The Roads Within - How Some People Heal Their Soul

I just met a woman named Margaret. I just met Jamie. My name is Joe Wilkins. Hi, I'm Janine. And I'm the Rockhopper. You're about to meet four people, most of whom have been to incredibly dark places in their lives. And they're going to share with us the paths they are taking, or have taken, to help heal themselves. When you're out, you know, just out in the wilderness, hiking around, you meet some pretty cool people. And I just met a woman named Margaret, and she's originally from Maine, and she's got a story. She's going to tell you a little bit about it. Margaret, tell us a little bit about your story. Yeah, so I've been on the road for like two years, and I started out in North Carolina and bought a van and kind of had a lot of things in my life just sort of go to crap. And half of my body doesn't work from a brain injury, and I didn't know that at the time. So I just bought a minivan and named her YOLO, and decided to just come out and see what America had to see. I'm just basically hopping around America, trying to find my place and my purpose, and hopefully heal myself. And I actually just recently found that that's possible. My name is Joe Wilkins, I'm a retired professor, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. I grew up, however, in what is now the Shawnee National Forest of Southern Illinois. My folks, we didn't have indoor plumbing, we didn't have electricity, or we didn't have telephones or anything like that. So, a bit of a primitive start out. I picked up a few degrees, and I also got a commission in the United States Air Force. I went to Vietnam, 1966-1967, saw quite a lot of combat, very lucky, served with a lot of really wonderful people. Traumatic experience, of course, it always is. I'm not sure anyone ever completely recovers from mortal combat. Hi, I'm Janine. So Janine, we're talking about the darkness in your life. Tell us about that. Well, I've had a whole lot of it, but 2020 was probably the worst year of my life, as it's probably been for all of you as well. I experienced a very traumatic event with a family member, my son, in April of last year where he called me up and he told me that he had killed his girlfriend. And at first I didn't believe him, and then I knew it was the truth. I just met Sharon and Jamie, and Jamie has an interesting story she's going to tell us about. So this is Jamie, and she's originally from Ohio. And tell us a little about your story, Jamie. Like me, you're home sweet homeless. I am. I'm purposefully homeless. That's another, I hashtag, I have hashtag she lives on the road and hashtag purposefully homeless because I did it on purpose. I'm doing it for a purpose, and the purpose really has been self-discovery within a safe circle of people that I love and who love me. There are lots of us out here. Lots of travelers exploring the country, seeing what we can find, healing ourselves and going not only on those roads, on the external, but exploring the roads of the internal self as well. So Margaret, you said to me, van life saved my life. Tell me about that. Okay. Um, so I've been living in this van for like two years. Ten years ago I was diagnosed with MS, and I was misdiagnosed. So I was actually pretty miserable, and I had a problem with bulimia for most of my life. During all of this, probably 23 years, I think, and I was dating someone at the time and got dumped. So I basically had half of my body working and half of it not working, and I had this horrible eating disorder that was literally like crack for me. Like it was kind of what I did every day and how I wasted my money. And after I got dumped, I had to move back closer to my family, but I wasn't really talking to my family. And so I literally was crying with banging my fists on the floor and just praying to God, like, what am I supposed to do now? You had mentioned that you were a combat veteran in Vietnam. Indeed. How did that affect you? Oh, in more ways than any of us ever really realize. It's the stress. There is nothing like that. And the trauma of mortal combat is, frankly, it's unparalleled. And as I said before, I don't think anyone ever really completely gets over it. You learn to deal with it. What do you do when you're a mom and your 43-year-old son tells you something like that? You do everything you can to try to get help. And that's what I did. And what I think the worst part of it was, was that nobody, because of COVID, wanted to do anything about my information. They thought that he and his girlfriend were just hidden away and not responding to phone calls. And so the police didn't really do too much. And 43 days later, just a brief overview, he came to my home here in Tucson and he wanted to kill me. I randomly met a love, one of those love at first sight, you feel stupid loving somebody this much kind of love, on a nude beach in Florida, where I wasn't supposed to be this year, but somebody gave me a house in Florida for a month. And so I spent a month in Florida at a beach house and I met a guy on a nude beach, but we were fully clothed all three times that we saw each other there. That's the irony. What am I supposed to do now? Like, I don't know what to do. Like my relationships were all failing. I had this horrible addiction problem that I couldn't figure out how to get over. And it was like within a week of that prayer, I just kept having this thought, sell the car that you're upside down in, buy a minivan and just go while you still can. And so my whole point was to like, sort of see if I could find a way in this world and maybe