Denver, Colorado                            

By the time I started working for Texaco, my focus to reach the U.S. Geological Survey was underway.  Applying to the U.S. government has always been a cumbersome and time-consuming process, a task requiring patience and persistence.  I was warned by others it would take time.  Of course I was “using” Big Oil, but decided to give them my best effort.  After all, the company paid for my move to Denver, and it would be wise to have exploration experience under my belt.

During those hectic few months of moving and resettling, Irene was very patient.  She had also wanted to move west and had grad school intentions of her own that were being held up by my needs.  In the 1970s, the male job search was a front burner effort on a high setting, but Womens Liberation was intensifying.  While at Syracuse, Irene and some of her friends formally changed back to their family names.  I totally supported her, but changing a spousal name in those days wasn’t easy.  Irene needed my permission to change her last name for credit card and other business-related activities.  Ridiculous!  Our parents were baffled by our announcement but didn’t say much.  The generation gap was wide in those days.

My Texaco career started in June, 1975 after the close of spring semester at Syracuse.  We drove to Denver in the Chevette and witnessed our first tornado as we crested a hill on I-70 in eastern Colorado, a very auspicious welcome to the Empire State.  The funnel was long and arching, extending downward some 5,000 feet from an ominous wall cloud, moving from southwest to northeast across the highway a few miles ahead of us.  We pulled over and watched in awe, so transfixed by the power of the twister, that we neglected to take a picture.

We leased half of a ranch-style duplex on Quartz Street (an apt name), in Pleasant View, an unincorporated residential community just east of Golden.  I immediately started working for Big Oil but continued my effort to snag a job with the USGS.  The head of the Resource Appraisal Group of the Branch of Oil and Gas Resources, Betty Miller, knew Dan Merriam at Syracuse University.  She wanted to hire several geologists for assessment work involving probability, statistics, and computer applications in geology.  Betty noticed Dan’s name on my application form.  RAG’s responsibilities included assessing undiscovered petroleum resources for the U.S. and the World, primarily for congress and industry.  I soon interviewed with Betty and her boss, Dick Mast, the newly installed Chief of the Branch of Oil and Gas Resources.

It was difficult to get a job with the US government if you weren’t a veteran or minority. I did not fit those categories and would never mention my one-year stint in the army reserves (ROTC) at Mines.  I was told by Dick Mast to emphasize specific skills in my application form (FR-171) that dealt with petroleum geology and computers.  Dick was trying to hire ME and was tailoring his request to the Office of Personnel Management based on MY specific skills.  Dick said that it might take several months to hire me. He was right.

In the meantime, I disguised myself as a Texaco geophysicist at the Grimes Building, the Texaco Rocky Mountain Division office on Grant Street east of downtown Denver.  I met staff and management, and although everyone was friendly and courteous, my initial suspicions about the company were soon verified.  I had heard rumors about dress codes, colored pencil extenders, and the antiquated system used to evaluate prospects, but I was still surprised by the corporate inefficiency.  The last significant domestic Texaco discovery was in 1956, nearly 20 years previously near Aneth in southeast Utah.  That did not bode well.  My colleagues were competent, but the entire office seemed to function in a perpetual state of slow motion, accomplishing little, just showing up from 8 am until 4:30 pm.  We rarely saw upper management.  They were a block away in another building, always portrayed in an adversarial way, almost mythical.  Arranging to meet with them was like applying for a visa to another country.  We prepared and rehearsed our presentations and then walked that block to another continent far away.  The company was a fossilized dinosaur.  I don’t remember getting dressed down for long hair or kakis, but I was careful because I wanted good reviews from management.  Supply closets were always locked, and whenever I needed some tool, a pencil, paper, or maybe an eraser, I had to approach the office secretary.  We lined up by the door at 4:25 pm every day just ahead of dismissal.  No one had the nerve to leave early, and we couldn’t work late because data files were locked in secure filing cabinets at 4:15 pm.

The geophysical process of developing petroleum prospects (or plays as they were called) involved evaluating well log (down-hole electrical signals) and seismic data (acoustic responses to subsurface rock discontinuities) and preparing isopach (lines of equal depth) maps of key stratigraphic horizons that defined an area of interest.  As I recall, we didn’t talk much with the geological staff.  They developed their own plays based on geologic criteria and often met separately with management.  I thought it odd that the geological and geophysical staff didn’t work together to compile all available information to create a more disciplined prospect.  I constructed contour maps of anticlines (upfolds) in Wyoming mostly based on seismic data.  I wasn’t a seasoned explorationist but was disappointed that my supervisor would edit my maps to make them more appealing to management.  On one occasion, I was reviewing a map, rolled onto a  work table, with two immediate supervisors.  We were reviewing it in preparation for the trek to the management building when a wood tick appeared on one of my plays, a coniferous forest tick, the kind you find in the mountains.  I had played hooky the day before and must have had a remnant tick on my body somewhere.  Thankfully, no one seemed to notice.

I soon started carpooling with two fellow employees, Joe G and Harvey K, both 1975 geophysics graduates of Colorado School of Mines, also Golden residents.  Texaco was their first full time employer.  We took turns driving downtown on the 6^th avenue expressway, sneering at single occupancy vehicles and feeling good about ourselves.

A few memorable moments from my 11-month Texaco incarceration are still clear to me.  The Colorado Front Range is noted for its hailstorms.  The mountains and foothills generate thunderstorms that produce violent tornadoes farther east on the high plains, but during storm genesis large hail and damaging winds are common in the Denver area.  One afternoon during the summer of 1975, a huge “wall cloud” formed over downtown Denver.  It was black and massive, an menacing shape in front of an advancing thunderstorm, but the air was perfectly still and the entire downtown area seemed to turn deathly quiet.  The office emptied as the monster cloud descended on us.  We stood outside agape as the base of the cloud turned gray and hazy.  Within a few minutes, baseball-sized hail began dropping from the sky, hardball-sized bombs exploding as they hit the sidewalk in front of us.  Everyone abruptly ran inside and continued to watch the storm from a doorway as it shredded trees and shrubs, damaged vehicles, and forced pedestrians to run for their lives.  The storm stopped as suddenly as it started after depositing a white layer of mashed hail stones several inches deep on the roadways, sidewalks, and lawns.  I can’t recall who drove that day, but it wasn’t me.  Over the years though, all of my vehicles suffered extensive hail damage, severely cracking windshields and denting hoods, roofs, and egos.

I visited the “field” three times while at Texaco.  My first field experience offered additional experience in geophysics, an opportunity that completed the full cycle of preparing seismic sections.  I had processed seismic data in Houston and Dallas for SDC and GSI, but I had not been in the field to gather raw acoustic data.  Data are acquired by placing geophones (microphones, often called jugs) along a quarter-mile or more seismic line and waiting for a vibroseis truck to thump its way across the sage fields.  I drove to Rawlins, Wyoming with a fellow geophysicist.  There we met the Texaco crew chief, a hard working good old boy from Texas, an old Texaco hand with 30 years experience running seismic teams in the field.  He managed a crew of surveyors, vibroseis drivers, instrument specialists, and “jug” hustlers.  Hustling means to move the jugs forward along a seismic line after the vibroseis “shots or thumps” were completed.  Hustlers were generally unskilled high school drop outs, guys from poverty, living a rough life prone to violence and general bad behavior.  I worked with them for several days and gained respect for their hard work under demanding conditions—the hot sun, thunderstorms, ticks, rattlesnakes, and incessant sage brush.  On one occasion, however, I broke up a knife fight between two hustlers.  Actually, the fight had not yet started but the weapons were drawn, ready for some slashing.  While I was calming the combatants with some words of wisdom (long forgotten), my Texaco colleague sprinted to the instrument truck, a quarter mile away to find the crew chief.  Our leader arrived within minutes and fired them both on the spot.  By then, the two had shaken hands, oddly the best of friends, which was a good thing since they had to share the back seat of a Bronco for the 75 mile drive back to Rawlins.  I commented at the time that I would hate to meet these guys in a bar in Rawlins after they had a few drinks.  I experienced that once on a Saturday night while bar hopping during our two week sojourn there.  The local entertainment scene was populated by oil field workers, local cowboys, transient bikers, and an explosive mix of testosterone and ethanol.  Needless to say, I survived, but thought better of making that a frequent form of entertainment.

Within a few months, I successfuly transferred to the geology division and visited southeastern Idaho with a colleague, Don F, who asked me to join him for two weeks as a field assistant.  We sampled Cretaceous source and reservoir rocks, measured stratigraphic sections, and mapped geologic structures.  Shale and mudrock contain organically-derived carbon to generate petroleum under certain conditions.  Organic carbon is an indicator of petroleum potential, especially if the rocks have spent part of their existence at significant depths and high temperatures.  We collected sandstones to identify permeability.  The goal was to find high organic carbon shales, permeable sandstones, and a trap to ensure the presence of an oil or gas field.  Easier said than done, but I enjoyed the experience, the challenge of trying to understand the rocks, how they formed and evolved, and whether or not they contained a hidden treasure!

I also “sat” a gas well with Don in the Green River Basin south of Interstate 80 a few miles south of Red Desert, Wyoming.  Red Desert is an exit on the highway about half way between Rawlins and Rock Springs.  Once off the freeway, a visitor can find a decaying general store, a phone booth, and lots of sagebrush.  The well was called a “production offset”, meaning that its neighbor, a 15,000-ft deep well a half mile away was already producing natural gas.  The idea was to extend the production of Table Rock gas field.  We stayed in a trailer on site and described well cuttings (rock chips) as they reached the surface, but our main goal was to identify the producing reservoir rock, a Cretaceous sandstone, and core the interval when it was reached by drilling.  The fun part of the experience was to watch how an enormous 12-story drilling rig worked, how drill pipe was added to the “string”, and how the crew operated in such a dangerous environment.  For example, a couple of strong thunderstorms passed through the site while we were there.  I watched a large lightning rod in action.

For some unknown reason, the “core point”, the depth at which thousands of feet of drill pipe are removed from the bore hole is always reached at 3 am.  A core is a cylindrically-shaped section of rock that is extracted with special drilling equipment.  The core point is identified by interpolating the depth of the gas producing interval from nearby wells, always a difficult process, especially if faulting or folding has taken place in the area.  During times when the drilling rig was inactive or pipes were removed, I looked for fossils.  The rig was sitting on the Green River Shale, an Eocene (50 million year old) lake deposit with abundant fish fossils that could be dislodged with a hammer.

Those three field episodes boosted my experience in petroleum exploration, a necessity for my future career with the USGS in petroleum assessment.  Back in Denver, I kept in touch with Dick Mast.  He gave me updates on the disposition of my application.  On at least two occasions during my 11 month wait, I modified and resubmitted my application based on his recommendations.  According to Dick, another applicant, a veteran with fewer qualifications, kept appearing ahead of me on the government roster.

Meanwhile, life rolled on in Golden.  I developed a lifelong interest in hiking and backpacking, skiing, and attempting to collect 14ers, those elusive 14,000-ft peaks—there are more than 50 of them in Colorado.  Sadly, the Irene-Ted marriage collapsed in 1976 with less romance and intimacy, different interests, and less communication.  I have to assume responsibility for most of the problem.  I was transient, impatient, unsettled, and dependent on continuous change and excitement for happiness.  I’m sure I was hard to get along with.  We separated just before I was officially hired by the USGS.  Irene was agreeable to the separation but was also good at hiding her feelings.  We were about the same age, married at 25 and divorced at 30.  I purchased the divorce forms at a stationary store in Denver and filed for an uncontested divorce.  We met 25 years later and reminisced over dinner in Denver.  Irene had completed a PhD program in psychology, and moved to California where she spent many years working for IBM in artificial intelligence.  She gained valuable experience in dealing with AI living with me for five years.

Shortly before I appeared in Jefferson County Court to have a judge sign our divorce papers, Dick Mast called and offered me a job as a GS-9 mathematical geologist.  The position was initially classed as “while actually employed” or WAE, meaning no benefits or vacation, and I could only work 32 hours a week.  I would be one of the first to lose my job during a “reduction in force” or RIF.  Dick informed me that I would receive a “slot” for a full time permanent position as soon as one was released to the Branch by USGS management in Reston, Virginia.  I had just received a job offer from the World’s most foremost geologic research organization.  The USGS was a Big Bang away from Texaco, where appearance, tenure, and company attitude meant everything.  I time travelled to a universe of curiosity, independent thinking, and collaboration.  I found the organization I would remain with for the next 30 years.

