<Begin Segment 23>

TI: The other thing when I go to Manzanar, on the horizon or in the backdrop you have these magnificent mountains. You mentioned Mount Williamson, Mount Whitney's there, and I know that you have a connection with those mountains. Why don't you talk about your connection with those mountains?

HU: Well, from the barrack that I lived, from the room I could see the whole scenery or vista, whatever you want to call it, and I used to look out the window, daytime, nighttime, and one night I saw a couple of lights coming down from the mountain. And it was coming down, I thought it must be a car and then, and then the, the light kind of, went kind of askew and I thought, "Oh dear, what happened?" Maybe they, maybe the light... you know, in those days headlights were mounted on, mounted on the fenders. I thought maybe it fell off or something. And so anyway, it was really eerie, and so the following day I told my friend Frank, I said, "Hey Frank, I saw this weird thing last night. There was a couple of lights coming down from the mountain." And he says, "Well, that's, they were hikers." I said, "Hikers? Where did they go?" He says they went to Mount Whitney. I said, "Mount Whitney?" He said, "Yeah, there's Mount Whitney right behind that mountain right there." And I said, "Wow, it doesn't look that far," because it looked close. When a mountain, even if it's far, it looks close. And I said, "Why don't we climb that thing?" And he said, "Hank, you fuckin' asshole. You got to be a free man to climb that." And right there and then I made a vow that when I'm a free man I'll climb Mount Whitney, but then when I came out of camp we came to Los Angeles. I didn't have a car and we just, I just didn't have the, what do you call it, no transportation, nothing, so that was out of the question. And then the Korean War started and I was at the other side of the planet, so, so I was thinking of climbing Whitney; that's out of the question. And then after I got back I got married and that's it. That's done. Until when my kids were young, I told them about the Mount Whitney story and they said, "Well, why don't we climb that?" I said, "Okay, yeah. When you get a little older we'll climb Mount Whitney," so that was a promise I made.

And then the kids, they grow up in no time, they were going their own separate ways, and I didn't have anything to worry about until when I was about sixty-eight years old, my friend got triple bypass, so Karen says, my daughter says, "Hey Dad, how's your health?" And I said, "It's great. It's, I could out-hike any of you guys," and I was joking. Only a moron would take me seriously, a sixty-eight year old guy with, hiking with people in thirties and things. But then -- I'm not saying that Karen is a moron, but one day about a week later she sent me an email and she said, well, why don't we meet at such and such a place and climb this place called, called Ice, Ice House Canyon? I said okay, and I knew I wasn't in shape, but all this time when they were kids I was lecturing them that you don't have to accomplish what you set to do, just try, so I figured, well, I have to try, set an example or just keep up with what I've been preaching. So, so anyway, we met at, we met there and started climbing this mountain called Ice House Canyon and the first five hundred feet or so my calf started hurting, I mean, my ankle started hurting, and then my calf started hurting and by the time I was halfway, I mean, I just couldn't make it. I just plopped back on my back and then they just went ahead. And then on the way back it was going downhill, so it was fine. I was in great shape then. And then Karen, says, "Hey Dad, we got to climb Mount Whitney." And I just broke out in cold sweat. I never thought that they remembered, but they did remember, and I said okay. I had no intention of climbing Mount Whitney, but I thought I would just play along, said, "Okay, we'll do that. We'll start training for it." So the following week I went up and went a little further, and I kept on going and I met this guy named Wilson Harvey. He was, he's a hakujin hiker, and I told him, "Hey, I'm sixty-eight years old. I shouldn't be doing this." And he got mad. He says, "Hell, I'm seventy-eight years old." And then I started hiking with him and when we started, when I started hiking Mount Baldy he was there. I used to go there early, he was there and he was sort of my mentor; he sort of gave me a lot of tips and things and we would hike together for a while and things like that. And then, then I got addicted to hiking, so I started hiking every weekend and then I met a lot of guys there, lot of hikers, and I would tell them that, the story that I once made a vow to climb Mount Whitney, but I had no intention of doing it now. Then they all said if you could make Mount Baldy you could do Mount Whitney, and I still didn't believe them until one guy says, "Well, why don't you try? If you don't make it you can always come down." I said hey, that's a good idea, so after two years of conditioning I tried, made an attempt at Mount Whitney. I went to the trail camp and it was cold; down at Lone Pine it was about hundred four degrees and when I got there it was freezing, and I wasn't prepared, so I thought gee, I can't go up anymore so I came down. That was a good excuse, legitimate excuse. And the following week I went up again and on this trail -- there was about ninety-eight switchbacks and there was a place where it was icy -- and then they were saying, "Oh, there's ice up there." I said, "Gee, I don't have my clamp-ons, so I have to go back. I'll come back next week." So the third week I went up with the clamp-on and when I got there the snow level was down to about seven thousand feet, so I thought oh my God, I'm saved, so I got out of that. So I trained for another, conditioned for another year and after third, after the third year I tried again and then I made it up in something like six hours and fifty-four, fifty-seven minutes or something like that.

