<Begin Segment 18>

RP: I was gonna ask you, you got to know the area around the camp.

YW: Yes.

RP: Eventually --

YW: We escaped. [Laughs] No, what it is is after a few months the guards realized we weren't goin' anywhere and the administration decided there was no point in putting guards, guards in the towers. Nobody's running off. I don't know. They, all they got to do is think, where we gonna run off to, right? So the guards pretty much disappeared, so we started getting a little more daring every day and start crawling under the fence and going beyond the railroad tracks. And pretty soon the guy says, "Hey, I hear there's a bayou out there." I said, "What's a bayou?" He said, "It's a big pond of water. You think it's okay to go over there?" Says, "Well, who's gonna stop us?" So we carefully crawled along the fence line and then got out, went out to see this bayou. And it became our swimming hole. It also became a fishing hole for the adults. They would go out there. I know, I remember this one man, he would religiously go there about every day, three in the afternoon, to go fish. And he was looking for garfish. You know what a garfish is? A garfish looks like, physically looks like a barracuda, slim and long, but the skin had a hard shell. The scales were very hard. And so I said, "What are you guys gonna do with this? You can hardly eat this fish." But they were using it for trophy. They would bring it home and gut it and salt it and dry it out, and that's their idea of taxidermy, you see? They had a trophy. But what they really liked about those fish was it had a, a long beak with sawtooth teeth. It was a fighter, so they loved the fight. So they got wise and got, started using wire leaders because those things would just cut up anything else, and they, these guys would typically bring home one or two of those. And that was their fun. That's how the older guys figured out how to have a little fun. Us kids went out to the levies that fed the bayou and fished for trout -- not trout, but...

RP: Crappie.

YW: Yeah, crappie.

RP: How'd you do?

YW: Once in a while I'd catch one or something, but I'm not much of a fisherman then or now. But it was fun.

RP: What did you use for a rod?

YW: You make your own.

RP: Piece of wood?

YW: Piece of wood. You'd find a limber stick. Somebody, somebody got some bamboo, I don't know where from. And little by little we'd accumulate a little bit of a fishing kit, if you will, put together.

RP: What would you use for bait? Would you find worms?

YW: You find worms, yeah. Worms were not too hard to find. But that's what we did and that, somehow we spent some time beyond the fences. And pretty soon people says, you know what, they're not gonna watch us. We're gonna come back and eat here anyways, so they quit watchin' us.

RP: You mentioned that also folks would, like, would go out and sit under the trees, in the shade during the summertime, relax.

YW: Yeah. One thing I noticed that the elderly Japanese craftsmen did, they went to the, some of the bayous and they would go after cypress stumps. And these cypress things would have root stalks that came up out of the water like this, and they would sever those things from the tree and bring it home and dry it out and make decorations. They would dry it out and varnish it, so it's a wood decoration. And I don't know if we had one at home or not.

RP: Your dad did that?

YW: My dad didn't do it, but he, somebody must've given him one, if anything. But a lot of these guys that were very artistic would see things like that, in the wood, and said, they would bring home these cypress stumps and work on it, dry it out and work on it and pretty soon polish it up and it'd be a little decoration and, and the, find a little empty bottle, find some flowers, put it in, it's a nice decoration for the sparse surroundings of the house.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.