Back from the Abyss -- Kristi’s Story

By the end of that first year, things had gotten rocky in Shangri-La. Bill and I fought all the time about money, kids, chores, and his latest obsession de jour whether it be fishing, music, the weather channel. But mostly we fought about the cabin. He thought it was great and couldn’t see what my problem was. After living in his little trailer with limited electricity and running water, the cabin felt like a regular palace to him. Plus the mortgage was relatively cheap.

I, on the other hand, had started to hate our “little log cabin in the woods” with its small windows, dark rooms, cranky plumbing, cold floors, smoking wood stoves, and decades of layered on yuck that no amount of scrubbing would clean. I cried regular tears for the tidy, bright little house I had left in Seattle. I knew I needed light and a more comfortable home. If I had to spend another winter in that dark place I was sure I’d lose my mind.

Finally we went to a marriage counselor where Bill heard a revelation. “Eighty percent of the problems we are having in our marriage are because I’m so unhappy in the cabin,” I announced. Bill looked at me in shock. “Eighty percent? Really?” He slowly absorbed this fact. “You mean more light and a newer home would mean a lighter, nicer wife?” “Yes,” I replied. And that was all it took. All of a sudden he was on board with my need for change. “I want a happy wife.”

I realized getting a new home would be no easy task, and, in fact, it took us years to fine a new home. But at least I finally felt we were working more closely as a team. Bill had always wanted to build his own straw bale home, and we started exploring designs. We visited properties, discussed possible models and couldn’t agree on a thing. He had been planning his straw bale home for so long that any suggestion I made was an intrusion and immediately rejected. Many a marriage had ended in this valley under just such circumstances. Building a dream home can be hell, and I wasn’t sure our marriage would survive the project. So we explored other options such as ways to bring more light into the cabin (solar tubes?). We put in a newer wood stove (less smoke). Bill did a major remodel on the one corner room in our cabin that occasionally got some light to use as my office. He put in new windows, sheet rock, wall paint, flooring and rugs so that it almost, almost looked “normal.” I loved it!

Not only that, but I was beginning to get some decent work and was actually making money. Contacts I had made at KCTS came looking for me to do outreach for their projects. On occasion, I could even hire some of my cool former colleagues like Ti, to design and work on different aspects of my campaigns. I was connecting with my former tribe, doing work I loved again, and for awhile, we weren’t even poor!

Making friends in the valley was still a little problematic, but I found out it wasn’t just a problem for me. There were lots of little cliques in the valley and they were hard to break into. One woman I met had tried to join a book club when she had first moved here but the club wouldn’t let her in. They told her they were full. So she went and started her own book club and that’s the club I joined. I liked the idea of being in the outlier group.

I had a similar experience when I asked if I could join a group of women who rode mountain bikes together. They all looked at me blankly until one finally said, “Well do you even own a mountain bike?” I must have looked at the woman funny thinking, “Why else would I ask” because she just turned and walked away. So much for the bike club.

My big break came when a tall, striking woman whom I met at the local Montessori, started telling me her own hard-to-make-friends stories. It turned out she had been rebuffed at least as much as I. “What is the deal with this place?” I asked. “It seems like high school again,” to which she quickly agreed. Finally, after much more discussion and laughing about our various run-ins with non friends, she came up with a brilliant idea. “I’ll be your friend if you’ll be mine?” she asked in a serious tone. “Deal!” I said. And my first real friendship in the valley was formed.

In truth, we may not have been friends had we lived in our old worlds; Seattle for me, a rich suburb for her. We didn’t share a large set of interests or friends and our politics didn’t always mesh. Our backgrounds were different, as well as our careers, our incomes, and our lifestyles. In short, we weren’t that much alike. But I hadn’t met anyone like me here, nor she anyone like her. So we decided to be oddballs together, and that has served us well.

But the most striking thing that changed my life here in the valley was the arrival of my third child, Jannie; the baby that wasn’t suppose to be. A year after we arrived I had almost bled to death due to a run-in with my IUD that caused me to lose 50% of my blood. After the second rush to the hospital (nearly an hour away), the doctors preformed an emergency D and C. My hemorrhaging stopped, but the doctor said my uterus was probably so scarred that I would likely never have more kids. We were sad as Bill had never had a child of his own and we were thinking we might try. But he enjoyed being a step-father to my girls, and I was fine with two kids. We threw away all birth control and basically forgot the whole thing. Until two years later when I noticed I wasn’t quite feeling right, and my symptoms were vaguely familiar. “Naw,” I thought. “It couldn’t be.” But just on the off chance, I decided to use a home pregnancy test that I had left over from a former time, and low and behold….”Hey honey,” I said, as I walked in on Bill chopping vegetables in the kitchen, pregnancy test in hand. “Do you see one line or two? I think I see two…” His eyebrows shot up and there was a moment of stunned silence in the room. “Does this mean…?” he slowly stammered, as a goofy smile started forming on his face. Bill was going to be a dad.

