Thursday, 11 June 1987 & Beyond: It’s Been Quite a Life!

July 6-7, Denver, Colorado 

My trip back to the USA worked out fine.  There were no hassles with Zimbabwean customs officials over the BMW auto parts I was bringing in and Robson’s grateful relative met me on Thursday afternoon at the station in Bulawayo to collect them.  I spent Thursday night with Adrian and Penny Feather in Bulawayo, the English couple who had hosted me for several days the previous year.  On Friday, they took me to the airport for my overnight flight on British Airways to London.  I spent a couple days in London getting to know that fascinating city.  Then on to Northern Ireland where I travelled around for a few days.  My positive interactions with Protestants and Catholics convinced me that spending time there to write about the serious conflicts in that society would yield a wealth of good stories.  From there I took a train to Dublin where I was treated to great Irish hospitality and that pub tour I mentioned in my last story.  

Sunrise somewhere over North Africa, 12 June 1987

 

One very sad and bitter disappointment greeted me when I got back to the States.  I phoned my friend Barry Kohn’s wife, Alice, who conveyed the bad news – AIDS had taken Barry’s life a couple weeks earlier.  This tragedy brought home in a personal way the sobering fact that AIDS was killing thousands of wonderful gay and bisexual men whose only crime was carelessness in the exercise of their sexual preferences. 

 

Above:  Cover story of the August 10, 1987 issue of Newsweek.  Below:  I have put a red box around the photo and description of Barry Kohn.  

My ex-wife, Genie, flew from San Diego to Philadelphia for a reunion.  I think we both realized that there was little point in us trying to get back together.  From there, I flew to Florida to celebrate my Dad’s 70^th birthday with his new wife and two of my new stepsisters.  Finally, I made it back to Colorado.

Dr. Jim Bachman, my unofficial “business manager” while I was in Africa, found me free accommodations for the summer in Frisco, Colorado, high in the Colorado Rockies.  I had a delightful 2-month affair with his ex-girlfriend which unfortunately ended badly.  More importantly, I labeled all of the approximately 1000 color slides I had taken in southern Africa which has enabled me to identify and use them in these articles.  

 

East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania

In late August, I arrived in northeastern Pennsylvania for my part-time college teaching job.  I enjoyed working with my colleagues in the Geography Department but my life there was utterly boring (Botswana was a hard act to follow) and the students showed little interest in my introductory cultural and physical geography courses.  I realized that unless I wanted to embark on a Ph.D. program at age 42, there was no future for me in higher education.  

I also tried to sell stories about my experiences in South Africa.  Only two of the alternative newspapers out of more than a dozen I had contacted bought my stories (Southline in Atlanta and The Ithaca Times in New York).  Perhaps I could have sold more and even gotten a book deal had I tried harder, known more about how to market my stuff, or had some contacts who were interested in my stories.  But I quickly got discouraged and lost interest.  It wasn’t until I discovered blogging a few years ago that I eventually decided to get these stories and photos together in a form I could share without having to market them to editors and publishers.   

Quebec

What really mattered to me now was getting back overseas, and I decided to pursue environmental work with international development agencies.  I figured that getting myself relatively fluent in French would open the door to work in some 20 French-speaking African nations.  I turned down an offer to work as a National Park Ranger at Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah for the summer of 1988 and headed off for three months in Quebec.  There, I threw myself into two French immersion courses, first at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi followed by Laval University in Quebec City where I qualified for their advanced level courses. 

 

Washington, DC

In September, friends from Colorado, Robin and Rick Bissell, offered to rent me their basement bedroom in a Washington, DC suburb at a very reasonable price.  Rick also got me temporary work at the non-profit where he worked, Medical Care Development International, and I did research and data entry for an upcoming international conference on emergency medical services. 

I started flooding Washington NGOs with resumes and managed to get some interviews.  It was very discouraging.  If an NGO had an opening for an environmental specialist, they needed a Portuguese speaker or if they had an opening for a French speaker, they needed someone with a medical background.  It always seemed like I had neither the right contacts in Washington nor the right experience. 

 

Pakistan

In March 1989, I did something I had wanted to avoid.  Since no one seemed to want me, I submitted an application to the Peace Corps.  They were actually happy to have me and offered me a volunteer position with a natural resources program in Niger.  The work wouldn’t start for another seven months so I took a geographic information systems course at the University of Maryland, then went to Peshawar, Pakistan for a couple months.  My friend Bryce, one of the Peace Corps volunteers I’d known in Botswana, was working there and found me a room in the large house where she was living.  Bryce put me in touch with some local NGOs and within a week, I had two short-term job offers.  I accepted the offer from a UN-funded agency that was creating village maps for French vaccination teams who were working in Afghanistan.  I realized that my job-hunting approach in Washington, DC had been all wrong.  It was easy with my skills to get a job if I was already in a place like Peshawar where there was a need for ex-pat specialists. 

