2/13 Activity

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p l a c e

A Polish American Vintner and

a Japanese American Berry Farmer

b a i n b r i d g e i s l a n d , w a s h i n g t o n

“First you lose your costume. Then you lose your language. The last thing you lose is your food.” After hello, these are the first words Gerard Bentryn speaks to me once I find my way to Day Road Farm and then, through the crowd at the harvest supper, to him.

In these three phrases, Gerard sums up the shock, the intense pressure to conform, and the losses that have shaped the lives of generations of immigrants to America. The story of how Gerard Bentryn, a Polish American, came to plant a vineyard here, on land he has shared for over twenty years with Akio Suyematsu, a Japanese American berry farmer, sheds light on one of the most precious legacies immigrants bring to America—an abiding love for the land. And the story of how hard they have had to fight to keep from losing the farm says a great deal about what America has so often sacrificed to fear of the stranger and too narrow an idea of what constitutes true wealth.

Though Gerard is well known in the Puget Sound region as

a passionate advocate for the environment—and, with his wife, Jo Ann, his son, Ian, and a young farmer named Betsey Wittick, for the wine they produce at Bainbridge Island Winery—he is lit- tle known for the immigrant heritage that has shaped him.

I have come a long way to meet Gerard Bentryn and Akio Suyematsu. Akio is a Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Amer- ican. Since his father, Yasiji Suyematsu, came to the United States in 1904, the Suyematsus have been known as berry farmers. Ex- cept for the two years when his family was interned during World War II, Akio has worked this land for his entire life.

For these two friends, the experience of being displaced within their native country has been answered by a commitment to this place. Day Road Farm is the oldest and largest working farm on Bainbridge Island. It was nearly lost twice, first when the Suyematsus were taken away in a military truck and sent to Manzanar, the first of America’s ten “relocation centers,” in March 1942, and again in the past five years, as the development spawned by an influx of new wealth created by Microsoft and other high-tech industries in Seattle drove property values so high so fast that it has become nearly impossible to live off the land.

I reach Bainbridge Island late one night on the last ferry out of Seattle. When I awake in the morning, it feels as if the world has shrunk. Even the trees seem pressed to the ground by the heavy shroud of sodden grayness. But by noon the sun has burned through the fog, and a vault of deep blue has opened above. Thin ribbons of white hover above the ridgeline of the Olympic Mountains on the horizon. The world has grown huge again.

Following the directions Gerard gave me, I drive past the gates that say bainbridge island vineyards and winery, The wine you drink is the landscape you create, and see, just behind them, a green wooden farmstand with a large red-on- white sign that reads suyematsu farms. A little farther up Day Road, I turn through a wide opening in the fence onto a dirt road with an old brown farmhouse on one side and a new shed on the

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other. A man is crouched on the roof, hammering. I drive past the pickups and cars parked along the dirt road until I can hear laughter and conversation, then park. Following the voices, I come around a set of small farm buildings to see a table that stretches the length of the barn, set out under the shelter of its roof, covered with bowls and platters of food and jugs of flowers. People are moving down the length of it, filling their plates and chatting.

There are great wooden bowls of green salad and ceramic bowls filled with red, white, gold, blue, and purple roasted pota- toes. There is fresh bread—baguettes, rounds, and loaves—and white goat cheese, bowls of beans and plates of sliced tomatoes, a platter mounded with steaming corn. There are berry pies, bowls of fresh berries, cakes, and cookies. And at the far end, a smiling woman with straw-colored hair and bright blue eyes is pouring wine. Her apron says Bainbridge Island Winery. This is Jo Ann Bentryn, Gerard’s wife.

Nearby, tables and chairs are set out on the grass around a beehive oven shaped like a great frog with its mouth open wide. Betsey Wittick and a friend have stoked the wood fire and are making fresh pizza with tomatoes and basil grown in the field just yards from here, where homemade signs posted on metal stakes run along the top of the rows stretching into the distance. welcome to laughing crow farm—come enjoy this great evening with us! the first sign announces, with Betsey’s signature beneath.

take a horse-drawn wagon ride pulled by our belgian draft horse, samantha, to see the farm. walk along the top of the rows and read about those of us farming here. A little way down the path I see the blue wagon and Samantha, the draft horse, quietly waiting. Betsey has stopped taking people for rides long enough to get some supper.

what will happen to this farm in the future? the next sign asks.

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opportunities to visit large, open working land- scapes like this farm are quickly disappearing. this is the only large working farm left on bainbridge and probably the biggest of its kind left in kitsap county.

pressures to develop farmland like this are great. new farmers can’t afford to buy land at development prices to grow vegetables, yet older farmers have no retirement income other than their land, and they can’t afford to sell it at a price the young farmers can pay.

so how can we, as members of a community, keep farms like this alive, providing us with food for both body and soul?

maybe you have an idea that will work!

All the way down the edge of the field, Betsey’s signs intro- duce me to a new way to read a landscape. I read the biography of a working farm while eating food and drinking wine produced from the landscape before me. Betsey’s signs invite me to know the people who have planted the rows I see. There are Betsey’s heirloom varieties of potatoes and garlic, Akio’s nursery trees, Ian Bentryn’s statice. But then there are long, wide rows of veg- etables, herbs, and flowers grown by people who have no land of their own—Gerard has invited them all to use the land for free.

in the distance you can see one of the vineyards of bainbridge island vineyards & winery, the next sign says. I have only to look up to see the broad aisles of grapes following the contours of the land, like green rivers. Betsey works in one of these vineyards or at the winery most of the time. Gerard and Jo Ann gave her the opportunity to farm on the island and made it possible for her to start Laughing Crow Farm. All of the winery’s grapes are grown on Bainbridge Island, in the six and a half acres of vineyards here and the one acre at the winery in town.

The last of Betsey’s signs shifts the focus from what I can see

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to what I can’t discern with my senses—the origin of this hu- manly shaped landscape and its place in American history. the forty-acre farm you are standing on, Betsey’s neat hand- writing begins, was started by the suyematsu family in 1928. They cleared the land with horses and dynamite, then grew strawberries, raspberries, Olympic blackberries, peas, beans, and corn. During World War II, when they and other Japanese Amer- icans were put in internment camps, the family was fortunate not to lose its farm, as many others did. They came back to find the land covered in weeds and brush, but they worked tirelessly to bring it back into production. Akio Suyematsu was the only son who wanted to keep farming on Bainbridge. He has spent most of his life here, and at seventy-nine years old, he can outwork people half his age.

Akio had no children and none of his relatives were interested in farming here, so in 1986 he sold just over half the farm to Ger- ard and Jo Ann so they could grow grapes for the Bainbridge Is- land Winery. Gerard made an agreement with Akio that Akio could still farm any land not planted in grapes. Today Akio con- tinues to grow raspberries, pumpkins, and Christmas trees on land he sold to the winery years ago.

in 1990, Betsey’s last sign says, akio sold me a two-and- a-half-acre piece because I was interested in farming. i got to know akio through working at the winery. un- known to me at the time, he was keeping an eye on how good a worker I was, and from that made his determi- nation on how serious i was about farming. (he tells me i was pretty slow at first!)

Everyone in Betsey’s story is here at the harvest feast but Akio. He is the man I saw working on the roof as I drove in, Ger- ard tells me, which is where he will remain, the sound of his hammer echoing across the field, until the light leaves the sky and all the visitors have gone home.

When Betsey stands up and calls out to all takers that the last horse-drawn cart ride of the evening is about to leave, I ask if

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I can come too. “Sure,” she says, “climb right up,” and she grabs my hand and pulls me onto the bench beside her. “How about if you hand out those songbooks?” She gives the reins a light shake, and Samantha lowers her head and pulls.