even heal what was wrong with me. And it's just, this like seriously has taught me how to live my life without having an addiction problem. And so this has literally saved my life because when you're foraging every day, you literally, because I have to get ice. I live like I'm camping every day and just, just taking care of myself, it's, it's teaching me how strong I am and how much I can actually overcome. And so it's been awesome. Coming back from a war zone, I understood perhaps a little better the need that we all have for the healing powers of nature had previously been trained in Arctic wilderness survival by the Air Force up in Northern Alaska. There is now, it was created in 1980, a national park there, Gates of the Arctic National Park. And it's the second largest national park in the nation. And he also wanted to kill his daughter and, and then we find out that there, that he had had her body for, his girlfriend's body for about that same amount of time. And that I think threw me over the edge when I realized there was a lot of horrific things that had happened in those 43 days with him and locked up in this apartment during that period of time for months and months and months after he, he told me he killed his girlfriend. He told me he stabbed her 15 times. I could not touch my cutlery knives for months. I couldn't cook. I would look at my knives and I would just totally, literally completely and totally freak out. And then I've still got about a half dozen more places to go before I decide to settle down for a minute and go back to work and try being responsible again for a while. Responsible? Who wants to do that? Not me, but somebody's got to pay the bill. So yeah. So you're responsible as long as you need to be so that you can then be irresponsible for as long as you possibly can be. And then you go back and you're responsible because you need to be again. Well, you know what I say to responsibility? I'm listening. Responsibility is highly overrated. I thought you were going to say responsibility sucks because that's how I would have summarized it. But I like yours too. Mine was the more diplomatic approach. So by getting out, out into nature and out by yourself and maybe, you know, even meeting people on occasion. So this is all contributing to your healing, right? Yeah. So all I do, I found that my passion is hiking. So that's one more thing that keeps me from having an addiction problem is being out in nature. And I just go from city to city, hiking trails, meeting people, telling my story. And I actually recently found someone that told me this is not MS and we've researched it more. It's actually brain damage from something that happened to me a long time ago. So that's exciting. Like I've been out there looking and like when you're looking for the answers, sometimes they come to you when you're ready. And so now I'm working on that part of the healing. Like I've kicked the eating disorder. I've kicked the MS diagnosis and you know, now all I got to do is fix the brain damage. All throughout my life, I've always had a great fondness for nature and the healing powers of nature, if you will, and the solace in nature. When I retired, I wrote the first book that's ever been written. No, the only book that's ever been written about Gates of the Arctic National Park. It immediately became an Amazon bestseller. I'm rather proud of it. The title of it is Gates of the Arctic National Park, 12 Years of Wilderness Exploration. Received comments from readers in every continent, including Antarctica. Very gratifying to see what people have had to say about the book. And this is Joe's beautiful book that he personally signed for me. You can find this book on Amazon, so check it out. One of the reasons that I so value the solace of the wilderness, the healing powers of the wilderness, is because we all need to go back to things that are natural. The natural sounds, the wind and the water, animals, birds. Nature really isn't quiet. Sometimes we think about going out there, out there, where it's quiet. It's not really. When you start listening, there's a lot of sounds, but the sounds are natural and they are healing. I always remember that Hippocrates, father of medicine, is credited with saying that the real physician, the best physician, is nature. John Muir, one of the most famous naturalists, at least in American history, always loved to say, the mountains are calling and I must go. And I knew that my knives weren't involved. I knew that subconsciously, but that's how horrible it was. So Janine, you've been through intense darkness in your life and intense trauma. How do you heal from that? Baby steps. Honest to God, baby steps. And for me, I wanted to heal because sometimes when you have a train wreck in your life, and it hits you so fast, and you really don't even know what hit you until days or months later, and then you finally realize, I just was in a train wreck and I actually survived it. You have two choices. You either heal from it or you stay in the train wreck. Day by day, I took time to get into nature and to ground myself with my animals and the trees and the sunshine and process through everything day by day by day by day by day. I'm still not 100% totally out of the dark night of the soul, but I have learned I also probably don't want to be because it's always going to be part of my life and I'm learning how to embrace that darkness now. And I'm a very fortunate woman that I've been able to do this. I call it practicing retirement. Practicing retirement is what I'm doing right now. I'm working on perfecting it. I'll get there. