Densho Digital Archive - Bob Fuchigami Interview (denshovh-fbob-01-0019)

<Begin Segment 19>

RP: Many of the camps that were located in these very isolated areas experienced severe dust storms, and I think Amache was no exception.

BF: Oh, yeah. Well, outside, Amache was on a hillside and was, they had cactus and what they call Russian thistle, I guess. They had, they had scraped it pretty clean with bulldozers, there's sagebrush, but they missed parts of it. So it was a land of rattlesnakes and turtles and lizards and jackrabbits, I guess. Pretty barren land. There was some better land alongside the Arkansas River, and that was used later on for farming by the evacuees. Amache had about 10,000 acres in total, but the housing area where we lived was about a mile square. And built on the hillside, low-lying hill, and it had, it hadn't been used. I mean, even now, if you go out there, there was a lease to allow cattle to roam, but cactuses come back, sagebrush, it was not too different from what it was when we got there. Yeah, it wasn't, it was strange land for us.

RP: So was the climate, too.

BF: Oh, yeah. The climate was the extremes. We have a pretty, in California, it was pretty even climate, although it got really hot in the summertime. I mean, you can get up to a hundred degrees in California, parts of it, anyway. But we certainly didn't experience anything like snow or freezing temperatures like they have here in Colorado. If you had a freeze in California, at least in our area, I didn't see any real freeze, although I guess there were times when it got pretty, pretty cold, near freezing, and Dad would cover the vegetables, crops with little plastic, or not plastic, but paper type of covers to protect them, but he didn't have to deal with snow and zero, zero temperatures. So it was quite a shock, and we had to, dust was always a problem. Amache was fairly close to that dustbowl area, and it was on the, right on the fringe. But at that time and that period of years, the dust storms were still there. There were times when we had dust storms where you couldn't see from here to the refrigerator, and yet people had to get out to go to the mess hall for, to eat three times a day, type of thing. You had to get out to go to the latrine, and it created real hardships for people. I mean, the dust storms were such that if you didn't know your way, you could get lost in a real hurry just from the barracks to the latrine. It didn't happen every day, but there were enough days when things were like that. They only had... I can only remember one time when they had a tornado.

RP: Tornado?

BF: Yeah.

RP: Went right through the camp?

BF: Well, it went through a part of the camp, and then destroyed some of the warehouse area. And they had a, they did have some, couple of rainstorms that created havoc.

RP: Flooding?

BF: Yeah, there's a couple of photos that show the damage from the rainstorms. But Granada is in an area, or Amache is in an area where they didn't get a lot of rain. They've experienced a lot of drought conditions, and they do, they did get some extremes in heat and cold, I mean, there were times when the temperatures went below zero, stayed below zero, and then there are other times when the temperatures went over a hundred. We didn't have much protection from the elements. So climate conditions were something you had to cope with and adjust to.