Joseph Schafer was Oregon's first academically trained, professional historian, serving on the faculty of the University of Oregon for twenty years. While in Eugene, he wrote what became a classic textbook on Pacific Northwest history. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner’s at the University of Wisconsin, Schafer remained a defender of Turner's famous "frontier thesis" of American history—which ascribed the nation's profoundly democratic, innovative, and individualistic tendencies to the frontier experience—long after many historians had turned against it.

My life was fairly typical until around the age of 30. I attended university, got a job in banking and joined corporate America. Then one day I was plodding through some marketing proposal and suddenly became disillusioned with my career and a future that seemed all too predictable.

Sono in viaggio dal 1984 e non si sono ancora fermati. Quando sono partiti erano una coppia svizzera di quarantadue anni; adesso di "primavere" sulle loro spalle ne contano sessantacinque, hanno ciocche brizzolate e si trovano decisamente lontani dalle natìe Alpi: sono infatti a Taiwan per l’ennesima tappa di un viaggio ininterrotto che dura da quasi un quarto di secolo e che i due non sembrano proprio intenzionati ad interrompere.