My Exodus from big L.A. to lil' ole Ridgefield, Washington...

As soon as our children could understand the concept of 'place and time', I assured them our sojourn in 'The City' was temporary.

"Don't worry about living in this condo," I told them.  "One day we are going to move to the country.  Daddy won't have to travel anymore and we'll live on five acres with our own pond."

"How big a pond," they would ask, and I would answer, "Bigger than the one I had as a kid," which would always satisfy them.

"You can run around, catch frogs and salamanders, raise chickens in 4H, have four cats and two dogs and maybe even a horse if you want."

"He's afraid of horses," my daughter would whisper in my ear so as not to hurt her little brother's feelings.

"Oh and you'll have such nice friends.  You'll be building forts and riding bikes, and I bet dad will make you a treehouse.  If we find a house with a big ole oak in the yard, we'll put up a swing that goes up and over the pond, just like the one my friend Peter had."

The kids would snuggle next to me on the couch as I finished with a soothing, "And we'll all be so, so happy.  Even Daddy."

I cooed these things like a lullaby, as childhood was supposed to mean freedom from humanity, a very untrustworthy group.

Without putting out any psychic calls to the Survivor producers, I confess I could live off the land.  I make no apologies and I have proof.  Whenever we walked the hills by the house we bought after the condo, I impressed every kid in that neighborhood.  I could catch a toad or a frog quicker than anybody you've ever met with the exception of my cousin Dana.  Hey, I had therapy. I don't need to be the best.

For those of you who have never honed your survival skills?  Toads will whimper pathetic birdlike chirps just before they pee-pee on your hand.  Of course it occurs to you immediately how terrified they must be and when your children beg you to let them go... mere women are no match for this kind of guilt-trip.

No, I do not eat frog or toad legs in spite of admitting just under 1/4 French heritage, but I liked having the critters in my yard.  I would capture them with good intentions as they would be released as soon as we got home.  I had a postage stamp of a yard back then, but I was trying to be a good land steward and rescue the poor creatures from the people who used chemicals on their lawns.

Yes I dreamed of a future when I could finally relax and let my children enjoy the same unsupervised wildness I experienced as a kid.  No neighbors' cats using the kid's sandbox.  No creepy men lurking around playgrounds and parks.  No irresponsible dog owners walking their pets  to defecate in the canyon behind our complex, spoiling it for either adventure, hiking or mere ambiance.

Oh, we would not miss The City.  We would not have to worry about a fifth grade teacher being raped in the ladies' room at Cal-State Northridge while taking a night class.  Or have to replace my window, dashboard and car radio for the umpteenth time because someone wanted a 'fix' and needed $20.  I would be able to smile at nice young men as they passed without hooking the strap over my neck and grasping my purse with both hands.  And when eventually I became an old lady, no gang members would threaten me for casually looking in their direction.

And I would be free of the freakin' noise. Sirens, cars backfiring, speeders revving up their cars, barking dogs left cooped up all day, someone's horrible hard rock music vibrating through my walls, children screaming and their parents fighting and the woman who lived above me.  It took all the grace God had ever given me not to strangle her at 5:00 a.m. every morning when she did an hour of aerobics right over my head.  The grand finale was her shower.  You would swear it was a freight train, as the pipes in the ceiling above my bed had never been insulated.

My first City experience may have flavored my taste for gross humanity's willingness to cram together on sidewalks that were obviously much too small.  My mother had had the audacity to birth my middle sister, and with my ADHD older sister's antics and my own habit of alternating between sulking and whining, she banished us to my father's care for the weekend.

In an effort to be kind, he took us to the Madison Square Garden in New York City to a rodeo that featured the dog Rin Tin Tin and somebody else.  It may have been Gene Autry or even Roy Rogers, as those were two of my father's favorites.  I vaguely remember calvary grey uniforms with red trim and small caps on the soldiers' heads, and the horses galloping with such vigor I lost my breath from the spectacle.

It was the trek from Greenwich, Connecticut, to the City, however, that was the most interesting part to me.  We lived in the suburbs among other families in a part of town known as Old Greenwich.  The only 'strangers' who ever spoke to me always turned out to be my parents' friends.

