my depression externalized for everyone to see, I began to feel better.

Unfortunately, when the crisis came, I'd forgotten that I'd committed myself to going camping in Northern California two weeks later. The plan was to visit one of the World War II concentration camps. My friend Ann Marie enticed me with an email that said, "Mom was telling me about an article she read about the internment camp, which mentioned the cemetery. Unlike the rest of the camp, the graveyard is still in good shape." I've long been fascinated with America's shameful history of wartime incarcerations of Japanese Americans. That an American concentration camp had a cemetery was all I needed to know.

We planned to camp at Lava Beds National Monument, the closest campground to the internment camp. The National Monument is named for the miles of lava tubes and underground caves from a prehistoric volcano -- sister to Mount Shasta and Mount St. Helens -- that last erupted over 11,000 years ago. The park has the greatest concentration of lava caves in the continental US, over 400 of which have been explored and 100 of which are open to the public.

In 1874, the lava beds were the battlefield of the most expensive war (half a million in 1870s dollars) launched by the American government against its native peoples. The Modoc War was the only full-blown war ever waged in California.

The war's roots reached back to the 1840s, when the native people living around Tule Lake objected to white settlers fencing land to graze sheep and cattle. Eventually, when the settlers outnumbered the Modocs, the government stepped in to evict the Modocs. They were sent to live with their enemies, the Klamaths, north of the lake.

As usual, the government failed to keep promises of support and supplies. The unhappy Modocs requested a reservation on the Lost River, their traditional homeland. After they were denied, the Modocs headed for the lava beds anyway. For nearly five months, sixty Modocs held off the U.S. First Cavalry, which was twenty times their strength. In the end, the half-starved Modocs surrendered and their way of life was destroyed.

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Both Ann Marie and I have camped numerous times in California and never had any trouble. We didn't think twice about being two women alone in the wilderness without a man to chaperone us. We hadn't taken into account how much my lack of hair might horrify other people in the campground.

We knew we weren't in Kansas any more on the first night of our trip, when one of the campers argued with the ranger over the age of the park. The volcano could not have blown up 11,000 years ago, he shouted, since the world itself is only 6,000 years old. I pitied that man's poor embarrassed children. Did their father challenge officials at every park they visited, if the geologic time contradicted his biblical dogma? I knew, in the vaguest way, that some people denied evolution. This was the first time I'd heard one ranting in public.

Next morning, while Ann Marie and I were brushing our teeth in the public restroom, a woman took one look at us and started rearranging the garbage cans to build a wall between her sink and ours. I don't know why she thought we (apparently lesbians) were going to lunge at her before 9 a.m. I had a bandanna over my velvet-stubbled scalp, but I'm in no way a scary woman. There wasn't anything suggestive or menacing about the way I was brushing my teeth.