What You Need to Know about Life, Death, and the Stories We Tell

Photo: Karen Dunnam. This is a ghost bike, placed in memory of Rod VanDyke. Do note that this is only near the site of the accident – there was no sidewalk where he was hit.

Rod VanDyke was killed doing what he had done many times before: biking in to school for a day of teaching. In spite of Mr. VanDyke having lights on his bike and being in a highly-visible position on the road, the driver of a car coming up behind claims not to have seen him and hit him from behind at speed. What caught my eye, and made my heart sink, was discovering that the man who had been killed was part of my broader community, a colleague of my once-roommate’s husband. The headline read, “Police: Teacher killed in crash had lights on bicycle, was wearing dark clothing.”

Any child of God deserves to have his life treated with dignity, to have the story of his life – and of his death – told with integrity. But this doesn’t always happen. It’s time for us to have a conversation – about life, about death, and about the stories we hear and tell.

Telling a story well can be uncomfortable. So can hearing a story well. Rather than receiving the story as it’s told, we may need to look a little more deeply into our own souls and re-examine what are sometimes ill-considered knee-jerk reactions. This is all the more essential when the “characters” in our stories are flesh and bone.

An excerpt from the story mentioned in the headline above:

A South Christian High School teacher who died after he was hit by a car as he rode his bicycle early Tuesday morning was wearing dark-colored clothing but had lights on his bike, Ottawa County sheriff’s officials said.

Rod VanDyke, a math teacher and girls varsity golf coach, was riding southbound on 36th Avenue near Jasper Drive in Georgetown Township when he was struck from behind by a 1999 Acura also traveling south. The crash occurred shortly before 6 a.m. Oct. 7.

Sgt. Steve Austin said investigation showed VanDyke was riding in the road, more than 8 feet from the edge. He was wearing black and gray clothing, and his bicycle had lights on the front and rear. Deputies found an MP3 player and headphones near him at the crash scene, Austin said. He was wearing a helmet.

***

Last year, a similar tragedy happened when a teacher on his way to Hamilton High School was killed in a collision with a a semi outside the Tulip City Truck stop. His name was Josh Hoppe.

The crash was described this way:

Hoppe was driving about 6:20 a.m. south on M-40, south of the I-196 interchange, when police say a truck pulled out into his path from Tulip City Truck stop.

He died at the scene after his 2009 Ford Fusion hit the trailer, near the cab of the truck driven by 54-year-old David St John of Wellston.

As the community grieved over Joshua Hoppe’s death, the public conversation was quickly filled with anger and determination. People called MDOT, filled City Council meetings, demanded traffic studies, reminded the powers-that-be that others had died here, too.

The community honored his life and demanded an accounting for his blood. What they didn’t do was question his decisions or character.

Incidentally, the community’s efforts were successful. MDOT is planning to make safety improvements to the road in 2016.

***

In researching this story, I read over a hundred media reports of car crashes involving bikes and pedestrians. I was encouraged by how many of them were neutral, including only the clear facts of what had happened.

But many were not. Too many followed a predictable script, script that reinforces our desire to believe our world is fair and orderly, and that tragedies like this are either inevitable or crushingly just. But this script quietly argues for a status quo that sees valued members of our communities and families unnecessarily killed every day – and then blames them for dying.

We don’t need to accept a script that far too often condemns the dead. On the contrary, this is a script that needs to be rewritten, and we have a right to insist that it is.

This is the first in a series on the stories we tell about the people who use our common roads in ways that our culture considers unconventional. Next time, we’ll look at how to identify the specific scripts we hear so we’re better able to push back against them when appropriate.

Make the Iron Hot (Wednesday’s Words)

I spent much of yesterday with the gentleman who advocates for passenger rail in Michigan, and this echoes the message of one of the things he said after a meeting – something about persistence overcoming resistance.

Tired as I am after a long, good day, this resonates. Let’s not wait the stars to align, let’s not wait to learn everything there is to learn or to eliminate every fear and every obstacle – let’s go. Let’s do. And let’s make the iron hot by striking.

We’re Not Even Trying

The housing inspector was going to be at our house at 9:00 a.m. sharp today, and my husband was gone for an early meeting. That meant that I had to make sure all three girls were ready for their day and out the door at 7:40 a.m. Sticking to the timetable was crucial.

In the swirl of

WHERE ARE YOUR SHOES???
and
HOW IS YOUR HAIR NOT COMBED YET??

