We let Kitakami station at a leisurely 7:40! 7:40! This means I, since I live about 5 minutes away from the station, only had to get up at around 6:40 or so! (I take a long time to shower and put on clothes and drink coffee and stuff first thing in the morning). It was heavenly. Usually I would get up at around 5:30 or 5:45.
We changed the time to try and make the drive over safer. Recently the weather has been getting cold, as it`s apt to do in inland Iwate, and the road can get frozen. Hopefully, departing an extra hour later gives the sun time to make the drive safer. (For what it`s worth, if the roads are too dangerous, HANDS cancels volunteer dispatch for that day.)
So halfway through the drive to Rikuzentakata, it starts raining. I think to myself, "Sure, it`s raining, but maybe it`ll stop soon. Because: I want it to stop."
Unfortunately, rain does not follow that sort of logic. If anything, it actually started to rain harder.
We pull into the parking lot and walk over to the volunteer center and it`s still raining. We get assigned to a job, and it`s still raining. We drive to the worksite. It`s still raining.
I read in Japanese somewhere that much of the big rubble in Rikuzentakata has been cleaned up and now it`s just "smaller" rubble, but judging from what we were working with on Saturday, small rubble isn`t really that small. We were asked to move piles of rubble around what appeared to be a field to a series of sorted piles that were next to the road. This was probably so dump trucks or such could easily pick them up later.
I say it appeared to be a field because in the part of Rikuzentakata that was hit by the tsunami, it`s really hard to tell what a place used to be. Part of Rikuzentakata was basically washed away. You can tell where buildings were because you can see the foundation, but otherwise it`s hard to believe there was a city there.
Myself and volunteer Will and blue coat studies legends of Toono-san (I still can`t remember this guy`s name) were assigned to a strip of land that hadn`t been cleared of rubble yet. We were to gather the rubble into piles, then carry the rubble via wheelbarrow to the piles next to the road.
There was a lot of wood and some plastic, and pieces of styrofoam that were blowing around in the wind. Shoes. A tire, a sheet of metal that had probably been a door to something, and a large tank of something that had been somehow buried almost completely in the ground. Unfortunately we didn`t have the time to dig that last one up, because it definitely wasn`t meant to be there.
The road from our strip of land to the piles of rubble, between our wheelbarrows and the rain--which wasn`t letting up so much as getting heavier--quickly turned into a big mud trap. Like a fool, I hadn`t watched the weather report so had come to volunteer wearing a pair of jeans, which got soaking wet in about 5 minutes.
Unfortunately, because of the weather, volunteer ended before lunch.
It`s worthwhile going, even when volunteering ends early or gets canceled, because otherwise the work we did wouldn`t have happened, but it`s kind of disappointing not to be able to put in a full day.
I`m not even sure a full day would have been possible even if we had decided to work through the rain, though, because if that road had gotten churned up much further, it wouldn`t have been much of a road anymore.
Rikuzentakata, the disaster area, is strange and depressing. The rain doesn`t help much. It`s mostly flat, with just a couple of buildings still standing. The only tree left in the great big pine forest that used to line the Rikuzentakata coastline is visible from a long distance away. The news recently said that the pine tree, which had been a kind of symbol for resilience or something, is definitely eventually going to die. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I wish they could put up a statue of a tree there when the real one dies, until they get some other pine trees planted. No one wants to see the one symbol of resilience for miles and miles wither up and fall over.
There are still animals. Birds, especially. Osprey, seagulls, ducks in the rivers, egrets. It can`t be a good place for a bird to live, anymore, though. The water doesn`t look right. You see some ducks in the water, you start to want to go out and coax them all into cages and bring them to a nice wetland somewhere.
Rikuzentakata is not completely destroyed. There`s an undamaged area, and people still live there. I always forget that, for some reason, remembering the part that got washed away.
In the volunteer center, where they give us free coffee and cocoa, I saw letters from schoolchildren in Rikuzentakata thanking volunteers. "Thank you for cleaning up the rubble so it`s safe to walk around." How terrible, to be a kid and live in a place where you have to worry if it`s safe to walk around.
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