Getting Outside

This is a memoir of a childhood spent on an isolated livestock ranch on the southern coast of Oregon in the mid-twentieth century. The author's family kept heading west until they reached the Pacific Ocean and then stalled for a hundred years. While much of the United States by 1950 was already urbanized, on Four Mile Creek horses were being replaced by tractors, axes by power saws, and coal-oil lamps by electric lights. The contrasts between the myths of the American West and reality are described: living off the land, freedom from all outside authority, cowboys, loggers, wilderness and the conflicted roles of men and women.