I was born in Salem, Oregon, so many years ago that I don’t remember the event. People tell me that I was a beautiful baby, and I have no choice but to take their word.
I grew up in a log house located a mile west of the town of Aurora, Oregon, population about 500 at the time. It was a farming area. I learned a few essential skills in my childhood, such as how to build a fire, drive a nail, and change a tire. I had three much older siblings, a brother and two sisters, but by the time I reached school age, they were all out of the house. My upbringing was a weird mash-up of “youngest of four” and “only child.”
I was a so-so student, torn between curiosity and boredom. It was a small, rural, public school. There were too many students for the number of teachers. In my early years, one activity that I hated with a passion was writing. The ideas came easily, as I was the owner/operator of a very active imagination–but I hated to write, simply because holding a pencil hurt my hand. I assumed everyone else had the same issue because my classmates always groaned when writing assignments were given.
In high school, my freshman year was truly awful. I was not alone: two of the freshman teachers were fired after that school year for incompetence. My classmates and I, while glad to see them go, had to cope with the results of their ineptitude. I did, however, take a typing class my freshman year (yes, “typing” not “keyboarding”).
Starting my sophomore year, things turned around. I got a good math teacher, and he helped me make up for my lost freshman year. I got a lit teacher who was dumb as a post, which motivated me to work hard just so I could make him look really stupid. Most importantly, I took a journalism class with Mr. Wes Benge. Mr. Benge pushed me to do more, think harder, use my imagination–and write, write, write. I spent a lot of hours on the typewriters and got faster and more accurate. I joined the school newspaper staff after the journalism class and stayed with it throughout high school. The quality of my writing improved enough that I won first prize in sportswriting at the Mount Hood Community College Mass Media Conference my junior year, and third place in editorials my senior year. Our paper was first in our division both years, and I was a very proud editor-in-chief as a senior.
In the midst of my high school years, my uncle David was a big influence. He found great joy in my imagination and storytelling. He loaned me the book The Technique of Clear Writing by Robert Gunning, which had a powerful impact on me. At some point in my sophomore year, at age 15 or so, I found that typing had become very natural. Writing had transformed from a pain into pleasure. A yearning to write professionally began.
I graduated in 1977, and went on to college as a journalism major at the University of Oregon. My first-ever college class was Shakespeare, taught by Dr. William Strange. As luck would have it, Dr. Strange was to be the absolute best professor I had in my four years at the U of O. He was passionate about language, about the poetic and graceful nature of words, and he could brilliantly share that passion with his students. If Mr. Benge taught me how to write during high school, Dr. Strange taught me why to write in college. My yearning to write grew several fold.
By my junior year at the U of O, I was tired. Tired of being poor all the time, tired of going to class all day and studying all night and on weekends, tired of producing the kind of tripe that college students pump out to demonstrate “knowledge”, and tired of professors reading my essays and saying, “I think…that’s a ‘B’ today.” I didn’t much care anymore. It seemed to all be a game: go to class, go to the prof’s office hours so s/he’d know your name, ask reasonably good questions, do the reading, pump out some tripe, take tests, hope for an ‘A.’ Rinse, repeat, ho hum. In order to graduate I needed a math/science credit, so I took a computer class. That change everything. I loved the discipline, the logic, the simple syntax. Computer languages came easily to me: BASIC, Pascal, COBOL at first, and many more later. It occurred to me (this was about 1980) that I could make a living at this, as the industry was growing rapidly and begging for talent.
There came a point when I was just done with college. I started sending out resumés and crossing my fingers. I even briefly relocated to a friend’s apartment in Cupertino, California, a short walk from Apple world headquarters, and had several interviews in Silicon Valley. Finally, I got a call from Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis, Oregon. Could I drive up for an interview? They liked my resumé and felt I was a serious candidate. That was Tuesday. I drove up on Wednesday, interviewed all day Thursday, and had the job Friday morning.
