It's been an interesting life...

I was given a value set by conservative parents along with the mind to analyze and criticise those values, ultimately rejecting many of them.

The time and place in which I was raised saw the end of the last pioneering American culture as it was being replaced by a settled, technological culture, but which still embraced many of those pioneer values.

I witnessed the dying embers of the true frontier spirit in the last place in America where it still existed, and was there when the change occurred that finally ended the American frontier forever.

I was privileged to be a pioneer in a brand-new industry that changed American and world culture, forever.

I had the opportunity to live in and explore some of the last bits of wilderness left in America, and had time to ponder deeply what the loss of wildness really means.

I have lived far away from America in an exotic and unique culture, and have had the opportunity to analyze and consider what meaning that culture and its values have for an American, while being far enough from American culture to understand what it means for the world.

I have learned firsthand what it is like to experience political persecution and to go into exile.

In all, I've had quite a time of it in the five-plus decades of my life. It hasn't been easy, and I can think of many things I might have done differently. But the broad outlines of my life have been satisfying to me, and I don't think I'd change that much of it.

They still talk about the day I was born

In post-war Idaho, things were still a bit tough. My parents were living in the basement of the house they were building (which my mother still lived in until very recently), and my father was struggling to establish an electrical contracting business (to this day doing business as First Call Jewel, now run by my nephew).

In the midst of post-war shortages, struggling to start a businesss in a period of raging inflation and now a blizzard so severe it actually cut off whole districts for months with drifts that completely buried houses, my parents had their hands full even without me, but now they had a newborn to deal with, too, along with two older brothers and an older sister. I was forever to be the 'baby' of the family, and something of a burden that just didn't seem to end.

Not Much Fun Growing Up

By the time I was four years old, I realized that there was something different about me. I didn't know what it was, but I knew I was different. By the time I was eight, I knew what at least part of it was, and knew the word for it. When, as an eight-year-old, I used the word "homo" in front of my mother, she was so taken aback by this (remember, this was 1957), that she still talked about the incident to the end of her days.

School proved to be difficult, as I found that since I didn't have playmates as a small child, I had few social skills. I was somehow different, too, and knew it. So these problems began to gnaw away at me. In addition, I had a learning/social skills disability, diagnosed in later life as Asperger's Syndrome (a diagnosis at the time would have been possible, but for some reason was never made). One of the symptoms of Asperger's is childhood depression, which only added to my social isolation and lack of interest in school and other activities.

By the time I was in fourth grade, my problems at school became so severe that my parents sought professional help. At the tender age of ten, I found myself on the psychologist's couch. Of course, I had a good idea of what at least some of the problem was, but couldn't say anything. And if I had, the psychologists of that day would have dealt with it in very unpleasant and damaging ways. I'm very fortunate that I kept my mouth shut. I had few friends, and didn't seem to fit in, no matter what I tried. I seemed to play well with others, but somehow they didn't much want to play with me. My interests and theirs were simply not the same and were not compatible. As is common with Asperger's patients, I was keenly interested in science, and I became obsessed with the little transistorized pocket radio I had received for Christmas, listening to it at school and in church, on my newspaper route, and at home - so much, that the cord dangling from my ear led many people to conclude I was wearing a hearing aid. It wasn't long before I could name every single AM radio station in the western United States, whose call sign began with "K." I could cite the frequency they occupied and could tell you whether they were daytime only or daytime-nightime. Radio became a fascination for me. I learned electronics and from plans in a library book, I built myself a rather primitive single-tube shortwave receiver, and began listening in to the world. That receiver opened a whole new world to me, and I began to understand more about the world outside the United States, taking an early interest in foreign affairs and politics. When I was given an ancient, junk shortwave receiver, I quickly repaired it with parts my father had saved from his electronic work in World War II, and started listening to the world, all night long, on a radio that didn't require constant retuning. All this came as quite a shock to my classmates, who viewed me, with some justification, as quite the geek. Science classes were supremely boring to me, because I already knew the material - in fact, usually knew it better than the teachers, who occasionally came to me for help.

What? You're Not Going to the Senior Prom?

When I was 13, my father mentioned, in the course of one of those father-son chats, that the only thing he'd ever disown me for, was if he found out I was gay. It was said in a context that let me know he was quite serious. Inwardly, I almost panicked. What if he found out? Where would I go? What would I do? How would I survive? I redoubled my efforts to suppress any evidence that might betray my orientation. This was the first of three times he said this to me. Each time it was with seriousness. I knew that I was developing a bit of a gay "swish." I worked very hard at suppressing it and, with great effort and a lot of struggle, largely succeeded.

