High School: High School

I clearly remember feeling real terror during my junior high school years concerning attending San Gorgonio high school. This was a very new campus located in San Bernardino. I had attended summer school classes in that facility several times, and I didn’t feel comfortable with the place or the staff. It seemed, somehow, wrong to me.

Not that I had any choice, of course, but I was not looking forward to my four years of high school at all. First, the school had guards (something I had never seen in an educational environment before), and I found that very intimidating. Second, it had a reputation for roughness (very probably undeserved but something that I took on faith at the time) which made me very hesitant about attending. I had visions of fighting off bullies and getting beaten up constantly, something which was not thrilling, to say the least.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my parents were in the throws of a decision. They wanted to leave San Bernardino (where we had lived for most of our lives) and move up to the mountain community of Lake Arrowhead (or one of the surrounding communities). They had plans to start a new business in Blue Jay (a small town a few miles from the lake) which sold my fathers artwork directly to the public. It must have been an agonizing decision for them: stay with a job at Norton and get a stable paycheck, or take a chance and start their own business?

They decided to start their own business, and we moved up to the mountains (still technically part of San Bernardino county). My parents wisely timed all of these changes to occur so that I could graduate from junior high and start my freshman year at my new high school in the mountains: Rim Of The World High School.

This new high school was an entirely different environment than San Gorgonio. There were no guards of any kind, no fences and a much looser operating style. I got the distinct impression that Rim Of The World was much better funded than San Gorgonio high, although I could be mistaken.

In general, the teachers at Rim (as our school was affectionately nicknamed) were of high quality and the environment was conducive to learning and studying. The school is located, as the name implies, directly and literally on the “rim” of the San Bernardino Mountains. On one side of route 18 (the main road into Lake Arrowhead) is the school, and on the other is a series of cliffs plunging down to San Bernardino. There were trees and nature all around and plenty of space to spread out and breath.

For the longest time, I did not view my four years of high school fondly. I took quite a few loses during those times, and more or less felt like I was treading water without making any real forward progress.

As the years have gone by, however, my viewpoint has changed and I have come to realize that in actuality those four years were good to me. The school itself was probably just about the best public school in the state at the time, and the environment was much more gentle on me than other schools would have been.

My high school years were among the most tumultuous of my life. I was going through tremendous changes and was under huge pressures that I didn't understand and couldn't seem to control. Not only did I need to get a decent education (which I knew that I needed to be properly set up for life on my own), but I had to deal with the results of thousands of other students going through much the same things as I was. On top of that, there was incredible pressure to "prove myself", and do whatever was necessary to be able to survive alone in the outside world.

I gained many things from my four years of high school. A good education was just one of the benefits. I also learned that I was very independent and self-motivated, and able to control my emotions and reactions in difficult circumstances. I discovered that I could operate under pressure without caving in, and I could handle just about any situation. My creative abilities blossomed, primarily because I needed to isolate myself from the pressure and emotions swirling around me, and creating something good was an excellent way to do that.

I drew the picture shown below while I was a freshman in high school. This is something that actually happened to me. You see, it was kind of a tradition to "trash freshmen" for the first few days of school.