Turtle Rock

Growing up an only child in the San Francisco Bay Area, I always wanted siblings but couldn’t have them. Many of my lonely hours were spent alone, at the movie theater as a young child. I especially loved western movies like the ones that starred John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Glenn Ford, and Audie Murphy. Always believing that I was born too late, I fancied a life in a log home, not unlike the ones I saw in those movies. Although, not a western, I fell in love with the cabin adjacent to a trout pond in the film “Man of a Thousand Faces,” the biographical film about Lon Chaney. I longed for a country lifestyle, being able to walk out the front door of the cabin and fish for my morning trout.

That dream continued even after I married my junior high school sweetheart and it became her dream as well. Not long after our two children were born, we purchased two country properties in Northern California before my parents died, taking with them a well-kept family secret to the grave.

Shortly after my fifty-fifth birthday, I received a life-altering phone call from a private investigator in Virginia. He proceeded to inform me that he had been hired by a woman who had spent much of her life looking for her half-brother. As it turned out, my parents who raised me were not my natural parents and I actually was born in Virginia to a mountain family in a log cabin. My biological mother gave me away through the window of a car to complete strangers so the evidence of her infidelity would be erased before her army husband returned from a tour-of-duty in Europe. Not long after that, my new parents and I were transferred to the San Francisco Bay Area, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Still in Virginia, my older sister, learned about me from a kid in school no less, when she was just 12 years old. She had spent most of her life looking for me without even knowing my name. Many years later, she hired a private investigator who found me within one year, shortly after I became 55. A DNA test revealed that we were not half siblings, but full siblings, much to our surprise.

The following summer, while visiting my sister, I not only met our half-siblings and their children, I also was surprised to learn that I was actually born in a log cabin on the outer edge of the blue ridge mountains. As it turned out, my wife and I spent all of our following summer vacations in Virginia getting to know my family. After several years we decided to purchase a property there on which we would build our dream home after retiring. After more than one year of looking, we purchased five wooded acres with a spring that runs right through the middle for our log home.

We have since retired and built our dream (log) home within a few miles of the log cabin I was born in. Now at the young age of 72, it’s been five years since we left California and we love our lives here at Turtle Rock, named for a large rock resembling a turtle shell that hangs out over the spring.

Yes, dreams do come true.