I reach into Betsey’s canvas bag and grab the books. Eager hands reach to take them. In a minute everyone is singing. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” rises into the gauzy air of late after- noon in September as Samantha takes us up the broad dirt path into the fields. Drawing her right hand back, Betsey guides Samantha into the turn that takes us through a field of soft brown grass, eventually heading back toward the barn and the people now gathered around a fire. A man behind me with a firm, clear voice begins to sing the opening bars of “Amazing Grace,” and by the second long note people begin to join him. Softly, everyone sings, stretching the hymn out beyond the first familiar verse. They split into four-part harmony. Betsey is singing beside me. With every footfall, Samantha pulls the wagon back toward the place we left from. As night falls, the air grows chilly and damp and the cedars at the rim of the land become sharp black points against the sky.

“I came here because I wanted to have a way to live in beauty,” Gerard says to me the next day. He has invited me down to the winery, where we sit at a picnic table in the fragrance garden, just beyond the blue barn, as Jo Ann greets visitors in the tasting room. “I learned in Germany that a family could own a small vineyard, make wine, and make a living on five acres of land. I saw the same thing when I went to Burgundy and the Loire. Rel- atively small amounts of land could be farmed and a family could make a living from it. Here at the winery we have one acre of grapes on three acres of land.”

At the head of each aisle of grapes Gerard has planted roses. A wide swath of grass divides the acre of vine rows in two, inviting visitors to walk straight out the winery door into the vineyard,

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where they are welcome to stroll and sip wine, enjoy a picnic, or simply be still. Not far from where we sit at the picnic table, birds swoop low to catch bugs on the surface of a small pond. En- closed as I am in this intimate, complex landscape, I can’t tell that we’re in the heart of Winslow, the urban part of the island. The winery is less than a mile from the ferry dock, from which many of the newest residents commute to jobs on the mainland.

“When we started here,” Gerard explains, “wine was seven dollars a bottle and a house on an acre of land cost $62,000. Now wine still sells for between seven and ten dollars a bot- tle, but a house on the required two-and-a-half-acre lot costs $475,000. The issue here on the island is what’s happened to us since we got all these new high-income people moving here. Jo Ann and I are probably worth something like one and a half or two million dollars in land, but our income each year is about $22,000 a person. We can’t compete for goods and services on the island. We can’t pay the taxes. We don’t want to get bigger, so our income isn’t going to go up, which means we probably have to sell this. Intellectually, it’s clear that we should just sell it and take the most money we can get so we can insure our success up at Day Road. Emotionally, after twenty-four years, I don’t really want to leave. And the thought of condemning the whole thing to bulldozers . . . Well, I’d have real problems sleeping at night do- ing that.

“It would be much cheaper for us to buy grapes. We could sell all the land—it’s worth a fortune—and just keep the little place here and bring the grapes in and make wine, like everybody else does around Seattle, and nobody would seem to care. And that’s what really bothers us.”

When Gerard and Jo Ann came here, there were between twenty and thirty active wineries in western Washington; now there are three hundred and forty. Largely through Gerard’s ef- forts, the region has a certified appellation. Its boundaries follow the rainfall line of sixty inches or less. Starting at the Canadian border in the north, it reaches to the foothills of the Olympic

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Mountains to the west, to the foothills of the Cascades to the east, and down to Olympia, Washington, in the south. Of the forty wineries in the appellation, the Bentryns, with Betsey Wittick, are the only ones who grow all their own grapes and produce a truly local and sustainable wine.

“Have you offered this lady some wine?” Jo Ann asks, sud- denly appearing from behind the hedge to stand beside me in her apron. “Would you like to taste some wine?” she says, turning to me. “We have a Madeleine Angevine, which is like a sauvignon blanc, or a dry Müller-Thurgau, which is like a chardonnay be- cause it’s oaked.”

“It’s not buttery like a chardonnay,” Gerard says, “because it is oak and floral characters together, which is very unusual. Why don’t you try that? They’re all unusual—we don’t make anything the way anybody else does.”

Jo Ann brings me three white wines, the Madeleine Angevine and two wines made from the same grape, the dry Müller- Thurgau and a traditional.

“What you’re going to get,” Gerard explains as I lift the first glass, “is fragrance as opposed to body in our wines. The Made- leine is floral, very delicate.”

It’s like sipping a garden, this dry, light, crisp wine. “You can see the difference in color,” Jo Ann explains, so

that I can distinguish between the two Müllers. “The dry is the darker.”

The traditional is light and fruity, and the dry, with its light oak to balance its fragrance, is more substantial.

The last wine Jo Ann brings me, a siegerrebe, startles me as soon as I detect its fragrance. Their wine list describes it as “spicy like Gewürztraminer, but not too sweet.” It’s simply a knockout.

“In the United States, we’ve industrialized,” Gerard says as he and Jo Ann register my pleasure. “The fake in wine has sup- planted the real. Right now I can order color, flavor, and texture and make wine out of things that come in little bottles. Much of the wine people are drinking today is entirely made that way.

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Ninety percent of the wine produced in Washington State is made by three transnationals. Mexicans grow their grapes and they irrigate from the Columbia River Basin. Native salmon die so they can mass-produce grapes in a climate unsuited to them. They’re on corporate welfare. So how do you educate people to look for reality—to be willing to pay a premium for the real and pay less for industrial wine?

“I remember when we got interested in organic viticulture and we wanted to know how you did it. We went down to California to a place that was doing it. Weed control was Mexicans. It was a hundred degrees, and they were pickaxing weeds out of the vineyards. I said to the guy, ‘God, that looks terrible.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I don’t know how those people do it . . .’ So I said, ‘Well, is this the ethic that we’re trying to teach? That we trade herbicides for slavery?’ He didn’t have an answer. It just didn’t bother him.” What mattered was being able to market the wine as organic.

“Growing organic produce is an ethic, not a marketing tool. What we need to emphasize is the local. We need to emphasize what Betsey calls the least impact. That’s the issue. And if the im- pact also involves fish and fieldworkers, we need to weigh and balance all those things. If we don’t tie together what we do with what we believe, we’re all going to fail.”

A group has arrived for a tour, so Gerard excuses himself, inviting me to go into the winemaking area to talk with Betsey.

“People think winemaking is very glamorous,” she says right off. “But for me, the whole romance of the winery is out in the vineyard. That’s the exciting part. Here, you’re standing around while the pump’s doing work, making sure that something doesn’t break. It’s boring. It just takes time. And then you’re cleaning. You’re wearing boots all the time, year round, and you have a hose in your hand, walking around in raingear. That’s what you do in a winery. It’s like large-scale dishwashing with some chem- istry thrown in. The real work of making wine is growing the grapes. Though we use a tractor for weeding and rototilling, we

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do a lot of handwork. In the field, it’s me, Gerard, and Gerard’s son, Ian. Sometimes people help us with things like leaf pulling— jobs that need to be done at a certain time and quickly.

“See how there are no leaves by the fruit?” Betsey says, walk- ing me across the driveway and up an aisle of grapes. The vines have been plucked clean of leaves to a uniform height, around knee level. “We pull them off so we get air circulation around the fruit. It’s getting close to harvest. It opens them up, so they’re less likely to get disease. They ripen a bit better.”

Three people tend a total of eight acres of grapes. At roughly 1800 vines per acre, that’s 14,000 vines.

“When we get to harvest, we need other people out there. We have to pick between twenty-five and thirty tons over the course of maybe six or seven days. Not consecutive. We’ll pick some on Friday, then we’ll wait another week or so before we pick the next variety,” Betsey explains.

