And Then There Were Two…

Howdy All!

It’s Clinton .  I’ve had an amazing 1st week in japan and can’t wait to share these incredible experiences with my family and friends. Patrick and I are resting from a long day at work at the Onsen and taking the opportunity to upload some pictures that we took after dropping Dave off at the bullet train.

This is taken from the center of Rikuzentakata.

This is everything to the North & West. A handful of contractors and construction workers come through to drop rubble into piles.

This is the rest of the town on the East side of the bay. The tree in the distance in one of many planted hundreds of years ago when the town was founded, but all of its brothers and sisters were swept away.

Here is P-San framed against one of the dozen or so two story trash piles there.  That building its next to is the last intact structure within walking distance of the location.

Here is us parked by the building. As you can see it has a tree wedged through the second-story balcony. We left the van in the hopes to get up close to the last pine tree.

Words failed the majesty of this tree, but I’ll go ahead anyway. I was awash with emotions as we drew near. The utter desolation in every direction  was total and complete, but this tree, hundreds of years old, orphaned and alone, stood over fifty feet tall, erect in defiance of this insanity. We kept a respectful distance and shot some brief video, and then headed back to the car.

I’m not posting these to upset or depress you, just to provide a sense of scope or scale for anyone who is only following on the news. This raw footage from Ground Zero is what gets us out of bed every morning and what motivates us to do the work we can do. Patrick and I are incredibly pumped for TJ to get here (He’s about 10 hours from touching down) and we’re eager to get back to work at the Volunteer Center tomorrow.