At an overlook outside of Monterey, California, we stopped to take some photos. A
conversation with Steve and Judy (sorry if I got your name wrong)
ensued about the beauty of the area around us. We discussed Steve's
correctional facility job, he recently retired from, where he worked
with paranoid schizophrenics. He told about his compassion for the
mentally ill, due to growing up with a father who was schizophrenic.
I asked him what it was like having a father who could hear the walls
speak and believed everyone was out to get him, “oh, I knew he was
out there, but I always had a sense of reality. I even found out
some of the things, I thought were false, he had actually done."When Steve was in middle school his father moved the family out to the Mojave desert on 150 acres of land. He told police officers that he was 100% Native American and that it was his land. For 30 years he lived on that land, using an outhouse he made, along with other structures to survive. Authorities eventually found out that he was not, in fact, of native descent and was forced to leave.
On a footnote the reason I met Steve and Judy was because they were
checking on a balanced rock structure a man had built the night
before at the seashore. The day before had also been their 40th wedding
anniversary. They came back to check and see if the structure had
remained through the rough winds during the night. It had.