Since my interests and those of my classmates diverged, I wasn't overly concerned with not fitting in. My small group of friends in high-school didn't seem to mind or question the fact that I wasn't dating (some of them didn't either), and if they were gay, they didn't say so, and neither did I. So we just pretended it didn't matter.

Learning The Family Business Starting With A Broom

College! On My Own! At Last!

That fall, I attended college at Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho. My major was in speech (I intended to pursue a career in broadcasting), and while there, I joined the New Freedom Singers, an "up-with-people" singing and dancing group, that toured the local area and sang and danced for local Mormon ward functions, half-time shows, etc. The group, sponsored by Ricks College, proved to be modestly successful. I enjoyed being a part of this group; it offered a sense of belonging I had rarely felt.

But I was able to remain a member only for my first semester. During my second semester, I was offered and accepted a job as the engineer for Ricks Radio, the broadcasting arm of Ricks College. My job was to engineer three weekly radio programs the college was producing, as well as videotape sporting events, television programs, lectures, etc., that the college wished to use for educational purposes. It was my first job in broadcasting and I loved it. But it was distracting, and my grades did suffer a bit from the long hours I put in.

Towards the end of my freshman year at Ricks, I heard about a job opportunity in Alaska at a salmon cannery from a boyfriend of my sister's. It really sounded fun, and very lucrative by college student standards, and it fit the agenda of how I wanted to live my life, so I decided to apply, not thinking I stood much of a chance. With my application, I included one of my business cards from my high-school audio recording business, and that did the trick. My application impressed the cannery office manager, and I was on my way to Alaska!

A Long Way From Anywhere, Especially Home

While I was there that summer, there came the news that there had been an oil discovery on the North Slope, at a place called "Prudhoe Bay." The natives dismissed it. It will never change anything, they said. They had seen this sort of 'big deal' before, they said, and time after time, nothing ever came of it. I somehow sensed that this time, it would be different, very different. That it would change everything, as I told them - and indeed, it ultimately did. Alaska was never the same after that summer. The frontier days were over. The slogan, "The Last Frontier" quietly disappeared from the license plates, to be replaced by "North to the future."

The office manager at the Egegik cannery of Alaska Packers knew from my application that I understood a little bit about electronics, and since there was no radio operator there, and one was needed to assist with the marine radios in the fishing boats, I was elected, like it or not. I was given the privilege of doing radio work on my own time, after hours, for whatever I wished to charge, and I arbitrarily decided my rate was $35 per hour, a truly princely sum at the time. There was enough work that it added handsomely to my regular salary. Of course, I came home with lots of war stories, some of them so bizarre as to be barely believable - stories of a village of 180 people, which averaged, at the time, a murder every summer, a stabbing every week or two, and a bar fight every night. I had stories about how rival fishing boats managed to somehow sink out in the bay, all hands lost, under rather mysterious circumstances. Stories about other college kids who managed to wrangle a fishing license and a little skiff, and managed to come home from a summer's work with tens of thousands of dollars in their pockets. Stories about life on the tundra, mosquitos and blackflies so thick they could kill. Stories about a meanspirited office manager who embezzled the company store. And I came home with lots of cash. Enough that when my college roommates were eating hot dogs, I was eating steaks.

The company asked me to return in following years, and as it was the ideal way to finance my college education, I eagerly accepted in spite of the hardships of life in that village. The experience of living in that harsh environment proved to be an excellent preparation for the life events that were to come.

In the fall of 1968, I transferred to Brigham Young University, mostly because I didn't feel particularly challenged at Ricks. My major was communications, an arts degree with a concentration on broadcasting. The communications school was a large one, and competition for jobs at the university station, KBYU, was intense, so I never did succeed in getting a job there. I didn't need it anyway, as my summer job in Alaska provided all the cash I needed for school. Professionally, it would have been a good thing, but since there were lots of students there who already had professional broadcasting experience, I was hardly needed. While at BYU, I lived off-campus in apartments with five other men. During my senior year, a pair of them were a gay couple, though I didn't realize it at the time. They must have sensed that I was gay, and they gently cruised me, but at the time, I didn't understand what was happening. I wish now that I had been more open to them. My life might have been much different.

