Pearl Buck - Bridge for Passing

I lay on my berth and reflected upon a strange life — my own. How is it that a mild-mannered peaceable woman with no desire, ambition or even inclination for adventure manages somehow to be always in the midst of adventure? So passionately do I love the usual, the commonplace, the everyday, that I turn off the television instantly if an adventure program comes on. It is no use. I am constantly involved in some daring expedition and loathing it, and I have always particularly hated the thought of drowning at sea. I dislike drowning in any case, but if it must be my end I prefer a small swimming pool or better still, a bathtub. Yet I cannot count the seas I have traveled upon, how many times the Pacific, scarcely less often the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and all the seas curling in and around the complex shores of Asia. Now apparently I was to meet my fate between Tokyo and Oshima. The Big Wave, indeed!

Dawn came at last, a weak wet dawn, the pale sun fringed with mists, and the ocean still growling and snarling its white-crested waves in contradictory currents. The dim outlines of Oshima appeared from nowhere and we struggled into our clothes. In fifteen minutes we were due to dock. Fifteen minutes became an hour and then two hours while we continued to roll. We could not dock, it appeared, because the sea was too rough. If it did not subside, we were told, we would be compelled to go to the other side of the island where there was an inferior dock. It did not subside and we went to the other side of the island to the inferior dock. A long procession of pale but determined school children disembarked and then we got off and went through rain to the hotel. This time I was too subdued to protest when I found myself again quartered in the Emperor’s room, a setting I had refused on my earlier visit as being too overwhelming for the modest citizen of a republic.

We had a quick breakfast and set out by car to the foot of the volcano. There horses waited for those who wanted to ride. I chose to walk, for it had been some years since I had been on horseback. Moreover experience had taught me to distrust the Asian horse, mule or pony. They lead a hard life, for the Asian is not sentimental about animals, as we Americans are. The philosophy of the transmigration of souls leads the Asian to believe that the human being who has been criminal in life will in his next phase be an animal not to be trusted to behave better than the criminal who inhabits him. While I cannot say that I believe this, yet if I were to judge by the behavior of horses I have known in Asia, I might at least consider it possible that they are indeed animated by some evil force. “Put not your trust in horses,” the good book tells us. On foot, therefore, I climbed the black volcano, ascending a dark and barren landscape spectacularly, horrifyingly beautiful.

Under a stormy gray sky the effect was even more somber and strange. Streamers of white steam flew from every crack and cranny of the volcano and the surrounding high mountains. These I had not seen on my previous visit, and were to be explained by the typhoon, I found upon inquiry. The crater of the volcano is very large, and had in the last few days become larger, for under the torrential rains the walls had crumbled at various places. Wherever there was a surface it had been dampened and choked and the steam thus held back had forced its way through channels in the mountains. Hence the ribbons and banners of steam, all blown by the wind in one direction. Again and again I stopped on my way to look at the spectacle, for spectacle it was. I have seen some of the most magnificent scenery in the world, but for splendor and terror, I put first the volcano on Oshima island, that day.

Two days we spent there, reckless, wonderful, unforgettable days. Only a short time before we came the volcano had erupted, throwing great rocks into the air and gnawing at the mountain. Guards stood everywhere now to forbid us passage, but we pushed our way to the very edge of the crater in spite of them, the camera perched precariously anywhere it could stand or be held. The drop into the crater was at two levels, the one an encircling terrace, the other without bottom and hidden in clouds of vile-smelling gas and steam. Camera and crew and director descended to the terrace, but I stayed at the edge above, not only because I am prudent, but because the distracted guards warned us that we must all run for our lives if we heard the slightest roar or rumbling from inside the crater. I did not wish to imperil the young men, in such case, who might feel in honor compelled to run at my slower pace.

The wind blew bitterly cold and work went on without the usual laughter and good cheer. Swiftly and with concentration each did his part. I confess my heart lost too many beats as I watched the crew walking about inside the crater, leaping across great cracks, sinking into soft ashy soil, standing at the very edge of the abyss. I recalled it all again when the rushes were shown in the theater in New York. I saw the boy Yukio standing there on the screen, his eyes wide with fear, the white steam curling upward from the crater and enclosing him. No wonder he cries out to his father,

“We are unlucky, we people of Japan!”

“Why do you say that?” his father asks.

“Sea and the mountain,” the boy says, “they work to destroy us.”

We were glad when the two days were ended, the work finished, and yet we would not have missed the experience. I shall never forget the landscape, black as the other side of the moon. And we flew across the water on the third day under a clear sky and arrived at Tokyo airfield in exactly forty-five minutes, safely.

Five days later the volcano went into eruption and the lava-black soil upon which we had stood fell into the abyss.

So the picture was made. It was finished except for the scene of the tidal wave, which was being built in the special-effects studio in Tokyo. Thither I went on my last day. The famous special-effects artist was waiting for me, debonair in a new light suit and hat and with a cane. He had the confident air of one who knows that he has done a triumphantly good job, and after a survey of the scene I agreed with him. In a space as vast as Madison Square Garden in New York, which is the biggest place I can think of at the moment, he had reconstructed Kitsu, the mountains and the sea. The houses were three feet high, each in perfect miniature, and everything else was in proportion. A river ran outside the studio and the rushing water for the tidal wave would be released into the studio by great sluices along one side. I looked into the houses, I climbed the little mountain, I marveled at the exactitude of the beach, even to the rocks where in reality I had so often taken shelter. The set was not yet ready for the tidal wave. That I was to see later on the screen in all its power and terror. I had seen everything else, however, and I said farewell, gave thanks, and went away.

My hotel room had become a sort of home, and I felt loath to leave it, yet I knew that my life in it was over. It had been a pleasant place and I had lived there in deepening peace. Now the old dread of facing another life without him and of returning alone to the places where we had always been together was with me again. It had to be done, however. I could not escape, and there could be no further postponement.

“Come back, come back soon to Japan,” my dear friends said, and I promised that I would and, tearing myself away, I went alone into the jet plane that was to carry me back again to New York.

I say New York, although of course New York is only on the way to my farmhouse home in Pennsylvania. But I have a stopping place in New York, that city of wonders and grief. He and I always kept a place there. He needed it for his work and for his spirit, and I have continued our tradition. It is not the same place we shared for so many years. Within the confines of our old apartment I could not escape the torture of memory. Whether I would have stayed I do not know, but the skyscrapers of steel and glass had pushed their way up our avenue, and the building in which we had made a city home was to be torn down. I found a place farther uptown in a new building, where there were no memories except the ones I carry hidden wherever I am.