The US Geological Survey in the mid 1970’s was a large and diverse federal agency with a billion dollar budget and more than 10,000 employees scattered around the country.  The three regional offices were located in Reston, VA, Denver, CO, and Menlo Park, CA.  The USGS is a Bureau within the Interior Department with several divisions or priorities. Water, Mapping, and Geology were the three main divisions at the time.  I was hired to work in the Office of Energy and Marine Geology, specifically the Branch of Oil and Gas Resources.  Other branches in the Geologic Division included topical disciplines such as geochemistry, paleontology, geophysics, and geologic mapping.  These branches conducted their own research but also supported commodity branches like mine.  For example, a geologist in oil and gas might contact a paleontologist in her branch to identify fossils in some obscure petroleum-bearing rock.  This system worked well over the years, encouraged creative research and resulted in multi-authored papers.  By the 1980s, the number of single-authored papers decreased because research required several specialists, each with different skills, to solve complex problems.  A project leader would integrate the work of each specialist into a collaborative document, while soothing the delicate egos of judgmental introverts.

I was officially assigned to the Resource Appraisal Group, and Betty M was my supervisor.  The RAG Group consisted of about 25 scientists and support staff, geologists, statisticians, computer specialists, and technicians. The primary responsibility of RAG was to conduct periodic petroleum assessments of the U.S. and the World, a summary of the remaining undiscovered petroleum resources under the ground and yet to be discovered.  This was no easy task, it was crystal ball stuff.  Geologists would become experts, usually over many years in a sedimentary basin or geologic province by developing an understanding of the petroleum production history, sedimentary geology, and basin evolution.  They would periodically meet with a committee of peers to evaluate the future potential for oil and gas in that area.  Statistics and computers were used in the analysis, and final results were presented as probability distributions showing most likely and least likely numbers of future undiscovered fields and field sizes.  Sound complicated? Yup, and definitely educated guess work, especially in areas with little geologic information.  RAG geologists knew they were undertaking a difficult task.  Answers were simply best guesses at the time because technological improvements and economic conditions could easily change the results.  The data were used by Congress, state and federal agencies, and industry.  At the time I was hired, RAG was gearing up for a new national assessment.

My first few days at work were filled with bureaucratic paperwork (insurance, retirement, etc.), but I paid a visit to Dick M.  I soon learned that I had other responsibilities.  In 1976, RAG was located in an office building on Dover Street a couple of miles from the Federal Center in Lakewood.  I had to drive to Building 25 at the Federal Center to see Dick.  Dick was a busy guy, ultimately responsible for 150 scientists and staff and a $30 million budget.  I waited outside his office for an hour before he was free.  He was always behind schedule.  We chatted about Illinois.  He had worked for the Illinois State Geological Survey and grew up somewhere in the state.  Dick then informed me that I had additional responsibilities if I wanted them, additional tasks I had acquired by default because his other new hire had recently quit.

Carol was a petroleum geologist, maybe 50 years old with a long career in oil and gas exploration.  She started working for the Branch but quit suddenly after only a few weeks.  She was hired to lead several large computer-related projects involving mainframe computers and large databases.  She may have thought the work too unstructured or maybe just too demanding or impossible to complete.  Dick was hoping I could take over Carol’s responsibilities.

The Well History Control System was a computerized database with geologic and production data on more than a million wells drilled in the US over the last 100 years.  WHCS was originally developed by two geologists, the Goodin brothers of Denver, as an analog card file with well summary data, like the old library card files, but with data for use in petroleum exploration.  The data were later converted into computer files and maintained by Petroleum Information Corporation, sold to industry, and updated as new wells were completed.  The RAG Group used WHCS for petroleum assessments, and other Branch geologists extracted information for research. At the time, BOG spent more than $200 thousand a year to access WHCS, a tidy sum in 1976.  Carol was to manage the USGS contract with PI and supervise retrievals, enhancements, and applications.

The Eastern Gas Shales Project was a US Department of Energy effort to identify the potential for natural gas in Devonian-aged shales in the Appalachian Basin of the eastern US.  Devonian shales were known to contain vast quantities of natural gas that were not yet economically productive.  New technologies had to be developed, and a better understanding of the geology of these rocks and their distribution needed to be developed.  The project included scientists from state governments, other Federal agencies, and industry.  It was just  beginning.   Studies ranged far and wide, from the geochemical analysis of the shales to fracture development of shale rock, and the thermal evolution of shale units.  The Branch of Oil and Gas was a member of this consortium and had the responsibility to supply participants with WHCS data and develop a new computerized database of information on the shales generated by project participants.  Dick Mast was in a bind because Carol was also hired to manage EGSP as well as WHCS.  After hearing his summary, I readily agreed to manage both WHCS and EGSP, fully knowing that I had little experience to do either.  Dick explained that PI would do most of the technical work for us under our contract using their programmers and geologists.  I would supervise their work and manage the budget.  I would also manage the overall PI-USGS contract, authorize other WHCS data retrievals for the RAG group and supervise applications.  BOG paid PI to access the data.  I was a new hire, a GS-9 computer geologist with additional responsibilities and a total budget of more than $500 thousand a year.  A fraction of the total budget was discretionary spending for my travel and other research expenses.  I was now filling two jobs!

Dick wasn’t done with me yet.  He produced another surprise.  He wanted me to manage another database, the Petroleum Data System.  I was already swamped in acronyms—I now added PDS to the list.  Where WHCS was a computerized database of oil and gas wells, PDS contained location, geologic, and production data on 40,000 oil and gas fields and reservoirs in the U.S. and Canada.  It was originally conceived by Dick Meyer, a USGS geologist in the Reston, VA office under contract to the University of Oklahoma in Norman during the 1960s.  The USGS in Reston built a computer retrieval system to manage the data and paid for the initial development of PDS.  Subsequent financial support also came from industry.  Retrievals were made in Norman by Information Systems Programs, the OU group under contract to maintain PDS.  Carol was also hired to manage PDS, maintain the contract, and supervise retrievals.

Dick produced yet one more tidbit before our meeting ended.  He had promised to give a talk at the American Association of Petroleum Geologists meeting in Houston that Fall using PDS as an application to heavy oil distribution in the U.S. (heavy oil is very viscous, like paste, and is hard to extract by normal drilling and production techniques).  He asked me to give the talk.  Carol was identified to give that talk too.  It seemed pretty clear to me why Carol quit.  My job was really a difficult one, but I was either ignorant of that reality, or just young and immature enough to appreciate its significance to my career.  I told Dick I was happy to assume responsibility for everything and drove back to Dover Street with enough work for three geologists.  Betty Miller just sighed when I described the additional work Dick wanted me to do.  Dick had just trumped her new employee, but I got along well with Betty and participated in RAG activities as much as possible.

My feeling about assessing undiscovered petroleum resources revolved around the following question:  What do you want to pay? $50 per barrel? $100 per barrel? As technology improves and the price for a barrel of oil increases, more undiscovered accumulations become available.  As I write this (early 2016), a barrel of crude oil is selling for $30 per barrel, less than the price in 1970 corrected for inflation.  The price collapse was caused by overproduction, improved technology, and increased vehicle efficiency.  Five years before, the US was importing nearly 60 percent of its crude oil, whereas in 2016 it’s around 40 percent.  Petroleum companies also did resource assessments, but that was like having the fox guard the hen house.

So, I signed on to my three full-time jobs: database administrator and contracting officer (WHCS and PDS), project chief for the EGSP data system, and petroleum geologist for the RAG group.  In my spare time I was to conduct research relating to petroleum, even though I was technically working 32 hours/week.  It was all pretty scary, but I had a lot of support at PI and my new friends in Norman, Oklahoma.

It soon became apparent to me that I was also very independent.  I had no time clock, no one monitored my daily activities, and only longer term goals mattered.  Yes, short-term brush fires were common as with any organization, but I had control of my work life.  For me, it was perfect.  I didn’t like supervisors breathing down my neck, or higher level managers playing games.  Some of that behavior did take place in the USGS, but I rarely saw it.  Our goals were to prepare products and advance science.  Most of us worked hard.  A small percent of staff were slackers, an inevitable result of working in large organizations.

In the 1970’s, the government issued travel vouchers, primarily for the purchase of airline tickets or rental cars for employees who traveled frequently.  The vouchers came in coupon-like books and were as good as cash to the likes of United and Continental Airlines.  I received my first book from Noreen B, our administrative officer, a caring and highly competent manager of BOG funds.  My first trip, however, was a short one to downtown Denver to the headquarters of Petroleum Information Corporation, where I met the geologists and programmers who would be doing much of the hands-on work for EGSP and other USGS projects.  My first long-distance trip was to Reston, VA to the USGS headquarters to meet Wally D, my primary contact there, and John R, and Laurie W his coworkers, all stratigraphers who had studied the Devonian shales in the Appalachian basin. Reston seemed like a planet away, but I instantly liked Wally, John, and Laurie.  They made me feel at home, were very kind, and gave me the grand tour.  They knew the ins and outs of the USGS establishment and provided invaluable information into each of the EGSP principal investigators, their work habits and quirks.

In general, Reston was too formal and dressy for me, but the cafeteria actually had good food.  Men often wore ties and coats, just like the old days.  In Denver we wore jeans and polo shirts, but Reston was essentially in the Nation’s capitol, home to the Interior Department, a more formal place, kind of Ivy League.  I also met Dick Meyer, the “Father of PDS” and old time eastern gentleman with a subtle brand of sarcastic humor and hearty laugh.  He was one of my favorites too.

I flew to Oklahoma City and drove to Norman where I met ISP staff at the University of Oklahoma.  Jerlene B, the Director, 40ish, friendly and very competent, a female manager in the 1970’s competing in a man’s world of petroleum company egos.  I liked Jerlene.  She was firm, occasionally defensive, but treated her staff like family.  I also met Charlie M, the State geologist of Oklahoma, and the Director of the energy program that housed ISP.  He was Jerlene’s boss, a highly skilled political animal with a subtle, slow moving, casual Oklahoma accent.  He was on numerous advisory boards and committees always headed somewhere, on the road to Washington to attend a Congressional subcommittee hearing or to Houston to meet with Exxon management or the Texas State Railroad Commission.  Charlie was a very perceptive and astute manager.  I enjoyed his quirky sense of humor, always joking about 3.2 beer or Oklahoma’s dry counties and the Bible Belt.  When I ran into him at some meeting, at some airport, or a geologic conference, he would always greet me with: “Hey Ted, how’s everything at the Useless Jesus?”  He was referring of course to the USGS.  He said it at full throttle: “HEY TED…”.  Charlie was a kick.  I never met a person who travelled as much as he did, especially to Washington, DC or Reston, VA.  Charlie was a mover and a shaker, one of the best schmoozers I ever met, a born communicator and good businessman.

My responsibilities also included memberships in several advisory boards.  As the USGS representative for the various databases, I was asked to join the PDS Advisory Committee, the WHCS Board, and the Potential Gas Committee as a USGS liaison.  I especially liked meeting with PDS board members to improve the file and to encourage use of the data.  Developing contacts and friendships with other government scientists, petroleum company staff, and academia proved to be invaluable to my career over the years.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was an organizer and team player, one who generates ideas for meetings and papers, rather than a highly technical scientist who works exclusively on research in his or her office.  My position required I work with others, and I excelled at it.  When an interesting idea flashed, I would approach several others, specialists in various fields, to contribute a section to a report.  I would compile and integrate the parts into a final product.  I soon learned that the USGS was comprised of a lot of very intelligent people with a wide range of skills, but some of them had fatal flaws.  Some were brilliant but couldn’t write.  Some continued to tinker with a manuscript as if they were afraid to let go of it.  Some were deathly afraid of the peer review process.  I quickly identified the “single author” folks.  Often these scientists worked in a narrow field, usually with very large egos, very introverted.  They just couldn’t work with others and published alone.  I always tried to work with friendly, cooperative people.  I avoided the others.

My science skills were at best average, but I soon discovered another personal weakness. I was scared to death of speaking in front of people, an unfortunate predicament for a scientist.  I was shy as a child and not yet confident.  My talk on heavy oil fields in Houston at the annual meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a 20-minute venue was a worrisome affair.  The data were retrieved from PDS—the talk Dick asked me to give when we first met in April.  Unbeknownst to him, I fretted over it, not the content but the presentation, standing in front of hundreds of people in a suit and tie at a podium in an auditorium, looking out at the crowd of strangers, hoping not to freeze up.  Jerlene and her staff of course gave me a lot of support.  I tried to exhibit an air of confidence.  When I arrived in Houston and registered for the meeting, I immediately walked to the dreaded auditorium to identify my chances of survival.  The room was huge.  I was scheduled to present the first paper, kind of a keynote for that session on heavy oil fields in North America.  I skipped breakfast after a night of little sleep and prepared to meet my fate.  I appeared in the vast room of empty chairs at 7:45 with some Norman friends, met the session co-chairs and waited.  A few more people trickled in, but by 8:00 am the auditorium was still nearly empty.  I gave the talk to a crowd of about 40, received the customary sitting ovation and waited for questions.  None.  I had not yet developed the devious skill of planting friends with questions in the audience.  The previous evening’s icebreaker was probably the culprit.  Lessons were learned from that experience, but it would take several years, many talks, and some beta blockers to relieve me of my fear.  Poster presentations, science fair like displays where authors interacted with an audience, were a viable alternative for me to present my science.  They didn’t make me nervous and I enjoyed preparing them.  This was the pre-digital age of press on symbols, Leroy lettering sets, double sided tape and Exacto blades.

