How a Walk in the Rain Led to a Dream Come True

In 1994, James Byrd and Susan Daffron were living in Southern California doing the standard yuppie thing. We both had reasonably good jobs, but they were unsatisfying, partly because neither of us fit the SoCal mold (we don’t tan and we hate crowds). But we figured that as a programmer and tech writer, we really had to be in a big city to find a job. So, we felt like we were on the slow track to nowhere, working for companies run by dishonest people (who probably should have been in jail…but that’s a different story). Every day, like most people, we made the 1.25 hour commute on the very scary freeways to our jobs since it seemed like the only thing to do.

To remain sane, we regularly took vacations to get away from the city. Both of us yearned for mountains and needed periodic “tree fixes” to de-stress.