I hate that I never bought property in Tahoe, Reno even. Damn hindsight.

My father was a mineralogist who worked a lot and then wanted peace from everything, so we lived all over Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona, always a few miles from the mine site. I was the last kid off the bus after a two-hour ride.

We weren't allowed to camp—coyotes—but I hiked around the sagebrush a lot. And read. I read a lot. Every 4-6 weeks, we would go to Reno, Boise, or Salt Lake City and get a bunch of books from a used bookstore. Later, I started collecting records and cassette tapes. Paris life is really different, to say the least, but my parents still live in the middle-of-nowhere Idaho. They don't camp or fish or anything. It baffles me.