We find honor for the young men who fought for the country that despised them. We find words of useless repentance etched in stone after stone. Later, we plod through six inches of untracked snow, across the sagebrush plain, to the derelict buildings. According to a map on one of the plaques, these are part of an old administration complex. They re rotting, but curiously untouched by vandals.
Doors still swing easily and windows hold fragments of glass.
The interior walls, though crumbling, are still institutional green. And Charles looks up and finds, caught under a light fixture, a scrap of wallpaper as bright in this dry climate as it must have been in 1942. Green leaves and red roses. But there s nothing here to renovate. And the only new buildings are far away prosperous farms pr ofiting from land the internees made fertile.