Becoming a USGS scientist was a rewarding and exhilarating experience for me.  I felt at home there, but soon realized I needed to finish my doctorate.  Many of the “old timers” like Wally D had only BS degrees in geology.  Many were WW-II vets, using the GI Bill to get a degree in a rapidly expanding peacetime economy, one in which a BS degree was sufficient to succeed.  They learned on the job.  In BOG, some of the older guys had MS degrees and years of industry experience in petroleum, enough to trump a PhD.  But by the 1970s a PhD was the entry level degree, the ticket needed to apply, preferably from an Ivy League school.  I needed to finish grad school to develop the skills in sedimentary geology to really succeed and to reach a plateau of professional acceptance.

Turning 30 was a big deal for me.  I had my first real geology job and was living in the Rocky Mountain region which made the mountains and deserts readily accessible to me. On a daily basis, I was minutes away from the foothills.  I could hike during lunch or after work on open space trails and paths close to the Federal Center.  I joined the Recreational Equipment Coop and geared up as finances permitted.  I read Colin Fletcher’s The Complete Backpacker and slowly acquired skills in cross country skiing, snowshoeing, hiking, and backpacking.  A one-hour drive would take me to 13,000-ft peaks in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, skiing on Berthoud Pass, or hiking around Echo Lake.  I jogged 2-3 times a week and ate decent food.  Cigarettes were a distant memory.  My fascination with deserts began early too, one that has endured for more than 40 years.  The canyonlands country in southeast Utah was always one of my favorite places, the national parks, Cedar Mesa, and Grand Gulch.

Some of my early outdoor decisions were dreadful.  I packed a skillet and canned food on my first trip to Arapaho Pass, a long weekender with nearly 50 pounds on my back, nearly half my weight in equipment, resulting in the mother of all altitude headaches.  On one hot July trip to Canyonlands National Park, I carried three gallons of water (24 lbs), some jerky and gorp, and a light fleece sleeping bag to Chesler Park in the Needles District.  I did that alone in 100-degree heat.  I must have been crazy.

Since I was now a bachelor, I focused on my social life.  I hated the city nightclub scene and needed a way to meet interesting women.  There weren’t many eligible females to date at the USGS.  Church was out.  I had long ago ended church attendance.  I joined the Colorado Mountain Club but hated hiking with 20-30 other nature lovers, although there were a lot of young women in the organization.  The CMC clincher for me was a hike somewhere in the Front Range one weekend. Everyone was singing while on the trail.  Not my style.

My best idea came while reading a class catalogue from the Boulder Free School, a community based non-profit adult education program that offered courses in art, media, natural history, entertainment and just about anything else.  The light bulb flashed instantly.  I called my class Boulder Mountain Geology.  I offered it free of charge, a six lecture summary of introductory geology with a Saturday fieldtrip in the Boulder Foothills at the end.  I covered all the geology basics in a casual, entertaining way and offered the class 5-6 times from 1977-1979, usually with 12-15 attendees, mostly women.  Classes were held in rented classrooms at Boulder city schools.  I arrived with 30 mm slide trays, rocks and minerals, fossils, and maps.  I left with names and phone numbers.  Classes were very enjoyable for me and, hopefully, for my students.  I met several intelligent and attractive women during that period, teachers, nurses, real estate agents, all interesting and fun.  The free school environment attracted outdoor enthusiasts, hikers, skiers, and climbers.  In one class, a student informed me he was a commercial pilot and had a large single engine Cessna parked at the Boulder airport.  He offered to fly students around the Front Range at the end of the class for the price of fuel.  On one occasion, a husband and wife couple invited me to dinner at the end of the session.  They lived in the foothills west of Boulder, maybe 45 minutes from town along a sinuous route of county roads with many turns.  I arrived only with the help of their directions, enjoyed a delicious meal, and smoked some of the strongest weed I ever encountered.  After several hits and numerous bouts of uncontrolled giggles, my humor changed to paranoia, resulting in a spontaneous exit.  I thought they were laughing at me.  Of course they weren’t.  I lost their direction sheet and wandered the foothills for what seemed like hours unable to find the route to Boulder and ultimately home.  I do recall waking up before dawn in the parking lot of the Atomic Bar on Rocky Flats just off highway 93 south of Boulder .

Somewhere in 1978 I called Ruth L, one of my former BMG students.  We went jogging or hiking and hit it off.  She was enthusiastic, upbeat, and great fun to be with.  We had a lot in common: outdoor activities, politics, intellectual pursuits.  She wanted to get an MS and PhD in southwestern archaeology.  Thanksgiving weekend 1979 was spent in the Grand Canyon enjoying a gourmet dinner of canned turkey, freeze dried peas, and instant rice.  Thousands of mice scurried about the desert floor outside our tent Thanksgiving night.  We had hung our food bag several feet below a rock overhang with piano wire.  The bag rested well above ground, below a sandstone cliff face, presumably out of reach of mice.  During the night, a few of the buggers managed to crawl down the piano wire into the bag for their late night Thanksgiving feast.

On the Fourth of July 1980, we pulled out sparklers at the head of Lower Red Lake Canyon in the Needles District of Canyonlands NP.  We celebrated Independence Day hiking two miles and a thousand feet down to the Colorado River in hundred degree heat with empty water bottles.  We hauled up 4 gallons, but used one to wet ourselves down to prevent heat stroke.

In May, 1980 we were in Grand Gulch, Utah.  We noticed a very hazy sky as we hiked out, announcing a major geological event.  Mt St Helens had erupted.  We spent Christmas and New Years in the northern Rockies, at the snow lodge in Yellowstone National Park and at an old cabin near Trappers Lake in the Flattops Wilderness of northwestern Colorado.  In Yellowstone, we skied 15 miles one day in the Lower Geyser Basin, past grazing buffalo and elk, returning in time for the evening show at Old Faithful.

My fondest memory of the year end trip to Yellowstone was “Nan the Cat”.  Ruth had smuggled Nan in her luggage on the snow cat (an enclosed snowmobile for several passengers) ride to the lodge at Old Faithful from Flagg Ranch south of the park.  Pets were not allowed, but no one seemed to notice.  The tour company probably never thought anyone would sneak a pet cat into a 5-ton snowmobile for a 20-mile ride in freezing temperatures to a winter resort in Yellowstone.

Nan had a story.  She was shot by some local kid with a pellet gun one day but survived with the pellet lodged close to her spine.  After seeing the pellet in an x-ray, our vet suggested we take Nan to the vet school at Colorado State University in Ft Collins.  Nan survived the assassination attempt but had lost bladder control.  She couldn’t urinate unless we “expressed” her by picking her up, holding her over a commode or her litter box and squeezing her lower abdomen gently until she peed.  My schedule was more flexible so I was the “chief expressor” much of the time.  Needless to say, I was rather unpopular with Nan.  After calling for her and searching the house, I often found her hiding behind the furnace in the basement.  We took her on several trips after the accident because vets charged too much to express a cat five times a day.

After dating for six months, Ruth and I leased a small house in Golden on Cheyenne Street.  It was a tiny bungalow of a place on a quiet street, well cared for, a one bedroom one bath, with a large back yard, close to downtown and a city park.  The owners were nice at first, somewhat inflexible, very conservative, and quick to anger.  The husband was an engineer and worked at Coors Porcelain Company nearby.  The couple moved to the mountains and used their former home as a rental property.  They commuted two hours roundtrip each day.  We were generally on good terms with them.  We paid our rent on time, mowed the grass and weeded regularly, and cared for the place as if we owned it.  Our monthly rent check was placed in an envelope in our mailbox next to the front door on the first of each month.  They would stop by and retrieve it on their way home. Once, I used a US Government envelope from a batch of discarded USGS office supplies.  Our official address had changed, and I hated to see old envelopes trashed.  I blacked out the return address label and used the envelopes for business filing or storing papers at home, never for personal postal use. One of these was utilized for the rent check that month.  We got a call that evening.  Our landlord was furious.  I politely explained the story behind the envelopes, that I was trying to be environmentally proactive, but to no avail.  They hated the government and didn’t speak to us for months.  I wonder what they would have said if I used an old Coors Brewing Company envelope.  Some veggies from our garden eventually mended the relationship.

Ruth started her MS program in archaeology at the University of Colorado sometime in 1979, about the time we moved in together.  I was totally supportive, being an academic myself, already thinking ahead to my own unfinished program.  We had talked about finishing our PhDs together somewhere, but Ruth needed to complete or nearly complete her MS first.  She decided on a research project involving Paleo-Indian ceremonial kivas in the four corners region, how they varied in size, shape, and construction over time, and what this might signify culturally or spiritually.  The project sounded to me like an opportunity to use quantitative techniques and computers, and I enthusiastically agreed to help her on that part of the research.

We ultimately decided on autumn, 1981 as a start date for our doctoral programs.  Ruth had to hustle with the MS and needed to spend time in the field measuring kivas.  Only a few of them were described in detail in the literature.  I first approached my boss, Pete S, the Branch Chief that replaced Dick M.  Pete was a well-published scientist, easy going, often showing up to work in cutoffs and t-shirts, more like a long-term grad student than a manager.  His publication list was a mile long.  Pete approved my request for academic leave, but said I would lose my slot.  Regaining it later was not a sure thing.  He was fully supportive though and approved my transfer to another location so I could continue my part-time work with BOG.

It’s not easy to find two acceptable grad school programs for spouses at the same university, one in sedimentary geology and another in southwestern archaeology, both with some financial support.  Qualified grad students could still get a tuition waver with their teaching or research assistantships in the early 1980s.  We started our application process in the fall of 1980.  I also approached my favorite colleagues, older guys with similar research interests, for potential dissertation topics.  From my point of view it’s better to enter a program with a research topic in mind, and selecting an advisor who will work with you, rather than having a “big name” select a topic for you.  The latter could end in either global fame or catastrophe.

Over lunch one day that Fall, Bill P, a BOG structural geologist, explained some problems he was having with mountain building events near Lima, Montana.  He needed someone to describe the age and stratigraphic relationships of Cretaceous rocks so he could understand the timing of mountain building events in the region.  The area near Lima is part of the thrust belt, a region of compression during the Late Cretaceous when plate tectonic events along the western margin of North America played a part in mountain formation in Montana as monstrous slabs of continental crust were shoved eastward.  He wanted me to subdivide the Blackleaf Formation into mappable units, identify their ages and any fossils in them.  Radioactive age dating would help identify the age of ash beds in the Blackleaf.  We agreed to meet in Lima in late August, 1981.

At this time, I was heading the Computer Group in BOG, with a small staff of computer programmers and operators.  I was still managing the EGSP project, and PDS and WHCS data retrievals.  I was giving talks and posters and managing computer retrievals in the Branch.  By early 1981, it became obvious to me that computer applications in geology were rapidly evolving.  Other more qualified specialists were better trained to lead the BOG Computer Group, including Ken T and Kym C.  Digital processing was switching from mainframe computers in a remote setting to more locally controlled minicomputers.  BOG would need its own computing system.  The environment was becoming more individualized, a chicken in every pot, a work station in every office equipped with word processing software and applications programs.  It was time to move on.

I had a lot of fun times at the USGS during those first five years.  I hosted foreign scientists from Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Honduras, the Soviet Union, and China to name a few examples.  On one occasion, Dick M and I flew to Reston to attend a dinner hosted by his boss, another Dick M, our Chief of the Office of Energy and Marine Geology.  Dick M was hosting some Soviet (Russian) dignitaries including the Minister of Oil and Gas at his home.  It was during a period of détente under Bresznev’s tenure, eight dark-suited gray hairs from The Party.  The USGS Director, Dallas P, was late to arrive.  When he finally showed, he walked up to Dick M and asked: “Which of those fuckers is the Minister?”  Dallas then casually walked over and engaged the visitors.  He was a good schmoozer and one of the last great directors during my tenure, a dynamic guy, a bit salty, who worked his way up within the organization and knew it backwards and forwards.

One of my visitors was from Saudi Arabia, a young geologist rumored to be related to the ruling family.  It was well known at the time that Saudis didn’t do much.  They hired foreigners to do their petroleum work, mostly exploration and production tasks.  One young man in his early 20s showed up after visiting Reston, a very polite young man, well spoken and friendly.  I hosted him in Denver.  He toured every aspect of BOG research, resource assessment, and operations.  He was invited to several BOG social occasions during his month-long stay.  He always showed up, drank orange juice, and graciously laughed at our jokes.  He was married, but his wife never showed up for events even though we encouraged him to include her.