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. I'll get there. Yeah, I'd like to know how you do that. Exactly. See? But that whole adulting thing. Responsibility. So you're saying that, you know, when you're out living like this, you really don't need much. It's really kind of like a form of minimalism. And I think what it teaches a lot of people is we don't really need all these material goods that we're led to believe that we have to have. And you can really live on very little. And you're still actually very happy, even maybe more happy than if you had all the material trappings. How do you feel about that? I feel a lot happier because it's like once you let go of needing all those things. I mean, I have one plate, one bowl, one pot, one measuring cup, you know, one drinking cup, like one fork, one spoon, one knife. That's it. That's my dishes. And it's like, you know, I've got a few books and some clothes and, you know, the things I need to survive, which are pretty basic, you know, a few tools here and there. But it teaches you how little you actually need, even in terms of food. Think about when you go to your cupboard and you say, oh, there's nothing to eat. You've got a full cupboard. Your cupboard is probably ten times bigger than my van. And you're saying there's nothing to eat. Me, I can put maybe five, six things in my cooler. And then I've got a little trunk on my back that I put some canned goods. And you realize, you know, hey, I don't need to get 20, 40 things of whatever. You don't need 50 rolls of toilet paper. You know, you need like the minimum amount to survive. And you get used to learning how to buy less and live off of it. And yeah, I'm incredibly like way happier. Gates of the Arctic National Park. It's a it's the size of Switzerland and it is totally primeval wilderness. It is the largest wilderness area in the world. It's wild, it's remote, it's rugged, and it's free. And one of the common sayings in Alaska and the northern Arctic is that the real beauty of the Arctic begins where all roads end. I chose to heal and I'm still healing. The anniversary of what happened with my son is not even a year yet. It's like it happened yesterday. I can't even believe it's already been a year. So it's a daily process. It's a daily journey. It's a mindful journey. Everything about my life has changed since then. There's always a depth of sadness that resides right here in my belly. There you have it. There's another person on not only on the external road, but discovering the internal road as well. Yep, do it if you can. Get out of the house every day that you can get out of the house and go back and visit nature for as many times and as many moments as you can because it will help you to see what you really need to focus your positive energies on. And how you can possibly avoid negative energies, even if it pisses other people off, that's their problem, not yours. So be the best version of yourself on this earth you can as long as you can be. And that's it. Nature's a wonderful- I'm a guru. Yeah, nature's a wonderful healer, isn't it? It is. This has been wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. So you're feeling like a more whole person now that you've been out on the road and you've been traveling and you've been immersing yourself into nature. Absolutely. I don't think I could ever go live in a house again. This is where I get my sobriety. You meet new people every day. You're literally out in nature, building campfires and cooking over them, meeting strangers and cooking dinner with them. It's amazing. It's like the most freeing feeling that there ever could be. So do you feel a real good sense of connection through all of that with like the greater world? Yes, oh my gosh. I feel like I prayed for an answer and that answer came to me and everything has just been unfolding throughout my journey, so for sure. I feel a connection to God. I feel a connection to other people. I feel a connection to nature. And then I find myself getting really offended when I show up at campsites and they're covered with garbage and people are littering everywhere. So it's also caused me to go out and pick up other people's trash. Show up to a crappy campsite, there's garbage everywhere. You clean it up, leave it better than you came. Yeah, I actually pick up other people's trash myself. And I'm sure there's no shortage of trash for you to pick up. As people are rather sloppy sometimes, to put it mildly. I mean, they're just really plain out disrespectful toward the desert and nature and places they shouldn't be. Which is too bad, and I think some of it is people just don't know. They live in their houses, they have things done for them. I don't really know what it is, but I think people just don't understand how to be in nature. Maybe they don't have the same connection that people like you and I do that live in vehicles and just travel. They just sort of feel like somebody else will clean it up. So I'm gonna guess that you suffered probably what they're calling PTSD. PTSD. Nowadays, and you probably had nightmares and you probably had some mental trauma. Sure. Now, tell me, tell the viewers, in what ways did nature help heal you? How did you repair yourself? The greatest assistance that I had when I came back, I've been interviewed about this a variety of times. And the guy wrote a book about me, actually. But he quoted me as saying, and he quoted me very accurately. As he was saying, my wife, Jean, when I came back, she saved my sanity, she saved my life. People help you, nature helps you, being