The last three summers in Egegik were much more fun than the first. The office manager, who had been my boss and a rather difficult man to work for, was fired because I was the only employee who had worked for him who came back for a second season, and his embezzlement had aroused suspicion. He was replaced with a much more reasonable boss, who was much more pleasant to work for. My second season was as the store clerk, with more reasonable hours, better pay and more time for radio work, for which I came much better equipped with some books and simple test gear, knowing I'd be doing it.

The last two summers I was the official, full-time radio operator. It was a job I truly loved. I still feel it was the best job I ever had. The work was interesting, the hours reasonable, I still had "moonlighting" privileges, and I got to play 'ham radio operator.' I'd always wanted a ham radio license, but had never had the determination to get up enough Morse code speed up to pass the test - very difficult due to my Asperger's - so I had never gotten my license. But operating on the Alaska Public Fixed frequencies didn't require more than a third-class commercial license, which I had gotten as part of my classwork through BYU, so I was set. My colleague at Naknek was a ham, and he was fun to chat with in the evenings when all the traffic was passed. In addition, a man in the village, Stan Chmiel, was a ham (KL7GSC) and used to invite me over for phone patches to home occasionally. We exchanged parts needed for projects we were each working on, and we talked about ham radio for hours, and I was hooked. When I returned home that last summer (1971), I started learning the code. Worked on it with determination - the time had come to finally get my ham radio license, and nothing was going to stop me. Every night for months on end, I practiced for twenty minutes, rain or shine, fresh or tired, and worked hard at it, determined to pass the test.

Dah Dit Dah Dit Dah Dah Di-Dah!

After graduating from Brigham Young University in the spring of 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications, I returned to Egegik for my last season as a radio operator. I then went back to Idaho Falls to work for Benay Cable, channel 9.

Only 20 Years Ahead Of Its Time

What Benay Cable did, basically, was to pretend to be a TV station. The owner of a local radio station in Idaho Falls, KTEE, wanted badly to get into television to compete with his arch-rival, but couldn't raise the cash to get a license and build a station. So he went to Idaho Falls Cablevision, the local cable TV operator, and leased a channel on the local cable, channel 9. Two cameras, a videotape recorder and a single rack full of equipment later, Benay Cable was on the air. What he was doing had never been done before, so he couldn't go out and simply buy programming from the syndicators, and he had to "roll his own." The program schedule consisted of about four hours in the evening, starting with "Party Line," a TV version of the radio station's enormously popular local radio talk show. They then did a very simple newscast, mostly a talking head reading news copy from the AP wire, and that was followed by pretaped basketball and football games from the local high schools and junior colleges.

Benay Cable could have made it with sufficient capitalization. The programs were surprisingly well sold and ratings were remarkably high, given the abysmally low production values. Nowadays, even low cost consumer-grade equipment could have provided much better images than was available then, and now, of course, syndicated programming is widely available to such operations. But in those days, none of this was possible, and eventually, after about six months of operation, it folded. I saw it coming and bailed out two weeks before it actually happened. It was a great idea, but Benay Cable was just too far ahead of its time.

A Crisis in Faith

In weighing the evidence, in leaving out all the emotional appeals, applying only the laws of reason and logic to the problem, I had to face the facts. If I was to be true to myself, I had to accept that Mormonism, which claims infallibility, was clearly wrong on at least this issue; other problems existed with Mormon doctrine too, which I couldn't reconcile with the realities of modern science and history. So after much thought and a great deal of self-examination, I abandoned the faith of my heritage.

I began a long period of agnosticism. I could see no evidence before me that could justify a belief in a god.

Making Money In Radio

In May, 1972, I drove the two hundred plus miles to Salt Lake City and took the exams for, and passed, my Advanced Class Amateur and First Class Commercial FCC radio licenses. While studying for them, my brothers had been having two way radio equipment installed at Jewel Electric, and the manager of the company doing the work was impressed with what I knew about radio. He offered me a job if I passed my exam.

When I recieved my license certificate in the mail, I took it down to the two-way shop and showed the manager my license. He didn't have an opening in his shop, but there was one in his Salt Lake shop, in the portables and pagers room. I jumped at the chance. I went to Salt Lake, interviewed with the shop manager, and got the job. I was now a two-way radio tech! Sure beat dispatching in my dad's electrical business, a job I well and truly hated!

Before long, I had established an solid reputation around Salt Lake as a two-way radio technician, and was making a reasonable living at it. My circle of friends in Salt Lake consisted mostly of other ham radio operators I had met on the air. We enjoyed weekends and vacations together hiking and backpacking, mostly in Southern Utah in the canyon country.

