BRIEF BIO
I graduated from LaSalle in May of 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics, and had been accepted to all the graduate schools I applied to around the country, but only one offered me financial aid in the form of a teaching assistantship: the Mathematics Department at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. Warm winters, I thought, no snowstorms or icy roads or freezing temperatures. So, I went; I was 22.
It was my first major time away from home, Vietnam was still happening, and I had a low lottery number; the lottery had been brought into effect that year. Some might say I had it made in the shade, or words to that effect.
I lasted one year. The work wasn't unusually difficult; I needed a break to think about things that were pressing on me with urgency, like, why was I afraid most of the time and felt so cut-off from the world and other people; what was I doing and where was I going? Everything seemed laid out for the future in a nice neat row, but I couldn't see the purpose.
So I quit school, and after a brief visit with my sister, who had recently moved to Santa Monica, I went back to Philly and spent that winter working in the lumber yard where I had spent two summers when going to LaSalle. And read, and thought, and worked on my head, so to speak, and asked questions of myself and life and reality. What the hell is going on, was one of them.
The following spring I left with a backpack, complete with canvas pup-tent and pot to cook in, and hit the road for Colorado. I spent two months traveling, hitchhiking from Denver to the southwest. From there I traveled to L.A. where I lived until December. Los Angeles in 1972 was a very intense place to be for a lot of reasons, especially for a 23 year old.
I went back to Philadelphia until that September when I left again for Colorado and points west. I found a job in the oil fields outside of Craig, Colorado as what's called a 'jug-hustler.' I was packing drilled holes with ten-pound sticks of dynamite, capping the last one and tying the end to a stick in the ground next to it. I was young and green and had only the slightest idea what I was doing. The job lasted two weeks, that's all I wanted of the experience, and working with a bunch of rednecks from Utah didn't help either. That night I ran into two guys from Boston who, somehow, spotted me in the crowd of roughnecks and other oil workers as an east-coaster. They were stuck in town for the night getting their car fixed; they were pulling a huge overstuffed trailer to San Francisco. Seeing how I was suddenly not obliged to anything at the moment, they asked me if I wanted to come along. My other choice was to go to Steamboat Springs to work on the then developing ski resort. Decisions, decisions. By the flip of a coin I ended up in San Francisco.
Three years later, with my girlfriend, six cats, driving a step-van plugged with all the belongings we could cram into it, including, of course, our Christmas decorations, we headed for the North Country, specifically - Port Townsend, Washington. I drove in on the night Jimmy Carter got elected President: November 2nd, 1976.
In '78 I began my commercial fishing career, trolling salmon off the Washington and Oregon coasts. In '82 I went up to Alaska, Juneau first, then Valdez to help a Port Angeles-based fish company establish itself in its first year. After that was over -- it actually took a few years -- I remained in Alaska, living and fishing. I spent about six years in Cordova, but also lived in Sitka (for one extremely wet but productive winter), Valdez, Homer, Kodiak, and fished out of every port, from Prince William Sound to Seward, Akutan and Dutch Harbor for thirteen years. 1994 was my last fishing year, out of Kodiak. The rules changed for longlining -- to the IFQ system where people who'd been out of fishing for years nonetheless recieved shares of the biomass -- plus I was getting too old for the show anyway. And the spirit was gone, the free-wheeling adventure and wildness of it all dissipated with the fish population.
During that time I attended Oregon State University, at Corvallis, in '82, for a postbaccalaureate year, studying writing, journalism, short story workshops; taking propaganda courses, political science and sociology. It was a good year; I needed to check in, if you know what I mean, refocus. Two years later I attended Western Washington University, at Bellingham, for a graduate year, studying mathematics, computer science, and Mandarin Chinese. I had the idea of going to Hong Kong before it turned back to China's possesion, so I wanted to have at least an introduction and a working knowledge of numbers, denominations, grammar, et cetera. But, I got sidetracked, as life will do.
In 1996 I began to lose my eyesight due to cataract damage -- staring at the ocean blue in the sunlight too much, perhaps. In '97 I had surgery to recover. Since then I've worked at random jobs, remodeling houses, tutoring math, working in restaurants, and maintaining a website. Oh, I also wrote a novel I'd been thinking about for years before getting started in 2004.
Nevertheless, I am presently living outside of Quilcene, Washington, with my cat friend, Dominoe, adjacent to the Olympic National Forest, staying connected to nature and working out the details.
I was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- West Philly, to be precise -- during the fifties and sixties. Went to LaSalle University (then, It was 'College') from September, '66 to May, '70. Vietnam was raging, most other campuses around the country were likewise, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing (you didn't want to be in the south with a Pennsylvania license plate on your car), but all was reasonably quiet on the small campus of LaSalle, too quiet, isolated from the storms. My entire neighborhood of men my age and slightly older were drafted and sent to 'Nam,' except for those attending school. One good friend I grew up with died from wounds received there. I was one of a large demographic the historians, journalists and writers seemed to have completely ignored or just plain missed. People who, in the midst of it all, were just trying to have lives. My main goal was to get out of my neighborhood.