In 1998, she and her sons, Michael Havey and Tab Uno, attended a reunion of internees. It was her first visit back to the camp, and her mother had recently died. The camp had become a cow pasture, with nothing much left but concrete foundations and elm trees that were planted by the inmates five decades before.

Lily Havey is a well-known artist in stained-glass creations. Her works have been displayed and sold in galleries, and she is commissioned for major projects.

But decades after the internment, the camp experiences triggered a powerful response that found its outlet in watercolors.

"She slowly began to paint these watercolors, and suddenly ... memories and experiences ... began to flood out," said Michael Havey.

Michael Havey, operations manager at KUER, the University of Utah radio station, said the camp art works "all sort of came out in a rush." When she did one painting, that would spark another memory and she would make another.

"Many of the early paintings were really quite angry in a way, that they held a lot of this suppressed sadness and frustration and anger."

He recalled the reunion in 1998. They arrived two days before the reunion and received permission to visit the campsite. They found the foundation of the barrack where Lily Havey had lived.

"It was the first time she had ever come back since leaving the camp all those decades ago," he said in a telephone interview.

As a child she had yearned to be free as the jackrabbits, to see what was outside the wire, to find out what the state was like across the border. "And Kansas was so tantalizingly close," he said.

As a surprise, Michael Havey drove her to the border of Kansas. "We drove out there, and we took some pictures, and stood out there, and she walked into Kansas.

"I said, 'Do you want to do anything further?"'

She said, "No. Now I've been to Kansas. That's enough."

The camps are deserted today, returning to the soil. Among the sagebrush are broken plates and pipes, foundations, blocks of wood, rusted bolts set in concrete, pieces of glass, strands of barbed wire.

But in the vivid paintings of Lily Havey, the internment experience will live on: sometimes terrifying, sometimes sad, always wrong.

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com