Gerard and Betsey watch through the long, slow seasons of new growth, maturation, and ripening and then rush to harvest at just the right moment to capture the flavor. One of their spe- cialty wines is the late-harvest siegerrebe. The grapes are allowed to hang on the vine longer than usual, until they are affected by a botrytis virus that softens their skins and renders them spicy and sweet and fragrant.

The winery produces about 2200 cases of wine per year and sells out at the end of every season. Betsey’s commitment to the farm is total. “Sharing the farm works mainly because of Akio,” she says. “He’s great. He lets me borrow things I could never af- ford to buy. That’s one of the advantages of being near other farmers, besides the emotional support and getting ideas from them.

“Akio is very quiet and very shy. He just keeps working. He was working last night. Did you see him up on his roof, hammer- ing away? He gets to know you through what you do, not what you say. I could see that he was eyeing how I worked for a few years before he would even talk to me. Once he saw that I was se-

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rious about farming, he was willing to sell me the two and a half acres where I built my house.”

At one point Betsey decided to go off to Montana to work with an older farmer who had experience farming with draft horses. “Gerard always wanted a draft horse, but he had never really worked with horses before, and neither had I, but I took it on,” she explains. Now she wants another horse. She wants to start raising hay. Among the most toxic chemicals released in fields cultivated with a tractor are the residues from diesel fuel. It’s hard to find the equipment to farm with horses, though Bet- sey salvaged an old cultivator recently, and built another from re- cycled parts she found on the farm. “I’d like to be able to farm only with horsepower,” she says.

Samantha completes the farm for Betsey in another way. “I put aside a portion of my time every week for slowing things down,” she says. “That’s why I take Samantha and my wagon out on the road. I like to go with people, though it’s hard to find anyone who will take the time. We’ll go to breakfast. It can take an hour to get someplace you could get to in five minutes in a car. But I get people to slow down. I get them singing. I have my little songbooks, now, you know, that I pass out, because nobody re- members the words. It’s all about time. It’s the most valuable thing we have, and we don’t appreciate it.”

“Wine is a time and a place in a bottle,” Gerard had said to me the night before. Time and place, a fully integrated life—that’s what Day Road Farm is about. None of this would have been possible without the years of struggle of Japanese immigrants, people denied the right to own the land they devoted their lives to, denied the right to become citizens of the country they chose, clearing their land with horses like Samantha, blasting out trees, dragging the stumps away, so the entire family could plant and harvest labor-intensive strawberries.

Akio stopped growing strawberries a while ago. Now he cul-

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tivates eight acres of raspberries, from which he harvests twenty- five tons of fruit a season, doing all the work himself until the harvest. “Akio lives by deeds, not by words,” Gerard explained.

It will take Gerard and Betsey days to persuade Akio to talk to me. In the meantime, I am invited to wander around the farm, which is alternately veiled in mist and bathed in dazzling sun- light. I am moved by the beautiful order of Akio’s short rows of raspberries and Gerard’s long rows of grapes. Akio’s pumpkin vines spread sweeping curves out over the rich, dark soil. I sit in the lean-to where Akio’s father once checked boxes of strawber- ries that Native Canadians had helped to pick, resting in the cool and quiet place that smells of straw and fruit. From that high point on the farm, the land falls away in two long waves. Some- one has piled burned twigs, the leavings after pruning, in a field of soft golden hay. The low rectangle of one pile speaks of the degree of thought and care that goes into every gesture on this place; the tall, tapering mound of another suggests an ancient forest dwelling. On one acre of pinot noir—the only pinot noir grown locally—I find myself transfixed by the deep purple of the grapes, hanging from leaves that have turned a flaming orange.

I can see what Gerard meant about living in beauty. These fields, with their wild edges full of flowers, with a hundred spe- cies of birds and a ring of tall, dark cedars surrounding them on three sides, are achingly lovely, a harmony of wild and cultivated, a thoughtful composition of human dwellings, artful plantings, and the fallow areas of softness. To what Akio’s family created, Gerard brought his own vision. What inspired it? Gerard an- swers with stories of the people and the places that shaped him. At the center is an experience of loss and cultural displacement so painful that the metaphor he reaches for is the classic one—the immigrant as plant: “You tear a plant from the soil, and the first thing it does is try to put down roots. It’s a matter of survival.”

But the immigrant is never simply uprooted or transplanted. The immigrant is not a plant but a gardener—shaping the world, not simply being shaped by it.

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“I grew up in Green Brook, next to the town of Middlesex in New Jersey,” Gerard begins. “In those days, Green Brook was still pretty wild. We had one bear that used to come down into the water recharge area, and a lot of deer and pheasants. We lived at the end of the school bus run. The bus would drop me off and go one way, and I’d head in the other. I had about a half-mile walk to get home.

“In summers I lived in the woods. And I became really shy. I couldn’t talk to people. Barefoot, in just a pair of shorts, with my dog, I wandered around collecting birds’ eggs, climbing trees, identifying plants, and things like that. And then one day I rode my bicycle across the county line into the next town, where there were scattered old houses. And there was an old man selling veg- etables, so I stopped to talk to him. His name was Web Town- send. He had been born in the 1860s and lived in an 1840s house. I was eleven years old when I met him, and I knew him un- til, oh, I think I was about eighteen or nineteen when he died. I spent a lot of time sitting around listening to him.

“When I first met him, it was all farms, dairy farms, and they were growing silage corn for the cows all around there. And then gradually the farms all around him disappeared. It was the big wave right after World War II when suburbanization was coming in. The first real housing developments. You know, on Long Is- land and in New Jersey. And I watched him. I watched his heart break as he saw it all go. He died on his tractor. They found him slumped over the steering wheel, with the engine idling.

“I didn’t see him,” Gerard says with sadness. “One of the other children told me, ‘Oh, Web’s dead.’ One of the great regrets of my life is that I never went back. I didn’t go to his funeral, I didn’t talk to his wife. I was just so heartbroken. I couldn’t han- dle the idea that he was dead. I still feel guilty. This was very, very formative for me, because it made very clear to me that there was this incredible beauty in the world, intricate systems of nature, but then, when people came in, ugliness came, and destruction. It seemed as though people equaled ugliness.

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“My father was born in Poland. In 1914 my grandfather was sent to the United States to buy machinery for a little factory. The machinery was still on the dock at Danzig, or Gdansk, in Polish, when the war broke out, so he ran and got his family—my father was the oldest child—and put them on a boat and brought them to the United States, and that was it. His name was Kazmiercz Leszczynski, and that should be my family name. It’s a fairly common name in Poland. A leszczyna is a hazel tree.

“In America, my grandfather went on to be head of a machine shop that built some of the first submarines the United States used to fight against the Germans. Because they had no money, my father had to go to work. When he was twelve, he got a job on the Jersey Central Railroad, which was entirely run by Irish unions. He was beaten up regularly. There was a tremendous anti-Slavic feeling among the Irish. They had made it; we were the next rung down, the newcomers.

“It was my father’s mother whose name was Bentryn. We traced that back to the Germans coming into Poland in the 1600s with the name Bindren. Then, when the Russians took over, it was changed into Cyrillic, and then later back into the Roman spelling, and apparently that’s when it became Bentryn. Since no- body else could figure out what Bentryn was, my father took his mother’s maiden name. To the Irish union members, it seemed to be Welsh, and that was all right—you know, with the y ending. He began to get better and better work. All he had to do was to deny who and what he was. So that’s where my name comes from.”

