Grad School in Wyoming

I ended up in grad school in geology at the University of Wyoming seemingly by chance encounter. My Kenyan school had a three-month-on/one-month-off schedule, and during my time off, I traveled—game parks with rhinos, elephants, and lions, and the lakes of the Rift Valley—Naivasha, Nukuru, Begoria, Turkana, and Baringo. At the latter, a 45-minute boat ride took me to Island Camp, where thatched-roof buildings, a swimming pool and bar, and tent accommodations awaited. It was one of the few places I visited more than once.

During my second year in Kenya, I decided that I would study water resources when I returned to the U.S. I had decided clean water is important. Duh! While visiting Island Camp, I went for a stroll. An old couple sat in front of their tent looking at the lake. I chatted for perhaps 20 minutes, but that brief encounter shaped all that came afterward.

The old guy was Don Blackstone, a retired and emeritus geology professor from the University of Wyoming, vacationing in Kenya. I told him what I was interested in, and he replied, “Why don’t you consider coming to Wyoming?”“

At the time, geology was one of the hottest fields for employment in the world, driven by sky-high oil prices. When I applied, I was unaware that I was among 800 applicants for perhaps 30 slots. If I’d known, I might have been intimidated. But unlike many geologists, I am good at math, plus I wasn’t trying for one of the oil-related positions. Thus, I stood out enough to get accepted. When I returned home from Kenya, I got in my old wrecked-and-rebuilt Ford Pinto, my first and only car to that point, and drove more than 1600 miles to Laramie, Wyoming, to start graduate school.

The author in the Snowy Range
outside Laramie, Wyoming,
in the mid-1980s.

In grad school, your most important relationship is with your adviser. I had applied from Africa in the days before the internet, so I knew little about my adviser except for his name, Peter Huntoon. However, I took a class with him that first semester, and he soon took us on an overnight field trip to northern Wyoming. By then it was late September, and it snowed a foot. My hiking boots were still coming back from Africa, so I bought some lined cowboy books with high-traction soles. They performed well enough but fit terribly, eating through my socks and into my heels, as I and the other students hurried and failed to keep up with Huntoon’s hiking to spots he wanted to show us.

On our return drive, we stopped in at the Thermopolis Hot Springs. Soaking in the 105-degree water was a blessed relief. However, I found no relief for my seeming inability to please Dr. Huntoon. I got a bit of insight on a later field trip when he said, “I believe in making a student as insecure as possible. That’s when they do their best work.” I didn’t need any help being insecure, thank you. As to students doing their best work, I couldn’t see that it was being done for Huntoon—of the three students who began working with him when I did, one dropped out of school, and the other two changed advisers.

During that first fall, I took a class in mathematical geology because the course I wanted to take didn’t fit in my schedule. I did very well in the course, and the professor, Leon Borgman, needed someone to work on a project for the Environmental Protection Agency. He decided to fund me, and that summer, I changed advisers.

Dr. Borgman’s approach to working with students was quite different from Huntoon’s. Borgman had trained national-level obedience dogs, and he once said to me, “Working with graduate students is a lot like working with dogs—you don’t start kicking them before they know what to do.” Personally, I was like the dog who responded to a pat on his head with a hump on your leg. Anyway, I thrived under his more gentle approach, and in return he was able to turn over to me much of the project work that he didn’t enjoy, such as writing quarterly reports. I even got to write a proposal for continued funding, a great experience for my future career. I ended up staying on for another four years and completing my Ph.D. under Borgman’s direction.

I tell my students about the importance of developing closeness with a few of their professors. “You’ll need some letters of recommendation someday. And when internships or other opportunities come up, we tend to think first of the students we know best.” But these relatively self-serving justifications are really just an attempt to open a door. Friendships are sufficient in and of themselves.

During the spring after I started working for Dr. Borgman, he took me along on a trip to Las Vegas, the location of the EPA lab supporting our research. Las Vegas might seem a strange place for an EPA office, but it’s the closest city to the Nuclear Test Site, where weapons were exploded and observed after World War II. Water is the limiting resource in that part of the world, so funding research on groundwater fit with the office’s mission. During that trip, I met Dr. Dennis Weber, who worked at a research lab associated with the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. The following summer, Dennis opened his home to me as a free place to stay while working with the EPA. For six weeks, Dennis and I spent most of 24 hours per day together, working on research, eating out at the casinos, hiking, and talking in the nearby dough-nut shop. He took me in once again two summers later when I returned to Las Vegas on another project with the EPA. And I just got an email from him a few days ago.

When I finally got close to finishing up at the University of Wyoming, I first needed to form a Ph.D. dissertation committee of five or so professors or experts in the area of research, a committee including Huntoon, Borgman, and Dennis. Another of my committee members was Peter Shive, a geophysicist and Stanford Ph.D. who worked on an associated project funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. During my time in Wyoming, Peter met his present, wonderful wife, Gail, an artist and avid bicyclist. (I wrote an article about her [here].) And they, too, became friends I’ve stayed in touch with since.

I’ve long since returned to Wyoming with my own daughters. Each spent ten days at a wilderness program that included a first repel off the billion-year-old Sherman Granite that I had repelled off 35 years before, except they did it in the dark. They got to see snowfields in July as they hiked through the towering Rocky Mountains, including the appropriately named Snowy Range. And hopefully, they have grown to love the natural world as they’ve hiked through it, run over it, and driven and flown by it.

I wrote this several years before I retired. I had a chance to visit Peter in hospice before he died and visited with his wife, Gail.  

