So it happened that when he was little and new in the woods, the boy rode a Caterpillar tractor in the morning and a gravel truck in the afternoon and helped the crew of raw and rough men build a road almost to Canada.
The year was 1944. The road had something to do with a war and with the chance that war might come to Minnesota. There were nine men in the camp, and only one woman, the boy's grandmother, who cooked for them. The boy helped. But he missed his mother and every day needed to be brave.
Even now, his summer in the cook-camp remains with him--the sights and sounds of the men's arduous work, the fun of learning the fine art of spitting, the memory of Grandma by oil lamp writing seven letters, one a night, to his mother in Chicago, letters she intended to mail "good and hard" from the town thirty miles distant, because of something the boy let slip about life at home while his father was off in the war. The cookcamp became, for a time, the boy's home--and has meant a kind of home for him ever since.