Niger

I was somewhat reluctant to leave Peshawar for Peace Corps training (Bryce and I were becoming close friends) but I wanted to honor my commitment to Peace Corps.  After three months of training, I was placed with a Nigerien government forestry program in a small town 40 miles south of the capital, Niamey.  After a few months, I was not very happy with my situation.  The work wasn’t all that interesting to me, I didn’t get along well with my Nigerien boss, and life in the Moslem town was pretty boring.  Nearly every weekend I would find a ride in a crowded mini-bus to Niamey where I developed a network of ex-pat friends who were working for development agencies.

Surveying a forest road in southwestern Niger as a Peace Corps volunteer, 1990.

 

On August 15, 1990, my life changed in less than a minute.  Our mentally-unstable project driver was showing off on the highway between Niamey and Burkina Faso.  He lost control of our Toyota Hilux crew cab pick-up which rolled at least once that I remember.  Fortunately, I was wearing my seat belt or I might have died or wound up in a wheel chair for the rest of my life.  I was dazed and unable to lift my right arm.  The Peace Corps doctor in Niamey sent me back to Washington, DC where extensive tests revealed that I had tiny cracks in my cervical vertebrae, and minute bone chips were compressing the nerves that activated my right deltoid muscle.  The Peace Corps got me excellent doctors who removed the bone chips, fused my C3-5 vertebrae using bone from my hip, and performed plastic surgery on a gash in my forehead.  A couple weeks after the surgery when I was on the road to recovery, I was discharged from the Peace Corps which didn’t break my heart in the least.  They offered to provide me with a one-way ticket “home”, and I told them home was Denver.  I’d had enough of international development work and just wanted to return to a normal life where I had friends.    

 

Return to Colorado

It was great being back in Colorado even though a stiff neck collar limited my mobility.  Following three months of physical therapy I was able to lift my right arm over my head again, the best Christmas gift I’ve ever received.  I decided to try to find a local job in environmental consulting which I had done in the 1970s.  A colleague, Jim Walsh, who was now president of his own consulting firm in Boulder, told me there was now lots of work in hazardous waste investigations and clean-ups.  He advised me to take an OSHA hazmat course and additional training.  I found a program at Front Range Community College near Denver where I could earn an associate degree in environmental technology and a certificate in hazardous materials management.  I completed the degree in only six months – I had all the prerequisites such as college chemistry and English.

 

Greystone Environmental Consultants

In the meantime, I looked for a job and was hired by Greystone Environmental  Consulting in Denver as a Project Scientist in May 1991.  Greystone was a small company (only 10 employees when I was hired) owned by two environmental scientists who ran the company like an employee-friendly, family business.  Believe it or not (given my previous work history), I actually stayed there 11 years! 

Our work was primarily the preparation of environmental assessments for energy and mining companies who wanted to develop resources that involved Federal land.  The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 required a formal assessment of the potential impacts of a project to the physical and biological environment as well as cultural and socio-economic resources.  I was usually charged with writing report sections on geological, soils, and water resources. 

The associate degree program that I completed in July 1991 included a course on environmental site assessments so I became the go-to guy to handle lender-required assessments of environmental liabilities associated with the purchase of commercial and industrial properties. 

I learned quickly that the way to keep my job was to earn money for the company by being “billable” as much as possible.  In other words, I tried to make sure that the time sheet I turned in at the end of each week showed mostly work hours that could be billed to a client.  As a result, I was always looking for opportunities to help out my colleagues on projects.  I provided support to the botanists, wildlife biologists, and archaeologists by participating in field work in rural locations around the West.  With my map-reading skills back in the days before GPS, I often helped my colleagues navigate in remote study areas.  Some of my colleagues didn’t like spending a lot of time away from home – not me.  Just get me a plane ticket, rental car, and motel reservation and I’m your man on the scene. 

Crossing the Dry Fork of the Little Big Horn River in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains in June 1992.  I guided our botanist, Jan McKee to sites of rare moss communities, on dark, north-facing slopes.  The area was so remote that we hired an outfitter to set up our camp, cook our meals, and provide us with llamas to carry our gear.  It was one of the best projects I got to work on with Greystone.  Photo by Jan Mckee.

