Life Pivots

When Nixon stopped sending young people to die in Vietnam for no good reason, my thinking about future life sort of stalled for a while before pivoting a few times. When it stalled, I continued hitchhiking around to places I thought might hold opportunities I wanted to pursue–as inexperienced, confused young people sometimes did, seeking a direction and purpose. I enjoyed that pivot point, meeting a lot of nice people and seeing a lot of places.

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After graduating from high school, the next pivot led to thirteen years of hard work as a common laborer doing various things, starting with a summer roughnecking on wildcat rigs. That work was okay but I knew I didn't want to make a life-long career of it, so I went off to explore other options. There were plenty of them, and work of all kinds was very easy to find.

Midway between four years of common laborer work, I completed the first year of college coursework and knew I wanted to someday finish that study path, but wasn't sure what degree to shoot for. After a few more common laborer jobs of various kinds I finally pivoted to pursue a dream of becoming a professional musician, auditioned for, and entered the performance guitar program at a university fairly well known for producing good musicians.

I loved that stretch of coursework a lot, but when some classmates returned from the east and west coasts after they had graduated and came back penniless and practically starving to death, I decided to pivot to civil engineering school at another university well known for producing solid engineers of all kinds. While attending music school I worked a construction project doing some welding and enjoyed it, and I knew how lucrative engineering could be.

But first I had to earn some more money before continuing university studies, so I spent a year building steel boat docks and floated them out to customers on Possum Kingdom Lake. As my final full-time common laborer job, it turned out to be my favorite of all. My boss left me alone to do my work in a beautiful little cove of the lake, the rest of the time spent out on the lake delivering newly constructed boat docks and repairing some old or damaged ones.

A year of that propelled me back to college to continue learning civil engineering. Then I got my hands on a brand new PC, with which I discovered the joys of software programming.

That learning led to a paid internship digitizing and building a database of petroleum well locations which were going to be inundated by a new reservoir covering about forty-five thousand acres. That job convinced me I wanted to pursue a career in software engineering.

So I pivoted again to finish out university studies earning a bachelor of science in computer science degree with a mathematics minor. The dean of the computer science and math department, Dr. Stewart B. Carpenter, welcomed me into the school without hesitation and provided the most rewarding learning experiences of my entire time in university. I earned the degree, and two months later was employed full time developing software applications.

Working on several software engineering projects for several different companies over the next twelve years allowed me to finally chase the dot com bubble seeking employment west of the Pecos on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. I had already read news of rumblings about the bubble bursting sooner than later before I left to go live and work there, but I pivoted and took the risk anyway because I had bigger plans already in progress.

Two years earlier, I had purchased a remote, raw, completely unimproved parcel of property ensconced deep in widlerness of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with intentions of eventually building my homestead and moving onto the carefully improved property to live and work year-round by the time I turned fifty, operating my own business until reaching age and financial capability to retire. Then the dot com bubble actually did burst and I was laid off for four months. Those were four happy months spent traveling along the Front Range and deeper into the Rockies westward, performing as an itinerant singer songwriter while interviewing for a new job in the realm of software engineering. One morning, three offer letters arrived in my mailbox at once. I accepted the one most suited to my present and future plans, and moved to high desert to wrap up the final stretch working as an employee.

At fifty I pivoted as planned by starting my own company, survived the Great Recession operating it, and continuing to do so through to retirement. Thus began a wonderful span of time spent doing precisely what I wanted to do, exactly when I wanted to do it without being interrupted by anything else...until the USFS played with fire like a bunch of bratty little children and burned everything I had built to ash. Pivoting sharply, the next four years were spent battling FEMA for just compensations to rebuild my ruined world. That battle is ongoing, having received only partial compensations while FEMA drags its huge, bureaucratic butt, playing all kinds of cruel stalling games in attempts to delay paying more.

In the meantime, another pivot has propelled my life forward toward yet another goal to re-establish the homestead, this time as a food forest growing and sustaining me through the remaining decades of life. Through the remaining decades, that is, until the next life pivot.