After a while, though, I began to tire of Utah's snowy winters, and longed for a warmer, sunnier climate, so I quit my job and applied at Motorola's Two Way Radio Division.

California, the First Time

In the spring of 1977, on the return home from a visit to me in California, my father died. That event was the beginning of a series of spiritual experiences that caused me to consider the possible existence of at least an afterlife, if not a god. But my experience with Mormonism convinced me that I had best be careful in my spiritual journey; this meant investigating all the major world religions equally, and not being prejudiced by the fact that I was born into a Christian society. To be true to myself, I had to look at all the religions on equal terms. So I began a long spiritual journey that eventually ended in conversion to an amalgam of Buddhism, Vedanta and Zen.

My long spiritual journey that began with my rejection of Mormonism back in Idaho came to an end in a series of experiences that led me to embrace a sort of New Age Buddhism.

I plunged into the New Age community in the San Francisco Bay Area with a young man's enthusiasm, and became a practicing New Age Buddhist, active in many of the activites of the New Age Buddhist community in California.

Among the experiences that brought me to this point was a series of hypnotic regressions with a psychologist who specialized in past life therapy. Over the course of a year and a half, I had dozens of "regressions" into what appeared to me at the time to be at least 32 separate past-lives.

A Look at the Middle East

Eventually, in reflecting on my understandings of science and spirituality, I came to the conclusion that much, if not most, of the "New Age" movement was bunk, and had to be discarded, but there was a small core of philosophy of living, combined with an explanation of the nature of consciousness that still made sense in light of my personal experiences, and which was still consonant with science. I ended up rejecting nearly all of the New Age stuff I'd been playing with, but kept that which still was rational and made sense to me.

Young and Gay in Late 70's San Francisco

As I look back on it now, I suppose it was probably a good thing. What was unknown at the time, was that a virus was spreading through the gay community, and it was fatal to nearly everyone infected. But no one had died yet and no one knew. Gay San Francisco at the time was one big party that never ended. The gay life in the Castro in those days was legendary for its debauchery and lack of restraint. And this is just what the spreading virus neeeded. Untold suffering lay ahead, and no one had a clue. No one.

I remember to this day, coming home from work one evening and watching on the television while cooking my dinner, a stunning news report talking about a new, mysterious "gay plague" sweeping through the gay community in the South of Castro. Its victims contracted a rare, almost unheard of cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma. They seemed to sicken and die at an alarming rate. Several had died already. Many more were gravely ill. The newscaster explained that scientists hadn't a clue as to what was causing it, and public health officials and scientists were fervently searching for the cause of the disease.

As I watched that report, little did I realize that I was watching history. That report was the very first report, ever, in the popular press regarding the AIDS epidemic, threatening to become one of the worst pandemics the world had ever known.

But this didn't affect me. I'm not gay, I told myself. I just like guys, that's all. That "gay" stuff is for those "perverts" up there in the city...

Salt Lake The Second Time -- For a Change In Career And Direction In Life

For the next two years, I managed that portable and pager department, seeing it grow from my one-man-band to three full-time techs in that time. But I had grown thoroughly tired of repairing radios. It had become long hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer frustration. I was ready for something else.

Early in 1982, Skaggs Telecommunications Service, the parent company of Skaggs Radio, began construction of a satellite earth station facility they were calling U.S. Satellite Corp. They got a contract to provide hourly 5-minute transmissions of local news for the Satellite News Channel (Group W Broadcasting's abortive attempt to compete with CNN). The administration of that contract meant that the new satellite uplink would have to be manned during the hours of operation.

I saw this as an opportunity to break out of two-way radio into something with more future, and decided to ask for this position. I approached my manager, and he put in a good word for me, with the result that in a few days, I found myself not just operating, but actually in charge of the operation of a satellite uplink. This was a brand new industry, and no one had any idea of how to do it - I had to invent all the procedures and accounting systems to make it all happen. It was quite a challenge, but somehow I pulled it off. My procedures and accounting systems were copied by several other of the new uplink stations. I loved the satellite business. It was brand new, and it was changing the world, and I was there at the center of it, right on the cutting edge.

In a matter of months, U.S. Satellite was contracted to provide uplinking facilities for ON-TV, a subscription-based cable movie channel similar to Home Box Office. ON-TV was to be the first fully scrambled cable channel to be delivered by satellite, and we had to have the new uplink up and running in a matter of two months, tripling the size of the facility. The service was turned up three weeks ahead of schedule and under budget - much to my huge relief.