 

In 1998, we scored a project providing environmental inspectors for construction and land restoration projects for interstate natural gas pipelines that were under the purview of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).  It involved inspecting pipeline rights-of-way all over the country.  I was “all over” this project and convinced the project manager to send me out as often as he could.  Over the following year, I inspected active construction as well as reclamation on projects in 11 different states.  I also became very interested in soil erosion control which became a handy skill in years to come. 

It was about that time that Greystone management became aware of a large pipeline construction project in South America which would require environmental management.  To show the potential client that we were serious about the project, Greystone’s president wanted to know if anyone wanted to learn to speak Spanish.  Of course, I volunteered as did several other employees.  They paid for lessons for a couple years until it became apparent that the project was not going to happen.  After that, I continued studying on my own eventually taking immersion courses in Guatemala and Nicaragua.  Since 2015, I’ve been taking regular lessons on Skype with one of the teachers I met in Guatemala. 

In 2001, Greystone’s owners were looking for a corporate buyer for the company.  They hired a kick-ass manager to bring more accountability, discipline, and bureaucratic management procedures to Greystone to increase profitability and make the company more appealing to potential buyers.  I soon realized that this was definitely not my scene.  I managed to “hide out” in the Chicago suburbs as the environmental inspection manager on a large Kinder Morgan natural gas pipeline construction project for seven months, taking care to avoid the office on my R&R trips back to Denver.  I didn’t like this new manager and wanted as little to do with him as possible.  I was pleased to learn a couple years later that the multi-national firm which bought out Greystone fired his ass.  Yes, I’m a vindictive son-of-a-bitch!

 

Turkey

In the meantime, I was looking for another job.  Jim Walsh, the guy who had advised me to get hazmat training back in 1990, had landed a contract to provide two environmental managers for the BTC Pipeline Construction Project which was to bring crude from Caspian Sea oil fields around Baku, Azerbaijan to Ceyhan, Turkey on the Mediterranean.  I was given first choice of which part of the project I wanted to manage:  construction of the pump stations along the Turkish portion of the pipeline or construction of the 280 kilometer section of the pipeline itself between the Georgian border with Turkey and just east of the city of Erzurum in eastern Turkey.  I chose the latter. 

Our client was a consortium of a Turkish engineering company which had become prosperous constructing shopping malls and similar commercial projects.  Their partner was a Dutch pipeline construction company.  I spent the first seven boring months of the project in the Turkish company’s office in Bilkent, an Ankara suburb.  The bureaucratic bullshit was soul-destroying.  We were constantly battling with the environmental staff of BOTAŞ, the Turkish state oil monopoly, which regulated the project.  They knew nothing about environmental protection on pipeline construction projects and nitpicked us to death, wanting us to produce “cover-their-ass” reams of meaningless resource plans, procedures, and method statements.     

The best parts of the job were enjoying Turkish food and culture with my colleagues in the capital city; getting to hire my own staff of about a dozen mostly young and eager Turkish environmental engineers, biologists, soil scientists, and archaeologists; and the two weeks off I got after every eight weeks of work (enabling me to travel around Turkey, Italy, Iceland, and back to Colorado). Finally in the summer of 2003, construction actually began and we all moved to eastern Turkey, based first in the city of Kars and later at a ski lodge in Sarakamiş.  Sounds like fun, but the reality was a giant pain in the ass.  I was caught between the BOTAŞ staff and their ridiculous shtick and our construction managers who wanted to disregard all the environmental procedures.  I had no time to adequately train my staff because I was essentially “chained” to my desk in the field office continuing to churn out nonsense reports. 

Just before I was to go on a long December 2003 – January 2004 break, I called Jim Walsh back in Colorado and told him I’d had enough.  He was fully aware of the problems, was sympathetic, and commended me for lasting as long as I had.  His pump stations manager had quit back in March – his boss with the consortium was a nasty excuse of a Turkish human being.  I was gratified to learn a couple months later that the consortium had been fired from the job (like I said, I’m a vindictive SOB).  Not only did they ignore the environmental requirements, but their incompetence in pipeline construction far surpassed anything I’d seen working on FERC projects (including the Chicago project where the construction company had been fired and sued).  If the Peace Corps hadn’t permanently soured me on international work, the Turkish pipeline project was the final nail in the coffin.