So to Gerard’s list of losses, we have to add his name, which carries not only the history of Poland’s suffering as a country an- nexed and occupied repeatedly but an accounting of the price im- migrants pay to become Americans.

“For years I didn’t understand why my last name was dif- ferent from my grandfather’s and my cousins’,” Gerard says. “When I came to understand the truth, I had already come to think of myself as a Bentryn. Later, I could see the pain in my

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grandfather’s eyes when he asked me if I ever wanted to be a Leszczynski like him. But I believe that I knew inside that it was safer being what I was—passing for white in a land that feared the strange or unusual.”

In the early years of the twentieth century, when Gerard’s family arrived, southern and eastern Europeans were not counted as white people in the American census. The virulence of Ameri- can nativism during World War I, when even the long-established German immigrant community found that their adopted land could turn on them in an instant, intensified in the early 1920s. The Bolshevik Revolution that brought Lenin to power in 1917 ended three hundred years of rule by the czars. The murder of Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their children, the last of the Romanov dynasty, launched the Red Scare, which swept across Europe and the United States. For immigrants to retain their foreignness, even in spirit, was considered an act of “moral treason” by the right-wing “America is for Americans” move- ment, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.

“It was my grandfather who gave me a sense of the land,” Gerard says. “My father was too busy just surviving. My grand- father would tell me stories about what it was like in Poland. And when I go back to Poland—I’ve been back twice now—the beauty of it just grabs me. I tell my son that I feel that we’re just as much a part of our environment as the jays and the juncos and the hummingbirds. You can’t live in the same place for a thou- sand years and not have it profoundly influence you.

“My grandfather would talk about collecting mushrooms in the forest. When I was little, he still went mushroom hunting. He’d take me into the woods and show me which things you could eat. He’d take me into the Pine Barrens and teach me to identify things. He always had a big garden, with whitewashed trees. In Europe, if you grow fruit trees, you always whitewash the bottom to keep the bark from splitting. He grew a lot of veg- etables and lots of flowers that aren’t in fashion, or are just com- ing back, like hollyhocks and cannas. He wrapped his fig trees so

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they could survive the Jersey winters, as the Italians did too in that area.

“You know, back then people didn’t have garbage pickup as we do now. Everything went back into the ground. When we would go fishing, anything we didn’t eat would go into the ground. They didn’t throw away anything organic. I mean, they absolutely didn’t waste anything.

“In Poland, the garden was where you entertained people. I remember how my grandfather would sit there twirling his mus- tache while everyone served him. He was the real boss, that was clear. The garden must have covered at least three or four acres of ground. And there was a little pond in the back. I would help him in the garden as much as I could at the time, though I was pretty little. But then my parents moved away from my father’s parents, and all that ended. They decided they didn’t want to work for other people anymore. They wanted to go somewhere where they could start their own business. So we weren’t around family any longer.

“So we had this complete break, and then I ran into this farmer and he took me under his wing. I think that’s why Web Townsend meant so much to me. My grandfather never really told me what he felt about it all. The problem was language. It was just a terrible loss of something . . .”

Here is the loss Gerard spoke of in the first moment I met him —the beloved man who introduced him to nature and instilled pride in his ancestry was separated from him as much by the loss of a shared language as by the physical distance his parents, driven to assimilate, put between themselves and their origins.

“My first words were in Polish,” Gerard explains. “But my mother wanted me to learn English. I think the idea was to get ahead, and you didn’t get ahead by speaking Polish. And I was very small, too. One of the things that profoundly shaped my life was that I wasn’t good at sports. I mean, I could shoot an arrow and I could catch a fish and I could shoot a gun, but I couldn’t

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catch a ball. If you threw a ball at me, I didn’t know where to hold my hands. It was funny for everybody else, so kids mocked me. But I read constantly, everything I could get my hands on. I started to read early, before I went to school. My mother taught me. I began to realize that whatever I was, it was a product of my mind, not my body. But then all through school people would say, ‘Dumb Polack.’ And I didn’t understand—it so confused me—because if I was anything, it was the way I thought. And if I was purportedly unable to think because of who I was, then who was I?

“When I got into high school, I got into the intellectual crowd —the boys that didn’t like sports, that were afraid of girls, that sat around and played chess all night, things like that. And they made fun of me. Even those. It was constant. All of the friends I grew up with, their parents were lawyers and architects, and my father had a truck stop. We were killing chickens because we couldn’t afford to buy them. I remember my mother sewing underwear back together again. My friends weren’t wealthy, but they were upper-middle-class. They were white Anglo-Saxons and I wasn’t. I think because of that I was not coopted into Amer- ican culture so easily.”

One can be set apart first by ignorance and prejudice, then through conscious choice. The trick is to remember what being on the margins makes possible, so that one is not driven by a hunger to conform just to ease the pain.

After high school and Web Townsend’s death, Gerard got a job at Bell Labs. He was placed in an apprenticeship program and sent to engineering school, where he was trained to create things from start to finish—to initiate an idea, create a design, determine the materials, and then fashion it—an experience he has translated into the making of wine, from planting the first vines by hand to selling fine wine directly from the vineyards. Within a few years he and Jo Ann married, and then he was drafted and sent to Germany.

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“I hungered for cultural wealth, and then I found it in Ger- many, which I should have hated, but I couldn’t—it was too beautiful.

“I got off the train after taking a boat to Germany in 1963 and signed into my unit, a guided missile repair unit. We were housed near the Reichsparteitage. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Judg- ment at Nuremburg, but at the beginning they show this big mar- ble edifice with a swastika, and then they dynamite it. That was part of the complex we were in. And the U.S. Army had turned what looked like a big stone parade ground in front of it into an airfield,” he says.

Assigned to a former SS barracks in Nuremberg, where the walls were full of bullet holes, Gerard had been sent to what had once been the epicenter of Nazi Germany. The Reichsparteitage, the Nazi Party rally grounds, was a four-square-mile complex de- signed for Hitler in 1933 by Albert Speer. The edifice Gerard re- members from the famous movie about the war crime trials was the Zeppelin Tribune, a colossal structure designed to accommo- date 60,000 people. A famous Life magazine cover from 1945 shows a jubilant American soldier waving from his perch just in front of the enormous swastika before it was blown up. The airfield that looked like a parade ground where Gerard learned to drive a truck was part of the Great Road that Speer had designed to connect the old city of Nuremberg with the rally grounds. Completed in 1939, it was sixty yards wide, more than a mile long, and paved with 60,000 slabs of granite put in place by en- slaved Jewish prisoners.

Less than two years after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem introduced Americans to the details of Nazi atrocities, Gerard was transferred to one of the former death camps. “From Nuremberg we were moved to an SS barracks at Dachau, where one of the field units we were assigned to service was located. I remember wandering around the facilities at night, by myself. I was just twenty-five, and it was soaking into me.”

Haunted by all that he saw and alienated by the younger sol-

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diers’ apparent detachment from the history of what had hap- pened there, Gerard decided to go out to meet local people. “I had been in cave-exploring clubs in New Jersey and Alabama, so I went to the local library and I said, ‘Is there a cave-exploring club here?’ And they said, ‘Yes, there’s a meeting tonight.’ I went to the meeting, and a few of the people spoke some English. At that point I didn’t speak any German at all, so I had instant friends. I spent all my free time until Jo Ann got there with Ger- mans, not Americans.

