Who am i?
my life
I have been on this planet since 1958 and am an oilfield machinist by trade and skill since 1979. But I like to think I have the heart and soul of a writer. Unless your last name is King, Grisham, or Rowling it’s a hard way to make a living. There is a reason they are called starving artists.
I am searching for my voice and I rely on you, dear reader, to let me know if and when I find it. The concept behind all writing is to inform and educate or to provoke an emotional response. Whether that be joy or fear, laughter or sadness, anger or calm. The true storytellers of our world can beguile or enchant the reader and sweep them to far away lands where anything may be possible. They can create a reality one might think impossible and make one ponder his or her place in the world and, indeed, the universe. In my own way I hope to find my voice and take you there.
THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME
The year was 1989. My father had died in April at the age of 63. I was 31. I suppose this qualifies as a mid-life crisis of sorts. Looking back at my father’s life I saw a life of unfulfilled dreams. All those things he was going to do, but never got around to them. Was I becoming my father?
Maybe I had fallen into the same rut. I had bought a house three years before and had become a slave to my mortgage. I worked too much and played too little. Life had become routine and oportunities to truely do something unique were, like warm beach sand, slipping through my fingers. I felt an urgency to shake things up, if only to prove I wasn’t my father. So on June 1 I flew to Vancouver, British Columbia. For the next 100 days I pedaled my Trek bicycle across Canada and down the east coast. I rode 6,269 miles. That’ll show ’em!
GONE FISHING
Every couple of decades, it seems, I need to do something to shake up my life. in 1989 it was riding a bicycle across Canada and down the east coast. In 2010 I resigned from the oil field tool shop where I was a 49% owner. Why I did that is a long story and perhaps worthy of a future blog. At the time I was simply burnt out. I had been working in machine shops for over 30 years and in the oil field side of things for 28 years. I needed a change. I was only 52 and I figured I was young enough to make a carreer change. But that window was closing. At some point a potential employer is thinking, is it worth the investment to hire and train a guy that is only going to be around a few years before he decideds to retire.
Now I love to fish. Every year I head up to the Eastern Sierra to go trout fishing. I had also done some ocean fishing, including marlin fishing in Hawaii. In 2001 I had been salmon fishing in Alaska and now I spotted a newspaper add that was looking for people to work in Alaska on a commercial fishing boat. What the hell! Might as well do something that I love, right? I signed a three month contract for June through August and part of September. The boat I was on, the Alaska Packer, is known as a floating processor. Three hundred feet long and 50 wide. About the size of a football field with five deckks and a crew compliment of a tad over 150 people. HARDEST JOB I EVER HAD! Well worth a future blog.