I decided that it would make best sense to drive the three blocks to school today so I could do my other two drop-offs directly from there. For five minutes I sat in the driveway, pulling forward and back as walkers passed down the sidewalk, waiting for traffic to clear. Once we were finally on our way, we passed a dad walking his pink-fleeced little girl to school. For five more minutes I worked my minivan through the traffic snarl outside the school to get to the elementary school drop-off line. As I clicked open the door, the dad and his little girl walked up to the kindergarten classroom.

For crying out loud, WE’RE NOT EVEN TRYING HERE. Walking this journey is obviously more efficient than driving, but some days it’s scary as hell. All those cars I was tangled in are in a HURRY, and trying to walk through an intersection with no crosswalk and no crossing guard and no anything at all but raw courage and a teeny flame of anger that we are so freaking uncivilized takes a lot of energy and a certain amount of disregard for one’s own mortality. And half the reason everyone’s in a car to begin with is that most of us don’t really want to contemplate death first thing on a Thursday morning, before we’ve even finished our morning coffee.

I’m tired of pretending that this is working for us.

I watched the video below first thing this morning. It’s an almost surreal foil to my maddening morning drop-off experience and I just can’t shake the contrast; it’s been on constant replay in my head all morning.

It brings you to the bike route that passes beneath the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where you can take in Gothic architecture and modern art and street performers playing Bach on your way to school. Take a look at all the different types of people – especially families – on all the different bikes passing through. And imagine – imagine! – if there were anywhere in America where you could have this kind of experience during your morning commute.

(If you don’t have a lot of time, consider clicking to the middle of the video – it’ll give you a good sense of what it’s about. You can read the original post by Mark Wagenbuur of Bicycle Dutch here.)

The Netherlands hasn’t always been a beautiful place to get around by bike. In the 1970s, they were every bit as auto-centric as we are now. They decided that it wasn’t in their national interests to continue down that path and made a change.

We can, too.

But we have to try.

So today I’m feeling all frustrated and ragey and like it is all futile, all of it, whatever it is. And so what I’m looking for from you is just this – your wisdom. What do YOU do when you feel like the mountain that stands before you is just too big?

A Place for Everything (Wednesday’s Words)

Our recent move has me feeling this little proverb pretty acutely. Since we’re planning to move again in a few months, we’ve limited ourselves to unpacking our frequently-used stuff. That has mostly worked, but a few times a week I find myself working myself into a frenzy trying to figure out where I stashed that seldom-used credit card or fuzzy wool socks.

This morning I saw mention on Facebook of another person running killed by a person driving. And it got me thinking about how this proverb, which we usually apply to order in our homes, is also applicable to order in our towns. Not knowing where things are creates chaos in my personal life; not having a place for all of our people in all their different ways of getting around creates chaos in a community.

When there are no sidewalks, no crosswalks, no bike lanes, everyone is jumbled up together like a junk drawer the size of your stock pot. Chaos is always aggravating. Sometimes, it’s fatal.

Lord, have mercy.

Mistakes You Can’t Take Back

There’s a parenting group that I’m part of on Facebook, a group of exceptionally thoughtful women and men who discuss everything from (not) sleeping through the night to endless potty training to what risks we let our kids take. It’s a good place.

This morning I was part of a discussion on what sort of risks we allow our kids to take, and I just loved what one of the parents said: we draw the line at mistakes you can’t take back (thank you for that verbiage, Janet). Falling out of a tree, okay. Falling off a swing, okay. Running in front of a car, not okay. Our actions have consequences regardless of our intent, and sometimes consequences are grossly out of whack with what we intend. This is one of the things we have to teach our kids.

This qualifies as Not Okay by any imaginable definition.

Sometimes it’s one of the things we have to teach ourselves, as well.

In our country, we’re setting ourselves up for failure by creating spaces for mistakes we can’t take back.

An article on Bicycling magazine’s website has gone gangbusters since it was published on Tuesday, and it takes a really interesting tack in discussing this. (You can find it here.)

In this country, “I didn’t see the cyclist” is the negligent driver’s universal get-out-of-jail free card…When the driver says, “I didn’t see the cyclist,” that’s usually enough for everybody to call it a “tragic accident”—and we don’t want to hold people accountable for accidents, do we?…

You want to know what’s really tragic? We allow this to happen. We make excuses, and offer up empty condolences, and don’t hold negligent drivers accountable, all because we’re afraid that we, too, might be held accountable for not paying attention. For not watching where we are going. For fiddling with the stereo, or shaving, or texting, or just daydreaming while driving, and not seeing what we should have seen, had we only been paying attention.

