13. Springtime!!!
The school year is sorta winding down. At Kubasaki High the rainy season is in full swing. One has not lived unless one has made the trek from the 200 Building across the field to pass by the 100 building on the left and the auditorium and the cafeteria on the right, across the teachers parking lot (4 rows of cars), down the little (often muddy and slick) hill to the quonset huts a.k.a the 600s in the pouring monsoonal rains day after day after day.
Us smoking area folks never used umbrellas, they were not “cool”. So you could always tell when one of us entered the classroom cuz we were always drenched head to toe. My homeroom was in the 600s area. From there, I would walk to the 200s for a class, then at some point back to the 600s. I wasn’t expecting the monsoons, as I wasn’t on island long enough to know what would come, so my schedule wasn’t worked out with this in mind (at the time I wish it had been).
The rain during the monsoon season was relentless. It rained, and rained, and rained, and rained, then just as it started to clear, it rained some more. The rainy season seemed to last forever. All hours of the day and the night (I miss it today). We learned to get around during the rainy season using umbrellas, because we did actually go out to the entertainment venues of Naha, Koza, the skating rink, and to the seawall even during this time. It was an awesome experience to sit in the cave and watch the rain fall outside and listen to the ocean ebb and flow. All this rain didn’t phase the Okinawans in the least. They still went about their daily lives as if the sun were out.
The one thing I remember most about the rainy season was whenever you went into a store there was a little umbrella stand right inside the door. Once you reached the awning over the door you would shake the water off your umbrella, walk into the store and simply drop your umbrella into the stand. No locks, but, your umbrella was always there when you got ready to leave (Try that in this country – the US). I never lost an umbrella in an umbrella stand in the 5 rainy seasons that I endured on island.
The rainy season brought the color out in the trees and on the ground. The hibiscus would begin to bloom, the palm bushes and trees would flower new bright green leaves. We had both right in the front yard and the springtime colors were amazing. The rainy season must have been smaller than in other years, because water rationing would get started during this year about midway through the summer. Let me tell you, water rationing is not a joke on Okinawa!
The Cafeteria at Kubasaki was remodeled during the ‘87-’88 school year. I trucked box lunches in every day from Kadena that year, and stayed through both lunches. I assisted two ladies from AAFES, Mrs. Annette Jackson, whom I knew from her family and I attending the same Church, and an Okinawan lady who’s name escapes me right now, in dispensing the lunches to the students. One day it was raining so hard that visibility was less than fifty feet. One student came in from the smoking area (without an umbrella, of course) and said it was raining so hard that his cigarette would not stay lit. As a non-smoker, I did find a lot of humor in that (sorry, John). The Principal at that time was Mr. Pfeifer, always a pleasure to talk with, as was Mrs. Smith (asst. Principal?). Mrs. Smith told me she was teaching at Kubasaki when the current campus was built in 1964. I met and talked regularly with many wonderful students that year, although only three of their names are locked in my memory. A very sweet, beautiful girl named Sandra wrote to me for a few years after she returned to the States in the summer of ‘88. She is not listed in the Kubasaki alumni e-mail page. It would be a great blessing to hear from her again. There was a kid named Leo who was always gambling with other students by pitching pennies against the wall. He was convinced that I was Air Force OSI (plain clothes Police)sent there to monitor his activities. I, as well as Mr. Pfeifer, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Jackson were never able to convince him otherwise. He would look inside the windows of the truck I had parked right next to the auditorium, and thankfully kept locked, asking me where I kept the handgun and badge. Often I would stand right behind him as he was pitching pennies. When he discovered my prescence, he would say to the others with him;”You nasty, nasty people, out here gambling when you know it is wrong. How many times must I try and stop you all from participating in this despicable activity. God is watching you. You all should be ashamed of yourselves”. He would then walk away, only to return once I went back into the Auditorium. Back to the rain. I now live in the desert in southern California, where annual rainfall seldom exceeds an inch or two per year. It is hard for some to imagine it seldom going a week without raining, or an entire month straight of rain, as we often had in Okinawa. Rain is one of the many things I miss about Okinawa. We even held radio controlled off-road car races at Kadena in the rain.
Comment by daveh5o — February 19, 2008 @ 12:37 pm