During the fall of 1980, Ruth and I had researched potential universities, schools with departments that could accommodate both of us.  We needed a university with good programs in both sedimentary geology and southwestern archaeology.  Fortunately, we found three candidates—University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon State University in Corvallis, and Washington State University in Pullman.  During Christmas vacation in 1980 we travelled to Oregon and Washington and visited each campus.  We had an interest in moving to the Pacific Northwest.  We both had academic ambitions to be university professors.  We applied to all three schools, paid our application fees, transferred transcripts and test scores, and waited, hoping for acceptance, some assistantship money and tuition waivers.  Word began trickling in after the holidays. Both of us were accepted at all three schools, but I only received an assistantship and free tuition at Washington State and Oregon State.  Ruth was provisionally accepted in Pullman and Corvallis pending completion of her MS.  The deciding factor for both of us was the faculty.  Ruth wanted to work under Dr Bill L, an internationally known expert in southwestern archeology.  Dr Gary W, the geology department chair at Pullman was internationally known for his work in paleontology and stratigraphy.  Our decision was made.  We were headed to Pullman, Washington.

Ken T threw a farewell party for me.  I received several great going away gifts including a lead bullet from Jim F from PI.  The bullet had a paper tag that said: “Here is a bullet to bite on when things are tough”. –Jim.  A very thoughtful gift from a sincere guy.  Jerlene Bright and her staff had a farewell surprise for me at my last advisory committee meeting.  ISP had adopted a new marketing strategy they named TEDS, in my honor.  It stood for technology, education, data quality, and system management.  I was surprised and felt honored by their thoughtful gesture.

During the spring of 1981, Ruth was starting her MS thesis and finishing her class work.  One of Ruth’s thesis committee members was the park archaeologist at Mesaverde National Park.  He took an interest in her work and offered her a summer internship at the archaeology lab there.  It was an opportunity she couldn’t refuse.  In early June, we packed some bare essentials for Mesaverde and stored most of our stuff in Denver for the fall move to Pullman.

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

The summer was idyllic.  We lived in a spectacularly beautiful place, a mesa top desert landscape, while pursuing our intellectual interests.  Ruth’s internship offered a minimal salary, but free housing–a green, plywood framed cabin in the residential area where the maintenance workers lived–mostly Navajo families who left the reservation for summer work.  The cabins sat in a pinyon-juniper woodland a quarter mile behind the visitor center, museum, and tourist village, away from the din of highway traffic and hoards of park visitors.  Our cabin had a combination kitchen-living area, a single tiny bedroom and a bath.  We were a short walk from the archeology lab where Ruth would work.

Before leaving Denver, I had mailed a dozen boxes to General Delivery at the park post office.  I called ahead and informed the postmistress that boxes would arrive for me and to please hold them.  I explained that I was there for the summer doing some research work while my wife worked in the lab.  The boxes contained computer printouts of oil and gas data, reprints of articles on the Cretaceous of the Rocky Mountain region, and a variety of books and maps–a rather non-threatening stack of materials for my summer enjoyment.  Shortly after we arrived, I headed to the post office to claim my parcels and thanked the lady profusely for holding them.  She seemed nice enough, but within a day I heard rumors from park staff that oil and gas wells would be drilled on park land, and that I was in the forefront of the drilling program, some kind of point guy preparing for the drilling crews.  I was livid and headed to the park superintendent that same day in an effort to catch the rumor in the bud, calmly (?) explaining that I was the husband of a graduate student intern and was just working on my personal geology problems for the summer.  The superintendent was a friendly lady, maybe 50 years old, sitting at her desk in a friendly office in the administration building.  She was aware of Ruth’s position and was empathetic when I explained my situation, that I didn’t even know anyone at oil companies that could drill in the park, and that I was a graduate student headed to Washington State University in the Fall.  I can’t recall exactly what she said to me, something about comparing national parks to small towns where people talked too much for entertainment, but I was left with the impression that the post office manager was a rumor monger.  In short, she really couldn’t do much about the incident but not to worry about it.  I confronted the Post Office mistress too, but she denied spreading rumors and claimed innocence.

Our “cabin in the woods” was perfect for us and allowed an escape from the realities of every day urban living.  Its only drawback was a lack of adequate insulation, especially as the summer temperatures on the mesa top soared into the 90s.  Our cabin was sited at the end of a residential loop of maybe a dozen other cabins.  It offered plenty of privacy.  We prepared drinks in the evening after work, usually an iced pitcher of sangria.  Later, we grilled our dinner on our desert-landscaped patio and enjoyed an evening of watching the stars and listening to the coyote melodies.  Mesa Verde was an ideal dark skies site.

Our neighbors were friendly but mostly kept to themselves.  A Navajo couple lived next door.  The husband worked in maintenance and emptied trash barrels, cleaned toilets, and maintained campsites.  He waved but rarely talked.  Navajos are reticent by nature and very private.  We started calling him “Can Jim” because he recycled aluminum cans—this was long before the National Park Service started recycling programs in the parks.  He would sort through trash and save the cans for redemption, storing the large black plastic bags behind their cabin.  Ruth and I both concluded that his efforts at can collection were worthwhile.  He showed up one day in mid summer in a shiny new F-250 4 X 4 pickup truck purchased at a dealership in Gallup, NM.  We were certain much of the money came from aluminum cans.

Other nearby neighbors included the Begays, a husband, wife, and three of their seven daughters.  They were the friendliest of our neighbors, very extroverted for Navajos.  The Begay daughters taught us how to make proper Navajo fry bread, a real treat.  Mr. Begay was the road crew foreman, a jovial man with a mild manner and constant smile.  Most of the road work was done in the summer months, repairing pavement, cleaning culverts, guard rail maintenance, and debris removal.  The mesa top is capped by the Mesa Verde Sandstone, a Cretaceous marine to coastal sand system extending throughout the region.  But it is underlain by the Mancos Shale, an older Cretaceous marine unit, very slippery and unstable when wet.  The road up the mesa was dug through the Mancos and often suffered mudslides during heavy rain.  During the summer monsoon season, the route into the park could be closed for short periods due to mudslides or rock falls after intense storms, trapping hundreds in the park.  Mr. Begay often had long days on the job.

Ruth and I were immersed in our academic pursuits.  We took several trips through the region seeking out kivas for her thesis.  Kivas are common to nearly all paleo villages.  They are especially well developed at Mesa Verde.  Ruth’s thesis work focused on the range of variation in kivas both temporally and geographically throughout the Four Corners region.  She made numerous measurements related to size, shape, and other physical criteria to determine how they changed through time from place to place.  I was her field assistant.  We measured and described many kivas that summer, fun work, trudging through desert landscapes to obscure ruins with a tape measure and high expectations.

Images of memorable moments remain with me. Moonless starry nights at the Sipapu rooftop patio bar at Farview Lodge, the blur of a racing mountain lion on the road in front of me on Chapin Mesa, July fourth fireworks in Cortez, Mexican food at the Cantina, and an occasional trip to Durango to whoop it up.  But I spent much of my time reading and writing.  I read about Montana geology and began to review my background in geologic concepts in preparation for my final attempt at a doctoral degree.  My brain slowly began to register the fact that this was my last chance, the final plunge, a huge undertaking that would require a lot of work for the next 3-4 years.  At one point during that summer, I sat in my private pinon-juniper patio reading about Cretaceous rocks, and suddenly realized that I was currently sitting on Cretaceous rocks (the Mesaverde Formation), albeit slightly younger ones than the rocks I would soon study.  I was getting excited.  It was time to return to Denver, retrieve our stored belongings, and drive to Pullman, Washington by way of Lima, Montana.

Lima, Montana

Chris H and I met at Kalbas Korners in late August, 1981.  It was a late dinner meeting of geologists in Lima after a long day in the field.  We had stopped there for a few days on our way to Washington.  Chris had already started his doctoral research at Johns Hopkins.  He was in his early 30’s, with thinning blond hair, a quick-witted disposition and a hearty, spontaneous laugh.  Chris seemed jaded enough, having shed his youthful idealism for guarded enthusiasm and an occasional reality check.  I was the last to arrive.  Chris was describing the condition of his campsite at Little Sheep Creek the previous day after a bear visit.  He was trying to decide whether or not to drive back to his bruin-ravaged abode for dinner, a slow drive of nearly 12 miles.  Chris was on a tight budget.  I wasn’t rich either but offered to buy his dinner, and besides, my field expenses were being underwritten by the U.S. Geological Survey.  I was a lucky guy.  I felt an immediate kinship with Chris even though we were opposites, he the intelligent, absent-minded professor, and I the hyper-organized, vigilant observer.

Lima was a Montana rendezvous for geologists in the 1980s, a community on the edge, just a stone’s throw from ghost town status, up valley from the Tendoy Range and Lima Peaks, and home to 200 eccentric residents: retirees, cowboys, professional fly fishermen, a bevy of Montana misfits, and a few bearded geologists in lumberjack shirts, all crammed into a half square mile of big sky country.  Lima was settled in the 19^th century when the railroad snaked its way southward from Butte, through the Red Rock Valley to Idaho, making the region accessible to ranchers.  Early settlers found the region stunning but remote and scarcely hospitable with challenging winters that often defied seasonal expectations.

As I sat at the table that evening eating a piece of huckleberry pie and listening to the geologic babble, the karma of Lima’s remoteness started to sink in.  Except for a few ranches, there was nothing for miles around.  Interstate 15 threaded its way through Beaverhead County along the route of old U.S. Highway 91 and a much older Indian trail re-traced by Lewis and Clark.  This was a lonely stretch of road.  Truckers passed through Lima on their way to Canada or Salt Lake, and a few Canadians sped their way southward shopping for bargains in the States.  One could stand by the Lima exit ramp and wait 15 minutes for a vehicle to pass.  The 50-mile drive north to Dillon could be done in 35 minutes on a good day.  Travelling south from Lima, heading toward Monida Pass, drivers encountered a single exit, a ramp with a bold No Services sign and another, apply-named Snowline for an old railroad siding.  The slow 15-mile climb to Monida Pass ended at a real ghost town of the same name, a former sheep ranching center for the Centennial Valley to the east.

There were only a dozen or so functioning businesses in Lima in the early 1980s.  There was Ralph’s Exxon Station, the post office, two motels, the Forest Service trailer, a local hardware store and lumber yard, and of course, the Peet Bar and Restaurant.  The Peet was next to the tracks in a dilapidated two-story brick-frame structure, a locally famous establishment known for its signature menu item, the cook-your-own steak.  The gastronomic concept was simple.  You were handed a rib-eye from the refrigerator and shown to a propane grill in the large, central dining area.  With a baked potato, some sour cream, and a salad, you were fixed.  This freed the owner (and only employee) to focus on bar customers.  Adelaide M, a long time resident of Lima, later told me that four or five passenger trains stopped in Lima each day during WW-II.  Passengers, usually soldiers heading off for a duty station change somewhere, would step from the train and descend on the Peet, where a chef in full kitchen regalia greeted them at the door.  One day while waiting for a friend in front of the Peet, I stared at the old building and the empty tracks across the street trying to imagine that time-lost scene.

Next to Ralph’s Exxon Station, the Kalbas family probably accounted for most of the local GDP.  The Kalbas’ owned the Sportsman Motel and a cafe across the street.  The Sportsman wasn’t a Hyatt Regency, but it was cheap. It was where geologists stayed while in Lima.

Others at the table that evening included Bill Perry, Eddie Maughan, Bill Sando, and Charlie Sandberg.  Bill Perry had the distinguished look of a 50-something geologist, a graying beard and deliberate style.  Bill was a structural geologist, one of a rare breed that could store the four-dimensional tectonic history of a mountain range in his brain.   Months earlier, I had pondered potential dissertation ideas and asked Bill for some opinions.  Bill had suggested I work on Cretaceous rocks near Lima.

Eddie Maughn, Bill Sando, and Charlie Sandberg were also senior-level USGS geologists and international experts on various subjects.  Bill and Charlie were carbonate researchers.  They liked to drop hydrochloric acid on limestones and identify their myriad fossils.  They both had encyclopedic brains.  Charlie specialized in conodonts, microscopic critters that represented the feeding apparatuses of otherwise soft-bodied animals.  Their rapid evolution during the long-distant Paleozoic made them useful guide fossils for determining the age of rocks.  Bill Sando was a coral aficionado and an expert on the Rocky Mountain Paleozoic.  Eddie was an all-around field geologist and physical stratigrapher.  He knew his sedimentary rocks and was very helpful in the field.  He saved me from serious harm one day as I was about to step on a non-rattling rattlesnake.  I had also asked Bill and Charlie for dissertation ideas.  As expected, they both recommended limestones, but I knew deep in my soul that I liked sand and gravel .