able to be out there in the natural environment. I still to this day, I love to be out, and I try never to not be in the wilderness any length of time. I love to be out there. And I like to say that if you can't be in a wilderness like Gates of the Arctic National Park, it's a long ways. It's difficult to get there. I've been going there for decades and decades, been very fortunate to do that. But I always encourage people to visit the wilderness near where they are, whatever that wilderness, even if it's only a few trees. Get out and get to know those trees. Trees make good friends. You feel like you've grown? Do you feel like the outer journey has contributed to your inner journey a lot? My goodness, so much, so much. It's like you go to these places in nature and some of these things you just can't believe you're so lucky to see them, and it just makes you incredibly grateful for everything you have, so absolutely. Right, so does it help you kind of live in the moment? Has it helped you a little bit? I'm still working on that. Right, that's a hard one for a lot of people. I'm still working on that, but it's teaching me to look inside myself for the answer rather than out there, rather than looking for people's approval. And it's teaching me to rely on me and trust me. I've often believed that all the answers are already inside of us, but sometimes it just takes something to help bring that out. Would you kind of agree with that? Definitely, and I feel like it's showing me the things I need to still work on within my inner world, but I have the ability to because I'm out here in nature. I have every day as a new start for me, and every day I have a new chance to try and grow and learn from my mistakes. I think that being an addict for so long, and a lot of people don't really feel an eating disorder is an addict. But again, for me, it was something I could not even sleep. I would scratch if I couldn't do it. It was horrible. I lost friendships, I'm lucky my family still talks to me. And it just, it kind of teaches you to avoid people because you're so busy hiding your addiction for so long. And so now I'm really working on that part of the inner part of me, which is why I'm even sitting here talking to you. Because I don't typically hang out with people, and so I'm working on that. I'm like, hey, you know what? This person's actually really cool. They're not threatening me. They're fun to hang out with. I'm just gonna hang with them. And so I'm learning that part too, is the growing with other people. It's like a community, it's a whole community. There are so many people living in their vans, sedans, cars, station wagons, SUVs, travel trailers, you name it. There's older folks, there's folks just out of college. The whole world is, or the whole country, well, the world actually, cuz there's fan dwellers everywhere. But there's so many people in this country that are just mobile. And it's a lifestyle that is giving so many people freedom. And freedom from themselves, freedom from addiction, freedom from the mundane life of living to work, working to live. You know, as they say, war is hell. And I think war is probably the closest thing that people will experience to hell on Earth here. And I think you'll agree with that. I could not agree more. And you said the thing about PTSD. I think everybody who comes back from combat, not necessarily just war, but from combat, has PTSD. And you never really get over it. You just learn to deal with it. And nature is a tool for dealing with it. So you immersed yourself in nature to begin the healing process and restore yourself and your sanity over time. And that has worked pretty well for you then. It has, it has. I'm one of the lucky ones, I frankly admit it. Came back, I had a loving wife, and she helped, frankly. And I've said this in public many times, the military really didn't help much. They didn't know very much about helping people come back, particularly from Vietnam. And I think they've gotten better. I don't know how much. I think they probably have improved. But we figured it out on our own. And as I say, I'm one of the lucky ones. I came back all in one piece. What do you think might be steps to help you restore yourself from something as traumatic as that? We talked about nature and getting out into nature and sort of being able to release your pain there. Talk a bit about that. So I'll tell you the biggest thing is to stay grounded. There's nothing you can do about outside influence, okay? But what you can do is you can do inside influence. So one of the things I've had to do a lot, and I still continue to do, is ground. And whether that's grab a bunch of dirt off the ground and put it in a pot and put water in it and put my feet in it and just sit in mud. Anything that keeps me grounded. So my head and all the things that are going through it to try to figure things out and resolve or solutions or what could I have done better as a mother and all those questions that come up when something like this happens. That doesn't matter. What matters is what is your physical body feeling at that moment? And you have to give yourself permission to feel the feelings. Process through them, but you have to stay grounded. You have to stay grounded. How do you think people who are kind of not in the road life, how do you think they kind of see a lot of the people who are van lifers, SUV lifers, RV lifers, those people, how do you think they perceive that? Unfortunately, pretty crappy. I feel like I get looked at a lot like I'm homeless. Or like I'm just trying to get something if I'm in