Why did someone who loved fishing and the water and had always lived by a coast, decide to buy desert land?  It would ultimately take two trips to investigate.   I still don’t know that I ever got the right answer, but we did make some quirky, fascinating discoveries about the drier places in our country.  And it was my first experience of the calm that an arid openness awoke in me.  Maybe Dad and I shared that. 

Coast-to-coast and back again

The water-lover was my father.   Major John Henry Austin USMC, ferried my Croatian mother, asthmatic little brother, Florida swamp-bred granddaddy, and me from Camp Pendleton on the Pacific coast to Camp Lejeune on the east coast of North Carolina. Granddaddy was not around for the return trip, but by then we had picked up a Chihuahua named Ginger. [Read more…]