This resonated deeply with me. As I go from car, to bike, to car, I find myself so frustrated with the careless driver rolling through the intersection… only to find myself forgetting to double-check a sidewalk before I turn. It really could happen to any of us, and the fact that I am not exempt from that is deeply sobering.

In the crash I witnessed this spring where the police officer pulled out in front of a woman in a minivan, the woman in the minivan was ultimately considered at fault. The crash occurred on a high-speed STROAD with multiple lanes. Visibility was poor, and – by design – cars were traveling too quickly to have time for an adequate response. Both of them were set up for failure, and the result was a mistake that neither can take back.

So what do we do?

I love it when a solution to a problem already exists.

[I]n the Netherlands accident investigations are required for every bicycle fatality…The intersection where [a child] was killed was closed by accident investigators, who painstakingly recreated the crash, as reported in the Boston Globe:

Along with clipboards and cameras and measuring tape, they brought with them an 18-wheeler and a child-sized bicycle. Over and over, they maneuvered the two around the corner, recreating the all-too-common “right hook” accident in slow motion, each time adjusting the truck’s mirrors or the angle at which it struck the bike.

…The Dutch response to the fatality didn’t end there. Remember that painstaking accident reconstruction? The intersection where young Hananja Konijn had been killed was redesigned within a month of his death. A mirror was installed beneath the traffic light to help drivers see approaching cyclists. A bike box was also installed, so that cyclists would be able to cross the intersection before a driver could right-hook them. And the bike lane was doubled in width by removing an automobile lane, and painted bright red.

How many people have been killed in the last two years on US-31 and Chicago Drive*? How many children have been hit near schools that we’ve never heard about because they didn’t result in death? How many of those deaths and collisions could have been prevented if we took a Dutch approach?

I think that perhaps we need to begin to care in a new way when these things happen. It’s clearly just not enough to care in the sense of feeling sad when we hear about yet another person killed on our streets, or even care in the sense of saying a prayer for the family or bringing over a casserole if we know them personally. (I’m not saying that we should stop doing those good things, of course.) But what if, the next time we heard about a person who has been killed, we go to our next city council or township board meeting and request an investigation? What if we called our legislators and asked them to sponsor legislation that would do exactly this?

What if we stopped viewing all these egregious tragedies as unavoidable side effects of the modern world, when they’re not?

The law holds us liable to see emergency vehicles who are running their lights and sirens because it’s not okay not to see them. One of our responsibilities, as drivers, is to SEE. Legislators have decided that it’s not okay for us to not see emergency vehicles, so we’re charged with the responsibility of seeing them. We could, pretty easily, extend this precedent to cover vulnerable road users (that would typically be people walking and biking and wheelchairing) as well.

That would be something that I would like to see.

*I should note that Chicago Drive has seen some recent safety improvements that reduce conflicts between people using the sidewalk and left-turning vehicles. This is AWESOME.

What Happened on the Way to School: What YOU Thought

Friends, I can’t thank you enough for your feedback on that post about how I was nearly hit near CJ’s school. I love that we can have this conversation as a community, and hope that those of you who prefer not to comment publicly will feel free to email me at tulip(dot)lane(at)outlook(dot)com.

Now, what you said. I pulled these both from the comments section and my personal Facebook page.

First of all, it’s clear that this type of experience is NOT unique to me. One of my thoughts in the middle of this experience was about why all this weird stuff always happened to ME. What am I doing wrong? Why doesn’t this happen to anybody else? Well. Let’s see what you said:

In the most intensive year of my life as a pedestrian (Chicago, 2011-2012) I was actually hit by a car once while running (minor thing, thank goodness) and had a car clip the front of [my son’s] stroller once. Yes. When you walk more, there’s more chance to experience this kind of crazy.

I’ll have to tell you about the time I was walking my kids to school and hit the trunk of a car with my hand while in the crosswalk because they didn’t give us the right-of-way…

I too have done something like that! Also, one of my friends said her normally calm husband finally walked out to the front of their house one day and yelled at the drivers going too fast to “SLOW DOWN” because there were kids around! Sometimes we just HAVE to speak up!

