EXODUS

My mom, even though raised in the Midwest, was a huge fan of Westerns and had a deep fondness for the world to the west of Detroit. As a boy, I'd doodle little flip book animations in the corners of her Zane Grey books. The author had written more than fifty Westerns, but I only knew him as the guy who wrote books that I used to draw cartoons.

Michiganders had a long-standing tradition of heading south to Florida when weather got bad or the holidays were upon us. My mother broke that tradition. She didn't want to go south – she wanted to go west.

"This Christmas, let's go to Phoenix instead," she offered.

The family looked at her in unison. "Phoenix ... Arizona?" we asked.

"Yep."

"Do they even have Christmas in Arizona?"

The takeaway from our "Western" holiday wasn't about fake snow being blown on entire neighborhoods to replicate the season – it was about staring at the vast, empty expanses outside my airplane window on the way to Phoenix. I was transfixed by large areas of desert that still didn't have any roads.

How is that even possible? I'd ask myself.

It wasn't like I grew up in a really crowded area, but there were always people around. My neighbors, while not packed in tenement-style, were everywhere. Every road – and most were paved – had cars on it, any time of day. Humanity was a constant.

The only respite, and one that I really took to, was property my parents bought outside of Gladwin, Michigan. At 160 acres, it was a quarter-mile square of woods, meadows and bogs – classic Michigan terrain. My mother designed and oversaw a small but fully functional cabin on a bluff overlooking the lower acreage. Many a weekend was spent at this wonderful getaway.

When my parents divorced in 1980, the property was sold as part of the settlement. This turn of events haunts me to this day. When Mom and Dad split, I was still struggling to complete Evil Dead and didn't have a pot to piss in monetarily, so I had to watch, helplessly, while my personal slice of paradise slipped away. That harrowing experience planted a seed that would grow twenty years later.

Post-divorce, Mom moved west to start a new life. She remarried, a rancher, and they migrated from one piece of western property to another. Whenever I wanted to see Mom, I'd make my way to wherever she lived at the time – Sequim, Washington; Nevada City, California or Humbug, Oregon. I loved seeing the new places she found and it really cemented my idea that the West was different – in almost every way.

The first time I saw the Milky Way was out west, while working on Sundown: A Vampire in Retreat in Moab, Utah. I was astounded. It was real. I felt like I was starting to reconnect a little bit with the natural world. While making that movie, I explored the Utah outback at every opportunity when I wasn't working.

It was the first time in my entire existence, while at the Navajo National Monument, when the only sound I could hear was the crunch of gravel under my feet on a remote trail. A crow passed by across the canyon and I could hear its wings flap, so distant was any traffic or ambient, human-created noise. Solitude was something I began to crave.

When I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting more seriously, I threw myself into a sea of humanity. Los Angeles has been described many ways: The City of Angels, The Big Orange, La-La Land. I call it the City of Sloppy Seconds.

Ironies abound – the guy with the fancy sports car can't get it over 45 miles per hour because of all the traffic; the "health nut" unknowingly sucks the equivalent of half a pack of Camels in particulate matter every day; the "Mellow" Californian doesn't exist – not in Los Angeles anyway.

About ten years into my L.A. "residency," I was returning from a trip with Ida – my wife and co-conspirator for twenty-five years – late in the afternoon. Through the airplane window, we could see the unmistakable pale orange band of smog blanketing the city. This wasn't "marine layer" or anything atmospheric – this was pure, big-city smog. Ida and I glanced at each other. I extended my right hand.

"Let's make a deal to get out of here in five years."

She took my hand and shook it firmly. "Deal."

To assuage her that we wouldn't starve if we moved out to the boonies somewhere, I drew up a "where did I work in 1997?" chart. It turned out that 70 percent of my movie or TV work took place outside of Los Angeles. With better rebate deals being offered by New Zealand, Canada, Bulgaria and others, film production left California at an alarming rate.

Only 30 percent of my work was in Los Angeles? Why was I still here?

Our five-year escape plan came to fruition within a year.

GO NORTHWEST, YOUNG MAN!

By this time, my mother lived in Ashland, Oregon, and she dabbled in real estate. Mom was an early "flipper." She loved buying places for cash, fixing them up and selling them whenever she and her new husband, Bob, got bored.

In an exploratory phase, Ida and I were looking for a house that wasn't in a standard neighborhood or even a small town – we wanted a place that was farther out, ideally with land.

Oregon seemed like as nice a place as any. It encompassed anything from high desert to mountainous forest to desolate coastline. Oregon was on the same coast as Los Angeles, so the whole time zone thing would be the same – and there was a two-hour direct flight from Medford to Los Angeles once a day.

This could work.

I asked Mom to fax me some real estate listings and a few of them seemed promising. Ida and I headed north.

Oregon in the fall is grand – it's a mix of still-warm days, breezy sunshine and fall colors. The day we accompanied Mom to see the Applegate Valley property was the kind of day real estate agents pray for: sunny, crisp with the slightest of breezes to remind us that it was fall. This particular piece of property was situated on a hill with spectacular south-facing views of the Siskiyou Mountains.

The setting was very appealing, but the ownership map told me everything I needed to know – our property was surrounded on three sides by land administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM – more on them later) and our mountainous view was also either BLM or National Forest Service land.

A mountain range with no lights on it. Where do I sign up?

I immediately turned...