 

O&G Environmental Consulting

When I got back to the States, I initially had some problems finding work but eventually got short-term contract work including a stint in Anchorage, Alaska.  At the end of 2004, I was hired by O&G Environmental Consulting, a small firm owned by two of my former colleagues at Greystone.  As the name O&G suggests, they worked almost exclusively on environmental reports and permitting for oil and gas projects both field development/production and pipelines.  It was a return to the early relaxed small office environment that I had initially enjoyed at Greystone.  Again, there were opportunities for field work in the western U.S.  And in 2006, I passed a rigorous exam to become a Certified Professional in Storm Water Quality.

In 2009, with the economic recession, the oil and gas industry fell on hard times and there were few new projects needing our services.  O&G owned the building where we worked in the Inverness Office Park on the south end of the Denver suburbs.  We only occupied about 1/3 of the building with the other 2/3 leased to a geotechnical laboratory.  When the lab got bought out by a larger company, they did not renew their lease and moved elsewhere.  O&G’s owners were stuck with a large, highly-specialized and potentially contaminated space which no one wanted to lease.  At the end of August 2009, O&G went bankrupt.  It was a sad event – not only was I out of a job again at age 63, but I felt bad for the owners – nice guys who had invested so much work and money into the company.

My Best Job Ever

While pondering what to do with the rest of my life, I received a call from Mike Stanley, an environmental engineer whom I had worked with a few years earlier at O&G.  He knew Petroleum Engineer who needed a Colorado Construction Storm Water Plan and Permit for a small oil and gas field north of Greeley, Colorado.  Could I do it?  Absolutely!  A few months later they needed someone to inspect the sites for compliance with the state’s stormwater regulations.  More sites were added and by 2013, I had another client with a field of 40 well sites which needed bi-weekly inspections for both storm water and spill control.  Over the next few years, I had a few good-sized contracts to inspect wells for environmental liabilities for prospective buyers – in the oil and gas business, owners are constantly buying a flipping properties.

Now at age 77, I still have a client with 19 well sites in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming that I inspect every three months for stormwater and spill control compliance.  I’ve thought of retiring but I’ve never had a better boss (me) and I enjoy driving around rural northeastern Colorado, snooping around well sites, and taking photos.  Some of my sites have nice westerly views of the Front Range including Longs Peak.  I give my client reports which include advice which they don’t always take but they are reasonably prompt in paying my invoices.  

My Personal Life

What about my personal life that I complained so bitterly about while I was in southern Africa?  After arriving back in Denver in 1990, I had a few one-night stands and short-term affairs.  Nothing ever seemed to work out.  One relatively long relationship and two promising ones ended when the 30-somethings I was dating heard the ticking of their biological clocks and announced they wanted to have babies.  No way – I know myself quite well.  I would not make a good father and had no interest in going that route. 

For several years, I had, off and on, run ads in the personals section of Denver’s alternative weekly, Westword.  This was long before there was such a thing as on-line dating aps so popular with singles nowadays.  My ads garnered me lots of dates but nothing that ever worked out for more than a few months.  In 1992, I was madly in love with a 31-year-old psychologist who shared my love of climbing peaks and skiing.  She also had some serious personal problems related to her abusive father.  I wanted to give her love and support but when she announced to me that she just wanted to be friends after a couple of wonderful (for me, at least) passionate nights together, I was crushed, quickly said goodbye, and went back to my apartment to write out another Westword ad. 

This time, I didn’t get many responses, but I did get a message from an intriguing voice on my answering machine.  She was a 33-year-old, never-married, Jewish, Vassar-educated, art conservator who liked that my ad said I was “childless by choice”.  She shared my interests in hiking and photography and was pleased that I was an environmental scientist.  We talked on the phone for a long time, and she seemed too good to be true.  I figured she must weigh 300 pounds with a face covered by warts – just my luck, right?  We met in late-January 1993 and surprise! – She was actually cute.  After that first meeting, we just kept getting together.  In October 1994, we bought a house together in Denver where we still live more than 28 years later.  If you ask Judy why we’re not married, you’ll get one of her sarcastic replies such as, “I don’t want to ruin my reputation” or “I don’t look good in white”.

With Judy Greenfield at the summit of Mt. Flora, Colorado in 2007 with our greyhounds, Prisa and Petunya.  Over the past 30 years, Judy and I have hiked many a trail in the Colorado mountains and the canyons of Utah.  We’ve also adopted several greyhounds and fostered and dog sat for hundreds of these “needle-nosed hounds".   Photo by Bill Alexander.