My takeaway is that when we get out of our cars, we frequently experience the public realm as a a hostile place. We don’t typically seek out confrontation, but when we travel by foot or on bike it seems to become unavoidable. That’s clearly a problem.

I think the fact that the driver had been confronted and punched in the face before is a huge red flag! She obviously drives in an aggressive manner and either isn’t aware or doesn’t care to change. I think you were right to confront her.

I think you did the right thing because when no one calls someone out for improper behavior, it is as if we are encouraging said behavior to continue…

I believe that pedestrians and bicyclists, by extension feel vulnerable and exposed. I applaud you for trying to strike up a dialogue. We need to do that more often and not feel like we were in the wrong even when it’s not our fault. We are quick to blame cyclists and walkers for pushing the boundaries when we do it often in our cars and don’t seem to notice that. (Emphasis mine.)

I thought it was interesting that everyone who commented thought that confronting her was an appropriate response, because I really questioned myself on this point. After I read that last comment above, I figured out why: In my gut, I felt like I was on the wrong because I had been crossing the street. This floors me. I, of all people, have so thoroughly internalized the message our surroundings give that I feel like I’m breaking a rule by crossing the freaking road? What the heck?

The question that remains is the most important one, though – was this conversation effective? And this is where I think Shelly absolutely nailed it:

…learning the genuine art of non-violent communication with these aggressive people is helpful, and can also teach others how to handle their unruliness and regain some humanity.

I don’t think our conversation was completely successful. It led to surface reconciliation, but I’m not convinced that she thought she had done anything wrong or processed that her actions had put me in danger. In fact, I think she may have still felt wronged by me because I acted like I didn’t think she was going to stop. (Gah. That still frustrates me, a week later.) The communication aspect is another post entirely, but I do think it’s key to the conversation. There’s a solid summary of the technique here.

I’m going to end with something Michael said – a reminder and challenge to both myself and all of you.

The more we walk and ride our bikes, the more considerate we will be around other pedestrians and cyclist. Keep up the dialogue.

A Crazy Thing Happened on the Way Home from School Today

Two weeks into living in town, and I am LOVING my ability to get places on foot. We’ll talk about how awesome it’s been in coming weeks. But I had a crazy, crazy experience today that I just had to share.

I’d just dropped CJ off from school and was crossing the street right next to her school. It’s a crazy corner – it doesn’t have the fastest traffic of our walk commute, but people swing around the corner like it’s just a curve in the road. As I crossed, a very big, black SUV started swinging around the corner – and it didn’t look like she was going to stop. So I put up my hand – no, not my middle finger, my HAND – in a “Holy cow, STOP!” kind of way.

And she honked at me.

You have got to be kidding. (That’s what the guy walking behind me said.) So I walked over to talk to her. And here is where you say, “Meika, seriously. What the blippity were you thinking?” We’ll get back to that.

She hit the gas and accelerated past me, FAST. Total road rage; completely out-of-control.

Throwing up my hands, I started walking home but stopped after a few steps. Thirty seconds earlier, I had crossed that street with my six-year-old. She was dropping her child off at the same school. We do this every day, twice. How can I just let this go? What about everybody else who crosses this street, what about the KIDS who cross here by themselves every day? I decided to see if I could get a picture of her license plate so I could report her for reckless driving. Or something. I don’t know.

And that is when I got to talk to her.

I wasn’t planning to approach her; she pulled up to me. She was stopping, she said! Why did I hold up my hand like she wasn’t going to? She honked to let me know that she saw me! (Ahem.) I told her that honking sounds aggressive, always, that the way she swerved past me was incredibly dangerous, and that if she hit me with her beast I’d be dead. She told me that she’d had a lady punch her in the face before in traffic and was afraid that I was going to do that to her. In the end, we both apologized and treated it as a miscommunication.

So you remember the other day how we talked about our cars making us all into a bunch of Neanderthals?

[When we get in our cars], millennia of linguistic development and body language melt away, replaced with a blaring horn. No wonder we don’t like each other anymore.

We’re like a bunch of cavemen, grunting at each other in the dark.

Which brings us back to the “what were you thinking?” question, which is also what I asked myself on the way home as I was wondering why this kind of thing doesn’t ever seem to happen to anyone else. I came up with a few things, and here’s where I’d like your thoughts, too.

First of all, most of us don’t walk very many places; I’m walking much more now than I was just a few weeks ago. This may not be as unusual as I think for people who frequently walk.