So here we were, the six of us, sitting around a table at Kalbas Korners, and talk of rocks was the order of the evening.  Bill Perry was expounding on the configuration of the Tendoy thrust plate west of Lima.  Charlie interjected that the conodont biostratigraphy of the Madison Group in the Tendoy plate was the key to identifying thrust geometries.  Eddie added that geologic mapping was critical to understanding the regional geologic history.  Chris and I were listening intently.  I felt relieved I could follow the debate.  I had done my homework and read everything I could get my hands on before arriving.  When Cretaceous rocks were mentioned, I sat up.

Chris had just started his fieldwork on the Beaverhead Group, a thick, regionally-widespread rock unit comprised mostly of conglomerate.  He explained that the Beaverhead was different everywhere because it was formed from numerous coalescing alluvial fans and rivers, draining ancestral mountain ranges to the west of Lima, the very mountains created by the thrust faults Bill was talking about.  Chris was in full swing and getting excited.  He described “marker beds”, intraformational unconformities, conglomerate clasts and source rocks, and rare Beaverhead mudstones with pollen grains that could be age dated.  I was dumbfounded when Chris said that some Beaverhead boulders south of Lima were the size of Volkswagens (or was it buses?).  I tried to imagine such large boulders.  Chris volunteered to take us to McKnight Canyon the next day to see a continuous 10,000-foot-thick exposure of Beaverhead along the eastern front of the Tendoy Mountauns north of Lima.  A single, continuously-exposed 10,000-ft-thick outcrop…wow.  Back in Illinois, where I first looked at rocks, it was a big deal to walk along a 200-foot exposure of Paleozoic rocks next to a county road.  Illinois was the craton, the old stable continental core of North America.  This was very different.  Here, several thousand cubic miles of sedimentary rock were thrust eastward as the Pacific plate collided with North America, a far cry from the Illinois craton.

Bill Perry suddenly startled me from my tectonic trance.  He was informing the others that I, like Chris, would provide him with valuable stratigraphic information and a better glimpse into the tectonic history of the region.  Bill was a firm believer in extracting as much information as possible from the sedimentary rocks within a thrust plate.  How fast and under what conditions were the sediments deposited?  How fast were they buried and lithified into rock?  Do the rock layers contain datable fossils, volcanic ash beds, or unconformities (time intervals of erosion or nondeposition).  The list of questions was long, and a structural geologist like Bill needed physical stratigraphers, sedimentologists, paleontologists, and geochronologists to help him interpret the complex geologic history.

I entered into this field-oriented approach to graduate school with some uncertainty.  Sure, I completed the BS prerequisites like stratigraphy and structural geology, and summer field camp in the Black Hills where I learned the art of doing fieldwork, but that was years ago.  I was rusty and inexperienced.  My MS research project wasn’t exactly field- oriented either.  My thesis advisor, Stan Frost, returned from a fieldtrip to Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, and handed me a fist-sized chunk of Eocene limestone he had lifted from the beach.  My fieldwork consisted chiefly of wiping 50 million-year-old crumbs off my lab table.

Bill was happy that Chris had already started his work on the Beaverhead and that I had arrived to take on the Blackleaf Formation, an older, somewhat thinner package of sedimentary rocks.  Bill had previously told me the Blackleaf was deposited in a variety of depositional environments in a large continental sea, the Western Interior Seaway, well before the regional thrust faulting that deformed the Lima region into mountain ranges that later eroded into the thick Beaverhead conglomerates.  I sort of understood what Bill was talking about.  The Lima region, according to Bill, was important to geologists because it represented a boundary of sorts.  The mountain ranges to the northwest of Lima toward Glacier National Park and into Canada were part of what’s called the Thrust Belt, a region where massive low-angle thrust faults forced mountainous layers of sedimentary rock eastward over each other.  Geologists refer to this tectonic style as the Sevier orogeny, named from the Sevier Mountains in Nevada where this type of faulting was first identified.  At Chief Mountain in Glacier National Park, a huge mass of Cambrian strata was thrust over much younger Cretaceous rocks (similar to the rocks I was about to study) resulting in what is known as an older-over-younger stratigraphic relationship.

South of Lima, evidence of Sevier-style thrusting is also pervasive.  Mountain ranges in western Wyoming and central Utah exhibit this same deformation where large masses of sedimentary rock were thrust over younger layers, often forming spectacular scenery and much head scratching as geologists have attempted to reconstruct regional geological history.  Sometimes thrust faults themselves become folded or tilted, or even overturned.  So…the Sevier orogeny has often been affectionately called the “Severe” orogeny.

Another structural style was also identified near Lima and south to Mexico, a style in which layers were pushed mostly upward along higher-angle faults.  The up-thrusted rocks were eroded much later exposing the ancient Precambrian metamorphic rocks of the North American continental basement, schists and gneisses of billion year old continental crust.  This thick-skinned structural style, called the Laramide orogeny, formed the mountain ranges of central and eastern Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.  Sevier and Laramide deformation overlap in time and space.  Geologists often like to talk of a continental-scale crustal collision where a thin oceanic Pacific plate collided with thick North American crust.  In the final act of this drama, much of the upper crust in western North America experienced a tectonic relaxation where extensional forces prevailed, cutting across older Sevier and Laramide structures creating even newer mountain ranges of the Basin and Range Province of Nevada, Oregon, western Utah, and southwestern Montana, masking the older eroded mountains.  I thought again of Bill Perry and his mental video of the region.  The modern-day ranges we were visiting were actually a stew of several earlier ranges, the tattered remnants of the older Sevier and Laramide mountains torn apart.

Lima was the center of attention because so-called thin-skinned Sevier mountain ranges overlapped with thick-skinned Laramide ranges.  Lima was on center stage in a vast multi-layered geologic performance, and Chris Haley and I were novice actors eagerly awaiting scene 1 and our academy awards.

My geologic tour of the Lima region had begun.  The next day a few of us visited McKnight Canyon, an amphitheater in the Tendoy Range where we hiked into the recently-faulted mountain front, higher and higher up the steep slope looking at younger and younger conglomerates eroding older and older rocks from the core of an ancient mountain range.  I was impressed by the shear magnitude of these erosional and depositional events, the merging and coalescing of alluvial fans.  We climbed higher into the massive outcrop looking for inch-thick shale beds containing  fossil pollen.

The next morning I bid farewell to the limestone team.  Chris, Bill, and I grabbed our packs and left Lima in a Ford Bronco 4 X 4 headed south on I-15 to the Snowline exit.  We drove for about a mile on a paved access road and stopped at a local cattle grazing association to gain permission to drive across private land.  I stepped out and looked around.  Lima Peaks dominated the southern horizon, their velvety sage and grass-covered slopes now brown from a month of dry weather.  We were headed for an outcrop of the Blackleaf Formation south of the highest summits.  The Peaks, actually five in number, represent a small mountain range by Montana standards, but they stand out in the region as conical sentinels guarding the Red Rock Valley.

The only access to the Blackleaf outcrop, a dirt track used mostly by cowboys to herd cattle, wound its way southward for a few miles, first across a sage-covered plain, then across the lower southernmost grassy ridges of the Lima Peaks.  Luckily we made it without getting stuck, although several extensive boggy areas necessitated rapid acceleration, worrisome fishtailing, and finally, sighs of relief.  As we forced our way through one low spot, I heard Bill say “This is definitely the best way into Sawmill Creek.  You should see the other route, over there”.  He was pointing to an area farther south.  Bill was driving and I was in the passenger front seat.  My learning curve that morning was very steep as I was quick to learn that the passenger seat occupant was the lucky fellow who opened and closed the cattle gates.  Commandment no. 1 of the “gate person” was to leave gates as found, open or closed.  Cattlemen periodically moved their cows into different pastures, and open gates must always be left open.  Gate fasteners also came in near infinite variety.  Just figuring out how to open and close these technological marvels required significant attention.  Commandment no. 2:  Never, ever inadvertently close a gate on yourself away from your vehicle and fellow occupants.  This results in an extremely embarrassing situation and years of ridicule.  After opening and closing five of these eccentric devices, I remembered that Chris had volunteered to sit in the back seat.

After thirty minutes of sudden breaking, accelerating, fishtailing, and other forms of vehicular maneuvering, we entered Beaverhead National Forest.  We turned right and descended into the Sawmill Creek drainage, named after the occupation of a local nineteenth century inhabitant.  This new dirt track was a vast improvement on the previous one and nearly qualified as a road.  After the last half hour, this was like driving on an expressway.  We managed to attain speeds of up to 10 mph.  Lima Peaks came into view again as we descended further and passed a hill on our immediate right.  Bill called it Shine Hill, a conical summit about 300 feet high.  Shine Hill shed many tons of pebbles and cobbles onto the track imitating the texture of a gravel road.  Shine Hill was a hill of conglomerate!

“Is this the Beaverhead?” I asked Bill and Chris as we passed.  “We’re not sure” Bill said, “There may be a fault running up this valley offsetting the entire (stratigraphic) section”, pointing to the ravine on our left.  “That stuff up there is Beaverhead”, Chris said, pointing to the red hills a mile to the southwest.  Chris was referring to the reddish south-dipping sedimentary layers to the south of us on a irregular line of hills and peaks. “They’re called the Red Conglomerate Peaks. They form the Idaho-Montana border.  That’s one of my sections”.  He was pointing to a distinctive knob on the far right where several thousand feet of Beaverhead was exposed.

Bill stopped the vehicle.  We got out to stare at the Shine Hill beds and panorama around us.  From this vantage point, we had a spectacular view of the Lima Peaks.  The rocky summits were still carpeted by a few snowy patches even at this late summer date.  To the left, southward beyond a low saddle, Red Conglomerate Peaks captured the skyline until they in turn disappeared along the southeast horizon beneath a mass of rising cumulus clouds.  “Looks like rain later,” Bill volunteered.  I looked up and thought about our return trip through the swamp during a thunderstorm.

We were walking on the track now, heads down, kicking loose pebbles and cobbles, examining exotic ones.  I picked up some beauties, letting their aesthetic quality mingle with my geological thoughts.  These pebbles and cobbles were the most rounded and polished I had ever seen, a panoply of red, white, and gray quartzite, dark-gray chert, and green volcanic rocks.  This was a magnificent collection, a little bit of mountain unroofing, the partial erosion history of a long lost mountain range, rivers of gravel transporting clasts eastward from central paleo Idaho.  Paleo Idaho?  I was contemplating paleo Idaho.

Chris motioned toward the rolling foothills in front of Red Conglomerate Peaks.  “We don’t understand the rocks between the Beaverhead and the Blackleaf over there”, pointing to the west.

“Let’s go.  The Blackleaf is about a mile ahead.”  Bill walked to the driver’s side and got in.

“Yup, let’s get going” I said to myself in anticipation.

We drove a quarter mile to the valley bottom on a stable gravel track and crossed to the north side of Sawmill Creek where we encountered more conglomerate outcrops similar to the Shine Hill beds.  Bill pulled over and parked on the uphill side of the road, about 500 feet south of a distinctive exposure of steeply-dipping, gray, green and red rocks.  Chris and I grabbed our hammers, cameras, and water bottles, and followed Bill up the slope through some matted sage and tufted grass to the edge of the large exposure.  These were definitely sedimentary rocks, shales and sandstones mostly.  The bedding was easily identifiable, but these rocks looked strange to me.  The beds were dipping north about 50 degrees directly into the Lima Peaks.  As we approached the beds I had a better view.  I looked at them, more closely now with the sudden realization that they were overturned— upside down, pushed over by the regional forces that thrust the Lima Peaks into position.  The youngest beds of hardened sandstone, pastel-colored bentonitic shale, and porcelain-textured mudstones were at the south end of this exposure closer to the creek.  Locals called this area the paint pots for the variety of colors.  As we walked, I saw that the shales had the texture of freshly-popped corn, a characteristic of very clayey shale when moisture is lost during periods of dry weather.

We walked uphill but down through time into the middle of the Paint Pots, occasionally chipping away at sandstone ledges to identify grains with our hand lenses.  Bill motioned for us to meet at a 100-foot-wide rib of sandstone near the top of the hill just above us.  We were 200 feet above the creek now.  As the valley opened up to us, I stopped and looked around while catching my breath—the Red Conglomerate Peaks to the south, Shine Hill to the east, and behind us, the nearest Lima Peaks, less than a mile away now, staring down at us from 10,000 feet.  We could see distant mountain ranges in the east, even the Madison Range 80 miles away north of Yellowstone National Park.  I noticed another rock outcropping south of Sawmill Creek, a mirror image of the Paint Pots, more pastel-colors, but these rocks were dipping vertically, pointing up to the sky.  The creek, it seemed, was following an old fault line, where rocks were juxtaposed, rotated and otherwise offset from each other on either side.

