Michael Riseeberg — individualist, artisan, photographer, adventurer, author, and software engineer. Always dexterous, he made intricate balsa wood airplanes. Relatives remember him as a voracious reader, which his adult library also showed. A sign on the darkroom he constructed warned his family to keep the door closed so the dark wouldn’t leak out. When skiing, he admonished his siblings and friends that “If you don’t fall down, you aren’t trying hard enough.”
From an early age he sought experiences in nature. After high school he built a kayak and spent a summer seeing America’s most beautiful scenery. The next year he started hiking the Appalachian Trail but soon decided they were not his kind of mountains and instead hiked the Pacific Crest Trail with two friends. His hunger for adventure not yet satisfied, he and his companions canoed 4,000 miles from Jasper, Alberta, to the mouth of the Yukon.
Still not ready for college, he began building a boat in which he would sail around the world. Eventually he sold the boat and enrolled at Pacific Union College where he lived in his grandparents’ basement apartment and worked for a construction contractor learning skills he later used when extensively remodeling houses, building unusually beautiful furniture, and making decorative items and toys for his co-workers and their children. A lover of animals, when he put a fence around his garden and orchard to exclude deer, he carefully left several small holes to facilitate the movement of the rabbits, quail, and their offspring that lived in the orchard.
After graduation he worked for four different computer companies. His co-workers called him a genius churning out code amazingly fast and spotting problems in the complicated programs quickly. His code, like his writing, was a reflection of an elegant, original, and brilliant mind.