Nuclear Victims Walk

Any given day is just a series of moments strung together...
Suddenly everyone started walking. There was no call over a speaker or countdown; everyone just got tired of sitting in the rain so we walked – hundreds of us.

It was still too early in the morning for the sun so we walked by the thin halos of naked light bulbs dangling here and there from houses. People spoke in low, feeling voices that took the place of eyes.

“Mr. Tim, Mr. Tim?” Anahko asked me.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

Last Friday was Nuclear Victims Day here in the Marshall Islands. School was cancelled and on Saturday morning, at 5 am mind you, there was a walk from the end of the atoll to the urban center of Majuro.

As I walked my students came and went, talking to me for a few moments before running off. Above us all the stars came in and out of sight as the clouds washed and swirled around. Sometimes rain came.

Every now and then I looked down at my tee-shirt (I was wearing two of them) to try and figure out in this dim light just exactly what its color was.

The reason I was on this walk was that every one of my kids said they would be doing it. So, despite the ungodly hour I was walking. Besides, there was a free tee-shirt for the first 100 walkers.

Long before there was a walk, in February of 1946, Commodore Ben H. Wyatt the military Governor of the Marshall Islands, asked the people of Bikini Atoll for permission to do nuclear testing on their tiny speck of land. He said it was “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars.”

The testing eventually led to this walk.

During the walk dogs barked at the mass of people coursing up the road and I gripped my dog stick tight. My kids laughed at me — they think it’s funny that I’m afraid of dogs. I’d show them the scar from the dog bite I got when I first arrived to demonstrate how unfunny it is to me, but I think that its placement would not have the desired effect. I was bitten on the bum.

Just as the sun was getting around to telling me that my free tee-shirt was maroon in color we reached the end of the walk. Hundreds of people converged on a field from the both directions of the island, people milled around and waited for organizers to hand out the breakfasts of oranges, hard-boiled eggs and doughnuts.
Stuff like this rarely strikes a chord with me. We have a big, dark history as a human race and doing something like a walk very early in the morning, just doesn’t seem to do the actual tragedy justice. My walk was just a bunch of nice little moments capped off with a free tee-shirt. It seemed sort of silly.

Then again, claiming to end all world wars by bombing someone’s homeland into oblivion seems sort of silly too. The Bikinians, as I hope we all would, chose to abandon their home for a greater good. To them it wasn’t silly, they left behind a home that due to radiation of the food supply, they still haven’t returned to. Now, 62 years later, the Bikinians hold “local” Government meetings hundreds of miles from the atoll of the governed. Some spend their days trying to convince the US Government that their injuries due to the nuclear fallout warrant compensation.

Just a bunch of little moments added up...

And so last Friday we just suddenly started walking. It seemed like a good idea, it had started to rain, and maybe everyone on the walk wasn’t doing it for any great and noble reason of remembrance, and maybe it doesn’t add up to the real and terrible tragedy, but maybe you just got to try to piece together little things like waking up early, walking with like-minded people and thinking about it all just a little bit and hope that it adds up to something more.