REALITY HITS--Ti

Three Questions

My dad had a “three questions” rule. I could ask him three questions and only three questions if I was wondering about something. (I could not ask for more questions.) I had to think very carefully about my three questions and usually, after thinking, observing and pondering, I answered my own questions.

Question #1: Did I uproot my life for love?

No. Yes. I don’t know. I understood that my not-yet husband was trying to make a new and different life for himself and his daughter. I understood how challenging that would be for the two of them.

Question #2: Then why am I here?

I think I came here out a sense of responsibility. I’m here because they needed me. The first thing I did when I came to the island was post the dinner menus for the week. It was one tiny bit of consistency; a thing missing from their lives. My sweetie and his daughter looked at that list a dozen times a day. No matter what, every evening at 6:00 p.m. or thereabouts, dinner would be ready. I fed them non-stop: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. They were certainly ready to be nourished.

Question #3: How long will I stay?

I don’t think folks had much hope for us. Maybe they thought we’d turn and run for town as soon as it winter hit. Or if offered the opportunity, the kid would go back to her city life. The first big school event in the fall brought two sets of grandparents, the kid’s mom, and mom’s friend out to the island. I had the feeling that the kid could have left with them if she had wanted to. But she stayed. And so did I.

Trying to Get Married

I moved to the island in October, but we didn’t get married until December. I lobbied for a nice wedding: sunset, beach, maybe in the tropics, a couple of my friends in attendance, a nice dinner. I clipped pictures of pretty dresses from fashion magazines and pictured myself with gardenias in my hair. My friend Suz bought me a waffle iron.

We tried to set a wedding date and the venue fell through. We tried to set another and my friends weren’t available. We gave up and decided to get married in district court on the shortest day of the year. I called around and found four friends who could drop everything and come. One friend brought yellow roses and cedar for my bouquet. We did have a very nice dinner at a great restaurant.

New plan: our friends would join us on the longest day of the year at the restaurant and we’d have a little celebration. I sent out emails to save the date. A month before our celebration, the restaurant burned.

I can take a hint. No more planning of celebrations.

Embrace Failure…

Folks here are used to failure. Get a car out here and it’ll quit working. The new refrigerator will balk, the stove will blow up, and the boat will refuse to start. A 25-cent fuse ends up costing $60, once you’ve got yourself into town and back. You had better be a jack-of-all-trades and be prepared to fail.

Fail in the city and you can quietly leave, start over somewhere else. Fail here and everyone knows. Years later, they’ll still be talking about you. But island folks are pragmatic. They wait and watch and you can ask for help—up to a certain point. But on some level you have to show that you have the resources to solve your own problems. You take responsibility for living your life.

We live in the land of Murphy’s Law, Exponential Model: if anything can go wrong, it will… and if it only screws up twice, you’re doing pretty well. It’s not surprising that just about every man who actually lives on the island owns a backhoe or two. When in doubt, use the heavy equipment.

…and be Prepared to Do It Yourself

Solder copper pipes in 12-degree weather.

Fix the roof in in a storm with 45-mph wind gusts.

Dig a trench and run power out to the shed.

Fix the fuel filter in the truck, the starter in the boat, the carburetor on the ATV.

Grow your own food; shoot or catch what you can’t grow.

Leap three feet from a heaving boat deck to an icy beach, then field the bins containing a month’s worth of groceries -- tossed with great accuracy by my husband.

Motor the kid to the school bus stop (one island over) in freezing weather, 20 mph winds, and four foot waves--in a rubber raft.

Stand waist deep in very, very cold water, hanging onto a boat that’s half on the trailer because the winch strap just snapped.

Check, check, check and check. All in one week.

The Washing Machine and No-Power Blues

The ancient, inefficient, leaky washing machine died in December. It spewed gallons of water all over the floor, but there’s no insulation under the floor, so the water just seeped down to the ground below.

My island neighbors generously offered use of their washers and dryers. I packed up loads of clothes on the ATV and scooted to friend’s houses to do laundry, drink coffee and gossip. A dryer! What a luxury! I’d been hanging clothes above the woodstove to dry them.

Then it froze. The power went off. No power, no well pump. No matter. The pipes are frozen. I could hear diesel generators firing up all over the island. Our generator was broken.

I lit candles and Coleman lanterns. I unplugged the fancy electronic phone and plugged in the old mechanical phone. It rang immediately. “Are you OK out there? Do you need anything? If it gets any colder, come to our place.”

