Move Over Tom Sawyer

A year can seem like a whole lifetime to a child. A lifetime of adventures can be had in 365 days. I was 13 the year my family lived in Prineville, Oregon. Prineville is a small town nestled in a valley between flat topped high desert mountains. The town is in the very heart of the state. The big event of the year is the annual Rock Hound Festival, where people from all over gather to show off their prize rocks and trade or buy rocks from each other. What I loved about the town was the weather. It was exciting weather, it invited adventure.

We arrived in the summer. It would get so hot that you could see the air blur in waves over our new backyard. On these days we would pack our inflatable raft into our Ford Pinto and head for the reservoir. The water there was thick with tiny floating algae and I loved to jump into it punching holes through the bright green surface exposing the dark water below. I would watch as the algae rearranged itself like clouds metamorphosing to cover up the dark water. In the evening, when the air cooled quickly, thunderstorms rolled over the valley crackling and streaking the steep cliffs with light. Then the rain would start. Giant, bloated raindrops crashed into the ground, each one creating a small crater and a puff of dust until the ground was thick with water.

In the fall, school started. It was the only year I remember with any detail as an adult. I had career planning, sex education and indoor/outdoor sports. I learned about aptitude and interviews, syphilis and c-sections, archery and candle making. I couldn't have created a more interesting curriculum myself. We took field trips to a ski resort where the bunny slope became our classroom. We spent the day sliding and skidding through the snow, mostly on our behinds. We did science projects where the whole point of the experiment was to see how badly it could go wrong. The only thing better than going to school was snow days.

Snow was a novelty to me, I had only experienced it a few times before. In the high desert it snows a lot in winter. My mother hated the snow. She had to put chains on the car just to get to the hospital where she worked a few blocks away. To me it was endless amusement. There was an irrigation ditch behind our house that froze over and made a treacherous skating rink. I nearly caught pneumonia there after falling through the ice on two occasions. The hills nearby were a bonanza of whoopdy-doos for riding inter tubes down. The snow was so deep at one point that we made giant snowballs the size of our car. We rolled them all around the field until they were to big to push any further. Our plan was to build the biggest snowman ever. When we couldn't figure out how to lift the gargantuan things into place we foraged for some plywood and laid it between the giant balls to make a room. We expanded our ice house over the next two days while it continued to snow. We spent a winter full of frigid days inventing new ways to play with ice and snow.

When spring came, I started to venture further from our home. The flat-topped mountains were an irresistible destination. The closest one to our house had a large pale green patch near the top the size of a football field. My brother and I had been discussing the green patch for weeks trying to figure out what it was. A UFO landing pad, an Indian burial ground, Kryptonite? We couldn't wait to get up there. One sunny morning we woke to a familiar note left on the table. "Hi kids, have some cereal for breakfast and don't forget to brush your teeth. I'll be home soon." My Mom left these notes whenever she got called into the hospital. She was a surgical technician and she had to drop everything whenever someone needed an emergency appendectomy or to have their spleen put back together. This was our chance to go to the green patch. We packed some peanut butter sandwiches and headed for the hills. We crossed the mint fields hitching a ride on the automatic sprinklers that crawled around the field in massive circles. We balanced on the giant pipes and let the water rain down, cooling our upturned faces. There was no path up to the green patch, so we disregarded all fences as we worked our way up the mountain. A full skeleton of a cow lying bleached in the sun distracted our progress for several hours. We studied each part and then used the favorable ones as weapons against the imaginary forces of evil. It was late afternoon by the time we reached our goal. We were unimpressed with the pale green scree that spilled down the side of the mountain. We returned home with bits of the rock in our pockets as proof of our accomplishment.

When summer began to heat the valley again, we were packing our things into a U-Haul truck. I was not happy about leaving this place that was so full of things yet to explore. My mother told me that it was too difficult to keep track of us if she was on call at the hospital all the time. We were moving back to our boring old hometown. The seeds of independence had already sprouted though and even moving back home didn't stifle my desire to explore. The sense of adventure I found that year never left me.