Wild horses running free

“You must always see with a big vision, / and if you keep your mind calm / there will be a way / there will be light.”
– Chiura Obata

The wild herd galloped across the desert with tails flowing, manes rippling, ears back, and muscles working under shining coats. Exhilaration filled me at the sight. I’d never seen anything so beautiful—or free.
This spring, we traveled to the Great West Desert near Delta, UT.
The West Desert is home not only to wild horses but also to the former Topaz Internment Camp. The day before we watched the wild horses, we visited the camp, located 15 miles west of Delta.
No buildings stood in the weed-filled, 31-square-mile lot, but a sign announced, “Historic Site/ Topaz Internment Camp/ Visitors Welcome.”
Cement-and-rock foundations outline where buildings once stood, and cinder streets, straight as arrows, show where foot traffic once traveled.
Rusted potbelly stoves, strewn pieces of metal, and signs constructed for an Eagle Scout project designating the main locations of the town were all that remained of the camp which contained thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Construction on the site began in the summer of 1942, but when the first internees arrived in September, the buildings weren’t yet finished.
Many of the Japanese Americans had lived in the San Fransisco Bay area, a mild and rainy climate. It was the second time they’d been “relocated.” The first time they were sent to the Tanforan and Santa Anita racetracks where stables had been remodeled for human habitation.
A few months later, they were transferred by train to Topaz, named for the nearby Topaz Mountain. Topaz housed about 8,000 people at its peak, but more than 11,000 were eventually processed through the camp in the three years it was open, making it the fifth largest city in Utah.
Since the buildings weren’t finished, the government hired the Japanese Americans to complete the work.
Those buildings included two elementary schools; one combined middle-and-high school; a small hospital; two libraries; a Buddhist church; a Christian church; mess halls; barracks containing different sized apartments; and recreation areas.
Guard towers equipped with searchlights and initially manned were located every quarter mile. Later, because of protests over a guard killing a Japanese man who had walked his dog too near the barbed wire fence, the military relaxed security.
Although the climate was harsher than what they were used to, the Japanese Americans raised feed crops, cattle, pigs, and chickens. They also produced blue-ribbon vegetables which they entered into the Millard County Fair.
Townsfolk hired some to fill vacancies left by men fighting the war, so those lived in Delta. Others were allowed to leave the camp for recreation.
During one of those expeditions in the nearby Drum Mountains, two men excavated a 1,164-pound iron meteorite which the Smithsonian Institution later purchased.
One of the most fascinating people to live there was Chiura Obata, a famous artist who taught at California University, Berkley before his internment.
He could have avoided being sent to the camp, but he wanted to support his friends. When he and his family arrived at the Tanforan racetrack, he asked authorities if he could create an art school.
Although short-lived, the school had 600 students of all ages, 16 instructors, and 95 weekly classes. Later, when Obata, his family, and others transferred to Topaz, he took the art school with him.
In a Smithsonian Magazine article, “How Japanese Artist Chiura Obata Came to Be an American Great,” author Alicia Ault quotes Obata as saying before his internment, “I always teach my students beauty. No one should pass through four years of college without being given the knowledge of beauty and the eyes with which to see it.”
The extreme weather in Topaz proved much different than the mild climate in the San Fransisco area, so Obata’s 11 months in the camps severely tested his gift of seeing and teaching beauty.
But according to Ault, he painted 350 pictures during that time. One of my favorite Obata paintings is titled, “Dust Storm, Topaz,” which shows dark clouds roiling through the camp and people fighting the wind. In 1965, he observed, “If I hadn’t gone to that kind of place I wouldn’t have realized the beauty that exists in that enormous bleakness.”
Although I was accustomed to the desert and dust storms, the abandoned Topaz site seemed bleak to me, and the next day, after we watched the wild hooves pounding the desert in jubilant freedom, confinement in the internment camp struck me as a stark contrast. Or was it?
One of my favorite quotes about freedom comes from Austrian-born psychiatrist Victor Frankl.
In 1942, the Nazis sent him and his family to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp where his father died.
In 1944, they were sent to Auschwitz where his mother and brother died in the gas chambers. Sometime during their imprisonment, he was separated from his wife who later died in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl ended up in Dachau where he was forced to do heavy labor on a starvation diet.
Forging his beliefs in the crucible of the concentration camps, he later wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Obviously, Chiura Obata, on the other side of the world, practiced that type of freedom, a freedom even more profound than wild horses running free.