David Mather

After Bowdoin College in Maine, I joined the Peace Corps. I was the most isolated volunteer in my group and those two years shaped my adult life.

Before the Peace Corps, I had caught the travel bug during summers between college semesters, working as a wiper after my freshman year on a Norwegian tramp freighter that sailed to Japan and touring Europe in a blur on a Triumph motorcycle. Like many of us in the ‘60’s, I was idealistic. The Peace Corps sent me to southern Chile where two things became etched into my being: I learned to love the simplicity of rural life, and realized that we just do not need all the ‘stuff’ we had back in the States.

After the Peace Corps, I traveled all over South America, including some 1000 miles up the Amazon, then bought a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle from a soldier in the Canal Zone and returned overland to the U.S. I ended up in N.H., where I bought a small piece of land in the woods over a mile from the nearest town road and electric service. I became a ‘back-to-the-lander,’ and I built a small cabin and have lived off grid there for over fifty years, although my wife and I now spend winters in North Florida.

In 2016 I published Crescent Beach which takes place in the Big Bend Area of North Florida. It is the first of the Crescent Beach Series, followed by Raw Dawgin’, The Biloxi Connection, Gator Bait, and Louie. Bodacious, the sixth in the series, is in the works. I have also written two stand-alone novels: Dylan which mostly takes place in the Honduras Bay Island of Roatan, and the historical novel When The Land Belonged To God—A Virtual Journey with Lewis and Clark.