Wheeler

Georgia Sullivan (1924–1998), was born in Oakland, California, where she received her primary and secondary education. She had a spirit that attracted many, and she made friends easily. While attending University High School and then Oakland High School, she developed a lifelong appetite for learning. In 1942, Georgia enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and chose a premed course of study. In 1943, while skiing in California’s Sierra Mountains, she met and fell in love with Miles Sullivan, her future husband, who was studying forestry at Cal and was a member of the university ski team. Miles earned a bachelor’s degree in forestry, and then served two years in the army before returning to Georgia in early 1947.


After she died, her daughter undertook to document her life among the redwood and fir forests at the north end of the Mendocino County coast, where her father worked, first as a forester and then as a resident manager, for the owners of a large tract of timber. In addition to Georgia’s photographs, she found notes she had made during her ten-year stay, many in the fashion of a natural history journal. The notes she wrote years after leaving the coast were of another type—those of someone planning to write a book. While living in Wheeler, Georgia wrote many letters to my paternal grandparents, and her daughter is indebted to her grandmother for saving them; they compose much of the structure of this work, which is the book Georgia would have written.