Second, although I don’t really think deeply about it in the moment, I categorize this as bullying and feel as if I have a moral obligation to stand up to it for the preservation of our civil society. Seriously. It’s a hundred million little things like this that create our culture and set its tone. This isn’t how we’re supposed to treat each other. SO STOP IT.

Third, I have an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation and should probably be prepared to get punched in the nose someday.

So what do you think? What are some appropriate responses for a pedestrian who encounters a threatening driver? And what can we do as drivers to make sure that this is never us?

We’re a Bunch of Neanderthals

Intending no offense to Neanderthals. Image: Action Press/Rex Features

As drivers, we become a bunch of Neanderthals grunting at each other in the dark.

This occurred to me this morning as I eyed the pick-up truck in the lane next to me as it edged forward while we were waiting at a light. It looked like he was thinking of changing lanes, and I was pretty sure I was in his blind spot. I couldn’t make eye contact. My voice wouldn’t carry into the cab of his truck. If he moved toward me, the only way for me to avoid a collision would have been to honk.

In that moment millennia of linguistic development and body language melt away, replaced with a blaring horn. No wonder we don’t like each other anymore.

I have to wonder how much this affects our negative view of civil society today – when we spend so much time in our cars, and most of our interactions with each other involve growls and imagined slights.

In Egypt, driving is something else entirely – in many ways! But one of them is the level of communication that happens from within vehicles. This can only happen at slow speeds, but there is a great deal of leaning out of the car, talking to other drivers, making eye contact with others and waving them on. It’s normal to see the passenger in a vehicle leaning out of the window and waving his arms at the driver of the next vehicle over when the car he’s in is trying to change lanes. There’s a hand signal for “slow down,” which I’ve many times over wished would translate. In Japan, if someone lets you merge in front of them, you turn your hazards on for a few blinks to say “thank you.”

What can we do to distance ourselves from our caveman ways? I’m resolving to make as much eye contact as possible, to smile, and to give other drivers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I’ll give the driver with the blinker space to merge in front of me.

Maybe I’ll print out this photo and paste it on my dashboard as a reminder of what I don’t want to be. No offense to Neanderthals.

How to Get Healthy and Lose Weight

Fall. The first visit to the apple orchard collides with the first confrontation with unforgiving blue jeans. Penance for the indiscretions of the summer diet – the campfire s’mores, the samples on the wine trail, the perfectly grilled burgers – comes swiftly.

Here in Michigan, we are the fifth-heaviest people in the country. (I don’t think they’ve highlighted that in the Pure Michigan campaign yet.) Overweight isn’t unique to our fair state, of course: Less than 30% of the American population maintains a healthy weight. There are plenty of reasons for this, but we’re going to focus on just one today.

We’re building our communities to make good health hard.

If your own blue jeans confrontation leads you to join the Weight Watchers program, you’ll find yourself invited to attend bonus sessions after the first two meetings. One focuses on your daily routines, the other on your physical spaces. These two things – routines and spaces – are a constant refrain at meetings. So what is it about the spaces that we find ourselves in that concerns the nation’s leading weight-loss program so much?

“Setting up your environment for success, wherever you are, is a really powerful tool” (here). (Tweet that.)

Tips for adjusting your spaces at home to be more amenable to weight loss include things like putting tempting food on a top shelf so it’s out of sight and pre-cutting fruits and veggies to make them easier to grab. It’s no magic bullet, but it’s about making desirable outcomes easier and undesirable ones harder.

When it comes to good health, the spaces outside our home are every bit as important as the spaces inside.

Experts say that the top barrier to getting enough exercise is finding time (here). So let’s take a look at a couple different options for getting 30 minutes of daily exercise.

10 minutes: walk child to school
10 minutes: walk home
5 minutes: walk to neighborhood coffee shop/work/grocery store
5 minutes: walk home

A thirty minute time commitment for thirty minutes of exercise.

10 minutes: drive to gym
10 minutes: get inside, get changed, get to equipment
30 minutes: exercise
20 minutes: shower, change, do hair and make-up again (guys, subtract 10 minutes)
10 minutes: drive home

Eighty minutes total time commitment for thirty minutes of exercise – in my experience that’s about right for a trip to the gym. And although we can exercise without going to the gym, all intentional exercise has the same weakness: each and every one of them involves going out of our way to make it happen. Which makes it all to easy to blow off on a rough day.