I cooked dinner on the woodstove, told the family that we could go to any one of a half-dozen houses if we needed to. I thawed snow on the stove and did the dishes.

What do you do all winter?

We live on a vacationer’s island. In the summer there are people everywhere, boats on every mooring buoy, planes zooming in and out. But by the end of October, I’d guess that 90% of the houses on the island are empty, most buttoned up for the winter.

In November the winter storm systems start booming in. If you live on an island, no matter which way the weather is coming from, you get slammed. A storm ripping down the Fraser River Valley hits one side of the island, a Pineapple Express slams us on the other side. A 60-70-80-90 mph gust sounds like a train roaring in the distance, it slams into the house, it roars off.

We hunker down. But after six weeks, the cupboards are getting a little bare. There’s no store on the island. No gas station. No coffee shop. Grocery shopping (any shopping) means a trip across Puget Sound. We do not have state ferry service. We travel on our own boats or planes; or use a water or air taxi service—when there’s a break in the weather. We check to see if neighbors need anything.

There is no garbage service—whatever we haul on, we haul off. We are very good at not making garbage.

In the summer, people ask what it’s like here in the winter, I say, “Cold, wet, dark and windy.” They laugh, and then they ask what I do all winter. I say, “Try to keep warm.”

They laugh.

I am not laughing. I am absolutely serious.

REALITY HITS--Kristi

In truth, reality had been trying to get my attention those first few months in the valley, but I determinedly ignored it. Like the time Bill carried me over the threshold of our old log cabin after we first arrived and I burst into tears. “Oh my god,” I thought. “What have I done?! Did I actually leave my cute sunny home in Seattle for this?” The cabin was dark and dirty and smelled like wood smoke. But I quickly recovered, pulled out the ten gallon can of specialty-mixed teal-green paint I bought at a trendy home store in Seattle, and began to paint. And paint. And paint.

The new color made a difference, but I could not escape the dark rooms and tiny windows of the old cabin. My solution? Stay outside! It was nice out there; so natural. So countryish! And between noon and one, you could even see the sun through the thick forest of pine trees that covered our property and hovered over our home. Wasn’t that nice? But if it was this dark in the summer, what would it be like in the fall, or worse, the winter….? Best not to think about it. So I didn’t.

Reality check #2 came in the form of the fabulous fishing phantom, otherwise known as my husband. Somehow it had escaped my notice that my husband was a hopeless fishing addict. He had gone fishing on occasion when we lived in Seattle, but it wasn’t easy to get to a good fishing spot. Not so in the valley with its many rivers and lakes full of fish. No sooner had we arrived in the valley and unloaded our boxes into our new home then Bill grabbed his fishing rod and vanished. “Hold it.” I thought. “Didn’t I have a husband around here somewhere?” And sure enough, eventually he would rematerialize like a ghost, grab a snack and vanish again in search of the next big bite. “Just an anomaly” I assured myself, as I slapped more paint on the walls. “He’ll be back and life will be everything I dreamed of. And isn’t it cute that he likes to fish? How countryish!” Reality refused to set in.

It did, however, successfully intrude on a day in late August when the temperature in the Methow dropped 50-degrees overnight leaving new snow on the high hills. Bill had mentioned getting wood for the winter, days ago, but I had only laughed. It was 100 degrees! Who wanted to think about wood? But I wasn’t laughing now. In fact, I was on the verge of tears.

Our cabin had a fire place, two wood stoves and no wood. Our propane tank had no fuel. It was raining and 50 degrees outside. By the time Bill got home from work that evening, the girls and I were freezing. As I started to complain about the lack of heat and how cold we had been all day, and what were we suppose to do, Bill took one look at us in our shorts and tee shirts and said, “Well you could start by putting on more clothes.”

I lost it. “I don’t want to put on more clothes!” I yelled. “I want heat in my home! I want switches that turn on lights and make rooms warm! I want a normal house!” Bill was looking at me like the alien I had become when my 9-year-old, Emily, quietly spoke up. “Um, mom? We have a fireplace and I saw a little wood in the shed. Maybe we could make a fire?” I looked at her and put my head in my hands. This city girl was in way over her head. A life of convenience had not prepared me for this. “Great honey,” I said, trying to sound like the adult I was not. “Let’s build a fire.”

From then on I decided to make peace with my heating system and learn how to use it. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I was the mother of girls that needed heat. So I committed to becoming the new “country me” and learn to make fires and chop wood. Bill had gone out to the forest and brought back nearly three cords of wood; an enormous amount to my eyes, and it all needed chopping. Which sounds easy enough, and, in fact, I did a pretty good job, up until the point I nearly cut off my right foot.

