Reflection

Along the windy roads where I live there are beautiful things to see. Most days I travel the back roads and sometimes drive right by photo opportunities but on this particular, stress-filled Monday morning, I stopped and spent some time by this pond.

Without a breath of wind, the pond was completely still and the reflection as perfect as a mirror. I made some images but as I got closer to the pond, my footsteps along the edge created some slight waves on the water, ruining the pristine reflection.

The few quiet moments I spent there put a wall between me and the harsh day I was experiencing. With the cell phone in the car and no souls with an idea of where I was, all was peaceful. I think stress is over-rated and anger and righteous indignation leave damage in their wake. But like the good soldier, I got back in my car and marched myself back to the front line.

The stress is gone, but I still have the image of a quiet moment where the song of insanity couldn't find me.

Wildfire chars part of Meyer Ranch

A 40-acre wildfire last week in Conifer’s own front yard reminded residents that fire season has definitely come early this year.

About 3 p.m. Thursday, Elk Creek firefighters responded to a wildfire at Meyer Ranch on U.S. 285 east of Aspen Park. The flames came within 50 feet of the historic Meyer homestead, but strong winds turned the blaze away from the house and onto a rocky ridge and a meadow on the property.

No injuries were reported, no structures burned, and the cause of the fire is still under investigation. The fire was fully contained by 8 p.m. Friday.

Four subdivisions were evacuated starting Thursday for about 24 hours, and residents had only moments to grab what they could.

Longtime Conifer resident Norm Meyer went to look at the fire just after it started and was concerned about nearby homes.

“I wasn’t too worried about my place, but I knew other people could lose their homes if the fire spread,” he said.

Nancy Schifo lives just east of the burn area, and as the wind-whipped flames began to move up the slope toward her house, a Jefferson County deputy knocked on her door and told her she had to leave. Now.

“I didn’t have time to think,” she said. “I grabbed my animals and my checkbook. That’s all I had time for.”

An evacuation center was set up at Conifer High School for residents, but Schifo parked her car at the Meyer Ranch Open Space parking lot and watched and waited with her dog and two cats.

“I don’t really know where to go, so I’ll just wait and see what happens,” she said.

After returning home, Schifo has a newfound respect for fire danger. Next time, she’ll be ready with items she needs for both her and her animals.

“There was stuff I left behind that I wish I hadn’t,” she said. “Now I keep things in a certain spot, and I have a bag packed. I’ve been up here a long time. The only thing I would do differently would be to take things that can help with my survival.”

Wildfire

Motorists on U.S. 285 witnessed the power of a wildfire close up as the flames brushed up against the highway. Spectators parked along the highway and at local businesses and watched a helicopter make repeated drops on steep slopes. A single-engine slurry bomber dumped flame retardant on the trees at a nearby home.

Jody Wagner, Elk Creek Fire District spokeswoman, said despite the much-needed moisture that came over the weekend, residents should still be concerned about fire danger.

“The tall grasses and surface fuels are still dry even with the recent moisture,” Wagner said. “In no time at all the risk of wildfire will be real high again.”

Wagner said the fire took two days and the work of several agencies to control. She said 60 firefighters from several organizations helped.

“Elk Creek historically has done so well with structure protection and safety, but certainly the progress we made with the Meyer Ranch fire would not have happened without the support of neighboring agencies,” Wagner said.

Elk Creek received aid from the Platte Canyon, Inter-Canyon, North Fork, Indian Hills and Fairmount fire departments, plus the Jeffco Incident Management Team, Sheriff’s Office and Animal Control. Also supplying aid were the Intermountain Humane Society, Elk Creek Support Team, Inter-Canyon “Vees” Volunteer Auxiliary, a Jeffco sheriff’s type 2 helicopter, the San Carlos Hand Crew and the Juniper Valley Hand Crew.

Wagner said the department is braced for a tough fire season and needs help in the form of volunteers.

“I encourage people to join the Elk Creek Support Team or the Elk Creek Explorers,” Wagner said. “For those who can’t participate as a volunteer firefighter, we still need many volunteers to support the organization in other ways.”

Jefferson County sheriff’s investigators are asking for the public’s help to find those responsible for starting the Meyer Ranch fire. The fire appears to be one of several started last Thursday along U.S. 285 in the area of Parmalee Gulch, Meyer Ranch and Richmond Hill.

Sheriff’s investigators are urging citizens to contact the tip line at 303-271-5612 to provide information regarding unusual activity or suspicious people in the area between 2 and 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 21.

