If you find yourself in Tokyo one day, drive north up the Tohoku expressway. In about seven hours, you'll arrive at the tiny sea-side community of Otsuchi. It lies on the Pacific Ocean side of the Japanese island, far north of Fukushima, where two natural disasters combined to cause one tremendous man-made one.
On March 11, 2011, a mega 9.0 earthquake struck eighty miles off the coast of Japan. It was the fourth largest recorded magnitude in the world. The thrust underneath the ocean created a 45-foot tsunami, reaching the shoreline fifty minutes after the shaking began. At the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, the horrific combination of disasters caused a failsafe protocol to do the unthinkable, and several of its six reactors blew. It is the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Close to 16,000 people died from the earthquake-tsunami combination. Over 3,500 are still missing. Almost 6,000 injured. 350,000 displaced.
The people of Otsuchi lost almost everything to the huge wall of ocean water. It swallowed whatever was in its path ... homes, gardens, businesses, automobiles, schools, animals, roads and railways. The coastal town was completely devastated in less than half an hour. A century-old community lost ten percent of its residents. But, despite such powerful devastation, one man's home is still standing.
A year before the disasters hit, Itaru Sasaki lost his cousin. More than anything, he missed their conversations. Overcome with grief, he decided to do something to make that pain a little more bearable. He built a telephone booth in his hilltop garden, overlooking the ocean. His glass-paned box is painted white, contains an old rotary phone, and its cord hangs in coils, disconnected. You won't hear an operator asking what number you need. You won't experience the click of connection when your call is picked up on the other end. You won't hear a beloved, Hello. And it will never, ever, ring.
But, you can speak your heart.
Mister Sasaki told a reporter in an interview, Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind. Thus, the kaze no denwa was born. The wind phone. Since the tsunami, his booth has become a pilgrimage for those struggling after the horrific events of 2011. Survivors come to say, I miss you. Some even dial their previous number, a reflex attached to home.
How many times, since mama died, have I reached for the phone?
How many times, since our last conversation, have I prayed for her voice on the line?
How many times, in the months since she said her last words to me, have I cried my own into the wind?
I still wince whenever I glance at the clock and realize it's 8 p.m. on the West Coast. The hour that I have picked up the phone to dial my mother's number a million times. 11:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. During that hour, we shared our day. We said goodnight. 2,737 miles between us. Our voices pinging off satellite rides. Our laughter soothing the distance.
It seems my life has been defined by wind phones.
The first 72 hours of basic training, at Lackland Air Force Base on the west side of San Antonio, Texas, I was consumed with the thought of home. Everything I had ever known was a phone call away. All I had to do was get through those
first three days to be awarded a fifteen-minute conversation. We all stood in line for hours to have our chance at hearing the familiar. To get a taste of the voices we had left behind. To feel once again the sound of love we so desperately craved. I marveled later that night, flat on my back and lying under a military-issued blanket, that there was only one person among everyone in my flight that had no one to call. Despite being older than most recruits at age 23, I still found myself crying when I heard my grandfather's voice go up an octave, once he realized it was me on the line. Hello, baby, he said, and that's all it took to make the waterworks flow. I am not sure how Alexander Graham Bell envisioned the world, when he filed a patent for his telephone on Valentine's Day in 1876. But, I imagine his life's work was born out of an acute yearning for love and connection, especially when considering that both his wife and mother were completely deaf.
In 1987, when I was stationed in Okinawa, 1600 miles south of Otsuchi, phoning home was incredibly expensive. An international call from Japan to the States cost $3.10 a minute. For an average twenty-minute conversation, equivocally at 2019 prices, I paid $135 just to hear the voices of my family. I was willing to shell out close to ten percent of my monthly earnings. Despite that exorbitant price tag, I managed to call fairly frequently. For the drawn-out absence between, my mother came up with a brilliant plan for sustenance. She bought hour-long cassette tapes. Several times a month, she closed herself off in her bedroom and talked to me through a portable, battery-operated recorder. Every day at lunch, I walked to the Post Office and prayed for mail that was worth more to me than all the gold in the world. The envelope always burned in my breast pocket, smoldering until the end of duty, when I could listen to my mother's words.
Twenty-seven years later, my little brother died from an unexplained and symptom-less heart attack. He was 37-years-old. Now, his son comes to visit me. He often spends an entire weekend and we do many of the same things that I enjoyed with his father. Music. Movies. Action Figures. Wrestling. Slowly, over the past year or so, his voice has changed from the higher pitch of a little boy to the deepened baritone of a teenager.