“How about if you cut the wood honey?” I sheepishly asked Bill given that I was supposed to help with this job. “We don’t both need to do everything and there are lots of other things I can do around here instead,” I offered. “Like what?” he asked, looking me over in my city shoes and nice slacks. “Um…” I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I replied, as I began to realize that I did not have the skills for my new life.

As summer turned to fall, the reality of what our move to the country meant began more and more to collide with my country living fantasy. Back-to-school shopping was a real eye opener, as our valley has few places to shop. School clothes had to be purchased in the nearest large town, which, for us, was four hours away by car, round trip. Shopping for school clothes and supplies took an entire day, from early morning to late at night, despite the fact that both my girls and I hate to shop. It was hell. In addition, Emily started third grade in her new school, and came home furious after the first day. “These kids are rude,” she announced as she threw her backpack onto the floor. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“They pick their noses and wipe it on their pants, put gum on their chairs and spit,” she announced.

“They spit?” I asked, truly shocked as I thought about the well-groomed, high-tech, children of professional parents that attended Emily’s north end school in Seattle - where children did not spit. “Give it a little time,” I said, reassuringly, even as my own concerns rose. Emily had gone to the best public elementary school in Seattle; one parents clamored to get their kids into. We had visited the local school district before moving out to the Methow, and the teachers had all seemed great. The district was tiny, less than 700 kids, and the classes were wonderfully small. But I didn’t think about the kids. What if they really were a bunch of rude country yahoos and Emily ended up hating it here? “The kids will just take some time to get used to. They’re fine. You’ll see,” I said to my dubious child. I just hoped in my heart I was right.

There was another big reality check I experienced that first fall: Hunting Season. You can always tell when deer hunting season hits because all of a sudden you can’t find a can of beer, loaf of white bread, or package of wienies in the local grocery store. You also start to notice large numbers of men in camouflage gear along your road, scoping the deer in your front yard. And who knew that for approximately two weeks in October, local people tend to wear red so they won’t get shot when they walk on trails. Some local ranchers actually take to writing HORSE and COW in bold letters on the sides of their livestock so that hunters, using long range rifles from a mile away, won’t shoot them by mistake.

One morning that first fall, I woke up to the sound of bullets whizzing past my bedroom widow. Someone had shot a deer in my driveway. I went tearing out of the house in my bathrobe with my husband yelling after me, “Stop! You’ll get shot!” The site of a crazed urban chick in a red robe swearing like a sailor, all wild hair and eyes, must have been sufficiently terrifying because those guys took off fast. But they left the deer carcass for my kids to walk past on their way to the school bus that morning. The local fish and game guy finally hauled it away. If that same thing happened now I would probably have Bill haul the deer to the local butcher. I’ve learned not to waste food in the country. But back then I was just mad. What a waste of good meat.

Then, as fall turned to winter that first year in the valley, another harsh reality struck. Snow. I love snow but that’s an easy thing to do when you don’t have to live in it. And this valley gets a lot of snow. We measure it in feet, not inches. This was actually an attraction to me as I love to cross-country ski, and our valley has over 180 kilometers of groomed cross-country ski trails – the second largest cross-country ski trail system in the nation. But that was little consolation as I white-knuckled my car and my two children through yet another blizzard and two mountain passes in the winter so they could see their dad. Our new parenting plan required that we make this trip at least once a month, rain or snow. On good days in the winter, it’s at least a five hour trip to Seattle from here one way. It can take hours, or even days more, if the passes close and you are stuck up on top of a mountain until: a) an avalanche is cleared; b) a fatal car accident is investigated; c) a storm passes and the roads are plowed..

I learn to pack supplies for the trip: Chains, flashlights, sleeping bags and blankets, extra food and water; picks and shovels. I feel like I’m heading out to climb Mount Everest every time I take my kids to see their dad.

I learn to watch the weather and how to read weather maps. I have never been so impacted by the weather in my life. In the city, I could go days and not even know what was happening outside, or care. Here, not being prepared can cost you your property or even your life.

Reality also hit in more minor ways. Unlike Ti, we have garbage collection service, and I note what a privilege it is to have someone else haul away my trash. The same was not true for recycling when we first arrived. But after a decade of saving and sorting my paper, glass, and plastics in Seattle, I just didn’t have the heart to send them to the landfill. However the nearest recycling center was over an hour away. So we put the stuff in piles in our three-bay shed, just waiting to be hauled to the recycling center. Nine months later it’s still waiting, and our pile of plastic, paper, and glass has grown to fill two of the three bays of our enormous wood shed.

