Red Dragonfly: Reprise

Our first day of work involved taking a bus to Hakozaki, in Kamaishi City, a city hard-hit by the tsunami. The damage is so complete that there's really no place to start- like one of those fairy-tales where the heroine must drain a lake with a sieve, or find a needle in a barn full of straw. However, there is an order to clearing wreckage: first, the most hazardous materials are removed and roads are opened. That had already been achieved. Next, utilities are restored. Our task was to clear debris out of a large rain gutter with shovels and wheelbarrows. And when I say debris, I mean BIG debris such as chunks of asphalt, rocks and shovelsful of heavy sand. The team of about 15 people included a Stanford graduate (Japanese), a couple of young men from California, a Mongolian boxer, a large number of tough-looking Japanese workmen, and, of course, us. We were given either a shovel or a "neko" ("cat," the Japanese slang for wheelbarrow) and got to work under the fairly hot sun.

Will, of course, was a natural. He jumped into a gutter, immediately up to his calves in polluted water, and got to work. The foreman took one look at Ben and I, and gave us wheelbarrows instead of shovels. Ben started in and did a great job hauling. Meanwhile, I assisted the tough, wirey worker featured in the photograph, who later became friends with Will. Some of the gutter was covered with concrete lids which didn't come off, and my guy decided to crawl under the lids and clear out some of the garbage.

"Sing to me," he said.
"Sing??"
"Yes, you must inspire me. Sing so that I can hear your voice and have a goal!"
With that, he dived into the gutter.
Well, he had asked the wrong person. Embarrassingly enough, what I wrote in a previous blog is actually true: the only song I can sing all the way through is the Japanese folksong Red Dragonfly.
"Sing! Sing!" came a dim, echoey voice from down in the gutter.
"Okay," I said weakly, and started in. I thought I heard a muffled, "Huh?" from under the concrete.
With vague hopes that "Red Dragonfly" would again produce tears of emotion in my audience, I dutifully sang all four verses. Then, out of songs, I gave a rendition of the only other songs I know even a bit, James Cagney's "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "We are Marching to Pretoria (both courtesy of my grandmother, who lived through World War I).

A time later, my hero backed out of the gutter shaking his head. "Too much gravel," he said. "Can't get through."

"It's my fault," I said. "I didn't inspire you."
He shook his head. "No, very good." He grinned. "Can't believe you decided to sing a Japanese song. . ." He added hopefully, "Maybe next time Madonna or American Pops?"