Life Behind Barbed Wire by Yasutaro Soga

Author:Yasutaro Soga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2016-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Climate

I lived in the wild desert of Lordsburg from the end of August 1942 through the middle of June 1943. During this period the climate was a problem for me. Although I was from Hawaii, I preferred cold weather, so the scorching desert heat was difficult to bear. The camp was four thousand feet above sea level and the humidity comfortably low, but we had sandstorms nearly every day. When they were severe, I could not distinguish the faces of people a few feet in front of me. I could not open my eyes or mouth. It reminded me of the Japanese phrase “like chewing sand” (meaning “tasteless”). My mouth was gritty and the feeling was terrible. Everyone conceded defeat to the sandstorms.

The climate at Lordsburg is continental, and in general the range of temperatures is wide. There is almost no spring or autumn. The seasons jump from summer to winter and winter to summer. The differences in temperature can be like night and day. Lordsburg is comparatively hotter than the rest of New Mexico, and it seldom snows in winter. In consulting my diary, I noticed that the temperatures were highest when I arrived there at the end of August. At the beginning of September, we suddenly had a few cool days. The weather was mostly fine every day, becoming cloudy for only a few days and turning chilly. It did not rain often, but when it rained, it poured. The average temperature at the beginning of September was about 60 degrees in the morning, 80 to 90 at noon, and 85 to 86 in the evening. On September 22, the temperature was 56 in the morning and 94 in the afternoon, a difference of about 40 degrees. After three or four hot days, uncomfortable chilly weather suddenly returned. Then there was a cycle of three cold days and four warm days. In this way a natural balance was maintained.

Winter arrived in October. The famous sandstorms gradually grew worse. It was very cold in the early morning and evening of October 18, but it was very hot during the day. There was ice on the ground on November 1, but the weather turned hot again on the sixth, seventh, and eighth. We were having an Indian summer. There was an especially fierce sandstorm on the eleventh before the cold returned the following day. The outdoor thermometer read 22 degrees in the early morning of the twenty-ninth. Winter came in earnest in December. We had a magnificent view of distant mountains covered in snow on the sixth. The temperature stood at 28 degrees on the morning of the seventh, the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The frost was so thick that the roofs of barracks where heaters had not been turned on looked as if they were covered with white sheets. The grassland glistened with sunshine. The next day the ice was an inch thick. It snowed and hailed once in a while from January through the middle of February.

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