the bomb holes

I went to Tinian to see the atomic bomb holes.

I rationalized going to the island to attend the (8th?) annual boonie pepper festival, which turned out, as I suspected, to be a large(ish) village barbecue, complete with coconut crab races and slippery pigs.

Tinian also hosts some other stuff -- big latte stones, more impressive and certainly more precise, than any I have seen on Guam.

There's a Chinese money-laundering casino, providing the best luxury a 1980s Las Vegas hotel room can offer.

But while being picked up at the airport by a limousine, stocked with the latest in VHS technology, and ferried to your entirely pink-striped room, complete with a pair Lucy-and-Desi appropriate (also pink) twin beds, has a kind of novel appeal, really, the bomb holes are why I came, and probably why most come to the island.

Once a Japanese sugar plantation, and then the center of American bombing operations in the Pacific, the island is green and mostly empty.

San Jose, the bustling urban center, is made up of a few neighborhoods of well-tended flat concrete houses, a convenience store that serves as the island's Wal-Mart, and other things I am sure I missed.

There's a nice beach, an abandoned and deteriorating pier, and some lovely walkways through coconut trees.

Outside the village, signs of domestic life quickly give way to what feels like a large field -- essentially the rest of the island.

Heading north, concrete roads constructed in straight lines become gravel roads constructed in straight lines, the north- and south-bound lanes separated by a wide grass median.

Along the way there are a few notable sites here and there, a Japanese shrine circled by roadway, some memorials to Korean workers enslaved during the war, a rocky ocean geyser.

But the real attraction is what's not there -- an expansive air field long ago carved out, now partly swallowed up by jungle and overgrowth.

Runways have been reduced to pot-holed gravel, and little vines with purple flowers encroach like tarantula legs from the corners of the greenery.

Real spiders, and proliferate wasps nests, have taken over whatever remains of bomb shelters and the buildings that housed Japanese military operations, located in what now look like concrete parking lots.

Maybe it's just that abandoned places are usually abandoned for a reason -- containing pasts better left undisturbed.

And I am, of course, biased. But clusters of large spiders in corners and hallways, and walls matted with brown wasps' mounds seem to signal a place haunted by the deeply wrong -- bellwethers marking things long askew.

Pilgrimages to World War II memorial sites -- or any war memorial sites, but particularly those from the "good war" -- can veer into the "Saving Private Ryan" territory pretty quickly.

Not that it wasn't all tragic, but mindless sap about sacrifice and all that does irk me.

There are World War II sites all over Guam, landing beaches, artillery guns and tanks rotting in the jungle, pill boxes turned into trash cans. But familiarity from tourist buses and dog walks has sapped most of the power from the sites, beyond the satisfied knowledge that Things Happened Here.

This place, however, did not ring of sacrifice or tourist buses.

I am sure Japanese tourists unload every now and then to see the markers of the weapons that ended the war.

But there were few, in fact, none others when we arrived at the site of the two glass caskets enshrining the holes that once held the atomic bombs.

Rationally, I know that we bring to places our own set of notions. We expect and we find. Not always what we expect, but we bring something to the equation that changes what we find.

This place was not like that.

I could have arrived giddy, or bemused or reverent -- I don't think it would have mattered.

Two holes, carved into the ground, with ladders climbed by real people, a plaque or two, some photos, the leftover scars of mechanical uplift -- that's all there was.

And yet, the place throbbed, sadly, deeply.