A forester turned foreign service officer, Hal spent twenty years saving lives and pulling people out of poverty across four continents, surviving a terrorist attack in Afghanistan, two evacuations, and a political dismantling that brought his life's work to a halt in a single weekend. Through all of it, he kept coming back to the same mountain, the same house, the same woman, and now he is quietly building the most important thing he has ever made: a life that stays.

Hal arrived in Idyllwild on July 11th, 2004, with 37 cents in his pocket, a case of ramen noodles, and a box of canned beans. He had just accepted a forestry job no one else wanted and driven down from Montana toward a mountain he had never seen. 

He had no place to live and no money to get one. So he drove up to Black Mountain, the high, boulder-strewn wilderness above Pine Cove, pitched a tent somewhere off the trail, and lived there for three weeks until his first paycheck arrived.

He grew up on the East Coast, born in New York, raised in the Southeast. He studied cross-cultural communication and political philosophy, then joined the Peace Corps in Ghana, a village of 700 people and two years in the red dirt and close heat, and somewhere in that work fell in love with the land, with what it could grow and what it could protect. By the time he finished a master's in international forestry at the University of Montana, he knew the shape of the work he wanted. He just needed a place willing to give him a chance.

That place was Idyllwild. The job was wildfire recovery work on the heels of the devastating fires of 2002 and 2003. Most foresters didn't want it; it wasn't the traditional timber country they'd trained for. Hal was broke and the job looked interesting, and that was enough.

For the first four years, his work was almost entirely on private land. He went through people's yards, met homeowners, walked properties, and came to know the mountain intimately. He got to learn the town the same way, name by name, fence line by fence line. He had done something similar in a West African village, he says, but this was different. This was his. 

Black Mountain is still his favorite place on the whole mountain. The ecology is different up there: quieter, more still, thick with sugar pines whose genetics are so resilient that the state nursery comes each year to collect their cones and propagate them across California. He talks about those trees with the reverence of someone who has spent years paying attention to things most people walk past. The mountain lions were there that first summer. The bobcats. The rattlesnakes. He did not leave.

Do You Like to Travel?

The restaurant where Hal ate breakfast on Saturday mornings was right next to his cabin, where Mile High Café now stands. That is where he first noticed the woman who would become his wife. Megan had started working there as a busser when her mother was a waitress, in the way mountain-town families weave together through the same handful of kitchens. She was born in Loma Linda and brought home to Idyllwild as a baby; her parents moved up in the 1970s and never left. She had roots here as deep as the oaks.

Hal knew her brother first, through the American Legion, the social backbone of old Idyllwild, and through weekends at Joan's, the beloved bar that once sat where the park is now, with its long counter, its dance floor, and a fire pit under the sequoias that filled with locals every Friday night. He and Megan knew each other, were friendly, crossed paths, but both were seeing other people. He watched her after she broke up with her boyfriend, waiting to see if she was the kind of person who rushed toward the next thing or the kind who stood her ground. She stood her ground. For New Year's Eve 2008, he asked her out.

They went to the old Chart House, up above town. The waitress came to the table, took one look at Megan, and went visibly confused: they had already served a woman at that exact table, in that exact seat, just an hour or two before. Megan's identical twin sister had been there with her husband. Same table, same seat, same face. They laughed, ate dinner, and later that night walked down to Joan's where a friend's band was playing. At midnight, their first kiss.

They married in May 2010. Their son Jackson was born a year later. Around that time, Hal had been thinking about applying to the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, one of the most competitive foreign service appointments in the government, accepting barely one or two percent of applicants. Before he did, he asked Megan the question that would determine everything: did she like to travel? She said yes. She had been to Costa Rica once, for two weeks. She had no idea what she was saying yes to. He applied. He was accepted. 

With a newborn and a wife who had barely left California, they moved to Virginia. He spent ten months learning Portuguese, then deployed alone to Herat's consulate in Afghanistan. Megan and Jackson came back to Idyllwild, to the house he had bought when they first started dating. It would become the axis the whole family returned to, summer after summer, the fixed point in a life always in motion.

