Retired Army special forces officer comes to Cambria to heal — and launch a new career
When recently retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Bill Edmonds and his wife, Cheryl, bought a 1,700-square-foot home in a steep, heavily wooded area of Cambria, they wanted to put down roots and allow their daughters the stability of secondary schooling in one place.
They also hoped the new setting would help Bill heal from the many wounds of war.
The Edmonds family bought their new Fern Drive house from Kyle and Amby Ronemus, who now live in Colorado.
The families are bonded forever in friendship over their shared love of adventure and the outdoors, as well as the forested, seaside North Coast town of Cambria.
Retired Army officer pursues new career
Cheryl Edmonds, 53, is a national board-certified acupuncturist who isn’t able to ply her trade yet in California. That’s because the licensing requirements here are different than they were in Maryland, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., where she previously practiced.
Her 51-year-old husband retired as a lieutenant colonel earlier this year after 33 years as an Army special forces officer.
The son of Peace Corps volunteer parents who are now teaching the underprivileged in Venezuela, Bill was raised in Fillmore near Ventura.
He enlisted in the Army Rangers at 17, then took a break to get his political science degree from Cal Poly while living in Los Osos. From 1995 to February of this year, he served on Army tours of duty that took him around the globe.
“I served in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe and pretty much all of Africa,” Bill said via phone.
When the family left Germany after Bill’s retirement, it marked the end of his military career but not the traumatic wartime experiences that are shaping his life in retirement.
Deep introspection about the past has led him down a path of self-discovery for the future, including new research, a vastly different career path and a fierce desire for stability for himself and his family.
Bill is now an author and a doctoral student in East-West psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
He’s on his way to becoming an instructor in mindfulness meditation. And he’d also like to teach yoga, something Cheryl taught him.
Bill already holds a master’s degree in science from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and a master’s degree in arts from King’s College of London.
Bill wants to continue his research into how those who’ve suffered severe emotional trauma — especially in war, as he did — can use writing and mindful mediation to “improve their overall well-being.”
“You can do that,” he said, “through the process of embracing a difficult memory, processing it, transforming it through writing.”
It’s the “art of noting your thoughts, your emotions, your body feelings,” Bill explained, adding that “introspection without judgment can transform emotions to memories that are important” but have much less power to continue traumatizing.
His 2015 memoir, “God is Not Here: A Soldier’s Struggle with Torture, Trauma and the Moral Injuries of War,” chronicles his year in Mosul, Iraq, where he served as an official military adviser to an Iraqi intelligence officer interrogating suspects in a makeshift prison.
“The longer he submerged himself in the worst of humanity, the more conflicted and disillusioned he became, slowly losing faith in everything and everyone,” the blurb on Amazon.com reads. “In the end, he lost himself. He returned home with no visible wounds, but on the inside he was different. He tried to forget ― to soldier on ― but memories from war never just fade away. ...”
“It’s not light reading,” Bill said of the book.
His experiences left him coping with post-traumatic stress and acute moral injuries. Healing in Cambria seemed to be the ideal prescription.
“With the ocean, mountains, trails … you really can’t do much better than living here,” Bill said. “And having a little slice of your own nature preserve?”
Move to Cambria prompted by camping trip
Bill, Cheryl and their daughters Natalie, 12, and Ava, 10, found Cambria after an intense blizzard near Lake Tahoe forced Bill off the Pacific Crest Trail.
He’d been hiking the trail for months, starting at the Mexican border.
Cheryl and the girls had been camping along the way, trailing along after him. But after the snowstorm, Bill’s break to warm up and some deep discussions about the future, the family shifted into house-hunting mode, hoping to add some permanence to their lives.
Natalie spotted the Ronemuses’ Fern Drive house online, and the family quickly fell in love with it and its owners.
“It was more than we wanted to spend,” Cheryl said via phone. “But Natalie and the house convinced us. … It just feels right, the house and its proximity to nature and the trails. We knew we had to find a way to make it work.”
At 1,700 square feet, she added, the home is “smaller than some other places where we’ve lived, but the living space is just what we need. … It’s cozier.”
The family put in a bid and went back “on the trail” for a bit. They then had to return to go through the purchase and escrow process.
They spent a month camping in San Simeon.
Escrow on their new property, which includes an acre of land, closed in June.
“The house blends with the forest, with a view of Fern Canyon,” Cheryl said blissfully of their purchase. “There are lots of trees, and Kyle and Amby left behind beautiful little trinkets that we keep finding … mobiles, birdhouses, a froggy bird bath hidden under the trees. (It’s) just charming.
“We’re so much happier here than we would have been” in a bigger suburban community, she said. “I just felt smothered there.”
The Ronemus family sold the home furnished, and the Edmondses brought their own furniture and belongings from Europe.
With “boxes in the driveway, a basketball court packed with furniture and boxes full of stuff we couldn’t use,” she said, they did what many Cambrians have done in similar situations. They held a garage sale.
“It was kind of overwhelming, but it was fun,” she said. What didn’t sell there, they sold on Craigslist or donated.
What’s in the future for families?
The Edmonds and Ronemus families share similar desires for their new homes and lives.
Kyle Ronemus hopes to create a small Colorado ranch complete with “goats, miniature animals, chickens, a couple of alpacas and maybe a yak or two,” he wrote via text.
“When Bill and I first bought the house, we asked ourselves ‘What can we do in Cambria that isn’t here yet?’ ” Cheryl said.
“Cambria pretty much has it covered, but maybe we could do a biergarten” similar to the ones they’d experienced in Europe, “near the end of a road, with fields where kids can run around, with a play-yard and animals,” she said.
Bill would eventually like to use the grounds surrounding their new home as a “place where vets can come and do meditation, yoga, go for walks” and heal.
His master’s thesis is about “using the writing process to assist in the therapeutic process, teaching mindfulness, being contemplative, working with difficult emotions as you’re sitting down writing about them.”
When he gets his degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies, Bill said, he wants to use his newfound knowledge, personal experience and the Central Coast “to help veterans, service members, first responders and others” suffering from PTSD and related issues.
This story was originally published October 7, 2021 at 5:05 AM.
