This all really starts when I was -9 months old and my mom became pregnant. She swore that due to the fact that her childhood had been marred by serious TV addiction, I would not watch any TV until I was six, and I would therefore have a better life (for a full account, read her book- or don't, as much of it is at my expense). This in turn inspired her to write her book, and everything started from there.
While she was writing, my mom felt that it was necessary to spend time away from my dad and me in order to finish. Over Memorial Weekend of 2005, she felt this urge and left for a few days. It was at this time that I started reading two hiking books, called "Old Growth Forest Hikes of the Oregon and Washington Cascades" and "Hiking the Columbia River Gorge." Though I read both cover to cover,since I live near the Columbia Gorge, that was the place where I hiked most often that summer. Taking pictures with my dad's old four megapixel camera, I explored almost every trail in the book that summer, working up to summiting Mount Defiance, the hardest hike in the book.
That November, weeks of heavy rain swept the Portland area, leading to epic high water both in the Gorge and elsewhere. Because of the rain, I did not want to climb any more mountains, so I went on three successive days of waterfall hikes: Eagle Creek, Silver Falls State Park and a day visiting all of the classic gorge waterfalls. I was so amazed by the size and scale of these waterfalls at high water that I took lots of pictures and created a slideshow that rated and cataloged all of the falls. I then set about to expand my "collection" and take more pictures.
After less than two years of hiking every weekend, I had completed nearly every waterfall hike in the Portland area on maintained trails. That was when I started scanning topo maps for spots that looked like they had waterfalls and scrambling to them off trail. This led to some pretty insane adventures involving cliffs, ropes and poison oak, but aside from the poison oak, I'm an adventurous person and I continue to go on more and more of these waterfall bushwhacks, including, in the summer of 2007, Wahe Falls, which is often considered the holy grail of waterfalls in the gorge.
Fast forward to the beginning of 2007. My mom's book was scheduled to be published in April of that year, and she decided that she needed a website now that she was about to be a published author. I was allowed to have a page on her website to give hiking directions, and I would also have to learn some basic web design skills so that I could do basic maintenance for her site and post her blog. She hired my cousin's friend to design the site, and for a while we thought it was perfect. However, it transpired that he was obsessed with Mac computers, and disregarding the fact that 90% of people owned PCs and used Internet Explorer to browse the web, he didn't bother to make sure that the stylesheet for the site worked with that browser. It did not, and eventually, after receiving lots of complaints, my mom decided that she needed a new website.
My mom found a new web designer to remake her site, thinking that the new site would be similar to the old one, but compatible with Internet Explorer. However, the new site looked uninteresting to us, and he also thought that my page was unimportant and a waste of his time to recreate. I decided that I wanted my own website that was not stuck to the layout of my mom's site, which meant that I would have to learn a lot more about web design, especially since my mom wanted me to become webmaster of her site as well. After arduously teaching myself HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript over the summer of 2008, I finally got my site online in fall 2008, six months after my mom's site was remade.
In June 2008, after years of getting annoyed about my various cameras not being able to fit large waterfalls in one frame, I got a digital SLR camera, and I immediately found a new passion in photography. Over the last year, I have taken my waterfall and landscape photography to the next level, and I have produced some images that I am really proud of. As it is, some of my pictures can be seen in the (outdated) Waterfall Gallery and the (new) Photo Gallery.
I am 13 (now 15) years old. I sit at the computer, typing about my life and wondering what I would be like if my mom had not mad the decisions that she made so long ago, or if my dad hadn't shown me those books. I feel like those choices have greatly influenced my life, but I can't be sure. I haven't lived enough of life to tell.
--Casey Currey-Wilson
May 21, 2009