Castle Rock could easily serve as a kind of Statue of Liberty
for our nation. In a very powerful sense, the jagged 800-foot
mountain peak symbolizes America’s never-ending quest for freedom,
justice and equal rights.
Castle Rock could easily serve as a kind of Statue of Liberty for our nation. In a very powerful sense, the jagged 800-foot mountain peak symbolizes America’s never-ending quest for freedom, justice and equal rights.
That’s what went through my mind Monday morning as I hiked the dusty trail to the pinnacle of this dramatic geological formation in Northern California just south of the Oregon stateline. Along with me for the climb were about 50 other people. We’d all come here on a patriotic “pilgrimage” that was intended to heal the wounds of a great offense done to American values more than 60 years ago.
You see, Castle Rock once overlooked an immense prison camp called the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Behind a barbed-wire fence, nearly 19,000 people were forced by their own American government to live in a desolate valley plain under often brutal conditions.
These prisoners – men, women and children – had never been given a fair trial as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. They had never been accused of a crime. Families had been incarcerated at Tule Lake – and in nine other camps throughout the nation – because the federal government claimed their Japanese ancestry made them a threat to American liberty.
During the years of the Japanese-American internment, my father Raymond Cheek worked as a music teacher at the Tule Lake Camp. So in honor of him, on July 3, I found myself hiking in his footsteps to the summit of Castle Rock – along with former prisoners and their children and grandchildren.
At the top, some in our group stood at the base of a steel cross near the cliff and posed for cameras. Back during their incarceration in the 1940s, Christian prisoners of Tule Lake had put up a wooden cross on the rock. They had celebrated Palm Sundays and Easter sunrise services here. But time and weather had decayed the old cross, so in 1982, it was replaced with a more durable one.
Gazing at the cross, I realized that Castle Rock is a kind of sacred mountain in America. Not “sacred” in a religious sense like Moses on Mt. Sinai, but sacred to the values of the American creed of “liberty and justice for all” promised in our Pledge of Allegiance.
Tule Lake Camp represents how easily our nation can forget to keep that promise. But Castle Rock represents another promise – a promise of hope for prisoners of injustice. Located just outside the main gate, its majestic ruggedness helped soften the despair of the internees in this desert valley. It gave Tule Lake’s prisoners a dream that they might one day find their freedom.
When he taught at the camp, my dad would every so often lead his students on getaway hikes up Castle Rock. For these kids, the climbs were always a welcome respite from the often dreary life behind fences.
Here in the 21st century, I tried to imagine the panorama my father might have viewed. The 1.25 square mile community would have been enclosed behind a six-foot-tall fence dotted with 28 armed guard towers.
I tried to imagine the churches, libraries, baseball fields and schools. In my mind’s eye, I reconstructed for a moment the 893 tar-papered barracks lined up in neat row. Those homes were covered with tar paper, and in the hot summer months, they became virtual ovens for the prisoners. Dust storms would occasionally sweep from the former lake bed basin and smother belongings with a powdery coat. Winter rains turned the dust to mud. But now in 2006, those camp buildings are all gone and replaced by desert shrub-land.
Through the telephoto lens of my Olympus camera, I focused in on two posts along California State Highway 139 where the camp’s main gated entrance had once stood. So many of the prisoners had passed through that point. Just beyond it were the remains of a concrete jail, a bleak reminder of the internment. A quick click of the shutter button and the scene was recorded into my camera’s digital memory card.
Back in the 1940s, my dad on top of Castle Rock had taken snapshots with a Kodak Brownie. And from the camp below, he’d also snapped photos of the wedge-shaped rock itself looming in the background beyond the fences and barracks. Indeed, many photos surviving from the prison camp tend to show the rock as a prominent landmark.
The more artistic prisoners often made drawings and beautiful watercolor pictures of the natural formation bordering their camp. Castle Rock represented something powerful to the prisoners. And it still does to the Japanese-Americans who come back to the camp site on the biennial Fourth of July weekend pilgrimages. On official Tule Lake Pilgrimage literature – as well as t-shirts, sweatshirts and caps – the rock is always displayed looming like some beacon of hope over a grim American prison camp.
More than a few interned people on the Tule Lake Pilgrimage joked about memories from their camp years. But occasionally, I noticed, those who still recall the injustice would drop their guard. Tears would well up and their words would choke in their throat as they described a personal tragedy.
Even six decades later, the wounds from the internment have not completely healed in the Japanese-American community. The pain of imprisonment and ill treatment by the U.S. government still linger in the mind’s shadows.
On top of Castle Rock as I stared down at the silent scene of the farm valley below, a thought hit me. America is a great country. America has done more good for the world than any other nation in history. I’m proud of that.
But there have been times when America has done evil deeds, too. The unconstitutional incarceration of 120,000 men, women and children is one such time.
Castle Rock overlooking the Tule Lake prison camp stands as a stoney witness to the dark days when America broke its promise of freedom, justice and equal rights for all.