My mother was from the generation who didn't drive, a status she maintained after the final attempt to improve her technique ended up embedding my father's new ford in a telephone pole.  None of us argued with her when she handed my father the keys and said, "I think you'd better keep these hidden somewhere."   (Yes, she was a bit of a drinker but I assume it was an under-developed spatial conceptual ability.)

I probably would have been more inclined to give New York City a chance, had my father not tired of me clinging to his inside pant leg.  Merely trying to protect myself from the shoving, pushing hoard that surrounded us as soon as we got off the train, I was acting a little chimplike for his taste.  He was 6'4" and so powerful to me, that I only felt safe being carried or hanging onto him.

At four years old, I think my expectations were reasonable, although I took him literally when he said, "If you don't stop clinging to my pantlegs, I am going to leave you right here by yourself."

In his defense, I had ignored his initial complaints as, candidly, I was completely terrified.  I wasn't used to being with him as he worked long hours.  Besides, he was my father.  Even with all those fall-out shelters they built here in the 1950's, and the emergency drills we had when we learned to hide under our wooden desks to protect ourselves? Most of us were more afraid of our dads than we would ever be of nuclear obliteration.

My mother's way of supervising us was to open the back door and tell us to come home for lunch or dinner, whatever meal was the next in line.  I guess women in those days had enough  neighbors to not worry if one or two of their kids were out of sight for even several hours. I find it amazing that all five of us survived, but two of my sisters raised their children in exactly the same way.

Anyway, I held my father's hand the rest of the way, squeezing my eyes closed as I stoically absorbed the random bumping of New Yorkers' bodies and their assorted pocketbooks and briefcases.  We waited in line to buy our tickets before we climbed a thousand hundred steps to seats at the highest possible altitude in the Garden.

I learned how to look through binoculars that day although I can now admit I pretended to see Rin Tin Tin after my dad said things like, "No right there!  Lift it up!  Can't you seem him?  What's the matter with you?  I told you, point them that way! Darn it, over there!".

For you hunting or sports dads?  Looking through binoculars is not a simple task for someone under five, which I mention strictly as an attempt to pass on useful information.

The first time we came to Ridgefield, Washington, was to visit the kids' grandmother.  They were six and ten and the last time she had visited us she had given them each five twenty dollar bills.  She was and is a very glamorous grandmother by the way, with the most elegant hands I have ever seen.  Her eyes light up with a beautiful bell-like laugh to reward you when you bring out dessert as long as it is flan or expensive chocolates.

We also brought along another grandchild, a non-English-speaking cousin who was staying with us for part of the summer for an immersion in English.  She promptly fell in love with 'Mike', the cute blond cowboy who lived next door.  He got so nervous around this beautiful Mexican teenager that even from a distance, we could tell his Right Guard deodorant was failing him miserably.

It took a little while for our daughter, who had been attempting to translate for the perspiring adolescents, to get their message.  Our niece, accustomed to slyly pinching her younger sister to gain obedience, had been sternly reprimanded by me for employing that tactic on my daughter.  Her intentions became clearer to our little girl, however, when after a barbecue that included watermelon, she threw the leftover rinds at our daughter when she attempted to follow the two of them out into the field behind the tall fir trees.

Insulted and hurt, our girl decided to let them struggle to be understood, too young to recognize they had become more interested in the international language of love than anything words alone could express.

Later Mike was feeling rather guilty, so he brought over a beautiful white mare who his family had just bought.  As a sort of penance he offered to give the kids rides on her back, but his new girl was rather massive and had been cooped up in a trailer for hours.   She danced and pranced and obviously wanted to run around.  Now I don't have a horse, because I don't have a barn, because I don't want to muck and because these days I would rather write.

That said, I do love a beautiful horse, so when Mike offered to let me ride her to show the kids not to be afraid?  I gracefully jumped up on that pretty girl.  She must have been owned by someone who reminded her of me.  Why?  Because as soon as I was in the saddle, she started acting happy, galloping around and showing off like her old Momma was on her back.

