I am a 50 year old father of 4 daughters and 1 son (28 to 19 years old), helped raise several more stepchildren and wandering teens.
I guess I have always been a wanderer myself as I spent many years hitching, hoboing and living on the road. I built, traveled and lived in several log houses, buses, vans, trucks, and tipi's all over California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Idaho and my favorite place in the world is the Pacific Northwest. Two of the kids were born on the bus but when my kid’s mom was pregnant with number 4 we realized there was no more room in the bus for additional beds and settled down in northern Idaho to build a house. We still traveled every year to make some money tree planting, picking fruit or go to some dead shows or the Rainbow Gathering. We Never missed the Barter Fairs especially Tonasket before holing up for another long winter.
As time went on the story of my life started to look like the back of a Louis L’ Amour novel where he listed the things he had done in his life, I had worked as a logger, ditch digger, surveyor, fire fighter, rabbit and chicken eviscerator, traveled with a Mexican circus, been a bar bouncer, cook, waiter, dishwasher, migrant farm worker, picked coffee and bananas, carried hod, chipped bricks, cleaned stalls for hogs, horses, cows and elephants, built a few houses, torn down a sawmill, owned a screen-printing, tye-dye and sign painting business and now design water, sewer and stormdrain systems for commercial and municipal applications to fend off a state of general cashlessness. I fight boredom and wanderlust with a varied collection of interests from all things dead related, collecting live shows (once on cassette, now on cd and dvd), surfing, my vw's (a 61 bus and 70 bug), labor history, the IWW, gardening, alternative energy, earthships, reading and building stuff. I love and collect artwork, Rick Griffin posters, sketches and other psychedelic art. I believe in and hope to return to the communal lifestyle and the barter system as the primary way of life and economics. I wholly support anarchy, but could possibly settle for some good solid socialism in the meantime. I am a Doctor in the Church of the Subgenus and like to encourage young folks to dissent, act up and search out a variety and alternatives to behavior. I have the greatest partner in the world as she supports, is amused and is even proud of the madness which is me. We now have started a Macadamia Nut processing business. We have 18 trees and all the equipmeent to husk, dry, crack and package a good percentage of all the macadamia nuts grown in southern california. Another wacky job for the resume.
