The long road back to the page

In the small rural community of Cedar Hills, Oregon, just west of Portland, I attended Cedar Hills Elementary. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Zoet, introduced us to the wonderful world of books and how to check them out from the school library. The title Pilot Down, Presumed Dead by Marjorie Phleger caught my eye. It was then that I was hooked on stories of high adventure and self-discovery. I remember being told that this book was "meant for older readers." With permission from my teacher I checked it out. Unbeknownst to me, what I held in my hands was a story that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I began imagining myself on a deserted desert island struggling for survival. I began to write short stories about life in the wilderness and what, in my mind, survival would actually look like.

Having survived multiple marriages and divorces, stepbrothers and half-siblings, my older sister and I went to live with our mom and her second husband. My school years were a chaotic challenge of jumping from school to school, and making lasting friendships was an exercise in futility. Eventually, however, the "family" ended up in Bend, Oregon, where I attended junior high and high school.

I remember very distinctly during my ninth grade year being given our term assignment. Lori Rich, my ninth grade English teacher, informed us that we were going to read Dickens whether we liked it or not. We were free to choose between two of his most popular works: A Tale of Two Cities or Great Expectations. I chose Great Expectations. The assignment stated that we were to write a summarization of each chapter, describing the events, the historic time frame and the characters.

I worked feverishly on my journal. Everyone in class turned in their assignments and we eagerly and cautiously awaited our grades, which Mrs. Rich would give to us individually in her office. Eagerly, because everyone felt as though they had done a relatively good job. Cautiously, because she also had the reputation of being a very stern task master and did not put up with any tomfoolery whatsoever in her class. In my mind, her natural attractiveness was the antithesis of her strict demeanor. As a young teenager, I was smitten with her. Certain I had done 'A' work, when she handed me my journal with a B- at the top of the page, I was devastated. As if that were not enough, she told me that I didn't do this work on my own and that if I had, I was a terrible writer. Downtrodden and heartbroken, I walked out of her office. I swore I would never write again, and I didn't for 53 years.

During the early years of retirement, my wife and I left Oregon and moved to Arizona. That's when I started writing again, at the ripe old age of 65. My first book, Of Water, Sand and Cedar, is a semi-fictional tale about mystical and mysterious rocking chairs that had hidden powers. The idea for the book came to me after I had been run over by a truck at the ripe old age of 15. My body sustained serious injuries, the likes of which I would eventually pay for the rest of my life. My step-grandparents had an old wooden rocking chair, and when I sat in it, all of my physical pain became a distant memory. For years I mulled the idea over in my mind, and after many starts and stops it finally came to fruition during our first year in Arizona.

My second book is centered around events I have experienced in the woods during my park ranger years in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. These events sparked memories of earlier experiences growing up in Bend while hunting in the Cascade Range, and other memories of the Oregon coast while digging for razor clams. I have never forgotten these events and thought they were excellent fodder for yet another book, Council of the Majestics.

My hope is that you, the reader, will enjoy the mystical and mysterious adventures contained in these pages, causing your imagination to run wild with the possibilities of what could actually be. The things we don't let our minds accept because they fall outside the known parameters of reality.