Out of Africa

Recently, an old friend sent me a photo from my time in Kenya in 1982-84:

Basketball game at Nyeri Baptist High School with me reffing. 
I'm the one with the beard.

Those two years were in many ways the most important of my life. I had just finished college with a math degree and did know what to do next. I had spent half my senior year in Germany, and I knew I wanted to keep traveling. When the opportunity to teach math at a small school in the highlands of Kenya presented itself, my only hesitation was that I would be working for the Southern Baptist Church.    

I had grown up in a small NC town attending a Baptist church, so I had an idea of what I was getting myself into. However, I was pretty ignorant of the larger changes occurring nationally with the growth of the Moral Majority and the push towards fundamentalism that the Southern Baptist Convention was experiencing. Seminaries and other SBC systems were being purged of people who didn't believe the "right" way. I nearly got purged before I even got started.

But that's another story for another time.

Once I got to Kenya, I loved it. The school schedule was three months on, one month off. During my month off, I went on safaris, camped where I had elephants and hippos around my tent at night, caught malaria (a great weight-loss approach), and went through a drought where the town I lived in was without water much of the time. I decided clean water was important.

Who knew?

The depths of my ignorance were unfathomable, looking back. I knew little about Kenya's colonial past. I knew little about civil rights. I knew little about world events. But in Kenya, coupled with my previous time in Germany, something stirred. I had always loved reading, but I'd read mostly fiction. In Kenya, I began reading Newsweek cover to cover soon after it was delivered to the newsstand near where I lived. I read history books and political science. I am thankful for all the things I'd been exposed to in college, because I could build on them as I continued educating myself.

It was during one of the school breaks, on a trip to Island Camp in Lake Baringo in the Rift Valley, that I briefly spoke with a retired professor from the University of Wyoming. I told him of my interest in water resources.

"Consider coming to the University of Wyoming," he replied.

And that's how I ended up in grad school there. That's another story. Soon.

DAWG Anthology Release

 

Writing Workshop

 

Registration is at 

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/writers-workshop-3

A Genie!

 A genie granted me three wishes!  I told him, "I wanna big cock.  I wanna hot girl  And I wanna fly."

Unfortunately, it was a Baptist genie!

(Okay, my inner adolescent was just testing out A.I.'s image generation.)

Maybe the ICE is finally cracking!

Mississippi River photo by Dale Easley

 I was in Eau Claire WI recently for a writing workshop.  Several people from Minneapolis attended.  Despite the problems there, a common theme I heard from them was pride in their community.  People were supporting each other, bringing groceries to those afraid to go out, and protesting in subzero cold.  A lot to admire.

An Effective Business Model

Create a need, then offer a way to meet it. That approach is at least 2000 years old. Only the methods for accomplishing it are different.

In recent years, advertisers and politicians have found new, highly effective ways to convince us that our lives are not acceptable as is. Only if we accept their worldview, buy their products, empower their policies, can we hope to have the life we aspire to.

Advertisers look back over a hundred years to when Kodak began selling a lifestyle rather than advertising the qualities of specific products. In the post-World War II, the explosion of TV access led to rapid advances in using lifestyle, emotions, and story-telling to sell products.

JFK was the best known politician to tap into the power of television. Polls after his debate with Nixon indicated that those who listened to the debate on radio thought Nixon had won, but those who watched it on TV gave Kennedy the win. It was about the visuals. Nixon sweated.

But the basic approach is nothing new. A foundation of Christianity is that each of us is born with original sin, that we’re deeply flawed, pretty hopeless without God’s intervention. But of course, the form that intervention takes is through the rules and rituals of the church. The church creates shame, then offers a pathway to overcome it. Oh, and by the way, we’ll take a 10% commission.

It worked quite well for a long time.

But with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, people began to want more freedom and material goods. That, of course, led to many wars, church splits, and intellectual debates. By the 1990s, it appeared that representative democracy had won out. It put the wealth-generation of planned economies (like the Soviets) to shame, and it offered a lot of freedom, too.

But something went wrong. Humans don’t actually like too much freedom, too many choices. Dostoevsky wrote about this a long time ago in The Brothers Karamazov. But an easier to understand example happens every time you go to the grocery store. In previous times, when you went to the small local store and wanted a product, you took what they had. If you didn’t like it, well, the store was to blame. But if you go now and there are 15 similar products of varying prices and styles, you pick one, go home, and if it isn’t satisfying, you blame your own choice.

And with the internet (Amazon and company), you have no excuse for not picking something you’ll like. Didn’t you read the reviews?

Unfortunately, politics has followed these models. Trump has mastered creating a sense that your life is crap and only he can help you meet your aspirations. He creates the need—immigrants are taking your job, other politicians are weak, other countries are taking advantage at us, even laughing at us!—and then offers himself as the solution. And enough people either believe he is the solution or at least believe all the other politicians are crap that they voted him into office.

I grew up Baptist, and one of the hardest things about Trump support is accepting that Evangelical Christians overwhelming not only like his policies but think he is a great man. How could that be?

But their business model is the same. You are flawed. Shamefully so. We offer the solution. And those churches are not democratic. They are authoritarian, more so now than even 50 years ago.

The mastery of TV and the internet has allowed the Evangelicals to spread their message. In turn, they have bought into the opportunity for political power, and Trump has offered it to them. But I’m pretty sure that Jesus himself turned down the opportunity for worldly power. (See, for example, Matthew 20:25-28)

All that said, those on the left have often used a similar model: Shame people for behaviors, with the way to feel better being the adoption of language and behavior conforming to a particular worldview.

Is there a solution? I hope so: Reject the shame and the shaming, the blame and the blaming.