Densho Digital Archive - James A. Nakano Interview (denshovh-njames

<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Now, I'm curious, you're now in Arkansas. And one of the things that Hawaii doesn't have are snakes, but in Arkansas there's lots of snakes there. Did you guys have any stories or experiences with snakes?

JN: Yeah. I remember there was a... we had to, in Arkansas, we had to go into the wooded area to get our own lumber. And I still remember, in the middle of the block, we had this huge lumber that everybody would then take home to their homes to have -- and we had a, we had a stove that warmed the house, that we needed wood for burning, for purposes of heating the house. And so there would be, everybody would go out to the woods. And I remember -- not that we were cutting any wood, but we were drawing the young guys that would go out there, and the older guys, too, I guess, they would go in to cut lumber and bring it back to the, to the block. And the reason we went out there was we wanted to look for snakes, we'd never seen snakes before, yeah. And then we saw... I don't know why, I'm not sure if this is true or not, actually, but it seems to me the first snake I saw was a water moccasin in the water out there. I'm sure we didn't catch 'em. We caught some harmless snake, as I recall, somebody caught it with a stick. Oh, with a forked stick, and there was a technique in doing that, as I recall. Somebody did it, caught it, and then we brought it back to Block 40, we brought back a snake. And that was our first exposure to see a snake. And this was a harmless snake; it wasn't poisonous or anything. Yeah, that was my experience with snakes.

TI: And so having grown up not seeing snakes and your brother's not having seen snakes, what was your feelings about snakes? Were you more frightened of them or just curious? How would you describe that?

JN: More curious, I think. Anyway, I was. I'd never seen one, and then of course I think, even by then, snakes were something slippery and something as a young boy you want to see and feel and touch and everything. So it was more for curiosity and saying, "Wow, this is a real one."