John M. Peters currently lives in a small travel trailer currently located somewhere in North America. It’s the four of us right now: our demon-spawn cat, Ella; our cute little dog, Charlie; my wonderful wife, Amy; and myself. Although we change our setting every few days, I’ve always found time to write. One exciting afternoon in Cut Bank, Montana, I finished the main writing on my first novel, Endless Horizon. Someday, I hope to share it with the world. Meanwhile, I’m working on my second novel, Clear Lake Miracle.
The journey to Cut Bank started in our home state of Oregon on Christmas Day, 2018. The weather in Oregon was normal for late December, which is to say, “awful.” So over the next few days, we drove the length of California–from Hilt to Needles. We spent the winter 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 starting the spring and summer. We drove up to Phoenix for a few MLB spring training games, then headed west to visit Joshua Tree and Death Valley National Parks. Then up into Utah for Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Goblin Valley State Park, Canyonlands, and Arches. Then up to Lander and Dubois, Wyoming, to visit the awe-inspiring Tetons. Finally, up to Cut Bank, Montana to visit Glacier National Park. The number of amazing sights we’ve seen, the people (and their dogs) we’ve met, and the myriad things we’ve learned defy counting. Suffice it to say that it’s been great.
The real start of our traveling adventure was five months earlier, on August 1, 2018. I had retired the previous day, and we drove our little motorhome away from our cottage in Southern Oregon. We headed north to Puget Sound, then east across Washington and Idaho, into Montana. Then we headed back across Idaho to eastern Oregon. Then we continued to Southern Oregon, and the Oregon coast. The rain and fog of coastal autumn set in, and we decided we needed a bigger living space, pronto. After much research, we decided on a 27-foot Lance 2295 trailer, with a Ram 1500 Ecodiesel pickup as our tow vehicle. We bought both, quickly grew attached, 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 and spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in the miserable Oregon rain. When Christmas Day rolled around, we were ready to go.
Our adoption of the traveling lifestyle started with two motivators: snowy winters plus smoky summers, and my job going away. Our cottage in the mountains east of Ashland was turning out to be a gilded cage. We made firewood in the spring– racing against time before the wildfire smoke choked us; in the winter, the snow was deep, so we kept the fire going and the long driveway clear. Plus, I worked full-time. We knew that, as beautiful as the cottage’s setting was, a change would be necessary. Then I got the news that my workgroup of twelve would soon be downsized to two–and I would not be one of the two. Amy and I had talked at length about our options should this happen. We had some money, but no specific place to which we both wanted to relocate. So we decided to sell our cottage and travel around in a small motorhome. Maybe we could even find a place to settle, at some point. We rented a big storage unit and filled it with the stuff we’d use to start up a new household someday. We threw a lot of stuff away, and donated even more. The critical few items went into our motorhome, a Leisure Travel Vans Unity that we named Nevada.
Three years prior, Amy and I had moved to a cottage tucked 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 more weather variety and a lot more sunshine. So I told my then-brand-new boss at Oregon State University (where I had worked for seven years) that we were going. I would work with her on a telecommuting plan if she wanted to keep me, or we could part ways. She kept me. So I worked remotely from our 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!
Just before getting the job at OSU, I was unemployed for two glorious summer months. I had left my previous job at Hewlett-Packard, we had no money coming in, and we were paying a king’s ransom for COBRA health coverage. On paper, we were not doing very well. But I felt truly free for the first time in my life! I spent my time researching a potential job with Oregon State University, located 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 ideas. 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.
My first job, at Hewlett-Packard, lasted six years, then I followed one of my bosses to the Linn-Benton Education Service District for four years. Then I went back to HP for seventeen more years. Sadly, I found that HP had changed, and the warm, welcoming culture I had come to love was eroding. HP was rapidly becoming just another company obsessed with “enhancing shareholder value” and ignoring the well-being of both customers and employees. HP quickly fell from grace. I couldn’t stand to watch the collapse from within, so I resigned.
After four years, at the University of Oregon, I was ready to leave and go to work. I sent 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. I had several interviews in Silicon Valley, without success. Then 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. For the next six years, I was sure there was no place to work on earth.
By my junior year at the U of O, I was tired. Tired of being poor, 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, hope for an ‘A.’ Rinse, repeat. But to graduate, I needed a math/science credit–so I took a computer programming class. OMG! 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–whether or not the talent had a college degree.
I graduated high school 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. Dr. Strange was 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. My high school journalism career had taught me how to write, but Dr. Strange taught me why.
My uncle David had always found great joy in my imagination and storytelling, more so as my abilities grew during high school. 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 become a pleasure now that doing it no longer hurt my hand. A yearning to write professionally began.
Starting in my sophomore year of high school, life turned around: we got a good math teacher, and he made up for our lost freshman year; we got a lit teacher who was dumb as a post, which made us work all the harder to point out his shortcomings; and I took a journalism class with Mr. Wesley 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. The quality of my writing was good enough to win 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.
Reaching high school, my freshman year was truly awful. Two of my teachers were fired after my freshman year due to incompetence. My classmates and I, while glad to see them go, had to cope with their poor results. I did, however, take a typing class my freshman year (yes, “typing” not “keyboarding”). I was okay at it, but I needed more practice.
In elementary and middle schools, I was a good student but, torn between curiosity and boredom, not great. I attended a small, rural, public school, which had too many students for the available teachers. 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. I figured out years later that I hated to write because it hurt my hand to hold a pencil! No teacher ever noticed, or asked me, or worked with me on how to properly hold a writing instrument. I just assumed everyone’s hand hurt to write because everyone groaned when writing assignments were given.
I was born in Salem, Oregon about six decades ago. I don’t remember the event, but they tell me I was a beautiful baby, and I will take their word for it. I grew up in a log house about 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. So my upbringing was a weird mash-up of “youngest of four” and “only child.”