Later we all went for a hike and our daughter, used to sidewalks rather than drainage ditches, slipped on the roadside gravel and ended up needing stitches.  When we  went home ten days later, neither of the kids was interested in hearing my stories about life in the country.  All they wanted was to extract a promise that no more cousins would ever visit us.  (I should mention my niece is in management with one of Nike's international branches, obviously having refined her domination techniques for their highest and best uses.  Really, but she's a lovely young woman.)

Southern California rarely if ever has humidity, so the downside of having come here in May during  a few days of suffocating air was a bit of a bummer.  During that few days the knats began hatching  and the mosquitoes kept happily mating.  (Tip for city slickers:  never wear red or goldenrod outside wherever flying insects inhabit the earth.)

I didn't bring up moving to the country again until my mother-in-law broke her leg.  My husband and I realized how isolated she was from the family and he correctly predicted that she could live independently a lot longer if we were close by.  This plan was put on hold, though, as we attempted to figure out how we could ever support ourselves here.  (We are still working on that.:)

A few years later on Thanksgiving night I smelled smoke.  This was before the days of deep-fried turkeys, so I thought it was odd.  We were all in a tryptophan-induced coma, dozing on the family room couches as over-stuffed as the bird we had devoured a few hours earlier.  Okay, so I am a bit anxiety-driven, but after reading this far into my article, I doubt if that's a surprise.

I didn't want to ruin the mood, but I heard myself say, "Do you smell smoke?"

My husband and I looked out the window and saw the blazing mountainside illuminating the night sky from two blocks away.  We called the fire department, which of course, was already fighting the blaze, then we started packing up our tax documents, pictures and family art.  We corralled our cat and dog and told the kids not to let them out or we might have to evacuate without them.

Okay, so I told my kids this and I was the one collecting tax documents and momentos, while my husband, like any pyrotechnically-inclined male, was outside enjoying the show.  Those wildfires in California are terrifying, by the way.  The firemen line up along the streets with their hoses and digging and raking equipment, and they stand there while they watch things burn.  Occasionally they all march in a line up the hill and that''s when it hits you. They might actually get killed.

I know there's a method to this seeming madness, and I know that firemen are among the bravest of the brave, including soldiers, policemen and mothers and fathers.  I am just unclear as to how things are contained when you live on the last street in Los Angeles County at a relatively high elevation above the normal suburbs.

Although I felt terribly guilty that night for previously joking about it, our neighbors across the street (who had the canyon and mountains as their borrowed backyard) were our natural fire break.  Typically female, I asked a fireman for a bit of information hoping to get reassurance instead.

By now my husband was next door watering down our neighbors' roof after already having done ours, as they were in Russia on some kind of high-level scientists' information exchange, courtesy of NASA's space program and the American taxpayer.

"Excuse me, sir, but when do we have to evacuate our houses," I asked the first fireman who seemed to be taking a break.

"Oh, you've got time.   Take off when your neighbor's house starts to burn.  That way you'll get out before they block off the street."  He said this matter-of-factly.

Luckily we had two cars, so I jammed everything into them that would fit and still allow the four of us and our pets to make an escape to a nearby hotel.  Tip to pet owners: You do need to have a crate for transporting and protecting your animals in these kinds of emergencies.

None of our houses burned down, thankfully.  Our neighbor's was saved by the giant pool and cement patio he had built in the back.  He claimed he had done it for just this reason.  It could have been true.

A few months later the Los Angeles' monsoon-like rains washed whatever ash had not already coated our houses, yards, lungs and cars into our storm drains.  I came home one night, driving down the center of our two-lane street and wondering if my car would soon float or sink.  It was impossible to drive in my own lane as three-foot-high waves were tearing down our hill on both sides.  I floored it to get across the stream and the engine died as we floated to the driveway.

