When I was in high school in the late 1980s in Florida, myself, my classmates, and most of the people in the town where I lived were optimistic and positive about life.  Life was pleasant and enjoyable in this small coastal town.

After I graduated from high school, I went to a small private liberal arts college in Virginia.  The faculty were mostly good, nice, intelligent, considerate, and helpful people.  The students were mostly positive, entertaining, sociable, and fun loving people.

I was supposed to transfer to UVA or Georgia Tech, but that didn’t happen.  I ended up going to the University of Florida, which was the last place I wanted to be.  The University of Florida was 35,000 pushy, aggressive, ambitious, scheming young people, and hateful, mean, bitter professors who had to fail out as many people as possible in order for the university system to work.  Though UF was the most difficult school to get into in Florida, and everyone there was very intelligent and capable of getting a college degree, the professors had to try to discourage most students from being there, there were just too many students.

I didn’t like my experience at the University of Florida at all, I wish that I would not have gone through it.  Most of the students in the mechanical engineering department suffered from Stockholm Syndrome.  Within about a year of graduating from UF, I had to move to Tampa for work.  Tampa was full of pushy, aggressive, ambitious, scheming people also.  I didn’t like living in Tampa.  I was very unhappy, uneasy, and uncomfortable there.

I very much wanted to get away from crowded places that seemed to attract the most obnoxious people, and bring out the worst in people.  In 2002, I put most of my belongings in storage, and I headed to the western U.S. in my truck.

I didn’t care if where I moved, I was sitting outside of a single-wide trailer in the desert of Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, or New Mexico with tumble weeds rolling by, this would be a great improvement over Tampa as far as I was concerned.

I wasn’t looking to find anything.  I was looking to get away from so many things that I didn’t like.  I didn’t like the super aggressive Blacks and Hispanics that were like some kind of vermin with a life span of three years.  I didn’t like the phony, fake, wanna be, con artist, ambitious stupid people.  I didn’t like the traffic.  I didn’t like the constant, unwanted noise.  I didn’t like the difficulty involved in just going to the store or going to get something to eat.  I wanted to get away from all of this, forever.

I stayed in a small town in Colorado for a while.  Just by chance and by luck, I happened to arrive at a very beautiful, heavily forested area of Arizona, and I stayed there for about five years.  I wanted to find a different area that was similar to this town in Arizona, but that was a little bit bigger, and where property was less expensive.  I moved to a slightly larger town in Idaho, that was much less expensive than where I lived in Arizona, but it was not as stunningly beautiful.

This plain, more ordinary, farming area of Idaho was where I finally bought a home on five acres.  It was quiet, peaceful, not overly developed, and I had a view of farm fields that stretched out to the mountains in the distance.

I knew that this is what I wanted to do.  Whether this was the best idea, perhaps it wasn’t.  To my surprise, my father who was born in Florida, and was now in his 70s, he had had enough of Florida, and he moved to a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.  It was hard to believe that my father was willing to leave the town that he had grown up in, and the people that he had known for his entire life.

When I was living in Arizona and Idaho, I saw that people from crowded areas on the west coast and the east coast of the U.S., were selling everything that they had, in order to move to less crowded, less developed, less expensive, low crime areas.  I later found out that many people in Florida were doing the same thing, and moving to North Carolina.

There are three well-known people, that appear to have done the same thing that I did, felt the same way that I did, at about the same time that I did.  Two of them, I didn’t know anything about them at the time.  I wanted to bring these three people up, because a lot is known about their lives, what they felt, and what they believed.  Also, they are interesting people that I want to mention to readers, and tell a little bit about them.  They are Chris McCandless, Art Bell, and William Cooper.  This will be in my next blog post.