Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
July 20, 2017 1:00 a.m.
This summer my family and I went to Hawaii. My daughter and I had visited Oahu nearly 30 years ago. We decided to repeat our tour to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. I realize that you can’t always recapture experiences but this turned out to be both new and familiar.
My first visit to this memorial really impressed me. Its most memorable sight was on the surface of the water. Oil from the Arizona’s bunkers had been seeping out and rising to the surface since she went down. You would be looking at the water surface and a tiny spot would appear. The spot would grow into an iridescent ring, and the ring would expand until it dissipated in the waves. There was something so riveting about it. You felt a tie to the past seeing that oil, as if a thin line linked you to that moment in time. The simple beauty of the memorial was something I remembered for years. The oil bubbling up seemed the slow death of the ship. This trip I wasn’t sure what to expect.
A boat takes you out to the memorial which is still amazingly white, stretching across the area where the bridge of the Arizona had been. The ship was visible under the water and the bases of two gun turrets rose above the water’s surface. Oil still came up from the ship’s bunkers but not as fast and not as easy to spot. As I looked out from the memorial, I could see the hills behind the harbor. It was a lovely day with just a hint of mist on the tops of the hills. I thought about that morning 76 years ago, which may also have been a lovely day. Hawaii has a lot of lovely days. Over those hills, Death was coming, as Death often does – unseen, unanticipated.
The men of the Arizona were not expecting to be entombed on the sea floor when they went to bed that night. They had little idea that an armed force determined to end their lives had launched itself days before. Why did I feel differently this time? When I first visited the Arizona Memorial, there had been no Iraqi wars and no 9/11. World War II and Pearl Harbor were only real as pages in my history schoolbooks. Now they were real in a different sense.
I am glad I took my grand children to see the Arizona Memorial, even if it was just a history book page to them. It is part of their heritage and mine. It will come to mean different things to them as it has to me.
Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. Evelyn is vice-chair on the Amelia Center for Lifelong Learning and is on the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.