“North of Nuremburg was Würzburg, the Franken wine area, where some of the families of the people in the cave-exploring club had inherited little strips of land. You could walk through a vineyard and there’d be stakes with markers on them. There’d be one here, one there—that was Harry’s, Bill’s, Bob’s. I started looking around the countryside, and I suddenly realized it was incredibly beautiful. And I didn’t understand why, because there were so many people. Statistically, I think there were ten times the number of people per square mile as in New Jersey. And so I began to ask the Germans I’d meet this question again and again. Why? Why is there beauty here? It was against everything I’d learned in my life. And one of the most frequent answers was, ‘Well, why would you want to live where it’s ugly?’

“Then one of my German friends who knew the brewmaster at the local brewery said, ‘Would you like to work in the brewery for three days?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Okay, well, he can’t pay you.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t expect to be paid, I don’t know any- thing.’ So for three days I worked in a brewery in the town of Fürth, north of Nuremburg, for a guy named Johann. I’d build a big wood fire, then work this big bellows with a crank. It heated tubes in the floor to toast the grain. The floor was so hot we had to walk around in rubber boots as we raked the grain with wooden rakes.

“And I would hear Johann rant—as I now rant about indus- trial wine—about keg-mixed beer. The real making of beer, he’d say, is selecting the grain in the field and then malting it. The last

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part is to take the malt, add water and yeast, and make beer. Almost all microbreweries in the United States buy the grain pre- malted from a few major factories in the world and then add water and yeast, and that’s called local beer. To Johann, that was evil.

“So I decided to ask him the question. ‘Why is there beauty here?’ And he said, ‘I have the answer, and I want you to come home with me.’ He lived in what’s called the Strassendorf by geographers. All the farmers live along the road, with houses on each side, and the fields lay out behind them. Very different from the North American idea of every farmer living out in the middle of nowhere on his own field. So we’re sitting there behind his house and he puts out our plates. And we’re eating, and he’s looking at me quizzically, and I’m wondering what’s going through this guy’s head. He wasn’t that good in English, and I certainly wasn’t very good in German yet.

“Then he says, ‘Taste this. Do you understand?’ “And I said no. I didn’t understand. So he pointed at each item

on my plate and then to the field that it had grown in—the poles on the horizon with the hops, and the fields of barley for the beer, the fields of rye for the bread and the potatoes, the cabbage for the sauerkraut. And then he said—and it haunts me to this day— ‘If you cannot see where your food comes from, you are doomed to live in ugliness.’”

What a sentence to pronounce. The force of it feels inescapa- ble. The truth it discloses—a relationship between culture and nature, between people and the land—feels piercing for all it im- plies about our situation in America.

Did Gerard understand immediately? “It changed my life,” he says, and then adds, with characteris-

tic modesty, “But it took time to unfold. The ugliness part of it answered my questions. And being of a place, that came pretty quickly to me. It wasn’t just the landscape that he was emphasiz- ing, but cultural integrity. And none of that really registered.”

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An encounter with a Native Canadian not long afterward, when Gerard had finished a degree in geography on the GI Bill and had gone to the Pacific Northwest to do fieldwork, helped him finally grasp the idea of cultural integrity.

“When I worked in British Columbia,” he explains, “we were doing surveys on wilderness perception in Strathcona Provincial Park. I spent days alone in the woods watching people through binoculars. When I would come down out of the woods, I’d eat at a logging camp. One of the guys who worked in the mess hall and would sometimes be having coffee while I was eating there was a Native Canadian. One day he says to me, ‘Oh, so you’re out in the woods, and you’re learning about this valley.’ He said, ‘I’ve never left this valley. Everything that I eat comes out of this valley. Everybody that I’m related to, all of my family, is buried in this valley. When I eat, I eat the people and the place. I’m made out of Vancouver Island. But look at what you’re eating.’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ and he said, ‘You’re made out of tin cans. Because that’s what you eat out of.’

“He was teasing me in a good-natured way, but I thought about it and he was right. We use the phrase ‘We are what we eat,’ but I also think we are where we eat. That’s the thing that people miss. This need to be of a place, to be of a community. So to have someone say that to you—and to be of a place—was very powerful.”

Soon after this, Gerard and Jo Ann chose to begin a life where they could support themselves by working with their hands. Ger- ard says, “I began to take my vacations in other countries where I’d work for people. I was really lucky to run into a guy named Reiner Eschenbruch, a German who was the head of wine re- search in New Zealand. I sent my son down to work with him. And then he came up here to work with us. We’ve been back and forth many times. He made connections for me in Germany and

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in New Zealand, in Australia and California. And I worked for two little wineries in southern England he led me to and learned that way.

“I decided that I wanted to grow grapes in the coolest possible place where grapes would ripen, because I wanted wine that was fragrant and delicate and intricate. That meant either west- ern Oregon or western Washington. So I came here in 1977 and bought land and started planting grapes. This was the first vine- yard. Then about sixteen, seventeen years ago, Akio sold me the twenty acres up at Day Road.”

“How do you plant a vineyard?” I ask. The land Gerard and Jo Ann bought in Winslow was a former

strawberry field grown over with alders. “You come home from your day job,” Gerard says, “climb a tree, attach a rope, winch it to the ground, then dig around the roots to unearth it. When the land has been cleared, you plant the slips.” They had six slips, to be exact, which they got from an experimental vineyard in British Columbia. “Then you propagate from those.”

We have sat for so long, talking, that we are both startled to realize we are late meeting Akio up at the farm. When we arrive, Akio is not there. A light rain begins to fall, and we take shelter under the overhang of Akio’s new shed just as he drives through the gate. It takes several minutes to persuade him to move inside rather than get wet, and I realize that he is hoping that if we stay outside, the rain will make me go away. But Gerard prevails on him to go inside, and we do.

“I’ve got raspberries, pumpkins, and Christmas trees,” Akio begins. “It’s his raspberries,” he adds, laughing, passing the con- versation off to Gerard. “They’re on his land.”

“So Gerard’s grapes grow on your land, and your raspberries grow on Gerard’s land?” I ask.

“It’s the closest thing to communism we’ve got around here,” Gerard says. “And Akio’s the closest thing to a relative I’ve got here.”

“This was our original homestead,” Akio says, beginning to

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tell the story. “We cleared this. It was forty acres of forest.” His family hired loggers to cut the trees, expecting to sell the wood, which belonged to them, to help start the farm. “They logged the whole place here and my dad never got one red penny. Not one red penny!” It’s the only time Akio raises his voice. “My father never went to collect what they owed us. Who went there? I went there. A young guy, only fifteen years old. ‘You going to pay your logging money?’ No way. You know what I mean?” The wrong is still vivid, and with it the frustration of being the firstborn son, the first to learn English, and his parents’ representative.

Akio and his brothers helped his father dynamite the stumps. “There were six of us. Strawberries, that’s all we had. When I was small, we all worked on the farm. But when we left here, you know, just one brother came back.” After the war, Akio’s brother went to work for the post office. “Then I was the only one here,” he says.

As the oldest, Akio was the first to go to an American school. “It was hard,” he says. “Nobody taught me English. It was all Japa- nese at home. I did two years in the first grade, how do you like that? So I got a better education than anybody!”

“That must have been hard,” I say. “You just had to sit there, not knowing what was going on.”

“Well, that’s just the way it was. It’s not just me. How about you?” he says, turning to Gerard.

“Polish was my first language. My father came from Poland, and he had to learn English. But my mother was born here. So my mother made sure that I knew English by the time I went to school,” Gerard replies.

Akio nods. “Sure, but my mother couldn’t, she just knew Jap- anese. My folks, they raise six kids. You know what that cost? We didn’t have any money. I lost my youngest brother. Nine years old. We never did find out what was wrong with him. There weren’t any doctors who spoke Japanese on the island. There was no En-

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glish in my house. It was really tough. You didn’t have money, you didn’t have enough food, you didn’t have nothing. You know, you have no money, you couldn’t do hardly anything. You know what I mean? What could you do? We couldn’t buy anything. We just had to . . .” Akio stops, looks down, then fin- ishes quietly. “We had some tough times.”