 

Volunteer Work at Home and Abroad

Being in a long-term relationship and having steady work for the past 30 years as well as growing older hasn’t totally quelled my spirit of adventure and my commitment to causes I believe in.  Starting in 1991, I began 17 years of volunteer work with Planned Parenthood in Denver as a patient escort at their abortion clinic.  I spent many Saturday mornings with a dedicated crew of volunteers enduring insults and threats of damnation from equally dedicated anti-abortion protestors who would line up with their bullhorns, signs showing aborted fetus photoss, doll babies on crosses, and other assorted props just outside the clinic property.  It was a productive way for me to show my support for the rights of women to control what goes on in their own bodies.  It was also a good exercise for me in personal anger management.  And it was a cathartic experience in thumbing my nose at the Roman Catholic Church which psychologically abused me as a young man by laying damaging guilt trips on me about my sexuality.   

There have also been a number of foreign volunteer adventures.  In 1998, when I was first learning Spanish, I took a month-long sabbatical to volunteer with the Mexican Institute of Water Technology in the city of Cuernavaca where I worked with a Mexican environmental engineer on a couple of groundwater quality projects.  Two years later, I did another volunteer gig – this time working with a local non-profit in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala to map soils on the side of an active volcano.  My mornings there were spent studying Spanish at a local school. 

In 2007, I went on an Earth Watch Expedition to the Makenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories to work with a team studying the effects of climate change on permafrost.  Three years later, I was in the Atlantic rainforest of northeast Brazil helping a friend with a topographic survey of his sustainable farm property.  

In 2011, I got involved with the International Erosion Control Association which paid my expenses in Ecuador where I did a preliminary evaluation of soil erosion problems in an Andean mountain community.  The following year, Engineers without Borders went back to help community members plant trees and construct erosion control measures where I had identified problems. 

The following year, I took the trip of a lifetime – Around the World in 93 Days, attending and speaking at conferences on erosion and landslides in New Zealand, China, Serbia, and Spain.  Details of that trip and lots of associated photos are presented in my blog, Perspectives of a Wandering Geographer (wanderinggeographer.blogspot.com).  The blog also includes a report of my three-week trip last year to Cuba. 

As Judy often says while rolling her eyes, “Everybody needs a hobby.”  Here I’ll confess to my nerdy side.  I have a huge collection of stamps from British colonies, territories, and protectorates dating from the 19^th Century Victorian era to the 1950s.  I’ve accumulated it over many years.  I enjoy working on my collection and readily admit that it’s a weird hobby.    

 

My Life Prior to 1986

I haven’t even touched on my life prior to the 1986-87 travels in southern Africa.  It’s a long and winding trail including an unusual childhood living in seven different Eastern states by age 14; my struggles as an undergraduate at Ohio State University starting out as a political science major and finishing five years later with a B.A. in geology; my experiences as an enlisted man in the Ohio National Guard and later as an Army reservist in Montana and North Dakota; my wonderful two-years as a geography grad student at the University of Montana followed by two relatively unhappy years working in a small town in North Dakota and in Boston.  Then there was my very interesting and challenging job working as an environmental geologist on the environmental impact statement to complete Interstate Highway 93 through New Hampshire’s White Mountains.  The company I worked for in New Hampshire transferred me to their Denver office in 1975 where I was mostly involved with mining projects for the next two years.  There were several years from the late 70s until 1985 when I did work that I’m not yet prepared to write about and make public.  Let’s just say that those years were very “complicated”.   And no, I didn’t commit any crimes meriting jail time.

 

Where Do I Go From Here?

There you have it – my life condensed to less than 4000 words.  I think it’s been a very interesting life.  I could write an autobiography of a few hundred thousand words providing details and anecdotes about my life that some people might find interesting.

Should I do it?  Well, not right now.  I feel there are more important things that I’d like to do with my computer keyboard.  I hope that most of my readers will agree that the earth’s physical and biological environment is in a terrible mess.  Sure, we also have serious problems with politics, poverty, and the human condition which really sucks for a substantial portion of the earth’s human population.  But to me, the threats to our climate, air quality, water and land degradation, and the earth’s plant and animal life are the most serious problems we face. 

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.  The question is, “What can we, as individuals, do about it?”  Many of you probably have despaired or are in denial because you feel there is nothing we can do.  The problems are simply too big and life on earth – except maybe for cockroaches, flies, and noxious weeds – is doomed to extinction.  Should we simply give up?  Well, I’d like to think that maybe there are things we can do but the really tough challenge will be to get enough people to make the large changes in their lifestyles that will be necessary to really make a difference. 

I’m going to think about this for a few days or weeks and get back to you.  And I’ll bet some of you have great ideas on the subject!