Thomas Seidel

A life lived in chapters.

Thomas Seidel has lived more lives than most people read about. He was born in Gassville, Arkansas, to a single mother and adopted at birth by his grandparents, Everett and Velma, who ran the Coolidge Dam Marina on the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona.

When his grandmother fell ill with MS, the family relocated to Tucson for better care, and the medical bills ate through their savings. He and his grandfather took to the road as fruit tramps up the West Coast, picking fruit, cutting asparagus, and picking strawberries and zucchini. At eleven, he ran away and joined a traveling carnival, where the Siebrand Brothers Circus and Carnival owners treated him like family. By thirteen he was driving a semi hauling a small roller coaster from town to town.

In 1966 he moved to the Salinas/Monterey area of California, and in 1969 he enlisted in the US Army, serving active duty until 1972 and in the reserves for three more years, through the Vietnam era. He built his first aircraft, a ROTEC ultralight, and never really stopped buying and flying real airplanes, flying airshows up and down the West Coast and eventually floatplanes into the backcountry.

In 1982 he got certified as an electrician and opened Seidel Electric in Salinas, doing industrial and commercial work primarily for the big produce companies. His youngest son, Chase, still runs it today. Along the way came seven years touring the Canadian Maritimes with the Bill Lynch Shows, a season guiding in Alaska, a gold dredge, the mines of Wyoming, and a trip to Louisiana in 2006 to help after Katrina.

After retiring, he built a resort on Idaho's River of No Return, sponsored a music venue on the Driftwood Stage built from logs dragged out of the river, and added a boutique RV park at the entrance to Hells Canyon. Most nights, he's still the one behind the mic.

Lost in Colorado, twenty-five years in the making, is his debut novel, and book two of the trilogy is already underway.