Several fires of suspicious origin have been identified in the past month. The Sheriff’s Office is asking the public to be aware of suspicious people and vehicles, and citizens are urged to call 911 if they see suspicious activity.

This story ran in the April 27, 2011 edition of the High Timber Times. None of my images ran with the story. The above photo is the first media photo of the fire.

Blog post: Lessons from the Depression

Blog post from March 28, 2011

In case you haven’t seen it, Evergreen Newspapers is printing stories of people who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Each writer for the High Timber Times, Canyon Courier, Clear Creek Courant and Columbine Courier are interviewing those who lived through the Depression and have a tale to tell.

I’ve written one Depression-era story on Conifer resident David George and have done interviews for others. I talk with our older residents in Conifer and frequently I’ll ask about their life during 1930s. It’s a fascinating subject and the stories are a peek into a world that disappears each time someone from that era passes away.

Mary Lunk Menke came to America, arriving from Hungary on an innocuous ship that docked in New Jersey on May 25, 1912. According to documents at Ellis Island, she was 16-years-old and arrived with $75 in her pocket and relatives in New Jersey. She remembered her life through food she’s eaten and upon arriving in the New World on that May day, she ate her first ice cream on that dock. After disembarking, she disappeared along with the tide of human hope that lugged few possessions in their suitcases and American dreams floated on their minds.

Mary was my grandmother.

Rumors have it that she worked in New Jersey for a time, probably as a domestic and according to my mother, she spent time as a maid for the famous actress and singer, Lillian Russell. Mom swore she had pictures of grandma standing gaunt-and-grim in the background of a picture of Russell, primping and preening, a forerunner to the glam that would overtake Hollywood in the near future. I never quite believed mom, after all, she was the one who told me years later that out of family of 17 brothers and sisters and countless cousins that I was the only one in the family related to Princess Diana. When I pointed out that it would have meant she had sex with Diana’s father, mom didn’t talk to me for months after that.

Grandma denied being Lillian Russell’s maid, but a far off look in her watery-blue eyes made me wonder.

My aunt Emy also had a tale to tell about grandma, she knew for a fact that grandma had worked the gold mines of Alaska. I mean worked the gold fields, not on her feet, but on her back. I never had the courage to ask the stately matriarch who drowned kittens at birth and who didn’t clean, she scared dirt out of the house about a bawdy life of Yukon gold.

As she aged, grandma became more open to talking about her life, though in the cinema of her 95 years, I caught only a two-minute preview, carefully edited and craftily told.

She was 34 when the Crash happened and she remembered people throwing themselves out of a window or putting a pistol in their mouth.

From their home in rural Wisconsin, the Depression reached out and touched the Braun family with hunger and violence.

The hunger wasn’t so much physical hunger but a want for something better.

Piecing family stories together, I’ve learned that my grandfather was a first class prick. My father, William, the middle child between the older Fred Jr. and the younger Helen was the target of brutality from his father. Dad called his dad, “the old man” and grandma was powerless to stop the hulking drunk from kicking the tar out of little William. When the beatings were done, grandma would feed little Willy, her only way of reaching out to her battered son.

As the Depression wore on, Prohibition joined the procession. You may be hungry, you may be broke but whatever you do, don’t drink. The old man always managed to find enough alcohol to fuel his rage at his own ineptness, probably because grandma ran the cleanest still in the area.

You wanted to drink grandma’s hooch.

It was rendered with the same cleanliness and fastidiousness that the milk from the family farm was famous for. Frequently, the old man would disappear for a few months a time, giving little Willy a break from the assaults. Grandma would dress the kids up in their farm finery and take them to a place where they would greet the old man, who, according to grandma, had been away at sea.

Year later, Helen told me the visits to the old man were at a prison where he was serving time for violating Prohibition laws. She also remembered the time the inspectors were seen coming up the long dirt road that led to the farm and grandma instructed the kids to hide the mash from the still out in the yard. The kids misunderstood the instructions and dumped the mash into the yard where the chickens fed and the cows hunkered down. After the inspectors came and went, but the chickens and cows had a hard time standing up and Dad said the milk from the cows tasted funny for a few days after that.

Dad remembered people coming to the back door asking for handouts. He said the parade brought men, women and children; some of kids would play while their parents either worked on the farm or ate their handout of bread and meat. Grandma said one man came to the back door, asking for a handout, that he was hungry and hadn’t eaten for days. Grandma handed over a sandwich and the man. Grateful, he sat down on the porch steps to eat his meal and with great care, the man peeled the crust off the break and dropped it to the ground. Her attitude towards the parade changed a bit after that.

