The Story of My Life (1972–2024)

My parents were from the Los Angeles area of southern California. They met at Long Beach State University in the mid 1960s and later lived in a communal house with a group of hippies. In 1970 they went on a six week backpacking and hitchhiking trip around Europe. When I was a kid they told myself and my younger brother stories about that experience, which no doubt influenced my quest for adventure.

Both my mom and dad worked in a hospital and one of my dad’s coworkers was from Vancouver, Canada. He moved back to Canada at some point, and shortly thereafter my parents were starting to think about moving out of Los Angeles. They decided to move up to Vancouver in the fall of 1971, where my dad got a job at a research center at the University of British Columbia, where his Canadian coworker was now working.

I was born in Vancouver the next year, in April of 1972. A year-and-a-half later, in fall of 1973 my parents decided to move back to Los Angeles to be closer to family and old friends. We lived in the Los Angeles area for a couple years, and my brother Christo was born there in 1974.

But my parents were still dissatisfied with life in the sprawling metropolis of LA and decided to move once again, this time to Glen Ellen, a tiny town in Sonoma County, northern California, about an hour north of San Francisco. We lived there for two years and then moved once again, when I was five years old, this time to a raw 40-acre piece of land covered in trees a few miles outside of the little town of Willits in…