The sea's gone from grey-green to a thick blue now

[sovay]

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.