(light guitar music)
(light upbeat music)
- [Melody] What happens when your life
falls completely apart, but you can't fall apart
because you're the one left holding everything together?
- [Marq] What if you worked hard building
a fairy tale life with blood, sweat, and tears,
and overnight it was gone,
and a life you didn't recognize took its place.
- [Melody] Maybe there's something in our story
that will help you through your story.
We are telling it for the first time,
not only to you, but to each other.
- [Marq] Fourteen years into our marriage,
I had an accident and sustained a traumatic brain injury.
I turned into a completely different person.
It took years of recovery, and over those years
we lost everything we'd built,
but we found things we never could have found otherwise.
- [Melody] This is a rough story.
It's the story of a family.
It's the story of a marriage.
It's the story of two people who had to figure out
how to make it on their own so they could find
the strength to bring it all back together.
- [Marq] We went to the forest to make these videos
because it was time to talk to each other
about what had happened and about what it did to us,
because once the hell was over-
- [Melody] We just moved on and we never talked about it,
believe it or not.
It was just too painful.
So we set up our camera phones in the forest,
and just talked, and we talked,
and we talked, and we talked.
- [Marq] We're bringing them to you
because we made it through that hell,
and we want you to know that you can too.
- [Melody] We hope you tune in, because sometimes,
when you're at the end of your rope,
someone might just throw you one,
and we want to throw you a rope.
- [Marq] We are Marq and Melody Ross,
and this is The Forest Conversations.
(light upbeat music)
- So I just want you to talk a little bit
about where you came from and your,
like if you and me were just meeting.
- You want me to tell you, or do you want me to tell them?
- You can tell them.
- My background is the grandfather and grandmother I knew
on my dad's side came from families of hard-working farmers.
My grandad had some different businesses
as well as ranching and farming.
But I grew up right next door
to my grandfather and grandmother.
I loved the farming life, so that's kind of
what I did growing up, along with, well,
like all kids do, a lot of playing.
But hard work was definitely ingrained in us.
I loved being around equipment, running equipment,
being out in the dirt and those types of things.
Some background with cattle and ranching some from them.
So I would consider myself kind of very salt of the earth,
do whatever it takes, use what you have around you
and what's available, and find joy in that.
- What were you like as a little kid?
- [Marq] How little?
- [Melody] Like five.
- I played with a lot of girls and Barbie Dolls
when I was five.
There were really no boys where we lived.
So yeah, I did that.
But I think that helped me have a feeling side
for women and girls, and trying to understand them
a little better, even though it was
my sisters and their friends.
But then I had a sandbox and played trucks.
Dad had set me up a basketball hoop,
and so I'd go out and play basketball
out in the back on the dirt.
There was no concrete, no blacktop, none of that.
I loved playing.
Learned to ride a bike.
Tried to be Evel Knievel.
I would set up the Tonka trucks from-
- Who's Evel Knievel?
- The first and most well known motorcycle stunt man.
Let's call him that.
- A daredevil?
- Very much a daredevil.
- I think you did become Evel Knievel.
- Whatever.
- You go by Pompy now as your grandpa name.
- Yes.
- And that is after your Pompy, right?
- That's right.
My grandad, my dad's dad, his first grandchild
was my older sister.
She couldn't say Grandpa.
It came out Pompy.
So he forever was known as Pompy.
He passed away just before we had our first grandchild,
and I wanted to keep that as a tradition, and as a memory,
and as an honor to him to still have a Pompy.
So that's me to our grandkids.
I am Pompy.
- I came from a big family, nine kids.
I was the sixth.
My parents are both musicians.
My dad was an electrician by trade,
but he was also an amazing singer and a guitar player.
I think he played some other instruments.
What's funny is there's nine kids, and I got named Melody,
because everybody's really into music,
but I chose a different path because I was rebellious.
I was just kind of the wild kid in the family.
I always just was a free spirit.
Just growing up, I just always figured out a way
to do everything I wanted to do.
Even though we didn't have very much money
and there were so many kids,
I just figured out from a young age,
you can find things, even just junk on the street,
you can make stuff out of things.
You can rig things up, kind of like we just did with this.
If you guys could see our tripod,
we just stacked up a bunch of rocks
because we decided to do this while we were up here
and we don't have the right equipment.
But always just figured out a way
to make what I wanted to make and to do what I wanted to do,
and that has really served me well.
My grandparents also were farmers.
I think that's one of the things that kind of
sort of drew us to each other, I think,
is we both grew up in Idaho,
and hard-working people who loved the land,
and loved the outdoors, and loved to work.
- She says that, but it was my hotness that got her.
- Yeah, it was your hotness.
- It was the hair back when I had it.
- Yeah, the mullet.
- I didn't have a mullet, not when you met me.
I did have a mullet before that.
- [Melody] Yeah, so we should talk about that.
How did we meet?
(light guitar music)
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