“This is not recycling,” I complain to Bill. “This is storage. God forbid anyone should light a match anywhere near all this dried up junk or it might all go up in smoke and take our cabin with it.” Which, as I started thinking about it, suddenly didn’t sound like such a bad idea…

Fortunately for our cabin, a local group established a recycle center some years ago. I’m thankful every time I only have to haul my recycle one mile instead of sixty. But the real lesson here has taken me ten years to learn: Use less stuff. That’s not a lesson people are forced to learn much in the city where someone else takes responsibility for your trash and hauls it to a place you never see. That’s less of the case in my world, and not the case at all in Ti’s. Your trash is, well, your trash. If you don’t want to deal with it then make less in the first place.

But this is a small inconvenience compared to the biggest reality check I’ve dealt with since moving to the country which is…..drum roll please…. Health Insurance!

Big surprise that; at least I know it was for me. Who knew the biggest stress of moving to the country was wondering if I could afford to take myself or my kids to the doctor? They never mention this stuff in those simple living guides, but for many of us out here, it’s the truth.

Like most Americans, I lost my health insurance when I left my job. I had always been insured through either my parents or my work, and just assumed we could buy health insurance somewhere when we moved. Since I never actually had to purchase health insurance before, I had no idea what it was like. But my shock at the system (or lack there of) grew rapidly after making our move.

When we first moved out to the valley in 1999, for example, we couldn’t even purchase health insurance on the open market. All the major insurers had pulled out of our side of the state because the population base was too small to profit from, and there was no private health insurance to be had. I was dumfounded. “I have money to buy a product and I’m being told I can’t have it? That’s just un-American,” I thought.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) our income at the time qualified us for Basic Health, the state sponsored medical insurance “for the poor.” That was us. But being poor and accepting charity did not mesh with my vision of moving to the country, though it appears to be the reality for many. The fact is there are very few jobs where we live that offer health insurance or any kind of benefits at all. Not only do most of us not get health or dental insurance through our work, we don’t get paid vacations, retirement, or even a single paid day off. If we’re lucky, we make a living wage – but many of us don’t even get that.

The exception to the rule is government work: Town, county, state, federal, teaching, law enforcement, whatever. Those folks usually get good bennies. Or if you’re one of the many people who work (or spouse works) at a good job outside the area and commutes back to Shangri-La on the weekends. That happens too. But if your thinking of moving to the country and want to keep some semblance of a safety net around yourself, either look for government work, figure out a way to make A LOT of money, preferably online, or do what local families do – give up your notion of a safety net. That’s what community is for.

My mistake was to start consulting and make too much money to qualify for Basic Health anymore. Not a lot of money, mind you. Just enough to get booted from the program. Fortunately, we got kicked out just as the insurance market moved back into our area. Unfortunately, the private insurance available was, and still is, expensive and poor quality coverage. Every year for the past ten years we’ve seen double digits increases in premiums, an increase in deductable and a decline in services covered. We were finally priced out of the health insurance market all together, and, for the first time in my life, I am uninsured. Fortunately, the girls qualify for SCHIP – the federal health insurance program for kids. But it’s back to that being poor/charity issue again. This is not what I thought my life would be.

The final reality check on moving to the country happened a year after we moved when I had to give up my kids so they could spend the summer with their dad. That was part of the agreement when I moved, but it felt like someone had ripped out my heart. The first day they were gone I could hardly breathe. Much of my identity had been tied up in being a mom. With my girls gone, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I missed my colleagues at KCTS and my old career. My house was still dark and smelled like smoke. Between his work, his fishing, his music jam sessions and his friends, my husband was hardly around. And I was having a hard time making friends; something I couldn’t figure out. Did I smell bad? Suddenly grow two heads? Wear the wrong kind of shoes? I had never had this problem before. But all of a sudden, it felt like one problem too many and I began to seriously question what I was doing with my life. This was not what I had planned when I decided to move to the country. This was not my wonderful life.

HOW WE GOT HERE--Ti

I’d been on this island before, though it took me a long time to remember when. The “first” time I approached the west beach from the water with my not-yet-husband, it looked familiar. The old road and little bridge were over there, that tree was here…but wasn’t it farther back from the water? The shoreline had eroded—a lot--several hundred feet in one place. But yes, I’d been here before.

When I was very young, my father brought me here with Lummi and other tribal elders to look at shell middens. The middens are thick piles of discarded shells—the result of decades—centuries—of the tribes coming to the shoreline to gather shellfish. At one time, people were forbidden to build homes over the middens because of their historic, tribal and archeological value. My dad and his friends were trying to locate as many of the middens as they could in the hopes that folks wouldn’t build houses directly on top of them.