For several years, I was the operations manager of U.S. Satellite, and during that time, was part of several industry firsts. Besides ON-TV being the first fully scrambled cable channel, U.S. Satellite was the test site for the FCC's tests of MMDS, or "wireless cable." U.S. Satellite was also the uplink for the first direct-to-home transmission service with home satellite dish owners as the intended audience. The service was the first technological ancestor of today's DirecTV and Dish Network. Several of U.S. Satellite's Direct-To-Home customers included some of the first satellite-delivered pornography channels - five of the seven on the satellites, at one point. Being a common-carrier facility, U.S. Satellite was legally obligated to take all legal comers - as was our principal competitor, Bonneville Satellite, owned at the time by the Mormon Church. When they were forced to take a porn service, just temporarily, the church officials hurredly decided to get out of the common-carrier business, selling out at a huge loss, much to my amusement - getting into the satellite business in the first place hadn't exactly proven to be an "inspired" move.

During my time with U.S. Satellite, a corporate affiliate, Centro Corp., at my urging, had decided to begin integrating satellite news uplink trucks. Since there were only two people in the company who understood satellite earth station engineering (the corporate engineering V.P. was the other), I was selected to work at Centro as the R.F. systems engineer.

From February, 1987, to May, 1988, I was responsible for the design of the satellite uplinks in eight trucks, including trucks for KTVX, the first to be constructed such that the uplink could be removed and used as a portable "flyaway," and a truck for NBC News. One of my innovations impressed NBC enough that they included it in their required designs for affiliates' trucks. I also designed a communications package for use with the GTE Skyswitch network that was the only one ever approved by them for use on their network which was not their design.

By May, 1988, economic conditions had caused a downturn in Centro's satellite news truck business, and soon layoffs were coming around. I was part of one of them. I was having my midlife "crisis" by now, and I had considered buying a van and moving in, and going 'on the road', but the layoff finally made up my mind. I went to work and by the end of the fall, it was done and I moved in and went on the road.

Thank You, Richard Oddo

By November of 1988, I had finished the construction of the van, with the help of several friends (thanks, Rex!), and moved in and went on the road. My first camp was at Palm Canyon, near Quartzsite, Arizona. It was the first of many beautiful spots that became my home. Over the next few years, I camped in various locations in Arizona, California, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and New Mexico. During this time, I supported myself by working for Lyman Bros., a company supplying communications to forest fire camps. When a wet summer hit, and I wasn't making enough money, I went to San Diego and worked as a temp for Raytheon Service Company, a two-way radio service shop owned by Raytheon.

"Hold On To Your Hat, Cowboy, 'Cause You Ain't Never Rode In A Rodeo Like This!"

After working for Raytheon for several months, just as the job was running out, I got a call from my contact at Nitech. He said there was an opening, and asked if I was still interested. "I'd go in a heartbeat!" said I. In less than two months, the delay mostly to accomodate the series of vaccinations I needed, I had left the cold and isolation of winter in the Southern California desert, and found myself plunked down in the hot and humid savannas of central Nigeria.

For the next 18 months, I assisted with the construction of television transmitter facilities, did some refurbishing work, and did the design of a television satellite uplink facility proposed for the new presidential complex under construction at Abuja. I travelled all over Nigeria, and did work in 8 of the 30 states. In that time, I became well acquainted with the major cultures of the country, including the Ibo, Hausa, and Yoruba peoples, as well as a handful of the minor cultures. Since the company used modified ham radio rigs for communications, I enjoyed listening to the ham radio operators in Africa talking to each other. I went to a great deal of trouble to find out how to obtain a Nigerian license, but never did manage to do so before I left. Entertainment was mostly shortwave listening. There was little television worth watching, although pirated fourth and fifth generation copies of videocassettes of American movies were everywhere.

Living conditions were generally rather primitive. Outside of the few guest houses (of varying condition) operated by the company, I stayed in Nigerian hotels, most of which were quite seedy. Most of the work sites had few, if any guest facilities, and living out of a suitcase proved very challenging. My driver, Ibrahim Mohammed, was without a doubt, my lifeline. Without his incredible resourcefulness, life would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. And thanks, too, to Yahaya Iliya, a devout Muslim who sparred with me on long, interesting discussions of religious philosophy, and whose books on Islam were very enlightening to me, while I was working on the station at Bauchi. I've written a travelogue/essay about my experiences in Nigeria.

In October, 1992, I returned to the U.S., and moved back into the van. With the fresh infusion of cash, I went back on the road and didn't even consider work for the next two years. But it wasn't a need for cash that brought me back to the world of work.

