I would like to invite you to read Drive – a Memoir, my 59,686 word adventure describing the life and hardships my brother and I experienced during the 50s and early 60s.  The memoir is set in a high mountain desert near Hamer, Idaho, a small farming community with a population of twenty–three. This coming-of-age account takes place when I was fourteen and my brother fifteen. It’s a year and a half of hair-raising adventures: fighting fires, participating in jackrabbit drives, “flying” a snow plane, constructing a whiz–gizzy, feeling the ghost’s wind, losing our way in the snowy mountains and experiencing the tragic friendship of an old man.
My dialogue is driven by a strong, but humorous narrative voice that depicts our life of hard work and hard play. The theme, that work and play meet, overlap, and become interchangeable, all the while teaching us life’s lessons, runs throughout the book and is the first definition of drive. The word drive also meant our struggle to survive nature’s heat and cold, the drive to maintain an independent, self-sufficient lifestyle, and, in particular, a crucial rabbit drive organized to save the crops from a plague of jackrabbits that threatened our rural way of life.
I write from a lifetime of experience, education and the wisdom of an old man remembering his boyhood – when food had to be grown, animals had to be slaughtered or sold, and when most needed things were built by hand. Hopefully this memoir will appeal to those who remember a rural era long past, and also to those who delight in the more timeless tales of young boys growing up with freedom to explore, invent and imagine.