To the Editor:

Snow stories recently in the Bulletin have been entertaining, especially when they have struck close to the geography and chronology of home.

I was interested in Mr. (Alan) Leonards weaving the themes of snow and memories. My parents house, almost within sight of the Leonard home, was and is on the side of a hill.

On one 1960s night after an all-day snowstorm, the clouds swept away, leaving a full moon that rendered an already impossibly beautiful landscape into a transient masterpiece. I put on my record of West Side Story, opened the window, breathed the exhilarating air and stared, dumbstruck, out into the improbably pure scene of hope, escape and peace.

The lyric, Somewhere a place for us, struck a deep cord in my sense of teen angst, although I did not have, at that moment, a clear sense of who the other part of us might be or that the phantom other might not think too highly of traipsing around in a somewhere full of six inches of very cold snow.

But the context is everything. The winter of 1961 was somewhat less transformative. Snow was plentiful, but I was in Alexandria, Virginia enduring the Americanized version of an English prep school whose credo must have been, Adversity builds character.

Even weeks of snow could not alleviate what the school really instilled in me, an aversion to the bullying and hazing of boarding school life.

One diversion did come on January 20 of that year when I tried to take a cab through downtown Washington. Streets were either blocked off by snow or cordoned off by Washington police to facilitate Kennedys inauguration. Snow was a mere impediment, and at that age, I couldnt have cared less for the politics of the day.

Mr. Leonard also noted Dr. Prestons pond, an aquatic development that became a reservoir of water and many family stories. I never knew about the dead bird he mentioned, but Im not surprised. The pond nearly killed me as well.

For those new to this area, the pond is a bowl in the center of the loop created by Warrior Drive.

Our father, Dr. Preston, firmly believed that my brothers and I would stay out of trouble if we threw ourselves into physical labor, and the pond offered ample opportunity for such diversion.

I guess his theory would have worked better if we had been shackled together full time as a chain gang. We were kids. However, the Preston Boys could not have done half the things we were accused of unless we had foregone sleep.

Anyway, my older brothers did all those things, not I. I just wanted to digress long enough to set the record straight.

We were put on notice to attend to various duties associated with the ponds construction in the 1950s. At first, the above-mentioned bowl had become an almost impenetrable jungle amid the old grape vineyard of Dr. Benno Von Kahlden, a ex-German physicist and my fathers patient. After Bennos death, my father bought his property and began to plan the garden estate, to clear the land, build a dam and generally give his life focus since he had quit hunting and serious fishing.

The small creek that meandered through the jungle allowed as how it would offer us three gallons a minute, enough to fill a small pond if we were patient. Clearing the land was not a meandering affair but a coordinated assault that frequently had its absurd moments.

We had been dispatched to the cleared bowl to pick up any remaining wood that was smaller than your wrist. As we piled these specimens for burning, we heard the roar behind us of arriving earth movers whose huge scoops hollowed out and refined the bowl and would have obliterated the puny sticks of wood we had spent hours collecting. But, the point was idle hands and the devils workshop and so on.

One morning before school my brothers and I stood staring into the burning brush we had collected. I know I felt at the moment like a smoke-cured version of walking uphill to school, both ways, through ten-foot drifts of snow. We were a resentful lot and probably better served by actual leg irons.

As smoke curled through our school clothes, I threw two shotgun shells I had into the fire to see what would happen. I like to think that we discussed the possibilities of trajectories and bullet wounds, but we didnt really. We just stood there six feet from the growing bonfire and waited.

Then our father drove onto the dam behind us, on his way to the hospital.

Scattering into the woods would have been an admission of sorts, and anyway he was there to evaluate our progress. Running would simply have compounded a negative evaluation. But there was the matter of shotgun shells warming in the fire. Not until he stood next to us looking into the blaze did I begin to contemplate the situation: Not that any of us, including our father would be hit by buckshot but that I had been wasting time and wasted two perfectly good shells.

Like a dream sequence in a movie we all stood there gazing at the fire, my mouth disconnected from my brain, because I started to complain about the difficulty of the work, the unyielding branches and so on. When my father offered the advice that if he were doing the work, he would use a bush ax, my disconnected mouth said, Why dont you?

A pause ensued as we continued to stare into the fire, when my father slapped me in the back of my head, practically catapulting me into the inferno, adding, And furthermore, I dont like your attitude.

School that day was a restful affair, safely away from burning bullets, near catastrophes, casual slaughters, even in smoke-filled clothes.

I do remember a snowy night during my younger years when my brothers rolled me down Oak Hall hill in a 55 gallon barrel. I didnt make it much past the library before the oil drum hit the curb. That night turned out well. At least I didnt make it to the train station.

Buck Preston