I worked at HP for six years, then followed one of my bosses to the Linn-Benton Education Service District for four years. Then I went back to HP for seventeen more. Sadly, I found that HP had changed, and the warm, welcoming culture I had known was eroding. Furthermore, HP was outsourcing (“offshoring”) all programming to India and China. It made me sick, to see the company that I’d grown to revere become just another vehicle for “enhancing shareholder value” and ignoring both customers and employees. Without the delicate, and powerful, bond between customers and employees, HP quickly fell from grace–and I couldn’t take any more, so I left.
I was unemployed for a couple of months. Best two months of my life to that point! Between no money coming in and the king’s ransom we paid for COBRA health coverage, we were not doing very well on paper. But I felt truly free for the first time in my life: no school, no job, no gotta-get-up-early-every-morning stress, no BS meetings with my boss wanting to me to list all project risk factors, known and unknown.
I spent my time in pursuit of one job: at Oregon State University, right there in Corvallis, Oregon. I researched the systems they used, their personnel, the IT culture. I liked what I found, and I thought I could provide some new blood. My research and preparation impressed them, and I got the job. Yay! Boo! It was back to work for me, and I was somewhat ready–but the memory of that summer of freedom stuck with me.
Seven years later, my wife and I decided to move to a cottage in the southern Oregon mountains. Our reasons for moving were numerous, but one was that we were tired of the rainy, Willamette Valley winters. We wanted a little variety. So I told my new boss at OSU (poor woman) that we were going. I would work with her if she wanted to keep me, or we could part ways. She kept me. For the next three years, I worked remotely from a mountaintop (5000 ft. elevation) via a satellite connection. If one has to work, having a view of a six-mile long lake from one’s home office window is a good way to do it!
Then, after thirty-seven years in the Information Technology business, wearing titles from Programmer to Senior Analyst to Data Architect, I got the news that our customers were going to drop our department’s services, and our group of 12 would be downsized to two. I was not one of the two. I’d seen it coming, and Amy and I had talked at length about what was next for us. Lacking any specific place we both wanted to move to, we decided to sell our cottage and buy a small motorhome, from which we could see the U.S. and maybe find a place to settle. Meanwhile, we’d have some fun travelling and being free. Mental images of my unemployed summer returned, and I was pretty jazzed for this lifestyle change.
We rented a big storage unit and filled it with the stuff we’d use to start up a new household, sometime, somewhere. We threw a lot of stuff away, and donated even more. The critical few items went into our motorhome (a Leisure Travel Vans Unity named Nevada). On August 1, 2018, our adventure began. We drove north to Puget Sound, then east across Washington and Idaho, going into Montana. Then back across Idaho to eastern Oregon. Then back to southern Oregon and the Oregon coast. The rain and fog of autumn set in, and we decided we needed a bigger living space. After much research, we decided on a 27-foot Lance 2295 trailer, with a Ram 1500 Ecodiesel as our tow vehicle. We bought both, loved them at first sight, and moved our motorhome stuff to the pickup (Ruby, ’cause she’s red) and trailer (Lance, ’cause he’s a Lance). We sold the motorhome, spent Thanksgiving and Christmas back in the hated rain, then headed out again.
We drove the length of California, from Hilt to Needles, then overwintered at Desert Trails RV Park, just southwest of Tucson, Arizona. At Desert Trails, we had a ball: hiking in the desert, meeting people, writing for me, knitting for Amy, seeing the local sights (and Tucson has a lot of sights to see!). We got comfortable with our new trailer and plotted a course for the spring and summer. We drove up to Phoenix for a few MLB spring training games, then headed west to Joshua Tree National Park. Then on to Death Valley N.P. Then up to St. George, Utah, for Zion Canyon, then Bryce Canyon N.P., Capitol Reef N.P., Goblin Valley State Park, Canyonlands N.P., and Arches N.P. Then up to Lander and Dubois, Wyoming, for The Tetons N.P., and back to Montana for Glacier N.P. The number of amazing sights we’ve seen, the people (and dogs) we’ve met, and the myriad things we’ve learned defy counting. Suffice it to say that it’s been great.
Along the way, wherever we’ve been and in whatever weather, I’ve made time to write. One afternoon, in Cut Bank, Montana, I finished my first novel, Endless Horizon. Someday, I hope to share it with the world. Meanwhile, I’m working on my second novel, The House on the Hill.