PIECES

• I have many short pieces in my notes. Some of them will grow into chapters, in which case I will call them "Chapters," and move them to the Table of Contents. So this book, PACHAMAMA, will be "built" here (and you as reader can watch) as it gets built and re-built, until it's finally published. So this piece, consisting of "notes," will be changed as I work until it becomes a "Chapter."

PIECES 1

When I tossed my web gear, rifle and seabag aboard the truck to leave Chu Lai, I knew I was going to Colorado College. I knew I was going to study philosophy, politics, and history until I had at least something approaching an answer to the question Why War?

I already had a freshman year behind me: Engineering studies at Oregon State University. It was a rigorous program, and I’d done pretty well, transferring enough credits to enter Colorado College as a sophomore in August 1966 with a B+ average.

But I didn’t want to stay in engineering. I liked the courses all right: physics I especially loved. I found that it trailed along behind the curiosities which had sprouted in me as a boy and young man growing up in Washington and Oregon: how does the world work?

But by the end of that year, when I looked around me, I got scared. Sure, I’d made a few friends. Henry Ng, who was Chinese, shy and very smart, is one I remember. And of course Gary Head, my roommate in Poling Hall, who would be going out for the OSU wrestling team. But what I remember most was: no women! I looked around the calculus classroom, or the engineering fundamentals classroom, or organic chemistry classroom, and saw, basically, clones of myself. We all had K&E log-log, 24-scale split bamboo slide rules hanging from our belts, and we lived by them.

All that was fine. But when I approached my advisor in the last weeks of the semester and asked him if I could take a liberal arts course – French, maybe – the following year, this man whom I liked and respected, and whom I wanted to like me, said “No. There’s too much for you to learn. If you want to be an engineer, you have to study engineering.”

That seemed to mean that while I was inching my way up the socio-economic ladder of my country, I would also be burying myself in a part of the country that, while it was improving my lot in life, it was at the same time making me into a less interesting – and less interested - person than I wanted to be.

Well, I had studied engineering. My scholarships were renewed for the following year. I was basically set for a career that would lift me out of the poverty I was raised in. But I had also taken, as a requirement, an honors English course. We read and wrote … poetry! And short stories! My teacher was Professor Garrison.

I wrote a fairly long poem about a boy who sat by a creek and imagined where that creek might go. My character made a little sailboat and set it adrift in the creek. My imagination followed the sailboat downstream through pools and rapids like the ones I had grown up alongside in the Rogue and Klamath Rivers in southern Oregon. I followed that little sailboat all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where Jack Dunham and his pals and I had hiked down the Rogue River Trail to Illahe, then taken the mailboat on the river all the way to Gold Beach, and the sea, two or three summers before.

Professor Garrison read the poem. He smiled, nodded: “You should do some more of this.”

I was in love. I don’t remember the name of a single engineering professor from that year, though this many years later, I would say that they were all very good, even excellent. But the one professor I remember by name from my freshman year at Oregon State was not an engineering professor. It was Professor Garrison, who taught my course in required English. And yeah, that class had women in it. Actual human females.

The story drifted down through generations of my family that one of my great uncles or great grandfathers had been involved in the invention of that locking brake that engaged when two railroad cars met on the tracks (with a great shuddering slam, if they were the lead cars in entire sections of the train, and even louder if they were heavily loaded) until the huge mechanical snake was all connected in a great reptilian mechanism.

The story of that braking system didn’t include a happy chapter about family wealth. What came to us over our dinners of navy beans and cornbread was that the originators of that simple-yet-complex braking system had sold the design to someone else who patented it, for the whopping sum of fifty bucks, or some such. Well, fifty dollars was a real chunk of money in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Why, you could buy shoes for the whole family, plus stay drunk for a week, which some of my male relatives were known to do.…(TO BE CONTINUED)