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In early 1997 I was feeling flu like symptoms, with dehydration, and constant thirst added. I had a prepaid ski trip set for Whistler Canada and I was not going to miss that. So I went. https://twitter.com/8thgenca/status/1345145325988634625
While on the ski trip my energy levels dropped after I tried one run and was rushed to a Vancouver hospital. Diagnosed Type 1 diabetic. Laying in the hospital all week stabilizing and reflected on what I had not done in my then 25 years of life.
So I decided to take four months off of my job as a Teamster at @StaterBrosMkts in SoCal, moved my stuff into storage, and ventured into a tent on the South Fork America River to become a white water rafting guide.
The owner of @AllOutdoorcom, offered a $5 per trip bonus to every guide who read Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. Other guides would talk of seeing remnants of gold rush towns only visible when Folsom Lake was very low. My mind imagined church steeples poking through the water...
Loved rafting so much I left SoCal & moved to Sacramento where I went to school at @SacState, reworked all my junior college Cs and Ds to As, and focused on history, especially how water played an important role in history and American West. @Raleys helped me pay for school.
Wrote a paper on towns & communities that existed before Folsom Lake and the CVP were finalized. After school I was offered a job selling underground water construction supplies at #PacCoast: Ductile Iron-PVC-clay-HDPE-steel pipes, gate valves, fire hydrants...
Kept learning about water, water construction, and precipitation in the west and was offered a job in the #CaLegislature on natural resources policy, and water policy among other policy issues.
Became so much more knowledgeable about water policy during my time in the Legislature, and how politics and policy plays such an important role for water management in California. Worked on what became Prop 1...
@DucksUnlimited asked me to be their advocate and work with the Legislature, Congress, water managers, wildlife stakeholders, and interested parties to provide water to wetlands for the environment & wildlife. Am able to volunteer for @JDRF to help fund research now as well.
Turning 50 this year and seeing how water and water policy is stunningly complicated, mesmerizingly productive for humans, our environment, and wildlife, and seeing only through collaboration can water solutions be implemented.
Oddly enough, met my partner in crime while rafting that first season, she was my rafting guest...we have three boys, who now raft with mom & dad...and it all came to be because I was diagnosed Type 1 diabetic 25 years ago.