The lowest and oldest part of the Blackleaf Formation was exposed along the ridge crest above us, a continuous belt of vertically-dipping reddish mudstone, yellow sandstone, and gray silty limestone.  The presence of small rounded nodules and light colors was very distinctive and characteristic of an ancient soil horizon, characterizing a time when the region was exposed to the atmosphere and the effects of intense chemical weathering.  I looked closely at one of the limestone beds.  It was literally a fossil coquina, a bed of high-spired gastropods, tiny snails killed in some ancient catastrophic event.  This limestone was unlike the much older Paleozoic limestones that Bill Sando and Charlie Sandberg had talked about.  This limestone accumulated not in the continental sea, but in an ephemeral coastal lake teeming with small invertebrates.  As I would later learn, gastropod limestone beds were common in the underlying Kootenai Formation.

“What an opportunity”, I said to myself as I stood on the ridge crest looking around.  I was probably drawn as much by the magnificent scenery as I was by the geology.  I looked up at the towering peaks again, then turned to the south to view the red ridge tops along the state boundary with Idaho, forgetting for a moment the huge challenge I was facing in Pullman.

Pullman, Washington and Lima, Montana

The village was originally called Three Forks because it was located at the confluence of the Palouse River and Missouri Flat and Dry Flat Creeks.  The growing community became Pullman when it was incorporated in 1886 in recognition of the sleeping-car magnate by that name, the owner of the Pullman Company in Chicago.  Three Forks apparently wanted the Northern Pacific Railroad to pass through the Palouse.  A few years later, Pullman vied for the new land grant college and offered free land to the State of Washington for a potential site.  The rest is history.  Today, Pullman has a population exceeding 30,000 that includes more than 20,000 students.  It sits snugly in a lowland area within the Palouse Hills geographic region of southeast Washington.  Loessal hills abound, remnants of late glacial windblown silt gusted in from the margins of retreating continental glaciers.  Thick flows of Tertiary basalt lie under the loess, and steptoes, as they are locally called, protrude from the silt and basalt mantle, remnants of the Paleozoic bedrock topography, quartzite sentinals reminding geology majors of a long geologic history.

Flood-carved river valleys snake through the region into the Columbia and ultimately the Pacific Ocean.  During the last glacial advance, an ice dam blocked the Clark Fork River in western Montana impounding 500 cubic miles of melt water, a lake half the size of Lake Michigan.  The dam failed catastrophically during the last ice retreat—and several earlier times during multiple glacial events—sending water cascading down stream into the Palouse, Snake, and Columbia Rivers, scouring the region into the Channeled Scablands.  Southeastern Washington is a region of geologic catastrophism, one cataclysm after another, a great place to study earth history.  The year before I arrived, in May 1980, students and faculty stood on the roof of the physical sciences building watching an enormous ash cloud from Mt St Helens billow above them, thousands of feet into the atmosphere, sending out lightning flashes from the dry convective storms.

To set the stage for Pullman, I will repeat a short story told to me by a seasoned graduate student.  Sometime during the 1970’s the geology department hired a new faculty member from somewhere back east.  He was offered and accepted a tenure-track position at WSU as an assistant professor, and with his wife, moved to Pullman.  It was the first time she saw Pullman apparently because she had not joined him on his previous visit to interview for the job.  Her first reaction to the community and campus was to cry.  I might have cried too if I had to spend my entire career in Pullman.  The town is drab, a mismatched confluence of agriculture and academia, a place without a visible horizon,.  One is faced with an inability to see beyond the banks of the Palouse.  Interspersed with farm implement dealers, truck sales lots, and seed producers are a scattering of restaurants, music shops, and book shops.  In the early 1980s, 80 percent of the students were undergraduates.  There were few good restaurants, coffee houses or bars appealing to graduate students, but there was some good news.  Moscow, Idaho is only 10 miles east, across the state line leading to the University of Idaho and some good restaurants, bars, and shops.  WSU students flooded across the state line to Moscow every Friday evening under the watchful eyes of state troopers mostly because the drinking age there was 18 at the time.

The Palouse was a wonderful place for the agronomy program.  The primary agricultural product of the Palouse is still winter wheat, planted in the Fall and harvested the following summer.  When we arrived in early September, farmers were burning their fields, a post harvest tradition to replenish the soil.  Since 90 percent of the area was covered in wheat, the result was a smoky haze, but the red sunsets were spectacular.  The warm haze-filled days lasted until the mid October when the weather suddenly changed.  It became cloudy and cold, rainy and blustery, never warming up again that year.  I didn’t know if this was an annual event, but the sudden change was dramatic, a phenomenon I had never seen in the Midwest.  Anyway, Ruth and I were immersed in our studies, focused on getting acclimated to grad school.

During those early smoky days, we moved into our new home in married student housing, vintage WW-II prefabricated 4-plex units purchased from the government at the end of the war for next to nothing. The buildings were uninsulated clapboard boxes waiting to be torn down.  They creaked in the wind and leaked in the rain, but they were cheap, or so it seemed, at $90 per month.   The female half of the couple below us was a pouting, sniveling, angry crybaby.  Every sound below us was audible—toilet, bedroom, every conversation.  We became defensive, especially quiet, whispering around the apartment to avoid losing our privacy.

There were other married student housing units at WSU but they were more expensive.  It didn’t take long to realize we could easily afford something better.  You get what you pay for in this world.  We stayed in the barracks until early spring when we reached our limit.  The winter had been very cold and the single oil space heater barely did its job.  Early one windy morning, our bedroom louver window was torn from its hinges and fell two stories resulting in loud crash, the shattering of glass.  First, a loud “Oh shit” from me, and then total quiet.  No sound except for the wind.  That same day I went to the student housing office and begged to be moved to Trillium Apartments.  I had heard about a vacancy at Trillium from Larry Davis, a fellow grad student who lived there with his wife and young daughter.  Trillium was a private home converted into married student housing, a donation to WSU by local benefactors.  We toured Larry’s apartment and fell in love with Trilium.  Trillium had four units, some with oak floors, built in cabinets, and high ceilings.  The available unit was a two bedroom, two floor, south facing apartment with an open floor plan.  The exterior was generously landscaped with flowers (trillium) and shrubs in a well shaded neighborhood of mature trees.  At $225 per month it was a bargain, and we could remain sane in the process.  Our lives improved dramatically after the move.  The only downside, albeit a minor one, was the proximity of Greek Hill, a concentration of fraternities and sororities on a hill above us a block away.  Larry and I would take turns calling the campus police on Saturday nights when the loud parties kept us awake.

Within days of our arrival that September I had met most of the faculty and grad students.  At the time there were about 40 grad students in the department.  Most had teaching or research assistantships that provided a monthly stipend and free tuition. That’s a pretty good deal when compared to the level of student debt today.  Grad students were divided into the old timers and the newbies.  An old timer had been in the program for at least a year, the usual half way mark in a two year MS program.  They knew the ins and outs of the department, who to work with, and who to avoid.

My concern over an academic advisor was assuaged a few days later when I met Dr Gary Webster, the department head.  Gary was tall, thin and full of energy.  He initially seemed a bit stern but needed to be to run a department with a dozen recalcitrant faculty and 40 grad students.  He respected hard work and got a lot of it from me.  I clearly recall our first meeting.  I sat down in his office on the 12^th floor of the Physical Sciences Building and summarized my research problem for him.  I think he was impressed that I came with my own research project.   “You said Beaverhead County, near the Big Hole and Red Rock Rivers, right?” He questioned me.  “Yes Sir.  Legendary trout streams in the area.”  His eyes lit up, and he cracked a slight smile.  “I can work with you.  Sounds like interesting geology.  I’m sure I could come out to visit you at least once each field season”.  As I recall, for two years, he came out once or twice, bringing his fishing gear. He was the best fly fisherman and outdoor fry cook I ever met.

He had an international reputation in the field of sedimentary geology, especially paleontology.  He became the department chair the year I arrived, a definite advantage for me because I didn’t have to go higher up in the department when I needed something.  He had departmental egos to deal with, budget frustrations, and interdepartmental competition, but he always found time for me when I needed it.  He could get angry, but never held a grudge and got over issues quickly.

I also liked Len Vasher, a mild mannered, easy going guy with a rye but slightly sarcastic sense of humor.  Len was low man on the totem pole, an assistant professor, in charge of the geology 101 program.  He was responsible for 1,000 undergrad students each semester, four or five lecture sessions, 30-35 laboratory sections, and fieldtrips.  None of the tenured staff wanted anything to do with geology 101, which was unfortunate because the program brought money and a few geology majors to the department based on student enrollment.  In other words, the more geology 101 students, the more money would become available for research, assistantships, faculty travel, and salary increases.  Len occasionally taught the introductory class himself but mostly supervised qualified lecturers when they were around.  When I first met Gary, I emphasized that I wanted to lecture geology 101 rather than run labs.  I felt qualified because of my previous teaching experience and enthusiasm for the job.  Gary supported me, and Len was happy because he didn’t have to teach the course himself.  I made Len even happier by signing up for his graduate level sedimentology class.

I had signed up for a class at the University of Idaho taught by Peter Isaacson, a young, sedimentary geology professor.  He was hyperactive, very bright and intense, seemingly about to explode from the smallest infraction, but surprisingly likeable.  He offered a course in the Geologic Development of North America, a survey of the geologic history of the continent.  Gary also asked me to take the 400-level course in invertebrate paleontology offered by Frank Scott, a 30-year veteran of the department and close to retirement.  Frank was affable and seemingly knowledgeable but without a long publication record.  He had advised many MS students with geologic mapping projects on the San Juan Islands, but never compiled the work into regional papers—a missed opportunity.  Early in the semester he suggested I transfer to another school, presumably to a better department, and he named a few.  I politely countered that I had a wife in a another PhD program, I already made one change, leaving Syracuse for WSU, and I still had a job waiting for me if I wanted it when I returned to Denver.  I told him that I appreciated his candidness but was staying put.  It was odd that he didn’t think well of the geology department considering he was only there about three days a week. He headed to the San Juan Islands for part of the week where he had built a retirement home.  I’m sure I didn’t have the full story on Frank.  Everyone is more complicated than it seems, but I was both fond of him and disturbed by his comments.

I liked both John Watkinson, a structural geologist, and Peter Hooper, an igneous petrologist who studied the basalts of the Columbia Plateau.  They worked in subject areas I was not interested in. Larry Meinert was also new to the department that fall, an economic geologist who studied skarns, a German word for scattered mineral deposits in sedimentary rocks.  He and his wife Georgiana, an attorney at the University of Idaho were amicable.  Larry was a recent Stanford PhD.  I invited them over for dinner one evening early in the semester to our closet apartment in married student housing.  It was kind of an embarrassing evening.  Larry was a big eater, but we only prepared one quiche.  They may have stopped at a restaurant on the way home.  Anyway, my plan was to work under Gary Webster.  Later, Larry did invite me to lecture his Geology 102 class on petroleum.  Geology 102 was a more intense form of 101, designed for science and engineering majors, a more virulent contagion with some math thrown in.  Can you believe that…math?

Richard Thiesen had a full, shaggy beard and looked older than his 28 years.  He stored his lecture notes in corn flakes boxes arranged on the book shelves above his desk.  He seemed to be a minimalist, very smart but also a bit weird like the rest of us.  I took a class from him on global plate tectonics, a meaty experience through hundreds of pages of research papers and excellent lectures.  He also served on my committee, a discerning guy who got his students to read the published literature regularly.

Needless to say, I was nervous before my first lecture.  I had taught college level classes before, at Metropolitan State College in Denver, but never 250 smiling faces in a large auditorium, students seeking an easy elective, not geology majors.  The room was nearly full.  I was overly organized as usual and had carefully prepared a list of class rules, a syllabus, and gave a lot of thought to how to conduct my classes.  Len Vasher was helpful, but left most of the details to me.  He seemed to be around to make sure that everything functioned properly, and if it did, he stayed in the background.  I had two sections of introductory geology that fall, both on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, one at 9 am and the other at 1 pm, each 50 minutes in length.  It was a three semester-hour class, and the added laboratory, a once-a-week session added an additional hour of credit.  The lab was taught and graded separately by the lab instructors, primarily MS students.  My feeling about a class of this size and demographic was to start out tough and ease up later in the semester.  Starting out easy in such an environment could be suicide for the instructor.  I was a freshman myself once, I know this from personal experience.  I had decided on a lecture test strategy, number of tests, makeup policy, and grading.  I settled on three tests and a final exam.  Students could drop the lowest score.  If they were happy with their grade before the final, they could skip it.  A no-show was automatically the lowest score.  No makeup exam sessions would be held.  The labs were graded and reported separately by the lab instructors.  A student could feasibly ace the lecture session and flunk the lab—an unlikely event.  Lecture exams were multiple choice—a no brainer considering the number of students—and graded in a pizza eating, evening session in the 11th floor conference room in the physical sciences building.  My plan seemed reasonable, but all plans face obstacles.

