Sample of Quiet People in a Noisy World. Along with a sample of the writing, I’ve included the table of contents to give you an outline of what is in the book. This sample is an HTML file. If you purchase the complete book in the file supported by your reader, it will be formatted for your reader.
54 of the essays in this collection have been published in Back Home Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, Home Educator’s Family Times, Men’s Fitness magazine, and Summit Magazine.
Book One: In the Beginning
A Unique, Light Grey Cowboy Hat
Miss Molasses, She Goes Slowly Rolling
Twelve Miles on Foot at 24 Below
Storms Along the Pete Mann Ditch
Lessons Learned in a Dusty Corral
The Largest Playhouse in Oregon
Book Two: Central Oregon
When the Alarm Went off at Midnight
Book Three: Colorado: Tomahawk Ranch
Images Captured Without a Camera
Weeding Strawberries, Eating Carrots
Largest Birdhouse in the Rockies
Wintering Animals in the Rockies
Book Four: Colorado: Magic Sky Ranch
Growing Lettuce, Essays, and Reverence
Journey to the Ridge of Spiral-Grained Trees
Owls Trade Observation for Observation
A Reverberant Woodpecker Sounds My Chimney
In the Midst of Lightning and Thunder
Intimations of Spring in Winter
The First Year on the Big Yellow Bus
All the Winter’s Interruptions
Walking in a Winter Wonderland
Taking the Untaken, Exploring the Unexplored
Finding My Way Around Campus (After 25 Years)
How to Become Water, Early in the Day
Book Five: Before and After
Getting Clean in the Great Outdoors
Owl Magic by Amanda Rose Remmerde
Thunder by Amanda Rose Remmerde
Response to my Aunt upon Being Asked to Shut the Door by Juniper C. Remmerde
Book One: In the Beginning
Laura and I lived in Toadtown, in the foothills of the Sierras, west of the Sacramento Valley, before we had children, a car, or many material possessions. We did own an aluminum-frame, nylon backpack that carried groceries and laundry well.
Now, because of dangerous experiences, I won’t hitchhike. Then, however, we did hitchhike, because it was the only way we had to travel distances beyond what we could walk. Early that day, we hitched a ride down the mountain, visited friends, bought essential groceries, and laundered at the laundromat. When we headed back up the road, dusk descended, hastened by heavy clouds gathered close against the mountain.
With our thumbs in the air, we hiked about three miles of a necessary ten, and rain began to pour down. We didn’t own rain clothes, but the rain was bearably warm, and we kept walking. Our clothes soon soaked through. Water ran off our hair, noses, and fingertips and into our shoes. Laura said, “Why won’t anyone give us a ride?”
“We’re soaking wet. We would get their upholstery wet. Besides that, anyone who would walk in a downpour like this has to be crazy, and people shouldn’t pick up crazy hitchhikers.”
The rain began to erode Laura’s spirit. I realized I could easily become discouraged. Then we would be two wet, discouraged walkers with a long way to go in a rainstorm. I sang songs I already knew, and songs I never heard before but pulled out of the dark rainstorm around us. I sang upbeat, even crazy songs. I danced. I blessed the rain and praised the clouds. I found reservoirs of energy that fired me with warm enthusiasm.
Laura’s beginning descent of spirit stopped, then reversed. She kept walking. She cheered up. She laughed and realized good still surrounded us. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than walk with a heavy pack on my back, Laura by my side, singing in pouring rain as cars sped by, spraying water from their tires and soaking us more, if we could be more soaked.
Laura said, “All those people are in their warm, dry cars, with the windows rolled up.”
“I know. Think of what they’re missing. All the great outdoors. This wonderful rain. What do they have? A tiny, isolated little place, rolling along too fast, cut off from everything real. They’re missing out on this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Think of how boring their lives must be.”
Years later, tonight in fact, Laura told me I rekindled her energy and helped her appreciate the rain, the clouds above us, the water running off us, and the earth running with water under our feet, but she wondered if I was crazier than she had ever realized and if the dark, wet night might never end.
I thought her descent into discouragement might begin again, and I said, “We’ll get home in good shape, in good time, and we’ll look back on our rainstorm hike with appreciation.” The time had come, in her book, for that promise to develop.
A pickup passed us, and the brake lights came on. The pickup stopped on the shoulder of the road. A voice floated through the dark rain, “Jon, Laura, is that you?” and since it was us, and the driver was Pike and his passenger was Shirley, and they were our neighbors in Toadtown, we ran, put the pack in the back and crowded in front with them, because they said they didn’t mind if we were wet. They delivered us right to our front door.
We built a roaring fire in the stove. We discovered the backpack was, as advertised, waterproof, and while our clothes weren’t, our skin was, and our hair soon dried. We had carried home freshly laundered clothing, and we put some of it on after we hung what we had been wearing to dry.
I peeled and sliced apples while Laura made a pie crust, and the odor of baking apples and cinnamon soon filled the small cabin, already full of the sound of rain drumming hard on the tin roof and the sound of Laura singing of the joy of rainstorms and the joy of living.
Someone who studied that hat might have concluded that it was a product of a hat factory and the Mad Hatter combining efforts. That was close enough to truth to qualify.
I camped out on Coalpit Mountain the summer I bought the hat, almost 25 years ago. I learned to walk again after having been hit by a drunk driver. I needed a hat. Sunshine at 5,000 feet in the clean air of eastern Oregon is intense, and a wide-brimmed hat would shade my face and neck and provide some shelter from eastern Oregon’s sudden cloudbursts. ……… (to read the rest of this essay and all the essays after it, please return to the home page and buy the book Quiet People in a Noisy World.)
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