The first time I noticed the difference, I remembered the tape.
It was early summer, 2014, just a few short months after Dwayne had died in March. I felt the need for a physical change, one that expressed outwardly the unrecognizable inner terrain in which I found myself lost. For days, I moved furniture in my house. I switched chairs and a sofa, even relocated bookcases towards better window light. Anything to mark that my life was forever altered without him. With these changes, I discovered that the cord to electronics in the living room no longer reached an outlet. I needed an extension to make it work, so I went to the garage and began searching in boxes that I had not opened in a very long time. The first one I pulled off a shelf sprayed my face with dust. I sat it on a workbench and pulled back the cardboard flaps. I thought it contained hand tools, old file folders, or photographs. But, right on top of all the contents, as if placed purposefully dead center of my face, was a cassette tape with my mother's handwriting. Dated April, 1988, Side A read, "A surprise from two of your favorite people."
I spent half a day searching for a store that still sold cassette players. When I finally got one home, I was terrified that the tape was too old. Would it immediately break? Was it worn so thin that nothing would come out of the speakers? Would it snap into pieces as it threaded its way around the swirling metal spools? When I pushed the play button, I couldn't help but hold my breath. My mother's voice came out of the box, thinned with time. She explained that this would not be the normal recording because two visitors had unexpectedly dropped by to deliver a basket of apples. I heard a chair squeak as she stood up. Muffled voices in the background. A door closing. Then, my grandfather cleared his throat and said, Hello, baby.
For fifteen minutes, I listened to the kind soul who raised me as his own child, talking about the crabapple tree that was in his direct line of sight from the living room window. When I was a little girl, it was Poppa that instilled my love of trees. He taught me to identify them by leaves, bark, and fruit. I knew instantly the one he was describing because of the time it takes to bloom. Juvenile trees can take up to ten years to flower, while building roots and height and sprouting foliage. My grandfather kept a watchful eye on that tree, sometimes lifting me in his arms to touch its leaves, teaching me to speak to its spirit. I learned about patience, waiting on the tender shoots to open. I listened to his voice, now ancient and mechanical, speaking proudly of the crabapple that finally burst into color. The smell of it was so desirable that he clipped a small branch and brought it into the house. Placed in water, it kept all the rooms bathed in perfume.
A few weeks after the original tape was flown across an ocean, I received a letter from my grandfather. In the envelope, there was also a Polaroid. The image was Poppa standing underneath his tree, a smile wide-flowing across his cheeks, and one hand delicately cupping its pale white and pink flowers. At the bottom of the last page, in child-like letters, he scrawled the same words he uttered at the end of every long-distance conversation, You be a good girl. I love you.
Again, the sound of a chair pushing back against a wooden floor. A door opens. Someone else shuffles into the room.
Hello, honey, we just stopped by to bring your mama some apples we bought over in Virginia. I never expected to be able to talk to you. How are you, darlin’? We sure miss you.
The sweet Southern drawl of my Aunt Mary Ann flooded the airwaves. Her laughter and jokes were as real as the tears streaming down my face. She told me that she bought Poppa ... one of those new-fangled clappers. You know, that gizmo that turns on and off your television just by clappin' yer hands together? Well, we couldn't figure out how it worked and I thought to myself, Lord God, if somebody pulled up in the driveway, they'd have looked in this big picture window and thought we's in church, with us clappin' and shoutin' and all. I had to stop the playback because I was laughing and crying so hard at the same time – what Dolly Parton proclaimed, in the film Steel Magnolias, was her favorite emotion.
I flipped the tape over to Side B and pushed play. What came out of the speaker buckled my knees and shoved me to the ground. It was my little brother. He was 11-years-old. I had long forgotten what his pre-pubescent voice sounded like. And just as with his son, it cracked on high notes, almost girlish in pitch. I listened as he talked about his little league games: the position his coach assigned versus the one he really wanted to play, how many times he got to the plate, the number of hits, their distances in proximity to the backfield fence. His voice softened when he said, I wish you could come home and watch me play.
My life has been defined by wind phones.
While in the Philippines for a military exercise in 1989, I became seriously ill and was hospitalized for several days. It was at the tail-end of our deployment, and my entire squad flew back to base in Okinawa, well before I was able to travel. It was one of many times in my life that I found myself super sick, in trouble, and alone. All you want in those moments is to hear the voice of someone who loves you.
