Houston approaches the obelisk with a sense of wonder and superstition. She fears crossing inside the fence surrounding it and feels the presence of her fellow internees. "Then, as if rising from the ground around us on the valley floor, I began to hear the first whispers, nearly inaudible, from all those thousands who once had lived out here, a wide, windy sound of the ghost of that life."
Wandering farther into Manzanar, Houston discovers the scattered rock gardens that the men of the camp arranged around the steps to their barracks. She describes the rocks, selected carefully for their shape and appearance, as "characteristically Japanese" and as monuments to "something enduringly human." These stones, like the obelisk, also have a voice. "Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who beautified his doorstep."
Houston ends the description of her tour of Manzanar at a stepping stone she imagines marked the front of her family's barracks. This time, the stone holds less significance than the chain of thoughts it provokes. She remembers her father burning cork to treat her mother's ailing back on the steps a few days before the family left the camp, and she finds the memory she has come to reclaim: the "rekindled wildness in Papa's eyes," she writes. It was the look of defiance he bore as the family departed the camp in her father's prized but dilapidated blue Nash.
Houston's return to Manzanar nearly 30 years after she left proceeded from a feeling that she had imagined her childhood experiences. Shame had prevented her family members from speaking openly about the camp. The stone artifacts she discovers lead her through a series of recollections, culminating in the resurrection of a proud and defiant father, that add substance to her past. As she left Manzanar for the last time, she "would carry that image ... as the rest of my inheritance."