Interestingly enough, according to a study conducted by several researchers at the University of Utah women in walkable neighborhoods weigh an average of 6 pounds less than those in sprawling ones, and men an average of 10 pounds less.

Depending on your weight, that could be a pant size.

So what do we do?

Here are two ideas I’ve tried.

1. Have a bias toward walkability.

Regardless of where we live, we can take advantage of the walkable neighborhoods we pass through.

Thanks to the housing downtown, I’ve spent the past six years living in a decidedly suburban neighborhood. During this time, I’ve chosen to do something that’s like the “parking in the furthest space from the entrance to get more steps in” drill taken to the next level.

Here’s one example of what this looks like. CJ’s school is in a walkable neighborhood. When I pick her up, I act like I live there. We may walk to the park, or to the tienda two blocks away to pick up dinner. I park once, then walk where we need to go.

Do you have a place you normally go where you could walk or ride your bike? Think of a good possibility, then commit to trying it three times. Was it what you expected? Easier? Harder? Regardless, if you got some exercise it’s a win.

2. Move house.

Yup, this is extreme. It’s also what we call a big win. By choosing a home base in a walkable neighborhood, we can forever make every single decision to get somewhere by active transportation easier.

We’re in the process of doing this right now, and are evaluating neighborhoods based on walk/bike time to school, church, coffee shops (as you may have gathered, that’s a big one for me), the library, and parks. We’re also considering traffic speeds on various city streets, amount of truck traffic, and how easy (or difficult) important streets are to cross. If our city had bike lanes, that would be a big factor, too. We’ve found Walkscore to be a good tool to start with, but some of our biggest revelations have been in conversations at the park and walks through the neighborhoods ourselves.

The way we build our communities has an affect on many facets of our lives, and good health is one of them.

How do the spaces in your neighborhood affect your life – and what can you do to make them work for you? Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail me at tulip dot lane at outlook dot com. And if you’d like to see more like this, remember to sign up at the top of the page to have posts delivered by e-mail, or like our Facebook page!

You may also like: Ten Reasons for Your Child to Walk to School.

Hiroshima and Hope

If you have found your way here via Strong Towns, welcome. This blog is an early first step in considering my own community in the context of strong towns and overall livability for all her citizens. To connect further, you can like our Facebook page or follow me on Twitter, @MeikaSue.

1.

Sometimes we find ourselves standing in awkward places.

I felt myself to be in one of those places on the sunny morning when a bomb was found in my neighborhood. I heard about it at my yoga class – how streets had been shut down, specialists called in. But there wouldn’t be an investigation, because it was immediately clear who was responsible: the Americans.

I was living in Nagoya, Japan, in a neighborhood that the subway had reached just a year or two before. New developments were springing up everywhere, replacing family homes and the odd post-war tin shack, and a construction crew had uncovered an unexploded bomb dropped by our soldiers in World War II. It really was no wonder that old men in the grocery store would occasionally stop in their tracks and gape at me; I found my presence in the country mind-boggling at times, as well. And awkward. I remember being surrounded by Japanese as I stood in the replica Nagoya Castle – the original, built in 1615, had been destroyed in the war – looking at this picture of their cultural treasure engulfed in flames just moments after my countrymen had firebombed it.

I kind of hoped they thought I was Australian.

The firebombing of Nagoya Castle during World War II.

(I should point out that if you’d like to visit Nagoya Castle, you can choose between two subway stops, one above-ground train stop, or three bus stops. You can also drive a car – but you’ll have a real choice!)

The history buff in me cringes at the knowledge that we destroyed something that had survived so many centuries. In 1615, the Pilgrims had yet to set foot on Plymouth Rock and smallpox had not yet devastated our own native communities. It was a different world entirely.

But this war was brutal beyond words, and this castle was the least of the casualties.

2.

Many of the casualties were in Hiroshima. Given the history, I was a little nervous about our visit to Hiroshima, fearing that “awkward” wouldn’t be the least of it.

The modern city of Hiroshima is built on a stomach-curdling graveyard. The atom bomb, dropped 68 years ago today, may not have been the greatest force of destruction unleashed upon Japan during the war. The firebombing of Tokyo probably killed more people, at least initially. Its horror was in its novelty and the manner in which it killed – and continued to kill.