Coming Out

I was camped at Holtville Hot Springs, a camp set up by the Bureau of Land Management for snowbirds spending the winter there in their motorhomes. The hot springs, really an artesian well, is a haven for retirees seeking the warm mineral waters in which to soak their arthritic bones.

At night, however, the character changes, particularly away from the heavily occupied areas of the campground. What I didn't know was that the spring is a cruising ground for local gays. While there was a lot of nonsense at night (drinking, drugs, etc.), it was also a spot where local gay men could come to make contact with each other. Even during the day, in isolated areas near the spring, occasional cruising happens. One fine spring day, I got cruised.

I was seduced. And I was blown away emotionally! It was one of the most emotionally profound experiences of my life. For the next several nights, I barely slept, going over and over in my mind about what a wonderful experience it had been, and how I wish I had someone like him with me. I had known I was gay, of course, but had never been willing to admit to myself the full impact of what that meant. And having the experience of making love to a very handsome 24 year old hispanic, made me aware for the first time in my life of the full scope of what I had been denying myself.

Over the next few days, in thinking the incident over, I decided that if I was to fully enjoy my life, the only thing to do was to come out. I felt that the denial to the world of who I am was a cancer growing on my integrity, and was eating away at my character, not to mention forcing me to live a life of unnecessary self-denial. By coming out, I could purge myself of that cancer, and become more honest with myself and the world, and enjoy a more emotionally satisfying life, sharing it with someone I could love and relate to. I made the decision. I would no longer run and hide.

Over the next few weeks, I formulated a plan. When spring came, I would go to Las Vegas and attend the National Association of Broadcasters convention, spend some time on the exhibit floor networking with some of my old contacts, and see if I could get a job. Once settled, I would find a partner who shared my vision, and together, we would buy a house and do what I had often dreamed of - start a shelter for homeless gay youth.

Finding a Real Job and a Life

I worked as an RF operator at the satellite earth station (now owned by Vyvx, Inc.), and in January, 1996 was promoted to station engineer. I acquired a taste for gay rodeo, and became quite active in the Los Angeles Chapter of the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association. After several years, when the career aspects of the job did not work out quite as I had hoped, and I was unsuccessful in attracting a life partner, I began looking for other opportunities.

In October, 1999, I was offered a position as director of engineering at a microwave and satellite telecommunications firm (name withheld by request) in Phoenix, with a mandate to organize an engineering department. I bought a house on a horse property in the Happy Valley district of Phoenix and moved there, adjusting slowly to the Phoenix heat. My employment took me to the company's many beautiful mountaintop microwave communications sites in Arizona, New Mexico and southern California, and I enjoyed taking my digital camera along, recording some beautiful scenery for my wallpaper page. Weekends were spent in hiking trips around Arizona, photography, and the activities of the Arizona Gay Rodeo Association and the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. Unfortunately, the job didn't work out - the company changed owners three times in nine months - and I soon found myself without a job as the result of the upheavals resulting from the last ownership change.

Back on the job market, I secured a job with Mericom Corporation, based out of southern California, but they agreed to let me remain in Phoenix and work out of my home when I was not on the road at a job site - I spent two months in Bend, Oregon in the dead of winter, planning microwave for a cellular network being built there, followed by a stint in Appleton, Wisconsin, also in the winter. As the weather in Wisconsin began to warm and the job came to an end, I was put to work on a large cellular build in Arizona, my home turf - just in time for the summer. It was a great job, in spite of the heat (I experienced my hottest outdoor temperature - 125 degrees - on that project), but was not to last - the company found itself in serious financial difficulties in the telecoms melt-down of the time, and soon began to quickly shed huge numbers of employees - by the time I was laid off, the company was down to a third of its original size and was shrinking fast. It was the last full-time employment I was to have.

It was during this time that I discovered that I am a high-functioning autism patient, with a disorder known as Asperger's Syndrome, and finally, at long last, had answers to some of the enormous social problems I had faced in my youth. I discovered that my obsession with radio is not at all uncommon among "Aspies," and that being able to name every radio station as I could when I was eight years old, was a classic (and surprisingly common) "savant talent" that is a primary symptom of the disorder. Unfortunately, I was also to discover that there is no treatment, only pallative psychological compensations, mostly through behavior adaptation, and most of which I had already discovered through trial and error on my own. It is surprising to me that the child psychologist I had visited as a child of ten had not diagnosed this - the syndrome was described in the literature fifteen years before I began to see him, and he should have been familiar with it. I also began to understand why I had been so unlucky in love - and why I was and remain single - it is rare that Aspies, gay or straight, marry successfully.