The history of a friendship emerges as Gerard adds what Akio would never say. “I remember looking in some of the old sheds around here and seeing shovels worn completely down. And you know that you don’t dig with a shovel when it’s worn down to nothing unless you don’t have any money. Because you can’t dig with a shovel like that. You don’t see people wear a shovel down anymore—it breaks before it wears out. So that’s the kind of thing I think he means, that you couldn’t even replace things you needed on a day-to-day basis, things that you needed to make a living. Like your brother being so sick that he couldn’t go to the doctor,” he adds. “That’s a real story.”

“Well, they should have taken him to the doctor, but they didn’t,” Akio says. “My mother took care of him. He went to school. He was in the third grade, I think. And my mother thought he was getting better. He wasn’t getting better, he was getting quieter, and then he just died. You know what I mean. He didn’t throw up or nothing, and she thought he was getting better, but he was getting worse.”

He died in the house. Akio was with him. The Japanese com- munity helped his family pay for the burial. “At that time, that was in the early thirties, everybody would donate. Port Blakely Cemetery is mostly Japanese. That’s where he’s buried.”

How did they get by in the hard times? “We went fishing a lot. We hunted, shot deer. My mother

made bread.” They kept a vegetable garden. “We would grow beans and corn. Mostly American stuff.” No matter how poor they were, they kept the traditional feast days. “New Year’s, that was the biggest. My mother would cook all that special Japanese food. Everybody did it.” They built a furo, a wooden tub heated

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with a wood fire. It was not a luxury, like our hot tubs, but a tra- ditional Japanese bath. “They all had it,” Akio explains.

How were they treated when they took their berries to mar- ket, when they went to public school?

“We were looked down upon, that’s for sure,” Akio says. “You know what I mean. You know how they are in school. They’d bring your whole family in. ‘Don’t talk to Japs.’ Behind your back. You don’t have to tell me who said it, I knew them all.”

His parents never spoke of the constant discrimination— the ethnic slurs, being cheated when they took their harvest to market.

As Akio speaks, his arms crossed, Betsey slips in and stands beside Gerard, facing Akio. I thank her inwardly for this show of solidarity—Akio might talk to me longer if another woman, a trusted friend, is here too.

“When the war started,” Gerard explains, “certain families on the island said the Japanese couldn’t be trusted. You know, till she died this one woman said, ‘We had to put them in camps. It was for their own good.’ That’s why when we tried to get the grange going again, Akio said he knew he wouldn’t join—he felt he wasn’t welcome.”

“It was Filipinos too, not just Japanese,” Betsey adds. “Fil- ipinos were discriminated against because they talked to Japa- nese. When the Japanese were interned, a lot of the Filipinos helped to maintain some of the farms. And they were shot at by white people. They were considered conspirators.”

“Were you allowed to keep anything?” I ask. “Keep?” Akio offers in reply. “What became of everything you left behind?” “You know what happened. You don’t have to ask that one.”

But I didn’t know. “A lot of people lost the land. I mean, you had to give it away.”

Though many Japanese families put their belongings in stor- age and had money in the bank, neither the government nor the Federal Reserve Bank guaranteed the safety or return of their

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property or their money. The Japanese community suffered unre- coverable losses of millions of dollars in homes, businesses, and life savings.

“There were one hundred thousand Japanese, wasn’t it? There were at least ten thousand in the one I went to in Califor- nia. And then I went to Idaho, and that was bigger yet. Then they had how many more beside that?”

Akio never uses the word internment. He never uses the name of the camps where 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent were held behind barbed wire for most of the war years. He just says “California” for Manzanar. After that, he adds simply, “We went to Idaho,” meaning Minidoka.

Akio’s cousins, B. D. Mukai and his family on Vashon Island, the biggest and wealthiest berry growers in the Puget Sound re- gion, were warned ahead of time and relocated until the war was over and they could return.

“They had enough money, right? So you can go where you want to,” Akio explains. He turns to Gerard. “Would you take a chance if you had no money, and go down to Moss Lake and try to farm, if you didn’t have a penny?”

“No,” Gerard answers. “Tell her about the radio,” he adds. “The radio and the guns. The stories you told me. How they broke the radio . . .”

He has struck a nerve. They take turns speaking to me, piec- ing together the story.

In March 1942, a curfew and other restrictions were imposed on all Japanese Americans before they were removed from the restricted area, which included the western half of Washington, Oregon, and California. All Japanese Americans were forbidden to have in their possession firearms, war materials, and short- wave radio receivers or transmitters. The Suyematsus’ hunting rifles, the dynamite they used to clear stumps from the fields, and their one luxury—a radio in a wooden cabinet—were all con- strued as violations of the new rules.

“People were angry,” Gerard says. They knew the radio

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couldn’t be used to communicate with the enemy. “They wanted to break the radio up just to get even.”

“They put it in the woodshed and took an ax to it,” Akio says. “It was a real fancy wood radio.”

Akio’s family had had two guns, shotguns they used for hunt- ing. “I had one real nice one,” Akio says. “I never did get that one back.”

“And one real junky one,” Gerard breaks in. “He got the junky one back after the war, which he gave me. The nice one dis- appeared.”

“What are you going to do?” Akio shrugs, looking at Gerard and then at me. “That’s already bygones.

“I went to the camp,” he says flatly of what happened next. “I didn’t stay in camp that long. Then I went to Montana. I worked on a farm. Harvested that. Came home. Then I went to my cousin’s. Worked for my cousin. And then they drafted me. You either volunteered or they were going to draft you. What are you going to do? I took the training for, you know, the 442.”

The 442 was the all-Japanese-American regiment, the most decorated regiment in the history of the armed forces. When the ban on Nisei joining the American military was lifted during the war, many enlisted to demonstrate their loyalty. Some helped liberate Nazi death camps. Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams recorded the scenes of Issei parents saying goodbye to their American-born sons in uniform or numbly receiving a folded flag when a son who’d left a camp to go to war was killed in action.

“I was on my furlough when we found out the war in Ger- many was over. And when I went to get on a boat, they put me on MP duty. So I ended up in the military police for two years in Germany. I got back in 1947. My dad came back here first. In ’46. The place was a mess. And my brother, he couldn’t be drafted, he had a heart problem. So they fixed it up pretty good.

“Actually, I’m not even supposed to be here. You know, a North Coast Electric man owned this. He said, ‘If you still want to pay the interest, you can have the land.’ I said, ‘Sure, why not?’

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I paid no interest, no principal, for how many years—two, four?” He turns to Gerard, who turns to me.

“This is why Akio’s nice to other people, because here was a guy who was a millionaire who was a real gentleman. He could have taken the land back, but he chose not to. So when I bought land up here, Akio said to me, ‘If you miss any payments because of you, I’m going to take it back, but if there’s a depression or a recession and you can’t make the payments, then I’m going to let you stay.’ That’s his way of paying back something that was done for him.”

“He was a millionaire for sure, for sure,” Akio adds. “But most rich people, you know how they are. They say, ‘Get out!’ He was a good guy.”

Until ten years ago, when Akio had a massive heart attack, he lived on the land in complete independence. He recovered well, but he won’t take his medicine. It’s too expensive.

“He told me if I find him out in the field, I better not call the rescue squad,” Gerard says, looking at Akio, challenging him. “He doesn’t want anybody saving him.”

