Where I've Been: A Memoir

This beautifully written memoir of love and adventure takes the reader from John Bruhwiler’s childhood in Switzerland to the wilds of Canada and eventually to the United States. While World War II rages around his homeland and gangs of boys fight in the street, Bruhwiler, the eldest of six siblings, dreams of escaping the rigid society of the Switzerland of his youth by immigrating to Argentina or, perhaps, a ranch in Arizona. At twenty he boards a boat to Canada with nineteen dollars in his pocket and half a dozen words of English. Working as farmhand, logger, surveyor, he roams the vast country from British Columbia to Newfoundland, from the Yukon to the eastern Arctic.This is a tale of struggle and setbacks, of women who are kind and men who are mean. When he decides his father is right and that he must set his sights on a career that will support a wife and family, he embraces a whole new set of challenges that leads him to the States. This is the tale of the women and the sons and the horses that he loved, who broke his heart and healed it again and again.