I remember the midden on our beach because one of the elders showed me how camas (Camassia quamash) had been planted near where the shellfish were gathered. When families returned to this shore to gather shellfish, the camas would be right there too, making gathering food a bit easier. The ten-foot-thick shell deposits are still here and so is the camas. However, the shoreline is eroding back so fast that I have been gathering the camas and planting it in my garden.

I’ve known my husband for a long time, though we were not each other’s type when we were younger. But we got older and I suppose we started thinking, “Hey, you’re not so bad after all.”

By the time he finally convinced me to marry him and move to the island I was decidedly not a young starry-eyed bride. And he was no Prince Charming with a castle. He had to offer: (1) a creaky old, dark, and uninsulated building on an island with no ferry service; and (2) an 11-year-old daughter. Oh joy, at an age when most women are thinking about retirement, I am about to move back out into the sticks and be a stepmom.

But still, I said yes.

HOW WE GOT HERE--Kristi

The Wild Woman’s Whitewater Rafting Adventure was an annual event with my group of single mom friends. We would head out to a remote, pristine little Shangri-La located in the North Cascades mountain range in Washington State, approximately forty miles south of the Canadian boarder as the crow flies. There we would raft the main river over Father’s Day weekend when the water was running high and we knew our kids would be with their dads.

During these trips, we usually encountered an adventure or two, like the time one friend in her short cut off jeans and cowboy boots attracted the attention of one too many cowboys. Or when I fell out of the raft during a class four rapid, was sucked into a hole and saw God. We somehow always managed to survive with only minor scrapes and more than a few hangovers. But one year was different.

That was the year, after drinking one-too-many chocolate martinis, we all decided to pile into the red jeep and see what sort of trouble we could get into at the local cowboy bar. And that’s where I met Bill, a quiet, handsome, long-haired hippie; the future love of my life. He had uncharacteristically come to that notorious bar to hear a band he liked, and was casually standing in the corner sipping a beer, when he caught my eye. There was something quiet and gentle about his demeanor that appealed to me after years of being married to someone who was not. Plus I had vowed to be the first “Wild Woman” out on the dance floor so I asked the quiet hippie to dance. Or, rather, I dared him to.

“Are you going to stand there all night drinking, or do you want to dance?” was my now-famous opening line. Why he didn’t run for the hills is anyone’s guess, but dance, we did, and then we talked for hours. In the following weeks, we began a steady correspondence, back-and-forth visits, and a cross-mountain romance.

Three months later, Bill was living with me and the girls in Seattle. And to this day, we’re still not sure why we clicked so well. We just did. The girls loved him, I loved him, and he loved us back. We wanted to build a life together, and somehow, I knew that we would.

But Bill did not love Seattle and often missed his valley home. His passion was nature, sustainable building (he was a carpenter by trade), and living a simple life. My passion was my career, my kids, and maintaining my complicated life. I had no idea how to make it all work. But I had just started an outreach campaign around a documentary on voluntary simplicity, and the idea of downsizing my “stuff”, working less, getting out of the city, and having more time with my kids was increasingly attractive. Bill encouraged me to explore where that road might go. He also maintained his home in the valley: a tiny trailer on 30 acres with an amazing view, where we would regularly visit. I have always been a city girl, but each time we went I felt a little more comfortable with the primitive lodgings, wide open skies, and miles of mountains and woods. I knew Bill was hoping we could all move to the valley someday but I wasn’t ready.

At the same time, my life in the city was becoming more and more untenable. I had a new boss who wanted me to go from conducting large, impactful outreach campaigns to writing her personal memos. I had to refinance my home to buy out my ex- husband, and was now living beyond my means. My bills were piling up, the freeway was always clogged, and my kids were in daycare (or school) ten hours a day. Traffic, stress, and guilt began to work their magic until one weekend in the valley, as Bill and I were sipping coffee in the sun on a bed of warm pine needles, and taking in his incredible view, I finally said, “Okay, let’s do it. It’s time to move.” Had I known what I was getting into, I might never have uttered those words. But looking before I leap had never been my strong suit, and leap I did.

Three months later we had sold my home, quit our jobs, negotiated a new parenting plan with my ex-husband, got married, and bought a tiny 1904 log cabin on several wooded acres in our valley paradise. I was ecstatic! Not only was I getting away from my ex-husband, tyrannical boss, high housing costs, and mind-numbing traffic, I was also living in a beautiful environment with low over head, a wonderful man, and more time with my girls.

Bill was thrilled to be home and found work easily in his trade. I had some savings after selling my home, and could afford to take a little time to figure out what I was going to do with myself. My youngest daughter, Rose, was four years old when we moved, and had been in full time daycare since she was one. I was thrilled to have the time to get to know my kids again.