somewhere, like why is that person in here? They just came from a van, like what are they all about? I guess they just don't really see that this is a true lifestyle for people. And I'm a person just like they're a person. I may not work, I'm on disability, that's nothing I'm ashamed of. But someday I will be working while I'm living in a van because I don't think I'll ever leave this lifestyle. And I'm a respectable human working a job just like anyone else. I just happen to live in a van. I shower at the gym, I'm not dirty. Most of us are probably some of the cleanest people you've ever met. If you've ever seen my van, which you're kind of seeing right now, it's clean. I'm clean. And that's the thing is people just don't realize that. They just look at us like we're hobos. Maybe we are, but we're cool hobos that are cleaning up your trash. Tell people why you think we should preserve nature. If we're going to survive with any kind of sanity in our world, we have to have nature. We need to be able to get out there. We need to be able to get away from, I love all of these modern tools of technology. They're fun, they're great. I love to do all of the things with them. But we gotta keep them in their proper perspective, in the proper place in our lives. The best way to get away from all of this chaos, if you will, in our lives. All of the noise, all of the difficulties that we have is to get into nature. I think it's just absolutely imperative for all of us. That's why we need all of these parks, national parks, state parks, national monuments. Those things are precious and they are vital to our, frankly, the survival of our species. Great point. I think that nature is the greatest healer. In your case, you had Jean, your wife, also a great healer. I think nature has been a great healer for me. And I think for many of the people out there as well. I think it's a place that people can rejuvenate their tired souls. Recently, I've come up with kind of a saying, for myself anyway, that I need to escape the din of humanity so that I can hear my inner self speak to me. And if I go into nature, that happens. And I bet it happens for you too. Absolutely, that's exactly my experience. So do you think this has really helped build your self-esteem and other qualities of your life? Heck yeah. I see so much stuff that I, before I moved into a van and I was having the problems with addiction, I didn't know how to take care of myself anymore. I relied on family to catch me every time I fell. And this is the one environment that you're like, my gosh, I'm gonna die if I don't go out and get my own supplies every day. I've gotta find a new place to camp every certain amount of time because you can only stay somewhere so long. My car just broke down. What in the world am I gonna do? And you learn how to deal with it. You figure out how to get from point A to point B. It strengthens your faith because every time something goes wrong, you pray about it, or maybe you don't. But for me, I pray about it and hope that it works out. And eventually, it always does. And it teaches me that, wow, I'm pretty cool. I'm taking care of myself. I'm taking care of this van. When it breaks down, that money's coming from me. It's just, it's incredible. Yeah, so it teaches you self-reliance and just a whole lot of other great qualities. I guess what I was trying to get at is there were so many things that I thought that I needed that I don't really need. I mean, running water, you can do so much without running water. And I'm seeing that I can be resourceful and figure this out. If I need water to wash my hair, I drain the stuff out of my cooler and boil it and let it cool again and use that to wash my hair. But it's all about being resourceful and learning how to jerry-rig things. And just seeing that, wow, I do have the ability. I've got one arm that works and one leg that works. But I have the ability to climb up and hold on and get things out of my roof rack. And that, to me, that is my freedom. Seeing that I can do this stuff all on my own is my freedom. So yeah, it's a total confidence booster. Nature is powerful. Nature is healing. It's vital in our lives. And I just hope people keep going out there, experiencing nature, camping, hiking, whatever, paddling a kayak, walking, anything. You can't do it wrong. Yeah, I hope more people eventually immerse themselves in nature, because I think only by doing that will they gain an appreciation for nature and want to preserve and protect it. Absolutely. And I always love to see when parents have small children and they're getting them out and walking around in whatever kind of wild place that's near them. It doesn't have to even be big, but they're getting their kids out of doors and experiencing nature, start those habits off when they're young. As I say, in my case, I think I was fortunate in growing up in some very remote wilderness areas. So I was introduced to it early, and I think it certainly has been good for me, and I think it's good for everyone. I love to see young people out there experiencing it. Absolutely, and as they grow older, what I think is that you protect the things you love, and if you love nature, you're gonna want to protect it. You're gonna want to protect it, absolutely. It is so vital, it is so vital. So the world right now could benefit from more protectors of nature. Absolutely could, absolutely could, yeah. It's rugged out in the wilderness, but there's also a fragility of nature, and we need to protect nature, and I think we will. Well, it's saved many of us, and we need to save it. And we need