The years of the Depression hit the family hard and fear spawned a thriftiness that stood watch to ensure nothing like the Depression would ever damn the family again. Each member took up the cause and squeezed even the fingerprints off a copper penny.

Grandma saved rubber bands and old plastic bags and darned socks and sweaters that were long past their prime. She prayed the rosary and prayed for coupons for the local Safeway. She was happy when she was finally diagnosed with cancer at 94.

Fritz was starved for love and married 5 wives. All were charming but eventually he bankrupted their love for him. An avid outdoorsman, he was always on the hunt for something, game, fish, women. A kind uncle, he was my favorite. He let me drop rocks onto the crabs that lived at the foot of the 20-foot-long pier of his seaside home. Uncle Fritz died at 57 of colon cancer.

Dad and mom traveled, spent money on parties and friends and really lived it up in the early years. As time went on, he scrimped and saved and he would drive 5 miles to save a penny on a gallon of gas. After losing his beloved job at Boeing in 1969, he limped into a poor man’s life. He wore paper-thin dumpy clothing that offered no protection from the biting Colorado wind and snow. After he died, I found drawers filled with brand new shirts, wrapped in cellophane, crisp and unused. His only request of my mother was that he not be buried in Colorado; the ground was too cold. His poverty consciousness eventually ate his life away and he died of colon cancer at 56.

Helen snubbed poverty and during the good years, spent money, wore expensive pink suits and dyed her hair platinum blond. The expensive suits and dyed hair gave way to thrift store cast-offs but the real secret was out when she died: $895,000 in her checking account and $1.2 million in assets. Even all that money couldn’t keep her well. In the end, cancer didn't take her life, it was a heart attack and she died in her own home, in her own second-hand chair at age 70.

The people in my family are so different than the people I have come across for my stories. My interviews reveal lives were beset by poverty, but they survived and today are happy, successful and remember the Depression as a bump in the road. Poverty wasn’t a mantle you take up, it was a stiff breeze you braced against and you went on. Though I was braced for the stories of unbearable poverty, I was surprised to find out that the people I’ve talked to about the Depression didn’t see it as something they had become, it was just something you lived through.

These stories have taught me that the Depression didn’t mean being poor of spirit but rich in the love, friends and experiences that bind us all together. Unfortunately, my dad’s family chose the wrong friends.

When poverty consciousness is your companion; it takes everything from you.

'We lost everything: Kittredge resident Robert Fuchigami recalls life in internment camp in southern Colorado

Some people used the words “relocation center” to describe Camp Amache in southeast Colorado, but Kittredge resident Robert Fuchigami calls it what it was to him: a concentration camp.

Today, his memories of the World War II internment center no longer hold Fuchigami captive; he’s made peace with what happened during the war, when thousands of Japanese-Americans were imprisoned by hatred and suspicion. Today, he’s fascinated with the camp’s history, not bound by his memories of the three years his family spent there.

On the road to nowhere

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into WWII, President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, issued Executive Order No. 9066, which called for Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to be placed in relocation centers.

The chaos that ensued in the days after the order came down overwhelms the imagination. Internees could take only bedding and linens, toilet articles, extra clothing, and essential personal items. No household goods were allowed. Pets were abandoned. Family histories were left behind.

“The suddenness of all this was incredible,” Fuchigami said. “People were frantic and were saying, ‘What do we do?’ ”

Fuchigami, now 80, said they were given six days to pack a suitcase and march into an uncertain future. Entire households had to be liquidated, and what wasn’t sold was stored or abandoned. Japanese-Americans lost millions of dollars worth of property and businesses, according to Fuchigami. His family left behind a 20-acre farm where they grew fruit and vegetables and lived in a five-bedroom home. His parents were panicked.

“We had no idea how long we’d be gone,” Fuchigami said. “We had no winter clothing … no toys and no bikes.”

Some internees stored their possessions at Buddhist churches, but the items were stolen after they left. Another family stored items in a garage, and it was burned to the ground. Cemeteries were desecrated and headstones were overturned as the climate of fear and enmity grew.

In May 1942, Fuchigami’s family, his father, mother and eight siblings, left Yuba City, Calif. Fuchigami was 12.