That first summer, Emily, my eldest (age 9) spent the summer with her father in Seattle, the youngest, because of her age, spent that first summer with me and Bill in the valley. Em came home and started public school in the fall, while Rose went to the local Montessori. There was no getting up at 6:00 a.m. to hustle them to daycare, no long commute in terrible traffic, and no stressful job. Em had a 10 minute bus ride to school, which picked her up in front of our door. Rose went to half day Montessori and spent the rest of the day with me. Bill worked and earned just enough money for us to get by. We were happy, in love, and life was good.

In the Beginning -- Ti

IN THE BEGINNING--Ti

The streets on our end of town flooded every winter. When the winter storms and high tides came the river would run over its banks and we’d row up and down our street in a Crayola®-green boat. All the junk under our houses would float out—garbage, bits of wood, beer bottles, along with an occasional dead cat. After the flood subsided our houses would smell damp and moldy for weeks. But at least, as my mom would say, it was clean under the house.

My dad insisted that I come along with him when he went out to work on the Indian reservations along the Washington coast. Though my family is Chinese-American, my dad had many friends among the tribes. He frequently took time to help them out with carpentry projects, pouring concrete for the floor of a new shed, helping with fishing boats, mending nets and more.

While visiting friends on various reservations, we stayed in homes and house trailers with limited plumbing and not enough insulation, though I don’t remember that as being a hardship. I remember fun times, good storytelling, legends from the elders and sleeping by woodstoves glowing red. I especially remember Grandma Marie’s outhouse, got up, as she put it, “…like a cheap whore’s bedroom…” with red-and-white flocked wallpaper, lace curtains, a gold-painted toilet seat, and a heart-shaped mirror.

I also remember getting in trouble for telling my mom what Grandma Marie called her outhouse.

Every evening the cigarette butts and beer bottles would pile up on the kitchen table. The other kids would try to sneak puffs from the smoldering butts and pull sips from the bottom of beer bottles. The drunker the older folks got, the better their stories were: raven, wolf, hummingbird, whale, and bear people and my favorite, the slug people, who talked like “thissshhhhh…”.

I plotted my escape from the Washington coast: college, then big city career girl. I’d wear snappy clothes and cute shoes and work in a big building with banks of shiny elevators. However, while working as a bicycle courier in Seattle, I discovered what I really liked doing was going in and out of the buildings and riding the elevators. I had no interest in actually working in one.

Did I mention that I’m Raven Clan? Grandma Marie said I was the sort of Raven that didn’t like playing pranks on others (true) or having pranks played on her (also true) but who could endlessly play pranks on herself (all too true).

On top of it all, I was raised outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. I understand responsibility and duty, but I had to take “Bible as Literature” classes in college to understand the use of allegory in western writing. To this day I still don’t quite get the concept of “guilt”.

I have fond memories of two friends, one Irish-Catholic and the other Jewish, trying to explain guilt to me. They’d toss example after example at me and ask how I’d feel.

Them: “What if you promised someone you’d do something and you didn’t?”

Me: “I’d contact them right away and then do whatever I was supposed to do.”

Them: “No, you’d feel GUILTY!

…and so on until we were all helpless with laughter. The end result is that I now also associate the concept of guilt with good times, funny friends, and laughter.

I went off to college in Hawaii, which was the place most opposite the town I grew up in that I could imagine. Blessedly, I looked like just about everyone else in Hawaii—just another Asian-looking girl with long hair. It was great.

And then I got married. At 19. And moved right back to the coast with my husband, who always wanted to live in Washington State.

I married young, divorced young, finished college with a Communications degree and did the wandering around looking for myself thing. I worked dozens of different jobs, waitressing, cleaning houses, lived alone in a cabin for a couple of winters (house sitting for friends), cooked on fishing boats, delivered sailboats, wrote computer code, taught middle and high school, worked for a type house, a newspaper, a TV station, a photo lab, a science museum. I stayed single as my friends married, bought homes, had kids. I hit the glass ceiling, took two years off, and went back to college for my Master’s degree.

All the strands of my life came together when I went to work at KCTS, the PBS affiliate in Seattle.

PBS and NPR were the place to go to work when I was in college. Public broadcasting, public voice, no commercials, experimental programming, educational television were the wave of the future. The edgiest programs were on PBS: Sesame Street, Big Blue Marble, NOVA.

Things had changed by the time I got to KCTS—PBS had become mainstream and the “educational” mission was blurring as new technologies flooded the schools. Nonetheless, KCTS was riding high on the success of Bill Nye the Science Guy and it was a kick to travel to PBS conferences and be working for the station with the cool program.