The other two sessions of geology 101 were taught by Lois Peters, another incoming PhD student.  Lois was also older like me, in her mid 30s, mentally scattered, impractical, disorganized, and seemingly ignorant of basic teaching concepts.  We had issues immediately.  She came from money, or so it seemed to me, a name dropper, without the basic skills to teach college level classes.  I never figured out why she was even accepted into the department, and Len and Gary were silent but understanding when my repeated complaints about her surfaced.  Lois was not a problem for me on a day-to-day basis.  I occasionally heard students talking about her, pissing and moaning as undergrads do, but issues did not surface for me until the first exam was graded.  We originally agreed to make the first exam difficult, a standard practice to encourage study habits, and to target a mean score of about 65-70 percent.  We would ease up on them later.  After grading a thousand exams and calculating the mean scores for each session, mine came in on the money at about 68 percent.  Lois’s two sessions averaged about 82 percent, a ridiculously high average, especially for the first exam.  I was later informed by a student that she had a review session beforehand and basically gave students many of the exam questions.

I showed up for my first lecture that Monday morning in September well prepared.  I entered the hall from a side door at the front and stared up into the rising tiers of seats now filling with anxious freshmen.  I pushed a 4-wheel cart, the kind used for movie or slide projectors, but on it instead was a 20-inch diameter foam rubber, imitation granite boulder, white and gray, to mimic quartz and feldspar.  It was a good imitation, especially from a distance of 20 or more feet.  I pushed the cart very slowly as if it was extremely heavy and left it in the center of the stage for the duration of the session.  I occasionally pointed to it during my lecture to emphasize a point.  Much of that class was relegated to discussing rules and procedures and summarizing requirements and subjects to be covered during the semester.  Near the end of the session, I asked for questions.  As the bell rang I lifted the imitation rock with one hand and threw it into the first few rows of the auditorium to the shrieks of those sitting there.  It bounced off someone in the second row and fell to the floor.  I presume that demonstration broke the ice and set the stage for the semester.

I settled into my first semester teaching routine always attempting to explain concepts as clearly as possible while using examples (I thought) best fit that concept.  The last 15 minutes of each session was usually devoted to a 35-mm slide show to illustrate the points presented during the lecture.  Occasionally, I used slides throughout the lecture.  [This was in the age before Powerpoint presentations]  I rarely lectured from the front of the auditorium but roamed up and down the long aisles watching for eye contact and participation.  I never used a microphone because the acoustics in the space were adequate, and my voice carried well.  I started out with a few jocks (football players) in the back row, big guys with a lack of interest and an attitude, uninterested participants talking to each other during my first two lectures, loud enough to disrupt the concentration of nearby classmates but not enough to affect the class as a whole.  I made eye contact with two of them on a foray up their aisle, hoping that my angry facial expression would solve the problem.  I saw them again during the third lecture, a total lack of respect for me or their neighbors.  I continued to lecture, as I slowly walked up the long aisle to within 20 feet of them, then stopped, waited a second or two, and laid into them.  I was really angry and yelled in an extremely loud voice something like:  “Get out of here.  Do you hear me? Now!” That seemed to catch their attention as well as the attention of 250 others in the cavernous room.  It was so quiet in there one could hear a pin drop.  They got up and walked out.  I didn’t know their names and didn’t care.  I can’t even remember if they showed up again, probably not.  I had no more problems that semester.  I informed both Len and Gary about the incident in case there was some blowback, but they never heard a word from the athletic department.

After the midterm grades were posted, I received notes from assistant coaches asking what the students could do to improve their grades.  It was surprising to me that I was contacted by the coaches, rather than the students themselves, a clear indication that the students (football players in most cases with athletic scholarships) were pretty irresponsible (or terribly overworked) and needed help from the coaches to improve their grades.  I was also contacted by their tutors.  These guys had private tutors!  As far as I was concerned, they should be treated no differently than other students.  Frankly, professional football should have a minor league system like baseball.  Some of these guys were simply on campus to play ball and could care less about their classes.  To be fair, some athletic majors were actually very good students and belonged on campus, while others were not college material.  Athletics was big money on campus!

One of the oddest campus arrangements was a “for profit” company called Note Takers that employed qualified graduate students to summarize lectures and sell their notes to other students. The concept was based on the idea that some people were just not good note takers by birth and needed to spend class time listening rather than writing.  The company was sanctioned by the university as a learning aid.  Students were not encouraged to sign up for “Notes” but were not discouraged either.  Prior to my first lecture, Larry Davis, a fellow geology graduate student (and later Trillium neighbor and long time friend) and note taker asked me for approval to sit in my classes.  It was up to each class instructor whether or not to allow note takers in class.  I said it was okay with me since many of my test questions came from the textbook anyway.  Larry agreed that students need to learn how to take notes sooner or later.  He was soon to start a PhD program himself.  He was an excellent note taker.

As the 1981-1982 academic year ticked away, I started thinking about field work for my dissertation. I’ve already explained why I selected a field problem.  I love the outdoors, especially remote and beautiful places, the vistas, the exhilaration of finding things out, travelling through a region while trying to solve a geologic problem.  Bill Perry, my mentor at the U.S. Geological Survey had recommended the problem.  I loved the region of sage covered basins and majestic mountains, a place of sheer beauty and remoteness.  I felt liberated in Montana and wanted to work there.  It represented an unburdening of everyday stress and anxiety.  Many graduate students find their research problem stressful.  I loved mine.

I planned on three summers in the field.  Winters would be dedicated to reading the literature and data analysis, examining thin sections, fossils, and pebbles, and running computer programs.  My plan was to identify the most complete stratigraphic sections of the Blackleaf Formation in southwest Montana, to describe their lithologic (rock) characteristics, sedimentology, petroleum geochemistry, and age, and to correlate the unit throughout the region based on time and similarity of rock types.  No small task.  My first summer (1982) was in part dedicated to travelling the region in order to select the best sections and to begin measuring and describing them.

I was very fortunate.  First, Bill Perry found me an old USGS trailer, a single-axle 18-footer that no one was using.  Ken Takahashi, my supervisor, promised funding for field work—camp fees, gas, a government 4 X 4 vehicle, food and equipment.  The USGS at the time had a warehouse that dispersed field gear, everything from cook stoves to packs, tents, sleeping bags, winches, hammers, shovels, sample bags, and much more.  While in Denver that June to pick up my Ford Bronco and trailer, I checked out as much gear as I needed.  My research was intended to fulfill mission goals of the Branch of Petroleum Geology, the new name for the old Branch of Oil and Gas Resources.  In the early 80s, discretionary dollars were readily available.  We had not yet experienced the years of reduced funding that would follow in the late 1980s and 1990s.  Twelve years later, the USGS would suffer the painful consequences of a reduction in force (RIF) as salaries approached 100% of budget.  I even had field assistants for two summers.  In 1983, an undergraduate student from WSU, Bob Niblack, a smart, hardworking guy with a rye sense of humor assisted in measuring sections, collecting samples, and protecting me from rattlesnakes.

I relished my first summer in the field.  I loved every moment except when I had to back up the Bronco and trailer.  I was apparently not endowed with the “trailer backup gene”.  It was also very frustrating to discover that I had lost 6 rolls of film due to an ill-fitting telephoto lens.  This problem was relatively easy to fix because I would be back next summer.  Lost however, were some great people shots.

I realized early on that I could constrain my field area to exposures along the flanks of several mountain regions in Beaverhead and Madison Counties: Pioneer Mountains, Snowcrest, Gravelly, Tendoy, and Centennial Ranges, and Lima Peaks.  My July, 1982 reconnaissance resulted in about a dozen useful sections.  I also discovered that some of the previously used names for Blackleaf members were either inadequate or needed updating.  I had previously contacted Bob Schwartz, an Indiana University PhD from the early 1970’s who had also studied these rocks in a much larger region.  He was friendly and very cooperative, a gracious fellow, who had no gripes when I later discovered some minor issues with his earlier correlations.  It’s easy for someone to return to a study area years later and discover new ways to look at rocks, especially when new data become available and new techniques are used to analyze rocks.  We each stand on the shoulders of giants!

My good fortunes continued because I had developed friendly relations with several other USGS scientists, all internationally known experts in various fields of sedimentary geology.  With bouts of good schmoozing and the promise of continued fame, I signed on these coworkers to help me with various aspects of my work.  First, there was mild-mannered Bill Cobban, a renowned paleontologist who studied invertebrates, especially clams and ammonite cephalopods.  Bill never got flustered and had a near photographic memory he exhibited when dealing with his little calcareous critters.  Some of my rocks were marine in origin, and when fossils were discovered, I mailed a box to Bill, resulting in a detailed paleontologic report including name, age, depositional environment, and ecologic characteristics.

Many of my measured sections in the Pioneer Mountains contained nonmarine rocks, so Bill couldn’t help me.  I solicited Doug Nichols, a truly nice guy, sensible, friendly and inquisitive, a palynostratigrapher who specialized in Cretaceous pollen.  Land plants evolved very conspicuously in the Cretaceous, and Doug had published numerous papers on the subject dealing with domestic and international palynomorph species.  I collected fresh, unoxidized samples of terrestrial black shale by digging a foot or more into an outcropping, usually under protruding ledges of sandstone, and sent them to Doug in Denver.  His turnaround was slower than Bill’s because pollen had to be extracted from sediment, acidized, sieved, and observed under a microscope.  Doug was invaluable to me and provided enough data to fill “meaty” data tables of names, ages, and depositional environments.  These ages were critical to correlating the measured sections.

John Obradovich was a geochronologist, a guy who knew the idiosyncrasies of a mass spectrometer, a large machine that bombards objects with ions to identify the rate of decay of the various elemental isotopes in order to determine the age of a rock.  Pretty spiffy stuff.  John had worked with Bill Cobban over the years by determining the age of marine volcanic ash beds and tying his ages to Bill’s relative time scale based on ammonites.  John was slow to get results, but when they came, they were significant.  Many of my rocks were interbedded with thin ash beds that had left their mark.  He gave me ages for tops and bottoms of rock units throughout the region.

I received invaluable aid from Bill Perry, Russ Tysdal, and Eddy Maughan.  Bill of course suggested the Blackleaf problem to me and benefited the most from my stratigraphic work, but he kept me in check by walking through my measured sections to be certain they were not (geologically) faulted.  One good post-Cretaceous earthquake could ruin the thickness of a measured section.  Russ knew the Cretaceous of the region well and had studied it in the Madison Range, east of my area.  Russ was a mapper and structural geologist, a very careful field worker and critical thinker who helped me find obscure partial sections of Blackleaf rocks in remote areas in order to fill a gap in my correlations.  Even a partially exposed section of rock can be useful.  Eddy Maughan was also a USGS mapper with lots of experience.  Eddy walked with me through many sections and offered personal incites.  I liked Eddy and appreciated his help.

Jim Palacas and Mark Pawlewicz were organic geochemists with the Branch of Petroleum Geology in Denver.  They knew a lot about petroleum source rocks and the maturation and migration of petroleum.  Organic-rich shales contain significant amounts of carbon from decaying plants and animals that evolves into petroleum under the right burial and temperature conditions.  My plan was to include a petroleum component in the dissertation for potential interest to industry.  Deep exploratory wells had been drilled in southwest Montana along the flanks of several mountain ranges, but no significant production had been identified.  Jim and Mark processed a dozen shale samples for me and provided a summary of the petroleum source-rock potential of the various Blackleaf shale units.

Bob Ryder, a geologist with our Branch in Reston, VA had done a Penn State dissertation in the late 1960s on the Beaverhead Group, thousands of feet of conglomerate and sandstone overlying the Blackleaf, rocks that Chris Haley was now studying.  Back in the 1960s, no one knew much about the Cretaceous stratigraphy of southwest Montana.  Bob was very cooperative and knowledgeable, but he was done studying the Beaverhead.  We chatted often about the rocks and the contacts between the various units.  He offered encouragement and wasn’t upset when some of his Beaverhead disappeared into the underlying Frontier Formation.

Gary Webster graciously joined me in the field during each of my three summers, providing guidance on the limits of my work and how to best include the various components in the final product.  Gary also knew several of my USGS colleagues which no doubt helped me academically because I had corralled these well known scientists to my benefit.  Gary never once mentioned that some of these guys were doing work that I should be doing.  We were simply collaborating as all scientists do when in the field, each working in his own area of study.  I was fortunate to have colleagues that I could rely on, a remarkable team of fellow geologists who provided unlimited support.

