Back on the road again we took the Air Stream trailer north and arrived in Gold Beach, Oregon a small logging town just north of the California border. We purchased a 5 acre piece of property on the shores of the Rogue River 3 miles from the inlet to the Pacific Ocean. This estuary offered an amazing variety of activates for a young adventurous child. Each day would offer a low tide exposing over a 100 feet of tidelands that would trap small animals and offer hours of entertainment. Every winter the river would flood its banks swelling into the property and causing uncertainty on the part of my mother as to whether this year would be the one that washed away our house which was built on stilts. For me it was a chance to take my mini kayak out and paddle through trees I normally played around during the summer.
On this property we parked the Air Stream trailer and proceeded to construct a 24 foot Yurt to live in. This Yurts was constructed of canvas wrapped around a wooden mesh for the walls and 2×4 beams tied together in the center with a clear acrylic dome. During the winter months when winds would reach over 50 MPH through the river basin the sides of the yurt would sway inwards and I always feared it would lift off and fly away.
Having decided the yurt was not well suited for the climate and raising a family my father happened upon the idea of building a geodesic dome in its place. So next thing I know we have a series of hexagonal pieces assembled in the driveway and viola we are now living in a dome. Which I thought was the coolest thing in the world and proceeded to construct my own scale model out of cardboard which I brought into 3rd grade for show and tell. I do however quite clearly recall my father’s dismay at the act of roofing and sheet rocking this multisided house.
I was introduced to the wonderful world of computers by my Mom’s Father on a visit to their house with his Vic 20 and I was immediately hooked. I was so amazed at what it could do with a coupe of lines of code that you typed in from a magazine. I was so enthralled by it that he gave us the Vic 20 and I dug into it later upgrading to a tape drive were I could store the programs I entered without having to retype them every time I wanted to execute them. ( I still have that very same Vic 20 stored) Then commodore announced the 64 bit computer and I drove my parent’s nuts until they finally bought me one. It was the beginning of the end and I became the resident computer expert even teaching the class how to use it when they got one in 4th grade.
After going through the 4th grade in public school I was bored of class and was continually finishing my homework ahead of schedule and doing stupid chores around the classroom because the teachers didn’t know what to do with me. Having had a degree in education my mother decided to try home schooling me. This turned out to be one of the best and perhaps the most influential decisions on my life. I thrived on this learning environment, I could sit down and whip out a couple of days worth of school work and then spend time on other things that interested me. I began tracking the stock market actively following the course of a number of solar stocks with my father, which I watched soar and the tumble as the energy crisis abated. I built models, studied chemistry, tinkered with the computer, and played for hours in the outdoors with nothing but my imagination to construct wondrous worlds and adventures from.
It was during this time that I became interested in more active environmental issues when tidewater corporation built a gravel mining plant across the river from us and my father became active in the community speaking out against it’s affect on the protected Rogue River basin and the community. I would attend meetings were people like him would speak out and then get yelled at and threatened by the people representing the county government and interest of tidewater corp. Determined to do my part I read about an organization called green peace that was trying to save the whales and I made tons of signs and with pictures of whales on them and put them all along the road.
Around this time a remarkable event happened, my parents had a little baby boy. It was a real treat for me because his birth was at home and got an up close experience on this amazing miracle, even getting to cut the umbilical cord.
Having had enough of the politics in Gold Beach and wanting to move to warmer weather we decided to move to Hawaii were we had been vacationing for a few years. We packed up and moved to the Big Island and spent a few months living in condos while we looked for places we could afford to live. Finally we moved into a small one bedroom condo, which we retrofitted into a two bedroom by sectioning off the dining room into a bedroom that held a triple decker bunk bed.
I became a beach bum! With no school to attend I would what hours my fair skin could stand on the beach swimming, surfing and snorkeling. Coming in during the hottest hours of the day to play with the newest Commodore 128 and exploring ways to peek and poke and otherwise manipulate the computer into doing what I wanted it to do.
