by Jon Yatabe
Besides the library (a barrack filled with donated books), the other thing I loved in Topaz was a jungle gym made of scrap pipe that the men had made in the camp’s central quad. It was large and complex. At the top you could put your feet around a central pipe and slide down like the firemen in the books did. Then you were at the bottom of a maze, trapped like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.
I usually went at twilight when no other kids were there. And often, a young girl would be playing there, outlined against the twilight sky. At first we just played on opposite sides of the gym, but after a few evenings she showed me how to hang by my knees upside down from one of the pipes. We would look at the waning moon and stay that way for twenty minutes. Then she would swing down, jump off the gym and run towards her barracks.
We did that all that autumn unless we had one of the many sandstorms or a desert lightning storm that illuminated the jungle gym like St. Elmo’s fire in the early whaling ships. When it got cold again, my mother made me come directly home from school and we read by the coal fire. But when the spring came and I returned to the jungle gym, the girl was gone and never returned.
About the contributor: Jon Yatabe was born in Berkeley in 1937 and grew up in Redwood City, where his father (Tak Yatabe) grew flowers. He was four when his family was sent to Topaz. His father joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and fought in Europe. The Yatabes settled in Berkeley after the War. Jon graduated from UC Berkeley and received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. After a long career in Washington and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he retired and divides his time between Alaska and Colorado (where he loves spending time with his grandchildren).
“The Jungle Gym” was excerpted from Chapter 9 (“A Day in the Life at Topaz”) of Jon Yatabe’s memoir, Letter to my Grandchildren. Copyright 2019, Jon Yatabe.