Somewhere in an Oregon Valley

by jon Remmerde

Overview

My family worked and lived on a ranch in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon with no electricity and no plumbing, no garbage pickup, no television, no radio, no modern conveniences. We pursued education where we lived, and we saw and interacted with abundant wildlife in the area. Choosing deeper meaning than concern merely for material fulfillment worked well for us as is evident to readers of Somewhere in an Oregon Valley.

I cut hay from the mountain meadows, cut firewood from dead lodgepole pine. We worked and played with a draft horse one fall. We fed cattle hay when winter started.

I stopped a lightning-caused fire one year, then spent most of a rainy, dark night on a ridge in the forest.

We had classes and worked projects at the kitchen table and had many other adventures I write about in this book.

Excerpts from Somewhere in an Oregon Valley have been published as essays in Bellowing Ark, The Christian Science Monitor, The Doula, Home Educator's Family Times, Home Education Magazine, Men's Fitness, Northwest, Summit, The Sun, and other magazines. About 92,000 words.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940155044079
Publisher:	Burnt River Press
Publication date:	10/05/2017
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	788 KB

About the Author

I took care of a hay and cattle ranch in northeastern Oregon, then the water inlets for the city of Bend, Oregon, on Tumalo Mountain, then a Girl Scout ranch in the Rocky Mountains near Denver and then another Girl Scout ranch in the Rocky Mountains near Fort Collins, Colorado. We, Laura, my wife, and I and our daughters, Juniper and Amanda lived on the places we took care of. My family participated in the caretaking and in the adventures of living in the mountains, nearly outside the consumer culture.
I've written most of my adult life. I've published essays, short fiction, and poetry in The Crab Creek Review, Back Home, Bellowing Ark, Bugle, The Christian Science Monitor, The Doula, The Fiddlehead, Home Educator's Family Times, Home Schooling, Men's Fitness, Northwest, Summit, The Sun, a Magazine of Ideas, Yoga International, The Wolf Head Quarterly, Zyzzyva, and other magazines and newspapers. I've published books of fiction, and books of autobiographical non fiction. I've created songs along the way
Many of my essays are about wildlife we saw and interacted with, about our close family that came from living and working in undeveloped areas, about the education within our family, about the perspectives that come from living close to the land with nature and wildlife close around us.
I've kept my songs for myself and for family and friends, but recently, I decided to learn guitar, singing, and all the computer-related procedures well enough to record my songs and make them available to interested listeners.
I'm involved in that process now, learning, practicing, recording and distributing my songs.  I will eventually record audio readings of some of my written work, because audio readings, along with my songs, have received good responses on my website.
I still write essays, poems and stories, and I keep my website http://www.oregonauthor.com as up-to-date and relevant as I can in an attempt to make my some of my work available to readers and listeners for free and in an attempt to sell some of it.