The order

The notices were tacked to telephone poles and delivered by mail: The U.S. government decreed that all Japanese-Americans must report to the California State Guard Armory for “relocation.”

“They called us persons of Japanese ancestry,” Fuchigami said. “They didn’t call us citizens — they called us non-aliens.”

According to Fuchigami, 126,947 people of Japanese ancestry then lived in the 48 states. Those in Washington, Oregon and California were moved to temporary “assembly centers” and then sent on to the camps.

Fuchigami said the barbed wire, guard towers and restricted movement spelled out concentration camp to him.

Amache bound

The Fuchigami family initially was sent to the Merced, Calif., fairgrounds and housed with thousands of other evacuees in horse stalls. The family was there from May to September 1942.

Camp Amache, which encompassed 640 acres on the scrubby plain outside Granada, Colo., was hastily constructed in 1942. It had 349 military-style barracks and multiple mess halls, communal latrines, showers and laundry facilities. By the end of that year, there were 7,567 internees at the camp, according to Fuchigami.

Each barracks was 120 feet long and 20 feet wide, with six apartments that housed as many as seven people each. There was no running water or toilets.

Each family was given a number; the Fuchigami family was No. 20480. Each family member was given a letter to denote his or her place in the family order; Robert was letter “I.”

Fuchigami said the weather was a surprise for the Californians.

“In the wintertime it was really cold,” he said. “It got below zero, and you’d wake up in the morning and there would snow on the inside of the windowsill.”

A small coal stove provided the only heat in the barracks.

Making a life away from home

Those in the camps eventually began to make a life there. Children went to school; people learned trades. The internees played baseball and football and held talent competitions, and Fuchigami joined the Boy Scouts.

“People who had never had time to slow down and learn new things finally had the time,” he said. “Even prisoners in jail have time to learn new things.”

He remembers one football game against the team in Holly; the center for the team was future governor Roy Romer. Amache beat Holly 7-0.

Churches, camp newspaper offices and a variety of clubs were all part of Amache life. Fuchigami said one sound from the camp stands out in his memory: the mess hall bells that would ring out three times a day to signal meal times.

Babies were born at the camp, and people died there. The bodies of Japanese-Americans who had enlisted in the U.S. military and died in the war were sent back to the camps and buried there.

In an odd twist, members of the Japan Red Cross sent packages to those in the camps.

Fuchigami said people were allowed the leave the camp only if they passed an FBI check, had approval of the community, and had housing and a job in the nearby town. But after a while, he said, the guards stopped manning the lookout towers, and people from nearby towns would come to the store at Amache to shop.

Belongings from back home began to arrive. His mother received a steamer trunk that had once contained bits of family history, kimonos, pictures and other personal items. When the trunk arrived, the lock had been smashed and the contents were gone.

“It broke her heart,” he said.

He said his mother had a stroke while in the camp, and his father fell off a truck and broke his back, ruining his health for the rest of his life. Fuchigami said his family was destroyed financially and physically.

“My family was basically destroyed in Amache,” he said.

The family lived there from September 1942 to September 1945.

Documenting the ordeal

A simple question asked by a student in Bob Fuchigami’s class launched him on his quest to know more about Amache through adult eyes, rather than through the perspective of a young boy.

Around 1980, people of varying ethnic backgrounds began to ask him to give talks about his experience at Amache, and he did more research to find answers to their questions. The culmination of that work is now in his neat office, which contains maps, neatly rolled and stored, photographs gently placed into clear plastic sleeves, faded camp newspapers and rows of books on the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Through his studies, he has come to think of that era as a strange time in American history.

A report titled “Personal Justice Denied” documents the thinking and events that led to the internment of Japanese-Americans. The congressional report was a basis for legislation that provided compensation to those who spent time in the camps.

Each surviving internee received $20,000 in the early 1990s. Fuchigami said many had died by that time, meaning people like his parents, who lost everything, received nothing.

Liberated but lost

When Fuchigami left the camp, he moved with his family to Greeley.

“We had no place to return to,” he said. “We lost everything.”

Later came a stint in the Navy, and an excellent education, culminating with a doctorate in special education. Fuchigami has spent his life as a special-education teacher and helped create federal programs that benefit special kids. He believes education will prevent injustices like the internment of Japanese-Americans from ever happening again.

“We just knew that something was wrong,” he said. “Our government did something wrong, and we were powerless.”

This story ran in the April 6 edition of the High Timber Times and the Canyon Courier. The story became part of the series on area residents who survived the Depression.