I remember crawling out of my bed, ensuring my gown was tied tight in the back, careful not to pull out an IV needle from the crook of my arm. It was close to 2 a.m. Philippine’s time. I could not sleep. A gnawing in my gut to call home. Despite the weakness of my legs, I managed to push the IV pole past the nurses’ station before any of them returned from a patient's room. The elevator dropped me down six floors to the hospital lobby. It was the only place in the entire building that housed international telephones. They were literally in a long line of booths near the front entrance. People were normally standing neatly in rows, waiting for a few minutes of comfort, but in the wee hours of that morning, no one was there. I maneuvered the IV pole between myself and the accordion glass door and managed to pull it within inches of completely closing. I picked up the receiver and it was not too long before the clicking converted into a Japanese woman's quick-cutting voice, asking how she could help me. I placed a collect call to my grandparents’ number. Being on the other side of the International Dateline, it was noon on the previous day in Tennessee. Poppa accepted the charges. We talked for about ten minutes. I never once told him I was sick. To this day, I cannot remember a single word of that conversation. All I can muster is how happy he was to talk to me, how comforting it was just to hear his voice, and that he ended it the same way as he always did: Be a good girl. I love you. Twenty hours later, my grandfather took his last breath.
My life has been defined by wind phones.
Last week, I read a news article about a mysterious radio signal from space. These signals have been known to repeat, but for the first time, scientists found a pattern in a series of bursts from a single source. They are coming from half a billion light years away. While most of these FRBs (fast radio bursts) emit once and do not repeat. When they occur very fast, they can appear as a wave across the space continuum. These repetitions come in clusters and are sporadic, at best. What is different about last week's FRB is that it is part of a pattern that occurred about every 16 days for an entire year. For four of those days, the signal sent out a burst every hour. Then, it went silent for 12 days before starting all over again. For the past twelve months, researchers in Canada observed and studied the pattern. They labeled it FRB 180916.J0158+65. Along with this signal, they found seven others that seem to be coming from very different sources. Why this is happening is a mystery. Scientists are alluding to possible explanations, such as the remnants of a supernova, a neutron star or an early star binary system, short-lived hot, massive stars or the winds coming off them. Astronomers simply do not know what they are or why they exist at all.
What I do know to be true, about our universe, reminds me of a story about a young boy and an old farmer. They were in a restaurant when the old man leaned across the table and asked, do you see how the light moves through those trees? Do you see how the dust shoots up behind that pickup truck? Can you see how the blades of grass bend under the wind? Then he paused, while the boy keenly anticipated his answer. He was certain a big secret was about to be revealed. The old farmer whispered, It's all ALIVE!
It's all alive. There are no eyes, no matter how tiny, no matter what body type houses them, that lack a soul. Everything is connected. Forgetting or not understanding the depth of this concept, or the magnitude it has on our existence, is to relinquish the very thing that sustains our hearts. We are not alone. And when we lose people we love, either to physical death or arguments or geographical movement, the only way to carry their absence without breaking is to look for them again in other forms.
We are all connected through the energy of life. To understand relationship, we must be able to grasp the fact that we do not simply live in the universe.
The universe lives in us.
The catastrophic death of a star brings new life to the Cosmos. A star must die in order for us to be born.
We are all stardust.
Whether rock or wind, animal or tree, human or light that bursts in soundwaves across time as we know it, our hearts all beat within an energy field that never burns out. Creation cannot stop. Why would it? It propels us to examine other realms of understanding. And the more I think I know, the more ignorant that I become. I experience such a feeling of smallness, a realization that I cannot possibly conceive of how all this works, when I walk under a forest canopy. And I crave a deeper awareness, whenever I become heavy with grief because I forget to look outside myself.
My life has been defined by wind phones.
The group of souls that cradled my first two decades of life, the loving stars that guided me in darkness, the very essence of my beginnings in the heavens, have all dimmed. My entire family is gone from me now. They have evolved into a higher energy. What I ache for is their humanness. What I long to hear is their tangible speech. But, I must continually remind myself that I am not separate from their pulse. They are as much a part of me as the cells that hold my own energy in place. As deeply as my heart breaks in half, yearning for the days I walked among them, I still feel the throbbing of their love in my bones. And when I tremble from the need to talk to them, I can converse while walking among trees of giants. I can inhale their words from the whisper of a rainstorm. I can cradle their laughter in birdsong.
There are days when my human frailties cannot reach beyond the constellations and cease the pain of my loneliness. But, when I do feel my lost relatives, bursting back to me in galactic waves, repeating patterns across billions of years of light, those are the instants when I am filled with awe. Those are the moments when hope bursts inside my heart. Those are the promising hours in which I find a sliver of peace.
And love is carried, endlessly and effortlessly, through a wind phone.
Yorumlar