The Attack

He had been in Herat for six months when the consulate was attacked. September 13, 2013. The largest vehicle-borne bomb of the war to that date. It blew out the front gate and killed seven Afghan guards instantly. Hal was blown out of bed at six in the morning. Rockets struck the floor above and the floor below. He was the last one off his level, making his way through collapsed ceilings, shattered glass, plumbing blown out onto live wiring.

What he remembers is not fear but a strange stillness, everything slowing down, a clarity he had no name for until he described it to his father, a combat veteran, who said: yes, some people have that. It's a gift. You make better decisions.

He helped triage the wounded, fetched what the medic called out for, kept people alive. None of the Americans died that day. When the firefight ended, he went upstairs to get his things and found his door locked. He kicked it in, solid steel anchored in concrete, and tore his ACL. He switched legs and kept kicking until the frame gave way. He was the last one onto the Black Hawk, could barely get through the door. The helicopter lifted and below him was a smoking crater.

What followed was its own wound. The agency put him on workers' compensation at forty percent of his base pay, and it took three months before he could see a doctor. He recuperated in Idyllwild, going into debt, carrying the bitterness of a man who survived a terrorist attack and was handled like a bureaucratic inconvenience. He worked through it, as he works through most things: without complaint, and with one eye already on what comes next.

Safe Havens

Every house they lived in overseas came with a safe haven: a hardened room, a procedure, a drill. A strange way to live. And yet Hal speaks of those years with warmth, not trauma.

Tanzania, four years. Food security and land tenure work, helping widows defend their rights to land their husbands' families were trying to claim. Working with a hired contractor, he drove the cost of documentation down from $800 to under $10, and the processing time from six months to two weeks. Tens of thousands of rural people got paperwork that said: this land is yours. Then East Timor, one of the youngest countries on earth, half its population gone from war and malnutrition. He ran the Economic Growth Office. Strawberry farmers whose income grew by over a thousand percent. Fiber optic cables. Marine protected areas. "I was saving people's lives and helping them get out of poverty," he says. "And not die from hunger."

They had a child before each posting, not planned that way, but that is how it went. Three children, three continents, one house on a mountain in Southern California where they came back to without fail each year. The house sat buttoned up all year, checked on occasionally by the in-laws, and then in summer it opened and they poured back in. A lot of foreign service families don't have that, Hal says, so they end up crashing on their parents' couches during home leave, rootless even at rest. His kids always knew where home was. They grew up saying it out loud: Idyllwild is my home.

COVID arrived halfway through the East Timor tour. The family came back to Idyllwild for the summer and when it became clear the school in Dili wasn't reopening, Megan stayed with the children while Hal went back alone. Ten months of separation, the longest they had ever been apart. He has been on the summit of the highest mountain in Morocco. He has sailed out of sight of land for three months in the North Atlantic. Being alone on an island during a pandemic, without his family, was something else entirely.

Then French school in Virginia. Then the Congo. Kinshasa, a megacity larger than Paris with no infrastructure and a war in its eastern provinces displacing seven million people. Their house in the diplomat zone sat next to the Iranian ambassador's residence. Protesters tried to reach the American ambassador's house a hundred meters away. His boss's home was overrun. In January of last year, they were evacuated across the Congo River by boat. One backpack per person. They left the cats behind.

The cats were fed by the housekeeper and gardener, who stayed on and needed the income. Months later, after Hal went back to Kinshasa alone to close things down, terminating local staff, one of the hardest things he has ever had to do, Megan flew out for the last week. Not for the furniture. For the cats. They flew home together and landed in California.

That same weekend, DOGE dismantled USAID. By September 2nd, Hal was officially, involuntarily retired. Megan lost her position at the same time. He had made it to just over twenty years of federal service, the threshold for a pension and lifetime health insurance, by the thinnest of margins. He is still waiting for his first pension check. Eight months have passed.

Depression and Wood Splitting

He came back to a house he had remodeled during COVID, the original pink concrete block cabin expanded by a thousand square feet, built to last, built to stay. He came back to Megan's family: her twin sister, her three brothers, her father whose health is declining and who needs her close. Now on weekends, he splits wood. He coaches soccer and baseball at the school. He volunteers at the American Legion: breakfasts, the deep pit barbecue, the free Thanksgiving turkey. He is, as he has always been, useful.

The kids came back to cousins, to seasons, to a school small enough to know your name.