Adventures In Free Speech

First, I received a death threat. It came in on my web page response form, but I have the script set up to record the internet IP address of the computer that sends me a response from that page - and when I checked to find out who the sending internet address was registered to, it proved to be assigned to the government of the State of Minnesota. Since this was an interstate communication involving a government, I forwarded the email on to the Phoenix office of the FBI, along with all the headers. But I never heard back from them, and didn't think anything more about it, since I get a lot of email from way out there where the buses don't run. It wasn't until much later that it dawned on me that coming from a government network meant it was likely the first incident in what was to become a pattern.

It was not long after the death threat that I got a series of three job offers out of the blue from two different headhunters in London. As I was unemployed, they were very tempting - work abroad as a telecomms engineer, and for really big money, doing exactly what I enjoy doing the most. There was only one problem - all three offers were for work in countries where travel or work by Americans was strictly forbidden at the time. One was in Iran and the other two were in Libya. I told the two recruiters that if they and their client firms would work with me to arrange a State Department license for me to travel to those countries, I would be delighted to accept them. Never heard back. As I look back on it, I now realize that these offers were nothing more than traps being set up for a certain unwary dissident.

Not long after, I noticed that whenever I went away for a few days, I would occasionally come home to find a few things had been moved around in my still-locked house - where I knew I had not left them. And there were occasional trucks parked out on the street, never in front of my house, but usually within two or three doors of my place. I didn't think too much about this, until one of these trucks, a pickup with a topper on the back, ostensibly owned by a roofing contractor, proved to be not what it appeared. I noticed that it was parked in front of a fire hydrant (for three days continuously) - and yet the police drove by on at least three occasions that I saw, and never stopped to ticket it. So I went out for a closer look and what I discovered really piqued my interest. The truck had Colorado plates - a big no-no in Arizona, especially for a commercial vehicle. And I noticed that the ladder on the roof did not have any asphalt on the rungs and yet the painted signs on the topper advertised asphalt membrane roofing work. When I looked in through the windshield, I got quite a surprise - this pickup truck, with a simple, cheap shell on the back, had a walk-through built from the cab into the bed. When I tried to look in, immediately, in seconds, a man climbed out from the back through the walk-through, got behind the wheel, started it up and drove it away. I never saw it or any of the other trucks again.

This wasn't the end of the strange goings on, by any means. I went to Las Vegas for three days to visit a friend, and as usual, had shut down all my electronics, including my computer. When I got back, I fired up my almost brand-new computer for an overdue email session, and to my horror, it would not boot. There was an operating system error, indicating that I didn't have permission to load certain files. This was odd, because I had set up the operating system just a few weeks earlier as the administrator, and had permission for everything. After several days of effort, I managed to come up with a workaround, and get the system to boot and be able to work with it, even if it was not working right. Then one night, I was watching Tech TV's "CyberCrime" program, and they had a special on the FBI's new virus-like spyware program, called Magic Lantern. They had a computer that they claimed was infected with it, with a defective installation - and the real shock was that the symptoms were identical to what I was experiencing with my own computer! This is when it all became clear - the truck in front of the house was an "LP truck" (listening post truck) designed to monitor a bug placed in my home in previous illegal breakins. And the computer problems were the result of a bungled Magic Lantern installation.

After hearing that Sophos, an anti-virus software firm in Britain, had announced that it would include a definition of Magic Lantern in their virus definition files, I contacted them and offered to conribute my Magic Lantern-infected hard disk to the cause. At first they were very interested in my offer of the hard disk. But then, all of a sudden and right out of the blue, they began denying that there even was such a thing as Magic Lantern! Interesting how they suddenly had come to that conclusion, in spite of the fact that its existence had been acknowledged by the FBI itself!

Furthermore, for some time, my email had begun to arrive days, occasionally even weeks after it had been sent - something that simply shouldn't be happening, given how the internet's email protocol is structured and how my domain email was set up. This was especially true of mail to and from certain correspondents - all activists, and only email with political content. The delays almost never happened with email of a non-political character, or at most, were only an hour or two. And political email I sent was delayed by many hours or days, and occasionally failed to arrive at all, even though I never got a bounce message. The only possible explanation for these selective delays, given my server's configuration, was interception.

