John Steinbeck, who wrote such great novels such as Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men among many others including Travels With Charley.  You may have read some of these around 8th grade.  Travels with Charley is a book about Steinbeck circumnavigating the US in 1960 in a 3/4 ton pickup truck with a camper shell in the bed.  The book is a collection of stories about the people he met in the many small towns he passed though.  His campers name came from the name of Don Quixote`s horse Rocinante.  Charley was Steinbeck`s American standard poodle and is mentioned numerous times as he travels from New York across the northern states to the pacific northwest then back to New York across the southern US from California.  Tis a wonderful book.

I have a nickname which came from skiing in Idaho in the winter of 1995/96.  I had been working at a ski resort in the central part of the state called Sun Valley.  Sun Valley is known as being a town for the super wealthy with neighbors like Oprah, Jean-Claude van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger  Bruce Willis and Demi Moore when they were together before Ashton Kutcher.  Ernest Hemingway had also committed suicide here in 1961.  Another of my favorite authors who wrote Old Man and the Sea and For whom the Bell Tolls.

Ski Terrain Map

The ski resort contains an elevation gain from the valley floor of roughly 3,400 vertical feet.  I was well acquainted with this as my trip to work involved taking a shuttle from the dorms provided by the resort to the Warm Springs Lodge (one of the two base lodges for access to Baldy Mountain).  The high speed quad chair lift provided a speedy 10 minute ride to work five days per week to the Lookout Restaurant at the top of the mountain where I managed the kitchen.  Working with a restaurant staff of 5-8 people, we all rode up the chair lift each morning at 0700 with other staff members of the mountain including ski patrol and their avalanche victim sniffing dogs (from muts to German Shepherds) and lift operators.  Immediately after sitting on the chair lift, the lift would detach from the pinwheel and take off at a much greater speed beginning just over the Warm Springs Creek.  Idaho is not only known for its potatoes but also for its amplitude of hot springs.  Each morning we were greeted by the smells of sulfur fumes rising from the hot springs in the icy laden creek below.

The ski patrol had an interesting job as the morning after a heavy snow storm, they were responsible for  releasing the snow cornices which built up on the windswept ridges above the black diamond slopes within a couple hundred yards from the Lookout Restaurant.  I have vivid memories of watching these man created avalanches being discharged lessening the threat to the paid guests.  These events occurred at least once a week throughout the winter and still yet each winter one or two resort skiers would die from an avalanche in the vicinity usually from skiing out of bounds in areas where avalanche dangers are the greatest.  The areas outside the bounds of the ski resort terrain were uncontrolled and were to be entered at your own risk.

View from Lookout Restaurant on top of Baldy Mountain

I would usually ski with two or three friends every week as I had two days off and did nothing but take advantage of the winter sports of being in the Rocky Mountains.  These sports included not only down hill skiing but also snowshoeing, cross country skiing, camping with snowshoes or cross country skis.  Skiing during "whiteouts" created a terrain very difficult to see in.  These conditions usually included fog and snow while skiing on white snow.  We would ski within sparsly populated evergreen trees to have a sense of contrast in the sea of white.  That first winter skiing with my friends, in order not to loose each other when one can`t see more than 20 feet, we would make sounds of various movie characters to help find one another on the slopes of the mountain sides.  My movie character was the wookiee, Chewbacca from Star Wars.  Twenty years later, I have forgotten what noises my friends made, but upon hearing each other, the one higher in elevation would ski in the direction of the others for a couple hundred yards and stop when the sounds would begin again.  We often wondered what the other guests thought upon hearing some of these noises and not being able to see themselves.  Sometimes responses were made from those not in our group.  We would often regroup.  Other times we would be out of hearing range and would reconvene at a predetermined lift at the bottom.  This is where the nickname Chewy came from and has been used ever since.

I have traveled and lived many places.  Tis a much shorter list of the United States I have not been, Alaska and Hawaii.  When I left Idaho that first winter and following summer in 1996, I had moved back to North Carolina to get my license to drive a tractor trailer.  Upon moving west form NC in 1992, I had traveled to many western states through dreaming, exploring and many adventures.  During these four years I lived in Montana, Oregon, Idaho and Utah working seasonal jobs.   Typically these places included room and board in touristy locations.  My employment included ski resorts in the winter and guiding white water rafting in the summer or working in a national park.  Between the seasons of winter and summer or the seasons of snow and no snow, I would have a few months off to travel at leisure to many of the national parks and national forests of the Rocky Mountains.  My favorites being Glacier National Park in NW Montana and the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA) south of Stanley, Idaho (Population 47 in 1996, and upon later visit 100 in 2009).

My ALLTIME Favorite, Stanley Idaho and the Sawtooth Mountains

My mode of transportation during these inter seasonal explorations  was either a Chevy S10 or later, a Jeep Comanche with a camper shell in the bed which had a dual purpose of also acting as a warm dry place to lay my head at night wherever I happened to park.

Driving a tractor trailer around the US from 1997 to 2007 led me to the rest of the lower states including all the provinces of Canada and many of the larger Mexican border towns from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

I have lived in Costa Rica twice, a couple places in Brazil including Rio de Janerio, South Korea and in addition to the other states Georgia, Tennessee, Connecticut and tomorrow, I am leaving for a three month trip to Tanzania in East Africa.  I will be studying Swahili in addition to working with a humanitarian organization related to environmental engineering or water resources.  I arrive in Tanzania a month prior to the language class and internship beginning on June 12.  My intention is to rent a vehicle and tour some of the remote (off the beaten path) villages to get away form the tourist locations and meet the real local populations of Africa.

Rio de Janeiro as seen from Christ the Redemer

Some day I will write a book of which I have already picked a name, Traveling with Chewy, after Steinbeck`s novel Travels with Charlie.  Most of my adult life has been and continues to be lived where my philosophy involves having fun.  Tis the purpose of my life in only the best way I know how.