I left Connecticut in the spring of 2016. I can still remember the newly formed oak leaves filtering the sunset as I loaded a fish tank and the last few plants from my house into my car. It was 7 PM, and I was going to drive all night to North Carolina in the hopes that I would miss traffic and spend the next day sleeping in my new home.
What I didn't know at that time was the places and people I would meet along the way, and the many miles it would take to find myself.
That first launch from Ashford to New Bern, North Carolina was just the start. North Carolina had a bevy of new experiences and things I had to learn. Whether it was how to prepare for a hurricane, how to become a husband or how to properly eat a pile of steamed oysters, the new things presented to me never seemed to stop. The big lesson happened after all three of those experiences teamed up and hit me in the gut with a diagnosis of ADHD.
Leaving my drive way in Ashford, I could not have dreamed that that little factoid would have eluded me for so long. But in Beaufort NC after a hurricane upended my life once again, the news that I was learning disabled came to light and that's when the miles really started to add up.
My newly acquired Wife and I loaded two dogs, three cats and all our most precious belongings into a 31' foot travel trailer and made our way west to Bullfrog, Utah. It wasn't that I would know what would happen in the westward travel or what I would find on the shores of Lake Powell, but somewhere between the desert heat and the sound of silence, I learned that my life's plan was all wrong.
It was in the desert that I finally figured out how to write my first novel and how to make the internet work for me. It was also there in the desert that I figured out that I wanted to make movies for a living. Of sure the idea of making videos hit me in Beaufort and even before in Annapolis on my family dock, but how I was going to make my first film didn't really hit me until I failed at making my first two pictures in Bullfrog.
The investigation into the Western Water Crisis in Lake Powell and the study of how cows are killing the American wildscape both failed miserably when I failed to raise a single dime toward making those films. It took a jaunt up to Aberdeen, Washington and then down to Klamath Falls, Oregon to figure out how to get a real job and then how to use it to make my first film.
God has a plan for all of us, and mine just took a little time to figure out. It came to me in a dream I had of my late father, where he told me about the gifts I was given and that this would be the place where I was destined to use them.
The dream got me to leave the radio station I was working at and the experiences I had gained with over 3000 miles of travel pointed me to the one story that needed to be told, the story of the Klamath Basin Farmers.
I got the gumption to ask the Klamath Irrigation District if they thought it was time to tell this tale, and it just so happened that they agreed. It didn't hurt that I had come to know them through my work at the radio station, and thankfully they agreed.
Imagine with all those miles travelled, I was led to the one place on the planet where I would meet a welcoming group of people who needed their story told, and I was the guy to do it. The lord works in mysterious ways, and as it seems, He led me here to Klamath Falls for a reason.
Nope, there was no way I could have imagined when I started the car and headed south from Connecticut that 8 years later I'd be in the high deserts of Oregon fighting to make it rain again, but alas that is exactly where I find myself today. I think Garth Brooks was right when he said, "the Lord knows what he's doing after all."
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