And then there was, it was something that... I feel great. It's something that I had accomplished, that I vowed to do, say, fifty-seven years earlier (...). But the thing that, that I got most out of that was that, while conditioning I was going up Mount Baldy and I did Mount Baldy about two hundred twenty-five times, and the thing about that was that in the beginning I, when I got up there it was lunchtime. I would go sneak around to a big boulder and hide in the back of a rock or something and eat my lunch, because I have this, or I still have them, but I had a real strong complex that a lot of Niseis have where we went through such a experience in discrimination that we're afraid to go into American or white people's society, and so when we were, when I'm up at, when I was up at Mount Baldy, I mean, I just couldn't get myself to join the other hikers there. But then as I kept climbing that thing, climbing the mountains, I met a lot of people and they're young people and they didn't have the experience of the thing that happened during the, during World War II, because I'd been, or Nisei's been exposed to a lot of these people who experienced World War II -- like I had encounters with guys who were in the, what's that, Bataan or Burma Death March or things like that, they had this very antagonism or very bad feelings toward the Japanese and the trouble is that they couldn't, they can't distinguish the Japanese soldiers from the Niseis, and as far as we're concerned we're Japs and no matter where we're born, we're Japs and once a Jap is always a Jap and there's discrimination. And we went through a lot of that. We had to take a lot of that. For example, I remember coming to L.A... in the, back in the old days they used to have community theaters. They used to have white community and they would have a street with Bank of America, a little theater and grocery store, so they used to have these small theaters. I remember in two, twice, we weren't able to go into the theater and, or... even employment. I remember going for a, applying for a dishwasher's job and the guy says, "Well gee, I don't have anything against you people, but if my customers saw you working for me I'll lose my customers," and things like that. He was very direct. And there was once when I was walking on Broadway and there were two marines, and they smiled and said, "Konnichiwa," and I said oh, these guys are very friendly. I said, "Konnichiwa," and then just, they just, this guy looked at his buddy and said, "Yeah, he's a Jap," and they just walked away. That's, that kind of thing is very, very, it sort of stays in your mind and affects what you, or how you react later on in life, so --

TI: And the example you gave, so these, some friends, these hiker friends that at lunch time you just didn't feel comfortable even sitting with them?

HU: Right. Yeah, in the beginning, but as, as I went, as time passed on and when I got to know a lot of these people, they were young, they were a lot more liberal. They had no idea about this, they had no, no...

TI: So the question I want to ask is, so when you're hiking with these, these friends in the Sierra Nevadas, do you share that during World War II you looked down in the valley, Owens Valley, you were, you were at Manzanar? Do they, do...

HU: No, I don't talk about that.

TI: You never, you never tell them?

HU: I never tell them. There was one guy that I talked about Manzanar, how I was at Manzanar. That was at Baldy, and funny thing that happened, last year he visited Manzanar Interpretive Center and he, I think somehow he, my name, a mention, my name was, came up and he says, "Oh, I know Hank Umemoto. We used to hike together." And he left me a message there and he said, "I was here," and so I emailed him, after I got home I emailed him and he was real nice about that.

TI: It'd be, it'd be interesting if, especially with those hiker friends, if you had, on one of those treks up Whitney, to have told the story of when you saw those lights coming down Whitney and that was when you were a young boy and how that was a promise that you, you made.

HU: Right.

TI: I think that would really be a powerful story for hikers up there.

HU: Oh yeah.

TI: Because when you're up there it's beautiful and you see it and you can see the valley, but for them to understand that, I think would be a really powerful thing for them.

HU: Yeah.

TI: Well, thanks for sharing the, the Mount Whitney.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.