I knew about the original wind phone. After his cousin died of cancer, Itaru Sasaki installed an old phone booth in his yard in Ōtsuchi, Japan. He would go there to “talk” to his cousin, though he made it clear it wasn’t a literal communication; talking on the physical handset connected to a telephone in a phone booth made him feel still connected to his cousin, helped him grieve… or commune.
The next year the earthquake and tsunami that famously devastated Fukishima also laid waste to the low-lying areas of Ōtsuchi. The town lost ten percent of its population that day, with more than fourteen hundred either dead or missing. Following the disaster, Sasaki opened his wind phone up for everyone to use. And more than 30,000 people from the Tōhoku region and beyond have visited.
I also knew that a number of similar wind phones have shown up around the world: after the Ghost Ship Warehouse fire in Oakland, an artist set up a wind phone nearby. On a mountainside outside Dublin, Ireland. Most recently, I read an article about a wind phone (just the phone) installed in a copse of pine trees off a ski trail on Aspen Mountain in Colorado. The artist (who remained anonymous because it’s not legal to build a shrine in a National Forest) said he did it to honor those who died in this pandemic.
So, when I read about a wind phone way off trail in the King Range National Conservation Area along the Lost Coast, I was intrigued. Since I read about Sasaki’s original wind phone I’ve always wanted to visit. After losing my mom a few years ago, though, that desire to visit felt like a burning need. I can’t explain it…
No, I can explain it. She and I were close… only we weren’t close. That is to say, we operated on the same weird frequency; no one else in the family got our dumb jokes or references to movies that only we appreciated. But being on the same frequency meant not feeling the need to always be physically present.
So, I wasn’t there when she died.
My sister was. Unlike ours, their relationship was very push-pull and filled with nettle-like stings in a field of poppies. They got along… until they didn’t. But anyone will tell you she’s the more responsible daughter. When Mom retired she moved in with Dawn and her family in their immaculate house in Portland. Dawn took care of our mom, right up until the end. And, Well, beyond as well – she was the executor, too. A role she handled with automaton-like efficiency and detachment. A year later when I visited and broke down crying about mom, she chastised me to get over it. “You weren’t even here.”
If mom and I were on the same frequency, Dawn is the opposite phase.
Dawn wouldn’t understand the Wind Phone. I know this because we talked about it. In 2017 a storm blew the roof off Sasaki’s phone booth. When I was visiting Dawn at one point I read an article about how carpenters from the area volunteered their time and materials to repair the phone booth – many of whom had used it themselves after the Tsunami.
“For a phone booth? Connected to nothing? Why?” I tried to explain. She wasn’t even listening. “It’s on his property? Oh no. No, no, no, no.” She clucked her tongue, “That’s a waste. A waste.”
I thought of that exchange as I bounced along a partly-flooded, deeply rutted forest road. I’d recently replaced the shocks in Aldebaran (my trusty ’98 4Runner) and hoped nothing else would give up the ghost as we jostled and crawled into the wilderness.
“look over there, just at the edge of that bluff,” Jaycee said pointing. Standing on the fire lookout high above the forest floor I traced the focus along the bluff line until… there it was. A phone booth. Not just a phone. Not a rough approximation of a phone booth. It was a complete metal-and-glass phone booth like you would have found in any city twenty years ago, complete with accordion door.
“Holy shit,” I said. “And it just appeared there?” Jaycee was the first person on the backpacking forum to notice this wind phone. She had been the resident of this Forest Service fire watch tower for months.
“Yeah. I haven’t left this tower for more than a couple hours since last June. The nearest trail is…. there,” she pointed towards a bluff much closer to the tower. “Anything that big and heavy I would have noticed.”
“Shit, I hope so!” I said staring at the phone booth perched overlooking a cliff and the seemingly endless ocean beyond. “Like those silver obelisks that were showing up during the pandemic?”
“Something like that, I suppose.”
“Have you been out to it?”
“I went out there two days ago.”
“And?”
“First, it’s a pain in the ass to get to. You can’t head straight there because that ravine cuts between us,” she pointed. “So you’ve got to get back in the woods… I’ll draw you a map. Come on…”
I trained the binoculars on the phone booth one more time. “What happened?”
“On the hike?”
“When you picked up the phone?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Nothing…. But it was peaceful.”
I nodded and turned to follow her inside.
Jaycee was right – it was a pain in the ass to get inland of that ravine where you could get across it without ropes. I left Aldebaran and made my way through the forest. There was no trail, but I could roughly make out where Jaycee had bushwhacked her way through a few days earlier. Up a rise I could hear the ocean distant, but unmistakable. A little further and the trees gave way to the bluff and ahead of me was the phone booth.
I stopped and stared at it. I’d wanted to visit Sasaki’s but I didn’t anticipate ever getting out to Japan. The others seemed… I don’t know… There was a Northern Exposure episode (Mom and I loved Northern Exposure) where Chris tells Joel he’s building a trebuchet to fling a cow to create a “pure moment” of art, only to discover that Monty Python had flung a cow in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And there’s no point in repeating what’s already been done – it’ wouldn’t be a pure moment. Those other Wind Phones were in the right spirit, but their creators weren’t creating out of whole cloth.
But this one? There weren’t any creators, none that made any logical sense. This thing literally appeared here. That’s original. That’s not possible. And yet… I was staring at it not a hundred feet away. Part of me wanted to turn around. But most of me was already in motion and I crossed the distance in a determined stride.
I pushed the little handle on the accordion door and it opened with a creak of metal on metal. I stepped inside and admired the black phone with its steel-covered wire to the black handset hung in front of the keypad. I stepped back out and looked at it, expecting it to vanish in front of me.
It didn’t.
I walked around the phone booth. No wires. No footsteps in the soft ground either; the soft wind-blown grass around the phone booth waved in the gusts, untrammeled.
I stepped back into the phone booth and closed the door. I took a deep breath and picked up the receiver and slowly brought it to my ear.
Silence. Heavy, persistent silence.
Tears filled my eyes.
I spoke. “I love you, Mom,” I said as the tears started to roll down my cheeks. “I miss you.” I let the tears fall unabated. I let a wracking wave of grief sweep through me like the surf so far below. The booth shuddered as a gust of wind blew up from the sea, whistling through cracks in the booth.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Mom,” I cried. “I’m so sorry. So sorry, so…” I wept openly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there…”
“You were there,” I heard her voice. “You were always there, baby. You are always with me and I’m always with you.”
I smiled.
The tears still came, but I had nothing more to say. I set the receiver back on the hook, opened the creaky accordion door and stepped out onto the grassy bluff. I started down the hill to the forest. Before I entered the trees I looked back but I didn’t see the phone booth. It might have been still there on the bluff but I was too far down to see it. Or it might have disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived. I sniffled, smiled, and didn’t feel the need to check one way or the other. I started back into the forest towards Aldebaran.