“Well, what use is saving somebody for a zombie or some- thing? You crazy?”

Dying on the land, dropping in his own field—that’s part of Akio’s independence. He knows Gerard will honor his request.

Though Akio wants this land to remain a farm, no matter what happens to him, the pressure of development and the tax burden it has brought to him pose a constant threat. “If you were in my shoes, would you want homes here?” he asks me.

Of course not, I say. “Sure, I want open space,” Akio says heatedly. “But you got

no choice at the end. He’s not going to have no choice either.” “Not unless the town does something,” Gerard agrees. “I told

them that if you drop dead out in the field, we’re all out of here.” Akio laughs. Gerard doesn’t. “I mean, seriously, if he dies, unless a miracle happens, they’re going to have to cut this place up to satisfy all of his heirs. And once there are houses here . . .”

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He pauses, shaking his head, looking down. I look down too. In the silence, I can hear the rain on the metal roof as I study their feet, the worn workboots of three farmers whose lives depend on this land—Akio at seventy-nine, Gerard at sixty, Betsey at thirty-five.

“We’re down to forty acres,” Gerard says. “Once twenty of that’s developed, then it doesn’t make sense to keep the other twenty open anymore.”

“Does it make you angry?” I ask. Akio answers first. “Angry? Why? Well, what do you get out of it, huh? You

don’t get angry, do you?” he says, turning to Gerard. Their gazes meet. “Sometimes,” Gerard says, “but I try not

to.” Betsey and I are watching them, listening as they say aloud what goes unspoken most of the time.

“I get angry too, but you don’t let it get you.” There’s a slight shift in Akio’s tone as he responds both to his friend and to me. “I mean, don’t let it get you. Sure, it’s bygones, bygones. I been through this all my life, ever since I was a kid. You know, you’ve been stepped on all your life—what are you going to do?” Now Akio uncrosses his arms. He reaches out with both hands. “Are you going to stay on this side, where they step on you?” Akio gestures to his right, pushing down with the flat of both hands, as if shoving someone under water. Three of us grow still and listen carefully, our eyes following his hands as he speaks. “Or are you going to go over here?” he says. “You’re gonna get on this side, aren’t you?” He moves his open hands to the left, palms up. “I mean, over here you’re farming, and nobody’s stepping on you.”

Gerard, moved, says quietly to me, “He’s just staying away from the bad and going to the good.”

“Everybody else just wants to make money. They want a big job and they don’t want to work in the dirt,” Akio says.

“Akio is happiest when he’s driving a tractor,” Betsey says, and the mood shifts.

“Yeah,” Akio says. “I’d start at five o’clock. It was so peace- ful, quiet. You know what I mean?”

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“No one else is up,” Betsey adds, “and you’re alone, you have the quiet time. And the birds are out, and that’s about it.”

“It’s all your own accomplishment,” Akio says. “When you go out there and work, you accomplish something. When you work for a company, it’s altogether different. You’re just getting money.”

Gerard and Betsey agree, warming to the subject. “When you go to work in Seattle,” Gerard says, “you work

by a schedule. When you work here, you work by a task.” “You do what needs to be done,” Betsey says. “It’s so different!” Gerard says. “Some days when you’re

picking berries, you’re up at four, getting ready, because it’s light by four-thirty, and you start picking. Sometimes I’m out pruning in the winter and it’s raining and thirty-five degrees and I should be miserable. But I’m out there by myself, and I’m listening to Mozart on my Walkman, and all of a sudden the sun comes through and the Olympics come out for a moment. Or an eagle flies by. You don’t get that when you work in an office in Seattle.”

“I like pruning at the end of the day,” Betsey says, “when the sun is setting and five hundred widgeons come in, sweep real low, and I hear the sound of their wings. You can’t hear that when you’re sitting in an office.”

“But they’re taking it away from us,” Gerard says. They all nod. “You have to defend everything you do.”

“You can’t go out and start a tractor at five o’clock in the morning anymore,” Akio says. “The neighbors would be bitch- ing.” He shakes his head, looks at the floor. Betsey and Gerard murmur agreement.

“It used to be enjoyable, farming. Now it isn’t. Too many complaints. Everything you do, you get complaints. You pump the water, the guy is six hundred feet away and he’s complaining. About little things. It’s not enjoyable to farm anymore.

“That’s enough!” he says, and it’s final. “You should talk to my sister, she knows more, for sure. You can call her. She lives over there on Mercer Island, she’ll talk to you.”

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Akio’s sister, Eiko Shibayama, is so amazed that Akio has spoken with me and urged me to call her that she can’t help exclaiming, “My closed-mouth brother spoke to you?” Then she laughs with amusement. She is the carrier of family history. She has even trav- eled to Japan to visit the towns her parents came from.

Yasuji Suyematsu came to America in 1904, when the big log- ging companies of the Pacific Northwest were recruiting cheap foreign labor. First he worked as a cook in a logging camp in An- chorage. When work brought him down to western Washington, he visited Bainbridge Island, where a Japanese community of berry farmers had established themselves beginning in the 1880s, and he decided to stay. Several years later he returned to Japan, where he married Mitsuo Tsuchida. Mitsuo was from the village of Kumamoto, on Kyushu, the southernmost and third largest is- land of Japan. In 1920 they sailed back to America, where they became strawberry growers. In 1928 they bought the forty acres at Day Road in Akio’s name. They were not allowed to own land, so they put it in Akio’s name when he was still a boy, since he was born in the United States.

Akio’s sister remembers when her father and brothers cleared the land. They would make her go inside before they blasted, and she would crouch by the window, watching. Four Japanese fami- lies helped each other plant and harvest their fields. “The older ones would make the hole, and then we younger ones would drop the strawberry plant in and the parent would come behind us to fill in,” she says.

She stopped eating the berries early on, and to this day does not enjoy them. There were just too many of them. When they harvested, they carried wooden trays divided into six compart- ments, and when they were full, they carried them up to the lean- to at the top of the fields, where her father inspected them. They had a truck for hauling the berries to town. All the berry growers were paid by the grade of their fruit. Often, Eiko says, the dealer

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would choose the worst flat and offer them a price on the entire harvest based on that one box. Farmers would complain to each other, but there wasn’t much they could do—he was the only dealer on the island.

Every third year they had to put in new plants. “You only get three crops per planting,” she says, and she laughs to remember how much she loved school because it meant not working in the fields. On weekends and during the summer, they all worked on the farm. Every summer, Native Canadians would come down to help with the harvest. They lived in cabins on the farm for six weeks every year. “We would have been lost without them,” she says.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, authorizing the forced removal of all aliens to the internment camps, the first people forcibly removed from their homes were the Japanese Americans of Bainbridge Is- land. On March 23, notices with the heading “Instructions to All Japanese Living on Bainbridge Island” were posted. More than 70 percent of Japanese residents sent to the camps were Ameri- can citizens whose constitutional rights were annulled with the first sentence of the instructions: “All Japanese persons, both alien and nonalien, will be evacuated from this area by twelve noon, Monday, March 30, 1942.”

With the second sentence, the Nikkei who had lived on Bainbridge Island for three generations became virtual prisoners there: “No Japanese person will be permitted to leave or enter Bainbridge Island after 9:00 a.m., March 24, 1942, without ob- taining special permission from the Civil Control Office estab- lished on this island near the ferryboat landing at the Anderson Dock Store in Winslow.” They were given one business day, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 25, to send a responsible family member for further instructions.

Eiko remembers that her parents remained calm. “That’s the way the Issei were raised. It was a high priority to remain calm and keep things to themselves. I don’t remember being very

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frightened until the fathers were being taken away.” It’s a chilling phrase, and she utters it calmly.

