I was born in West Lafayette Indiana, grew up along the Wabash river a few minutes outside Battle Ground. My parents were school teachers and in the summers they rented, then bought, a house on the Penobscot Bay in Maine. We grew and caught our food. My parents rebuilt both houses from raw dilapidated shells, made their own furniture and clothes from scratch. Like, Dad scrounged barn wood to rebuild the walls and make chairs and couches, and Mom got raw wool and carded it, dyed it, spun it, wove it and sewed it.
Along in there we spent a sabbatical year in Vermont.
My parents split up, and when I was 12 Dad went to Upstate New York and Mom went to Central Virginia. I only spent a few summers in NY though.
A constant for all these locations was no TV service. No cable would come, and too far out for antennaes. Another was not many kids my age to hang out with. Dad was an English professor: he gave me books to live in.
I flunked sixth grade, ninth grade, then couldn’t muster the credits to graduate High School. I headed West. Lived on the streets of Phoenix Arizona for six months, then in Klamath National Forest in Oregon for another six. When it got cold I hitch hiked cross country to Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, and happened to get a GED. Hitched back across the country in the spring, then rode freight trains around the Rockies West for a year or so. I was in Wyoming when I decided I wanted a job that required education. I went to Sheridan WY and spent four years at two year school and got a one year certificate in Machine Tool Technology (eh, to my credit: while VP of the Academic Honor Society). Summers I spent on ranches, both in WY and across the border into MT. Which is mostly fencing. Endless fencing. Few better jobs exist for a 20 something.
I didn’t want to be a machinist. I figured that out the first month of school. After ‘graduation’ I did a bit more ranching and random construction, then the Methane Industry hit WY. I was real good at that. It’s just intense work.
A truism I have learned is, those who say they are hard workers aren’t. If they think they’re a hard worker it’s because the boss is whipping them and they’re whining. In order to be the best at anything you have to love it. And then it isn’t hard.
Sometimes though, hard work and a high paycheck isn’t the best situation for a bachelor. When it was time for a change of scenery and career, or really just change of lifestyle, I chose Tucson Arizona and Auto Tech. Which I wasn’t any good at. It’s too detailed to perform unfocused, and too slow to get me focused. Mostly I worked security. Not the boring ‘check IDs at the door,’ but exciting stuff. Undercover Loss Prevention at Circle Ks, Burglar Alarm First Response in the inner city, and delivering legal papers for Pima County Court. My court territory was the rural areas, the ones with ‘No Trespassing’ and ‘Beware of Dogs’ signs, out in the Sahuaros and Mesquite where the roads change location after every rain.
I also drove a school bus, and I’m here to tell you the stories from that job are crazier than from security.
In Tucson I got into music. I’ve always been moved by music, but never been very good at it. In high school I had a guitar and learned a few riffs, at Sheridan College I’d taken some theory classes and figured how it fits together, but I never truly understood how to make my music move others. I had a few steady gigs, two promoters even took me under their wing, but nothing clicked between me and the audience. Especially when I decided I had things of my own to say.
When I was 42 I moved near Nashville Tennessee. Not because I was ready to be a professional musician, but I wanted to get out of a city and houses were cheap here at the time. And around this music town I fully figured out I do not know how to make my music move people. But I did rediscover the love of wind and water from my childhood. And started studying how to make boats.
Now in my 50s I’d rather create crafts and build boats and work at a hardware store then be a musician. But I have written a few songs, and I hope you listen.
