Portrait of an Artist

One morning in November, I woke up and discovered small flakes of snow falling. I immediately bounded out of bed, for this was the first time I had seen snow. I tried to wake up my brother but he merely grunted and went back to sleep. I had overslept this morning and my parents had already gone to the mess hall for breakfast. I knew that they would bring our breakfast home for us so I took my time as I walked through the snow to the washroom. When mother and father came back from the mess hall, they found my brothers and me pelting each other with snowballs. We were promptly herded inside and placed next to a red hot stove to thaw out.

One of our favorite pastimes during the summer was building clubhouses. We did not have enough lumber to actually build a house, so we dug deep holes and covered the top with planks and cardboard. It was always nice and cool underground.

Once we decided to roast potatoes inside one of our huts, so we went to the mess and got a few potatoes from the cook. We built a fire inside our hut and put the potatoes over it, but the darn fire started to smoke, and we were afraid that someone outside might see it and scold us for starting a fire. To mask the smoke, I went outside and stirred up a lot of dust. Despite my attempted diversion, the man who took care of the boiler room came over and asked what we were doing. We explained that we were roasting (more like burning) potatoes. Luckily the boiler man was a good-natured fellow. He laughed, told us to get some new potatoes and he would let us roast them in his boiler room.

One of the most memorable experiences of camp life was that of going out into the desert. We were allowed to leave the gates of the camp but had to be back by a certain time. Once the whole block went on an excursion to the mountains that surround the camp. At one of the mountains we discovered a little gully that was glittering as if covered by diamonds. The diamonds turned out to be quartz crystals. We gathered the best and clearest ones and discovered some of them to be pink in color. On that same excursion we also found fossils of trilobites and ferns, which we still have today.

In the fall school started. My older brother was in junior high school now and we ceased to play together very much for now he had other interests, namely, girls.

The winter was quite severe and snow fell heavily. In some places where the snow had drifted it was as deep as three feet. I can still remember trudging to school on cold mornings. In the few minutes before class started, we would stand around a red-hot potbellied stove and tell one another of the movies we had seen or of the snowball fights in our respective blocks.