to save it too, yep. That you have to stay grounded, and that's what I do daily. I'm outdoors, I love hiking, I love being with the trees, the mesquite trees, I love being with animals. And I do that, if not daily, more than two or three or four times a day, is being in nature. Because grounding is what helps keep me sane, but it's also the life energy force and the light energy coming into my soul to keep me in a place of soulful resilience, if you will. So that my physical body can heal itself from the deep guttural pain that I feel about what has transpired in my life. Because no matter what, it's traumatic and it's a different kind of trauma than what we went through in 2020. That added insult to injury, to be honest with you. Because having to deal with something as devastating as this, and then having to deal with having to learn how to wear masks and be in the public. And all of the other trauma that was going with all of that, and the social distancing. And I'm a hugger, I love to be around people, and that was just completely taken away from me, so I had no outlet there. That was really difficult, so I had to become more one with nature, because that's where I found peace. That's where I was able to unite with my higher source energy and my spirit guides and everything that was part of who I am. And that's what has saved me, that's what saved me and keeps me going still to this very day. One of the things that I've learned about severe trauma, and I'm also in therapy, so I need you to understand that I have that in place as well, and I have a fabulous trauma therapist. You can't rush healing. It doesn't matter what kind of trauma you've been in, it doesn't matter. If you've been traumatized in any situation and you find yourself having post-traumatic syndrome distress over something that affected you from an emotional, spiritual, physical, spiritual manifestation that's manifesting in your life at that moment, that's PTSD from that trauma event, because it triggered something, okay? You have to stay present, constantly present to process through it, and you have to give yourself permission to process through that, and you have to stop. I have to stop at that moment when I know that I have that. So the secret is to give yourself permission to stop and process through the trauma. Some people are more comfortable at home. There's nothing wrong with that. For me, I like to be out in nature. Nature heals. So Janine and myself, we've known each other for over 15 years we've just established, and we've both been through the hell that is Eastern Oregon. Yes, we have. And we've been through that similar hell, so we understand each other, and we understand how dark a place that has been for both of us. Yeah, and it's so great to see you come alive again. I mean, I can see it in your face, and your smile, and your eyes, and your work on YouTube. It's so good to see you be creative again. Like the people who've shared their stories with us, I too have experienced trauma and darkness in my life. As some of you may have also experienced. Love, travel, and nature. These are what brought healing and helped those who you've met today restore their heart and soul. While love has been rather elusive in my life, travel and nature have been my constant companions and led me on a path to a better place. Where I could rebuild myself and my psyche, offering a means and a nurturing environment where I could restore self-esteem, confidence, believing in myself, and create a better person. Nature helped save me after enduring a traumatic childhood of emotional and physical abuse. Travel and nature have also helped me cope with job losses, deaths of friends and family, and the hell that was Eastern Oregon. Living in a town that detested outsiders. There I was taunted, was thieved, had my house and garage broken into, was sprayed with poison by the local vector control agency, was threatened with death, and was the recipient of thousands of dollars of damage to my property. A local realtor and property manager stole and embezzled thousands of dollars from me. I took her to court, but due to the corruption, I lost even though I had a binder full of evidence, and she didn't even have a piece of paper to prove anything. Even though she won, she tried to hire a hitman to have me killed. I couldn't go to the police, as I was advised that the dirty and corrupt chief of police and his brother, the so-called detective, ran the force and were receiving sexual favors from her, as likely were many others in positions of power, such as the DA, an attorney or two, and possibly a judge. I had already experienced the police doing everything in their power to protect her. Ultimately, the state did an investigation and proved everything I accused her of and more, and ultimately revoked her property management license for several years. I handed the completed investigation from the state to the detective and the DA, and yet they refused to do anything. My girlfriend in Baker City warned me that the town was a sad, lonely, depressing place full of darkness and oppression. I didn't want to believe her, but she was right. Darkness fears the light. Eastern Oregon proved to be a region rife with ignorance, closed-mindedness, and corruption. I said of Baker City, the town where I lived, that it's candy to the eye, but acid to the soul. It had a tall mountain backdrop, but also the most concentrated amalgamation of mean-spirited people of any place I've lived. Nature became my escape, my healer, my friend. There are different things that heal different people. What heals you?