1990 Gibralter Road has been God’s way of teaching me about life, my life. In a fundamental way this place has been my salvation. At sixty-seven years, my life was still bound as it always had been, by what, I did not know or understand. My father had gone, my older brother had gone, my faithful courageous wife had gone and my mother had just been admitted to hospice care and soon to be also among the dead.
My life was
a trainwreck, every opportunity given to me in life was sabotaged by me, no one
else. I was bewildered and befuddled at the value of even being alive, all
seemed to be lost as sinking into a bottomless quagmire. Maybe it was
desperation or possibly insanity but for some unknown reason, I decided try to
buy a house. This was an almost insane
decision, from whence this hope came to me, I knew not at the time.
This loser and the greater family had lived for over thirty years in a community that had grown to be unaffordable so with my meager resources I began to search the outer regions of civilization. In 2012, the first place I looked was down the road but still in the high desert of California. I had recalled trucking down the 247 in 1992 following the earthquake when we were detoured around a section of the road that had dropped three or four feet. I'll check it out.
Following the Landers sign east from the 247, I quickly found that Landers is a Post Office, a Community Center and a Moose Lodge, that's it, perfect. The search for a house was another story, frustrated and disappointed, I called a
real estate agent. When we talked and I shared my meager resources, I shall
ever wonder why Herbert did not laugh, maybe he and our unseen force had a
plan.
Amazingly we
set a day to begin a search, a two-bedroom abode for one and of practically
any condition with enough land to be semi-private. Minimal is the word that would best define our
search. After viewing a few properties
that had potential but would never qualify for financing, we drove two miles
down a very ever bumpy dirt road in Landers, California.
-to be continued-
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