The younger two adapted quickly, in the way children do. Jackson, now fourteen, is having a harder time. He has seen too much of the world to fit easily back into a small mountain school. More mature than his peers by a decade of lived experience, he is the kind of kid who navigated geopolitical crises before he navigated high school. He has thrown himself into sports. He is finding his way.

They had spent their whole lives in the tropics, these three children, and they had only ever known Idyllwild in summer. Their first real winter brought one proper storm. They took full advantage of it. There was a lot of sledding. The snow melted fast but nobody minded. For kids who had grown up between Tanzania and East Timor and the Congo, the sight of snow falling on their own mountain felt like a kind of miracle.

While they found their footing, he was losing his. The depression came after the layoff, as it does when the thing you have given yourself to disappears. "It was a lifestyle," Hal says, "not just a job." The foreign service had been his whole world: the purpose, the movement, the meaning. He describes those early weeks like being on a life raft, drifting. He looked for work, but the math didn't add up; anything earned above a certain threshold would be deducted from his pension, making most jobs barely worth the effort.

Idyllwild Daycare

The answer, when it came, was closer than he expected.

Teacher Kathy has been the town's childcare provider for thirty years, beloved by everyone who has raised a child here. She is retiring. The vacuum she is leaving is real and felt. Hal and Megan decided, gradually and then all at once, to fill it.

He registered Idyllwild Daycare as an LLC early April. The county inspection is on the calendar. The old garage beside the house has been converted: fresh paint, a bathroom, a kitchenette, a covered drop-off area he built himself. He is excavating the backyard to level a playground, building the form boards from the wooden shipping crates that carried their belongings home from Kinshasa. He will plant a garden. He will teach the children where food comes from. He will plant trees.

Megan will be the face of it. She is back waitressing at the Red Kettle for now, serving people she has known since childhood, rebuilding the social world she grew up inside. They will enroll six children to start, aligned with the school calendar. Small and intentional. A place where the mountain is part of the curriculum.

The Best Weather in America

Every year for his birthday in late May, he takes the tram up to the top and hikes back down to Idyllwild, nine miles and almost entirely downhill, a little snow still at the summit, all the water running. He knows every step of it.

He loves the sugar pine above all other trees. He loves the way wind moves through the whole canopy, not just one tree but the entire forest in conversation. He loves the sound of running water, rare enough in California that it still feels like a gift. He has hiked parts of this mountain that almost no one else has walked, given the years he spent mapping fire risk across private land, and he carries that knowledge the way you carry something you chose before you understood why.

This mountain, he says, has the best weather in America. Enough snow to make the seasons real, then blue skies, then the long mild spring. Two hours from the ocean. Next to the desert. A town small enough to know everyone who matters, quirky and independent, every house a little different, nothing prefab, nothing chain. A place the right size, he says, because it keeps nature close. When a town gets too big, you drift away from wildness. Here, the wildness is always just outside the door. Megan can tell you everybody's genealogy, who is related to whom, who used to own what, how it all connects. He married into this mountain. She, he says, was born into it.

His deepest hope for this place is simple and serious: that it never burns. He knows fire behavior the way few people here do, knows the fuel loads, knows what was lost in the early 2000s, knows how slowly a forest comes back. He wants the fuel breaks maintained. He wants young families to stay. He wants the school to survive.

He is the kind of man who has spent a career giving people the conditions to grow, the seeds, the land rights, the paperwork that says you belong here, this is yours. He is doing the same for himself now, quietly, one fence post and one form board at a time.

The house he bought before he had a life here has become the life. The mountain he camped on with 37 cents and a box of beans is the place his children run toward when the plane lands. The woman he watched from across the restaurant, before he had the courage to ask, is at the Red Kettle right now, carrying plates, laughing with people she has known her whole life.

Hal sits at the kitchen table, mulling spices warming on the stove, the cats lounging nearby, the forest pressing gently against the window. He has survived a terrorist attack, a pandemic, four postings to places most people will never visit, and a political dismantling that brought twenty years of work to a halt in a single weekend. He is not defeated. He is, if anything, clearer.

"This is my home," he says. Not as a declaration. Just as a fact, like the mountain, like the sugar pines, like the sound of wind moving through a forest that has been here far longer than any of us.