I met Kristi at KCTS where she created outreach projects for various broadcast programs. I admired her work, and we worked well together though we were just about complete opposites. For starters, I’d thrived at The Evergreen State College, she’d hated it there. I never wanted kids or a house, Kristi wanted both and was a great mom with a great house. Funniest of all were our many “east-west moments” when Kristi would say something perfectly logical to her and I’d think that she’d just flown in from Venus. And vice versa.

But Kristi is the idea gal and I am the “make it so gal”. If you need 1000 plastic eyeballs by 5:00 PM, call me. If you need to know what to do with 1000 plastic eyeballs, call Kristi.

Kristi was going through a divorce and I tried not to listen to her heated conversations with her lawyer, and soon-to-be-ex, even though our cubicles were right on top of one another.

After her divorce, she came back from a trip across the mountains grinning, saying she’d asked a ponytailed guy to dance and thereafter she traveled across the mountains to be with him.

Abruptly, Kristi’s job changed. She went from running big projects to being a glorified secretary and she was clearly not happy. Her ponytailed guy had moved west to be with her, but suddenly, as she put it, their five-year plan became a five-month plan and then a five-minute plan: she married her guy, and poof, moved to the remote valley where her new husband had lived.

In contrast, my job was getting more interesting and the diverse paths of my life had finally merged: visual and graphic arts, education and writing. I was experimenting with early versions of streaming video, trying to figure out ways to use the technology in the classroom. I was working with youth media and helping emerging producers get their work on the air. When I mentioned where I worked, people said, “Cool! We love PBS!”

The only thing I wasn’t doing was any work of my own.

In the Beginning -- Kristi

IN THE BEGINNING--Kristi

In the beginning, I was a basically “normal” person. I was raised by working class parents in Portland, Oregon, who respected education and encouraged me to get a degree. As Ti mentioned, I started out at the alternative Evergreen State College in Olympia, where I learned I wasn’t “alternative” enough to fit in. So I put myself through school and earned a degree in International Studies from the University of Washington. Upon graduation, I fled the country to work in remote Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Impetuous move #1. Little did I know I had just set the stage for my whole life.

After returning from the Peace Corps, I cast around for a direction and life. Finding neither, I did what many a lost woman has done before me: I got married and had kids. By the time I figured out I had picked the wrong guy (and the wrong life), I had moved back and forth across the country following my husband’s struggling career, had another child and ended up in Seattle where I finally figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up: work for Public Television. I started out as a receptionist at KCTS just to get my foot in the door. But two days after my (now ex) husband moved out I got a call from KCTS offering me the job of my dreams: Outreach and Learning Services Coordinator.

By 1997, I was a single mom with an interesting job, two young children daughters, a nice “normal” home in an upscale neighborhood of Seattle, and lots of fun, educated, left-of-center urban friends that looked and acted like me. A pretty average urban life.

My work as an outreach coordinator creating public education and outreach campaigns for PBS documentary productions was rewarding. I got to do meaningful work and work with cool people like Ti, who, despite our many differences, was a great cubical mate. She was quiet; I was not. She worked odd hours; I punched the clock. She had a fish tank and art and other cool things on her desk while I could barely find mine under piles of paper and files.

Ti was Chinese-American with great stories to tell about her family. I was an American mutt with few stories to tell about mine. Her work ethic and organizational skills were incredible while mine were okay, but not great. I often would sit in awe as she effortlessly moved between the three computer screens sitting on her desk, each with a different project, while I struggled to even find my current project in the pile of poo that was my desk. We mostly did our separate work but would occasionally collaborate on projects together, which we did well. Casual conversation, on the other hand, was dicey. Example:

Kristi (making light conversation and obviously wasting time): “So, Ti, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?”

Ti (rapidly typing away): “Why are you asking me this?”

Kristi: “Ummm, just curious.”

Ti: “No.” Conversation ends.

I remember the time I laughingly told Ti my philosophy on life, which had been passed down to me by my anti-authority mother. “It’s easier to say I’m sorry than to get permission.” I chortled. Ti looked at me squarely for a few moments and said, “Why would you apologize?”

“Okaaaay” I thought. Another east/west moment bites the dust.

Yet, despite these rather odd cultural moments, my life in Seattle was pretty normal. My home was tidy, my children were clean, people liked me and thought I was a nice person. I had lots of good friends. No big controversies to speak of.

How it is that I end up living in a small, dark, wood-smoke-filled log cabin in a remote mountain community where bears wander through my garden, people shoot deer in my driveway, and I develop a growing reputation as a troublemaker is… Well, that is the heart of my story, and something I’m still trying to figure out. In retrospect, I blame it all on the “Wild Women.”