A Brief History of Kyle Keller

August 2002: Born in obscurity in Laguna Niguel, CA.

July 2005: Family camping trip #1 to Tuolumne Meadows. The first of many summer camping trips and the beginning of a lifelong relationship with the Sierras.

September 2007: Showed up for my first day of Kindergarten at San Juan Elementary School. “Wait a sec, why is everyone here speaking Spanish?” Because my parents enrolled me in a dual immersion Spanish-English program, that’s why. I wore Target polo shirts and navy blue shorts for the next six years and became part of the elementary school melting pot, it all seemed normal to me.

June 2011: Won the AA Little League championship game with the Cardinals. We beat the Giants 16-11 and many chocolate cupcakes and juice boxes were consumed after the game. The greatest sports day of my life.

September 2013: Left all my San Juan Elementary amigos and moved to Niguel Hills Middle School (a normal English-speaking school) for 6th-8th grade. One of the hardest years of my life. Basically, I survived by finding my best friend from preschool and joining the demanding NHMS Orchestra program. Those are the three things that saved me in middle school: Chris Hamilton, the marvelous Miss Choi, and eating lunch with all the other orchestra nerds in Miss Choi’s classroom every day.

August 2015: My first serious backpacking trip to Cottonwood Lakes (west of Lone Pine). With Chris, of course.

May 2016: I guess all those lunchtime practice sessions paid off. I was chosen for the SCSBOA Honors Orchestra two years in a row and got to perform at the fancy Kennedy Performing Arts Center in La Palma, CA. My instrument was the standup bass and I played it with swagger.

September 2016: What the heck, why not change schools again? After hearing about Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA) from my dad, I decided to submit a last-minute application with a few writing samples. To my surprise, I was accepted to the Creative Writing Conservatory in the fall.

I spent the next four years waking up at 5:55 a.m. every morning, driving to the Laguna Hills transportation center with my mom (on her way to work), hopping on the Route 83 bus to downtown Santa Ana at 7:12, attending OCSA classes from 8:30-4:45, running back to the bus stop to catch the 5:04 bus back to Laguna Hills, finally arriving home around 6:15 p.m. every night. It was an exhausting four years but I’m glad I did it.

Summer 2018: Started my first job as a Ticket Seller and Info Booth Guy at the renowned and funky Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Beach, CA. I got hired at least partially because of a doodle I drew at the top of my job application. I spent the next three summers riding my scooter through downtown Laguna to and from the Sawdust grounds (which are in fact covered with truckloads of sawdust each year), where I sold tickets and answered customer questions and drew giant doodles on the Sawdust daily whiteboard. Man, everyone should have a first job like that.

May 2020: After visiting multiple campuses with my dad and taking an eye-opening trip to Missoula, I was 90% sure I was headed to the University of Montana. But when I drove up the hill to UC Santa Cruz and saw the wide open spaces and redwood trees and families of wild turkeys wandering around campus, I knew that’s where I wanted to be.

April 2022: While taking “Intro to Radio” and “Radio Production” during spring quarter, I started interning at KZSC 88.1 FM every Friday morning. On my first day, legendary morning host Dangerous Dan asked me to come up with a nickname… right there, live, on the air. “Calamity Kyle,” I ad-libbed.

Dan and I became fast friends and I spent the next two years co-hosting the “BushWhacker’s Breakfast Club” every Friday morning from 6:00-9:00 a.m. In addition to taking listener requests and playing an eclectic mix of indie music (country, rock, bluegrass, folk), Dan and I interviewed musicians and politicians and civic leaders from the Santa Cruz community and beyond. When Dan was away on trips (he’s been DJing at KZSC since 1989 but has a real job as a Petroleum Geologist), I took primary responsibility for Bushwhacker’s and hosted the show with my friend and fellow intern, Katrina (aka Kaos).

August 2022: Mid-way through my sophomore year, I submitted a long shot application to become a Resident Assistant (RA) and was hired to join the RA team in the fall. So in addition to being a full-time student, I served as an all-purpose advisor, counselor, and problem-solver for 28-32 undergraduate students during my junior and senior years at UCSC.

Summer 2022 and 2023: Realizing that a Literature major might not get me very far in life, I decided to move to Berkeley for two consecutive summers to complete a Minor in Journalism. The first summer (2022) was brutal: three semester-length classes crammed into six weeks, a last-minute sublet in a run-down UC Berkeley student house, living in a new place where I didn’t know anybody or anything. “What on earth am I doing here?” I asked myself several times a day.

The second summer (2023) was a lot better: only two classes, a handful of good friends, and a very cool sublet apartment on a tree-lined street in North Berkeley. This time around, I had a better feel for the summer school routine and the various nooks and crannies of Berkeley. I also made it over to SFO and Marin a few times and was able to enjoy some of the vibrant Bay Area music scene (which I intend to get back to some day).

September 2023: After taking “Press Production” and working as a staff writer at City on a Hill Press (CHP) the prior quarter, I was invited to work even harder for free and serve as a News Editor. I was always confident in my writing skills but working at CHP taught me things I didn’t know – like how to be part of a team, how to edit other people’s work, and how to burn the midnight oil and rewrite a story seven different times in order to get it to press on time.

June 2024: After taking my final trail runs and mountain bike rides amongst the hallowed Santa Cruz redwoods, I moved out of the concrete Porter dorms and departed UCSC once and for all. Watch out world, here comes another impecunious liberal arts major ready to do something meaningful and important.

Post-graduation update: The day after graduating, I drove to Bishop, CA and spent the next six months working as a research intern with an amazing group of people studying land stewardship and environmental change in the Eastern Sierras (more info on my resumé). On January 6th, I boarded a plane to Peru with Chris (who else?) and we are currently on walkabout in South America (more info on my Instagram feed). If all goes well, I’ll be back in April ready to get started on whatever comes next.