A 7.3 magnitude earthquake rocked the northern Rockies on October 28, 1983.  The temblor was centered on the southwestern flank of the Lost River Range in central Idaho at the foot of Borah Peak, the highest summit in the state.  The quake resulted in a 22-mile fracture with multiple scarps and as much as 16 feet of displacement.  It was felt as far away as Pullman, 300 miles west.  Shortly after 7 am that morning I was awakened by shaking of my bed at Trillium.  My sleepy brain reacted, and I soon realized a mild earthquake was underway, but I had no idea as to the magnitude at the epicenter.  It was time to get up anyway, and today was a geology 101 lecture day.  As I started to process the event in a more caffeinated state, I realized I had a valuable teaching tool, a rare opportunity for teachers and students alike.  As the news poured in on the radio (no Internet in those days), the details trickled in.  There were two deaths in Challis, Idaho, but damage estimates proved to be minimal, simply because the epicenter was in a remote area.  My 9 am lecture was surprisingly full, no doubt due to the quake.  I abandoned the scheduled topic and started by asking for some personal experiences, what each person felt and thought about the event.  I talked about Basin and Range extension, stress relaxation, West Coast plate movements, and Pullman’s proximity to the epicenter.  Midway through the hour I could feel it, a subtle gentle shaking of the building, an aftershock.  I may have yelled “Quiet!”  Maybe “Wow!” I don’t remember exactly what I said.  The auditorium was so quiet one could hear a quartz pebble roll down the carpeted aisle.  So, I talked about aftershocks from a major quake and how stress was slowly and erratically relieved in the rocks.  Quite a real time laboratory for the study of earthquakes—a real one during class!  Unless one is teaching geology 101 in southern or central California, the opportunity for such an event is very rare.

My marriage with Ruth was probably on the rocks before we even got married.  If I had to pick a troubling event, one that marked the beginning of the end, I would choose a fateful talk at the city park in Dillon, Montana during the summer of 1982.  Ruth was in the field with me.  We happened to be in Dillon for errands and a picnic lunch.  It didn’t end well.  Everything came up in our discussion: our marriage in general, having children, my lack of romance, our future together.  We both realized we were headed in different directions, but our talk cemented them in place.  We should have separated earlier, but we were focused on going to grad school, a glue that kept us together, an adventure to be shared because we did have many similar interests including our academic pursuits.

We functioned reasonably well and remained together during the 1982-1983 academic year, helping each other and essentially ignoring our underlying problems.  At the end of the spring semester, 1983, we were both in Boulder and Denver for a week, visiting friends and addressing academic logistics.  We usually stayed with Ruth’s sister and brother in law in Boulder.  Ruth was looking forward to her job for the summer with the Dolores Project, an archeological reconnaissance of sites to be flooded by a future reservoir on the Delores River in southwest Colorado.  The project was  sponsored in part by the University of Colorado.  The area under study was to become the new McPhee Reservoir north of Cortez and Mesa Verde National Park.  Dam construction was underway, and in archeological terms the crews were one step ahead of the bulldozer.  The area was rich in Pueblo Culture (Anasazi) and ruins, a paleo indian gold mine.  The project was an archeological opportunity for Ruth to gain field experience, mix with faculty and other graduate students in a rich intellectual environment.  Ruth had driven my 1980 Datsun truck to the camping area.  I drove her yellow VW Beetle out there a week or two later when accommodations improved for project workers.  When I arrived in Dolores, I was impressed with the organization.  Archeological research is big science with many contributing people.  There was a large dining tent and a full-time cook, portable showers, a professionally run affair with hard work and fun in the sun.  I stayed for some beer drinking and schmoozing, but soon left to drive north in my truck.  I think I had a 4 X 4 waiting for me in Dillon or Lima.

At the end of the summer, Ruth and I met again at her sister’s in Boulder and soon drove back to Pullman.  We both agreed we had a serious relationship problem and decided not to seek therapy, a decision cementing our separation.  We fell into the fall semester routine.  Ruth and I were reasonably friendly and cooperative that Fall, with few arguments.  We filed for a non contested divorce and waited for a court hearing with a Whitman County judge in Colfax, Washington.  Ruth moved out of our apartment in January or February and found one nearby.  We met for a final time in Colfax that spring to sign the divorce papers.  We never communicated again.

I scheduled comps (comprehensive examinations) for the spring of 1984.  Others did the same.  Several of us formed a study group and met once a week to review concepts we thought were important, a memorization blitz since we had no idea what to expect.  I faced four examiners, Gary Webster, Sam Johnson, Peter Isaacson, and Richard Thiessen.  I had to be familiar with stratigraphy, sedimentology, paleontology, tectonics, and regional geologic history.  The exams were both written and oral, full day written sections by each faculty member were followed by a conference room inquisition emphasizing the weak answers from the week before.  My exams were scheduled for April.

The exam week was an exhausting experience resulting in a stack of penciled blue books an inch thick.  As anticipated, Peter Isaacson focused on the geological development of North America.  I was ready for his test with a sandwich, a large bottle of water, and some fruit to get me through the ordeal.  I received a typed sheet with 20 questions, all essay stuff requiring long potent paragraphs.  The directions said “Answer any 19 of the following 20 questions”.  That was typical Isaacson humor!  I sighed and got to work.  After 10 hours, numerous blue books, and several bathroom breaks I was exhausted.  It was about 10 pm when the night janitor peaked in.  I couldn’t think straight anymore.  I felt I had done reasonably well so I just faded out on the half finished 19^th question ending in some snide remark and an explanation mark.  Sam’s and Richard’s were not as long or tiresome but still required 4-5 hours each.  Sam’s questions were entirely sedimentological—graphically illustrate and explain a meandering fluvial system, etc.  Richard’s—describe the Cenozoic evolution of western North America illustrating the positions of accreted terranes through time.  I did reasonably well on most of Gary’s questions, but he slipped me a ringer: name the most important paleontologists of the 19^th century and their most significant contributions.  I wasn’t prepared for that one. It slipped through the crack of geological knowledge, but by oral time I had crammed in one hundred years of European fossil men (and one or two women) since I knew I would get hit with that again.

I spent most of the summer of 1984 in Montana before heading back to Denver.  I cemented my relationships with USGS colleagues and completed measuring my stratigraphic sections.  I developed a new way to name the units within the Blackleaf Formation by establishing “members” using northern Montana nomenclature.  Doug Nichols and Bill Cobban were sending me paleontologic information, Jim Palacas provided me with geochemical characteristics of shales as petroleum source rocks, and John Obradovich was radiometrically dating my volcanic ash beds.

Denver, Colorado

At the end of August, I showed up near the Denver Federal Center in an 18-foot Ryder rental truck full of mostly rocks and books.  My old friend, Jim Sickles, innocently volunteered to help me move in—I had helped him with several moves.  I distinctly remember unloading 36 boxes of rocks.  I found a nice one-bedroom apartment on Green Mountain, a five minute drive down hill to building 25 at the Federal Center.  I soon got in touch with other old friends and fellow WSU grad students who had moved to Denver.  Both Diane Lane and Joanna Scheffler had graduated ahead of me and had applied to the USGS at my recommendation.  They got jobs immediately, thanks to their academic credentials.  Sam Johnson, formerly on my committee, was now with the Branch of Sedimentary Processes.

Dudley Rice, the current Chief of the branch (now called Petroleum Geology) found me an office in a large, second floor open area, several thousand square feet in size, unoccupied except for me.  I used some cubical partitions left over from the previous occupants (USGS administrative people) and made a cozy corner place for myself—maps on the wall, book shelves, rocks everywhere, knickknacks, and field gear.  I found an old metal IBM punch card file cabinet used to store computer program cards and requisitioned it for rock samples.  A 1930s vintage oak desk, a light table, and two decrepit filing cabinets completed my decorating debut.  Building 25 housed Petroleum Geology and several other branches within the USGS.  It was a former small arms ammunition factory during WW-II, long overdue for remodeling, now a sprawling cavernous affair with hundreds of offices and cubicles.  Building 25 was to be my home for most of the next 22 years.  As usual, my luck continued to hold.  I was not given a full time career position yet (a slot, as it was called), but was guaranteed a temporary position.  Slots were held like real money in Reston by the Director’s office and used selectively when needs developed, or maybe to bribe or threaten a branch chief.  At the moment, slots were unavailable.

I assumed some minor responsibilities with my old colleagues in the computer group but for the most part was left alone.  I did the logical thing at the time, I continued to analyze my data and run computer programs for my statistical analyses.  I counted sand grains for more than 200 thin section slides to establish “lithofacies” and “diagenesis” based on composition.  No one minded that I did dissertation work on government time, after all, it was a research organization, and I was doing research in petroleum geology.  I would ultimately publish much of the work through the USGS.

Anny Coury, the deputy chief geologist for the Geologic Division in Denver (called the Central Region) chatted with me one day about teaching an introductory geology course for non geologists at the USGS in Denver.  Anny was an old friend and originally part of the RAG Group in late 1970s.  She suggested I offer such a course.  So, during the next couple of years, I taught introductory courses in geology to secretaries, computer programmers, and administrative people.  It was enjoyable and an excellent opportunity to continue teaching.  I contacted Metropolitan College in Denver, and my geology 101 class was offered for 3 semester hours of credit as an extension class for those seeking a degree.

I also sent resumes to universities in the hopes that a tenure-track position might open up.  I wanted an insurance policy in case I couldn’t snag a slot with the Branch.  New university positions in most fields of study became quite rare during the mid 1980s.  Nationally advertised jobs in geology had hundreds of applicants.  Walking on water and graduation from an Ivy League school were required prerequisites for infrequent opportunities.

I prepared my measured sections for publication with the help of Russ Tysdal who had his own sections of Cretaceous rocks.  Russ and I began collaborating, the beginning to a long relationship together.  I conducted statistical analyses of sandstone compositions to understand source terranes in the Cretaceous.  Doug Nichols and John Obradovich completed their analyses of pollen and isotopes.  Bill Perry and I talked repeatedly about the unroofing history of Cretaceous mountain ranges using sandstone compositions and depositional histories.  Chris Haley (now teaching at Miami University of Ohio) and I continued to chat about the thick pile of rocks lying between his younger Beaverhead Group conglomerates and my underlying Blackleaf Formation.  With limited data available on these rocks, we decided to use an existing name for them—the Frontier Formation.  The Frontier Formation was well exposed in northwest Wyoming, east of our study area.  There, the Frontier was a coastal fluvial and deltaic depositional system of shaly sandstone, mudstone, and coal.  We felt that we were dealing with a more nonmarine equivalent of those rocks.

It wasn’t all work that fall and early winter.  Many Branch colleagues enjoyed a good party.  I vaguely remember going through my tequila phase with Joanna Scheffler, and did a lot of cross country skiing and hiking.  I managed to lose a few unneeded pounds and gradually got back into decent physical shape.  I even tried downhill skiing that winter.

I started dating Jenni Caldwell after the Christmas holidays in early 1985.  Jenni had taken one of my introductory classes in geology the previous fall.  She was on sabbatical leave from Arapaho Community College in Littleton as a technical editor and to offer short courses in editing to USGS staff.  She worked with a group of other editors to improve the quality of USGS geologic manuscripts and to edit for conformity of style.  Jenni and I went on a lunch date in late winter and soon on a cross country ski date in the mountains that included her son, Ken.  I remember that ski date clearly.  When we arrived at the trailhead, I realized I had neglected to bring my ski boots, a fatal mistake for someone who wants to ski. Thinking quickly in the thin alpine air, I suggested ice skating at Evergreen Lake.  Evergreen Lake was a delightful ice skating venue, background music, groomed surface, rental skates, hot chocolate in the foothills west of Denver.  I think Ken enjoyed it.  I lucked out.  Unfortunately, late in the afternoon I felt sick and got even sicker by dusk as we left the lake.  I was getting the flu.  Never one to disappoint my guests, I plodded on through dinner.  We went to a seafood restaurant in Lakewood.  I knew that Jenni and Ken liked seafood.  Somehow I managed to get home and into bed.  I stayed there for four days.

That early fall, 1985 was semi frantic as I continued to make minor manuscript changes.  I set a defense date for early December in Pullman and made roundtrip plane reservations for Seattle.  I asked Jenni to meet me in Seattle after the defense to celebrate my victory.  I couldn’t imagine failing my defense.  After all, I knew these rocks well and had no disagreements with my committee.  I had an accepted final draft, a position with the USGS, university teaching experience, and a proven publication record.  The defense seemed to go smoothly.  As I recall, Richard Theissen, Pete Isaacson, Gary Webster, and an outside faculty member were present.  WSU required that each committee include an individual from a different department, presumably to promote fairness of judgment.  I gave a short presentation summarizing my results and answered the questions thrown at me.  Finally, after an hour or so, the conversation lagged.  Gary asked if there were any further questions.  Everyone said they were satisfied, and I was asked to leave the conference room.  After what seemed like an eternity, probably about five minutes, Gary came out and said “Congratulations Dr. Dyman.”  I liked the ring of that.  Gary shook my hand and invited me to dinner.  I later drove my rental car to Seattle, a four hour jaunt through the eastern Washington desert, and met Jenni at the airport.  I was now a true Softrocker, one with an official title, a geologist who studies sedimentary rocks.