As I opened the door thrilled to be back in the safety of our home, it was too soon to feel rescued.  At the back of the house there was water seeping in from our patio into our sunken family room.  I looked at the newly installed, champagne-colored carpeting and felt sick.  May I make a comment here without offending those partial to fertilizing their lawns with steer manure?  Kindly never, ever buy a house next door to me.  I've paid my dues on that one already.  Yes, I thought about typhoid and cholera against my will, but you do what you have to and you survive until you can clean it all up.

Well, if that had been the worst of it, I might have taken my lumps.  By that I mean things happen.  Life is tough and filled with tragedy, misfortune and suffering.  But this was the year 1992 and when the jury in Simi Valley, California, didn't hold the police accountable who were video-taped beating poor-ole-felon-speeder-doper, Rodney King?  It seemed the entirety of Los Angeles County went up in violence and smoke.

After watching houses down below us burning from our hillside view, a snide ten-year-old made the comment, "Look, another house on the barbie!". No it wasn't one of my kids, and that Crocodile Dundee movie was really popular then, but it gives you an idea how callous some kids in the city can get.

My daughter's 14-year-old birthday party had to be cancelled, as Los Angeles County was on lock-down and essentially under military rule.  My husband called to tell me he was stranded in Guadalajara.  His return flight had been cancelled because of reports that 'snipers' were shooting at airplanes trying to land at Los Angeles Airport. These were not foreign terrorists, my friends, but  fellow American citizens.  It was too much for me, truthfully.  I was afraid I couldn't protect my children if things got worse.

When my husband got back we decided to take a vacation, as my nerves were more than shot.  We flew up to Washington state and drove around for a few days with a realtor.  We told the kids we were really going to do it, and we made an offer on a house.

There are times when you do something rash, and then regret it, but neither of us looked back.  The beginning of June we were treated to a really scary earthquake with aftershocks that went on for a month and a half.  We moved up here in July of that year.  I used to make a very bad joke that it wasn't that different if you counted the four seasons.  Just the names in California had been changed to fire, floods, riots and earthquakes.

It was a bit of an adjustment at first.  We hired a fellow to help us put up a storage shed, and after work one day I offered to let him put all his tools into our garage overnight.  He looked up at the sky and said, "Aw, that's okay.  I don't think it's gonna rain."

It took me a minute to realize that although I was concerned about theft, his only concern was rust.   The truth was we had accidentally purchased a home that was smack dab in the safest part of the whole county.

The weather?  Our average snowfall is 6 or 7 inches a year, it doesn't usually get below the 20's in winter and the Japanese current warms the entire western part of the state.  It doesn't get really hot or cold until you cross over the Cascade Mountain chain.  Our local climate is similar to Britain's with lots of rain and a rather temperate climate, excellent for growing almost anything except perhaps citrus.  Christmas tree farms are everywhere locally and some of the most beautiful Japanese maples are grown here too.

The expectations I had of great new restaurants were dashed when every place had the same menu: always something with cheese, gravy or deep-fried.  Oh, it's gotten a lot better in 15 years and we were thrilled when they built a Panda Express ten minutes from here a year or two ago.

The kids finished growing up here and learned how to blend.  They could dance to hip-hop as easily as line-dance country and western.  After going to school in Seattle, one moved across the river and state line to Portland, Oregon.  She's got a wonderful career there and is raising her young family just a half hour away by car.

The other went to school in Cambridge, lived in Portland, then Seattle and just moved to San Francisco a few months ago.  It was tough to see him leave, but he doesn't have any kids yet.  Eventually The City will get to them both, if they are their mother's children.

They think they like the excitement, the stimulation and the city sounds, but I notice they breathe deeply and tell us the land looks beautiful each time they come to visit.  The trees we planted are getting close to magnificent, and they are both always pointing that out.

They are smart kids, civic-minded, loving and the best of people who inspire nothing but confidence.  One day I believe they'll come to realize that their dad and I could live independently much, much longer if they both lived close by.  After all, 'independently' really means not living with one of them.  (We're no fools.  We love it here.)

And finally may I give credit and thanks to my husband for the pictorial essay which accompanies this article.

Written by Elizabeth Madrigal

© 2008 Elizabeth Madrigal