At 8:15 a.m. an estimated eighty thousand people died instantly, many of them vaporized beyond ash. Nearly as many thousand more died in the following year from radiation poisoning. More still died in the decades following from leukemia and other cancers caused by the radiation. They were ugly, painful, lingering deaths. Survivors often lived ugly lives, with neighbors afraid that radiation sickness was contagious. Some were disfigured, ostracised, unable to marry. Many still fear telling their stories.

Close-up of the A-Bomb Dome. Notice how the support beams have been bent by the blast.

The effects of an atomic bomb are so horrible that… well, okay, they’re actually not that difficult to convey. Frankly, I just don’t want to describe what an atom bomb does to a human body in detail – that’s how horrifying it is. In fact, whatever you’re thinking, I can guarantee it’s worse than what your imagination is coming up with. But here’s a link to one pictorial record (here) with a warning that although these photos are very graphic, they don’t express the very worst.

3.

Hiroshima doesn’t feel like a graveyard, though. It turned out to be one of my favorite cities in Japan – bustling and beautiful, with green parks fronting the river and great places to eat, small enough to see the hills surrounding the town from the riverfront. In spite of its horrible history – or maybe because of it? – Hiroshima had a comfortable, welcoming feel. And because so many foreign tourists visit the city, I felt relatively inconspicuous as a foreigner there.

Across the river from the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima

It was a great place to visit…

Downtown Hiroshima

And has streetcars!

Green streetcar rails in Hiroshima

Despite the fact that the war ended just days after the bomb fell on it, Hiroshima wasn’t rebuilt quickly. It struggled mightily for many years, until the national government decided to fund the rebuilding in order to create a national monument for peace and witness against the atom bomb. And much like the discussions that followed 9/11 on what to do with the space where the World Trade Centers had been, some advocated for relocating the city and leaving the original space dedicated as a resting place for the thousands who had been killed.

A rebuilding proposal that recommended moving the city from its original location.

Ultimately, the city was rebuilt right where it was, with a peace park running through the center, along the river and surrounding the A-Bomb Dome. It was slow work, but beautifully done. (For more of the story, click here.)

4.

Can we learn anything from the rebuilding of Hiroshima? Is it even appropriate to try to “learn” something from an event like this?

Three things come to mind.

First, it’s appropriate to work with hope through crises. Nothing can erase the suffering of the people of Hiroshima after the bomb. This is about as bad as it gets. But it’s not the end of the story. We live in a cynical age that insists that despair and brokenness are the things that are real and true. But hope isn’t insensible, or foolish, or naive – it’s real, it’s something that animates us and drives us to rebuild communities devastated by incomprehensible losses. It’s the part of human nature that allows us to create beauty out of this field of ash, and it’s worth celebrating.

Second, a city in distress may need outside help and investment to recover. Wait, what? Yes, a tax base is a mundane thing to concern ourselves with when talking about the horror of an atom bomb, but the reality that the city faced in the aftermath was a tax base so decimated that there was simply no money for rebuilding. They needed outside help to make that happen, which they found in the national government. It wasn’t something that happened immediately – Hiroshima was far from the only city that had been destroyed and didn’t make the first cut when it came to receiving aid. It wasn’t until they decided to rebuild Hiroshima as a city of peace and a witness against nuclear warfare that the money came through. So with that thought in mind…

Third, it may be in our interests to think more broadly about our purposes in either giving or withholding help from a city. I’m still rolling this one around. We tend to talk about whether a city deserves help or not. But I’m wondering if we might benefit from asking what’s best for our regions and states, as well. Does letting a city fall apart help us? What do we want to see there? Under what circumstances would it be beneficial to intervene, and how, and with what goals? If a greater outside community decides to intervene, how do they honor the citizens who live there every day? In this way, Hiroshima was an easier case than some of the questions we face now. I’m thinking of Detroit and New Orleans, in particular, where questions of culpability and racism and the specter of future disasters overlay the city in ruin.

Less than seventy years after Hiroshima’s devastation a thriving city lies in what was a barren field of suffering. Thanks to people who worked harder than most of us ever will and to the investment of those who had a vision, a decimated city was transformed into a beautiful place where a former enemy can visit and suffer nothing more than mild awkwardness. When I find myself frustrated by relatively small things like a stubborn lack of bike lanes or more sprawl going up behind my house, I need this reminder of humanity’s ability to change what’s around them in circumstances far more extreme than my own.

And on the anniversary of a day of horror, that’s a pretty good reason to hope.