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The sea's gone from grey-green to a thick blue now
My brother's godfather has died. He was a geologist married to a botanist, for half my life in Colorado, the other half in Arizona, their house a triple-stacked library of speculative fiction in my childhood and in their retirement filled with the art the two of them made. With the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with the Bureau of Reclamation, as a citizen scientist and volunteer on the San Pedro River and Ramsey Canyon Preserve, his specialty was rivers, aquifers, water in the earth. He had built dams and blown them. He cared ferociously about conservation. I walked above the treeline in the Rockies with him; I saw the most stars I have ever seen in a night. Once as a child, I didn't recognize him at the door because he had traded his badger-beard for a ponytail, which eventually he traded back. Famously, the family story went, after getting his advanced degree, he was so unemployable with it that he ran for dogcatcher and lost to a zoologist who was in much the same position. I have a scan of a sun-blown slide from the middle of the 1980's where, a long lean hiker in blue jeans and a Christmas-plaid shirt, aviator sunglasses and a bucket hat decorated all over with the logo for Miller High Life, he is toting my infant brother across some high country on his back. He told me never to let the Puritan work ethic catch up with my art. I have photographs of his right up until this last year. He was not replaceable in the world.
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The San Pedro River people and Ramsey Canyon Preserve are doing good work.
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Thank you.
The San Pedro River people and Ramsey Canyon Preserve are doing good work.
I am glad you know them to say it.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you. He was! And I was saying to
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Indeed not, and I'm so sorry.
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Thank you. I was thinking of so many other people of his age who would not monitor a river for decades or speak out in defense of indigenous conservation.
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Thank you. He could also be invaluably cranky. He was not my godfather, as the botanist was not my godmother, but they were people who taught me how to be human.
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he was so unemployable with it that he ran for dogcatcher and lost to a zoologist who was in much the same position.
Well, for that line of work, a zoologist would arguably have an advantage over a geologist.
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Thank you.
Well, for that line of work, a zoologist would arguably have an advantage over a geologist.
Exactly! If only a town rock-catcher had been in demand.
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That is sound advice.
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I really try to follow it.
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My sympathies, and I'm glad you had the times with him you did, even if they aren't enough and both you and the world still want him. His memory for a blessing.
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Yeah! This year! Come on!
My sympathies, and I'm glad you had the times with him you did, even if they aren't enough and both you and the world still want him. His memory for a blessing.
Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you. I had forgotten that he originally wanted to join the Air Force and washed out instantaneously on account of turning out to be colorblind. I remembered the colorblindness, because it never affected the composition and brilliance of his photographs. I had just glitched on the story of its discovery.
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*hugs*
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Thank you.
*hugs*
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Thank you. It is just not necessary in this year to lose anyone who took care of the world.
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Hhe sound n magnificent. I send you all my condolences.
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*hugs*
Thank you.
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Thank you. *hugs*
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*hugs*
Nine
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*hugs*
I read so many authors for the first time in their house. Most memorably the Pinis, because I was four years old and had poison ivy and read the original four volumes of Elfquest (1978–84) feverishly while covered with calamine lotion on a camp bed. When I came back at thirteen, I re-read P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982) which I had remembered partly by the cover art of its first edition and went on to Dark of the Moon (1985).
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Thank you.
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I am sorry for your loss and rejoice that you each had the other in your lives.
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Thank you.
*hugs*