I also noticed something strange about my snail-mail. Some of the flaps on the back of certain envelopes had the appearance of having been opened and resealed. When I started watching for this, I noticed it was a pattern - only envelopes dealing with my financial affairs and first-class mail to my friends was apparently being opened. And it was arriving late, too, often several days later than it ordinarily should have.

Early Retirement In Exile

During the middle two weeks of May, 2003, I was in Costa Rica, enjoying my friend's warm hospitality (thanks, Diego!), and visiting most of the major parts of the country and meeting some of his friends. Costa Rica proved to be everything I had hoped for and more - far more livable than Nigeria, and with less poverty and more access to the amenities of life, yet with a pleasantly low cost of living. Utilities and infrastructure are more modern and reliable. And the government and people were friendly and accomodating. So I decided it was a go - this was a place I could easily see myself living in.

I returned to the States, and immediately put my house up for sale. I began preparing for the move, and finally, on the ninth of August, 2003, came the big day. The house sold, the goods packed and shipped, I got on a plane. As I write this, I realize that as the connecting flight from Houston to San Jose cleared the Texas coast, I didn't even look back for my last view of the United States. I no longer loved the land of my birth; it had rejected me. So I looked forward to my new life down south in the tropics, where I had always dreamed I would one day live. The next day, I began my new life in Central America.

Pura Vida!

The owner of the farm where I was staying was developing a new series of lots nearby and offered to sell me one at a significant discount, as I would be the first buyer in the new development. I liked it a lot, and it was perfect for my ham radio. While waiting to get my financial affairs in order and preparing to build, I moved into a rental house on a hilltop next to the development, where I could easily supervise the construction of my new home. As I settled in, I was in for quite a surprise. The weather at the end of the rainy season, at this relatively low elevation, proved to be cold and constantly windy, drizzly and foggy, to the point that it was downright miserable in the morning, especially in mid-winter. One of my ham radio friends, a Tico, even told me that the area had a reputation across Costa Rica as "La Penitencia," the place where God sends sinners to do penance. Then there were the houseflies. Whenever it wasn't cold, windy and nasty, the flies came out in swarms, buzzing around the house and being a constant nuisance. I concluded that the constant housefly problem was due to the presence of a chicken farm on the other side of the hill, in spite of the prevailing wind blowing the other way. I almost never smelled it, but the wind didn't stop the flies, which were everywhere. In addition to all that, the developer's partner built a house on a lot directly below the hilltop lot I was interested in, and his roof would have been a major part of my otherwise million-dollar front-window view. So, given my concerns about the weather and the fact that the lot I wanted was ruined for its view, I decided not to buy the lot, and look elsewhere.

One of my ham radio friends, who lived in the little town of Arenal on the north shore of the lake by that name, suggested that I might wish to come up and have a look around. Of course, the fact that he was also selling real estate on the side, meant that he knew the area and that I could probably find a property to my liking, though he certainly had an interest in making sure it was sold to me. Along with another ham friend, also from Phoenix, and who was also looking, I went up to Arenal to look around for a couple of days. I was delighted to find a beautiful property which was quite affordable, and was perfect for my needs, other than the fact that it was not a particularly good location for ham radio. But the property was about two acres, mostly already landscaped, and with a large fish pond. The lot was almost exactly the same size as the lot I had been looking at in Los Angeles Sur, and the lot, including the house, was going for little more than the cost of the lot alone in Los Angeles Sur. It also had all services already installed, and a truly beautiful flower garden with lots of mature landscaping - I didn't have to wait for any of that. I decided to buy the house and move in - it was the best deal I had seen in the country so far, and was an almost perfect match for my needs and desires.

The result is that I have been living in Nuevo Arenal for some time now, happily retired and spending my time gardening in a gardener's paradise and web publishing when the weather is bad. Yes, it rains a lot here, but that's mostly at night and seldom past ten in the morning. The weather is only occasionally nasty and cold and when it is, it is seldom so for very long; most of the time it is cloudy, but warm and pleasant. The locals have accepted me as one of their own, and the place is very agreeable to me in many ways. Overall, I am pleased with my choice. No houseflies at all, little fog, no constant drizzly, foggy wind, and lots of gringo as well as Tico friends. And it is an exquisitely beautiful place. The drive from the Arenal volcano to the town of Arenal has to be one of the most beautiful drives in all of Costa Rica - the highway tunneling through the rainforest in many places, interrupted by gorgeous views of the lake and the volcano. At last, I have found a little bit of paradise. And so far, with only occasional harassment from the Boys Up North. I couldn't be happier.

Your Tax Dollars At Work