“I never saw my parents get excited, not even when my dad was taken away. Somebody came and got him—it had to be the FBI—because he had the dynamite”—for blasting stumps, Eiko reminds me, for clearing the land so they could plant the berries. “Then, when we got to the camp, he was returned to us. I remember the truck ride, but I don’t remember walking down the ramp to the ferry. I remember being in Seattle and getting on the train. All the soldiers stood watching us. I noticed that all the shades on the train were pulled. It was getting toward evening. We were traveling at night.” She pauses. “They were nice to us, the soldiers.”

In photographs of the ferry ramps and train stations, the sol- diers are dressed in battle gear, their rifles fitted with bayonets. The shades in the trains were drawn so that white people would not see the Japanese Americans inside and throw rocks at the windows.

Eiko remembers that they were allowed to take one suitcase— per person, she thinks—but she does not remember carrying any- thing herself. In photographs of the forced evacuation, huge piles of luggage, each with a ticket, are piled in great mounds, waiting to be loaded onto the trains.

Eiko remembers being taken from the train to Manzanar by truck. “I remember thinking, ‘What kind of place is this?’ There was hardly anything there. They were just building the barracks.” The barracks were built of quarter-inch boards on a wooden frame covered with tarpaper. “We had only one big room with the cots. It wasn’t quite ready, because I remember there was no insulation. When we had a sandstorm, it could come in. We had only blankets separating our beds. I remember the living quarters and the mess hall where we had to go eat.” Each person had to carry his or her own plate and eating utensils, which they would clean at the communal sinks. For every 250 people there was a common mess hall, shower, and laundry.

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There was no privacy. There was no running water in any of the barracks.

The Suyematsus were at Manzanar from April 1942 until February 1943, when they were transferred to Minidoka Reloca- tion Center in Hunt, Idaho, joining other Nikkei from the Pacific Northwest.

Eiko’s mother worked in the mess hall, and she can’t remem- ber what her father did. She remembers that they were calm through it all. “It seems like our parents just accepted it. But they were very happy that we could finally get out.”

Unlike many, who never returned to their homes, Eiko’s fam- ily went straight back to Bainbridge Island. “We had to start over,” she says. “We had to cultivate the fields and plant again. We were having a hard time and we weren’t able to pay the rent, but the owner said we could stay.” His name was Harry Burns. “He was a true gentleman,” Eiko says. “My parents hadn’t been able to pay the mortgage or even the interest for years, with six hungry children to feed.”

Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior under FDR, referred to the evacuation as “the great uprooting.” Ansel Adams wrote that “the human challenge of Manzanar will rise insistently over all America—and America cannot deny its tremendous impli- cations.”

Milton Eisenhower, Dwight’s brother, resigned after serving for three months as director of the War Relocation Authority. In a letter to the man who replaced him, he wrote that he could not sleep and do the job. “How can such a tragedy have occurred in a democratic society that prides itself on individual rights and freedoms?” Eisenhower later wrote in his memoir. “. . . I have brooded about this whole episode on and off for the past three decades.”

“It’s bygones,” Akio said. “You know, it’s odd what I don’t remember,” Eiko said. One true gentleman, a millionaire, made it possible for the

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family to stay on the land. He recognized the dignity of their la- bor and seems to have been moved to generosity by the injustice they had endured.

Last year Akio sold his portion of the farm to the city of Wins- low, after securing an agreement that it would be preserved in perpetuity as open space. He will live on it until he dies, secure at last.

This year, when the property taxes came to twice Jo Ann and Gerard’s annual income, the winery and the vineyard near the ferry were sold.

Up at Day Road, a new winery has been built. Gerard and Jo Ann are renovating the simple house where Gerard’s mother still lives. Day Road Farm is now home to Akio, Betsey, the Ben- tryn family, and the winery. The blue barn that was the original winery is going to be moved to a new location, for use as a 4H center.

Once they’d emptied the barn and removed the winemaking equipment, Gerard went back to dig up the fragrance garden. He moved as many of the roses, trees, and shrubs as he could up to the new place. On one of the last days, working alone in the orig- inal vineyard, he found himself undoing the work he’d begun twenty-five years earlier, pulling out grapevines in order to recy- cle the posts. The vines could not be moved, he said, because they don’t transplant well. “Like people, I guess, or people who are well rooted.”

After some time, looking up from his work, Gerard told me, he saw that deer had come into the vineyard. He watched as they browsed nearby, eating the vines. They didn’t even notice that he was there.

That was not the hardest moment. Up at Day Road, Jo Ann and Gerard had a new winery built

in accord with local ordinances. “They say that if you grow it,

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you can process and sell it from the same property,” Gerard ex- plained. But the new all-island government required them to make the agricultural building already under construction con- form to requirements for a commercial building, which nearly doubled construction costs. Then, when the building was com- plete in time for the summer season, the city wouldn’t let them open. They were told they couldn’t sell retail on the property af- ter all.

“That’s when my heart stopped,” Gerard said. He dropped to the cement floor in the barreling room. For a long moment, he had no pulse. Then his heart began to beat again. He very nearly died just as Web Townsend had.

A local newspaper reporter outlined the Bentryns’ struggle with the city. Then a Seattle paper picked up the story. Next a lo- cal radio station, and soon after that a regional one, aired the story. People became indignant. The city, flooded with letters and phone calls, hired an attorney who specializes in land-use issues. He reviewed the case and informed city officials that they were wrong on several counts.

By the time the city gave the Bentryns permission to reopen the winery, they had been forced to remain closed for four months, missing Akio’s raspberry harvest and so the chance to produce their elegant raspberry wine, a specialty that is an hom- age both to an enduring friendship and to the land these friends share.

Now Gerard and Jo Ann are working to develop a plan that will protect their portion of the farm as well so that it cannot be divided and sold to developers. Gerard has a vision of using the farm to teach people the deep meaning of what it means to be of a place.

He says, “Food, because it’s the last thing we lose, because it’s the thing that controls our lives—though we like to think it doesn’t in modern life—is a key to finding the place we live in and finding the people around us. If we all eat from a place, if we all live in love with that place, then we all live in love with each

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other. What I’d like to do with the final part of my life is to figure out a way to bring people out to farms, give them a place to stay, go out and harvest the crops with them. Not a giant farm, but like what we have up at Day Road. Drive around with a horse- drawn wagon, give them a sense of the spirit of the thing. Pick some of the food, bring it back, prepare it together, eat it to- gether, and then talk about it together. And talk about other cultures.

“I feel that the landscape of food, culture, and community are completely tied together, but in our society we’ve completely sep- arated them. That’s the issue I feel most strongly about—more than about being Polish, more than about being American, more than about wine. I just feel that we have to somehow get people to treasure that which is real, particularly in food, and I think a lot of other things will flow from that. When you really want to communicate, you sit down and have a meal, you eat to- gether. It’s spiritual.

“People know that what Betsey’s doing, what I’m doing, what Akio’s doing, what the young people who don’t own land are do- ing, is somehow important to them, but they don’t seem to un- derstand how important until it’s gone. They see it going, and they remember it—they grew up with it, and when it goes, they feel empty. They’re not sure they’re willing to pay for it, but they don’t want it to go away. So that’s what the meeting was about the night you first arrived. People will pay for schools, they’ll pay for police, they’ll pay for roads,” Gerard says, “but farms? ‘Maybe we should,’ people say to themselves, ‘but I don’t know that I really want to do it.’

“My dream is not to just save Bainbridge Island but to save the beauty in the world by getting people to eat from where they live. That’s my last mission in life.”

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