It was the late 1930's. She was shy and sedate, from
a family of teachers and scholars. But it was love at first sight.
To her family in Virginia she wrote hazily of the adventurer she had
married.
Bill had left home at 14 with a nameless longing in his
heart. "I can't take a soft life," he told his bride. "It rots
a man." So they started their quest for freedom in sun-scorched
Death Valley. Bill was exultant.
Free as a bird. All we have to do is toss our worldly
goods on the burros and in five minutes we are moving! Who else in
the world has to so little and still so much?
As they roamed the deserts of Arizona and California on
foot, making friends with prospectors and desert rats, Edna found herself
absorbed in her new life. Sometimes she wondered how, gently bred,
she was content to live in the crudest manner, eating the barest
subsistence diet, wander afoot across deserts, plains, and badlands,
sleeping under the stars, hobnobbing with miners, Indians, sheepherders,
and bindlestiffs. It was because she and Bill had found inner peace.
"In this place," Bill said, "a man can find his God."
Mrs. Price tells her story with gaiety and humor.
With a twinkle in her eye, she recalls the hardest experiences which we
part of the happiest years of her life.
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