I'd handed Kim that note when I did because I didn't know how things worked at Fishtrap and I wasn't sure if I'd get to spend much time with him. I had wanted to make sure I accomplished my prime mission of the trip, and I figured the earlier I gave him that note with my blog address, the better.
As it happened, this anticipation was completely erroneous. In the informal setting of the conference, there was ample opportunity to chat with anyone there.
Nevertheless, having committed myself to the gag, I kept my mysterious distance during most of the afternoon as people milled around outside the lodge. Then I made myself scare by going for a long walk in the woods before dinner time, up along the river as it comes cascading out of the Wallowa Mountains and cascades towards the peaceful lake.
I got back to the lodge in time to hear the dinner bell ring and arranged to be one of the first in line to fill up my plate. The tables inside the lodge were scarce, so I took my food outside to the patio and sat at an empty round table in the corner. A group of high school kids had taken a few of the other tables nearby and slid them together so that they could eat together. I began eating my meal in empty-minded solitude, grateful just to have arrived and to be there.
A few minutes into my meal, a woman about my age approached the table and asked if she could join me. She introduced herself as Pat and took a seat next to me. Within a few minutes the entire table had filled up, with two other men a little bit older than me, and then finally Kim and his wife Perrin. Kim sat right next to me. As he sat down he eyed me suspiciously as if to say, "who is this guy?"
By then I had officially registered and was wearing my apsen-slice name tag around my neck, showing only my first name.
"Need a hint?" I asked him with a grin, holding up my name-tag necklace.
What happened over the next hour of dinner was splendidly fun.
Pat asked me where I was from. "Colorado," I said.
"What town?"
"Fort Collins."
"Oh, yes," she said. "I lived in Fort Collins."
At that point that man next to her chimed in. "I used to live in Fort Collins," he said.
He turned out to be Don Snow, one of the authors leading the week-long workshop sessions. He was a published naturalist essayist, and was the chairman of the Environmental Humanities Department at Whitman College in nearby Walla Walla.
He said he'd gone to graduate school at Colorado State in the mid 1970's. He had lived there in the years right before my family arrived. He waxed about the good times he spent in the English department there.
"Did you know Bill Tremblay?" I asked him, referring to a retired member of the CSU English faculty whom I knew. It turns out he knew him well.
"How do you know him?" he asked me.
"I went to high school with his son," I told him. I said the Tremblays were good friends of my folks, and that they still lived in town.
Don brought up James Crumley, who had been on the English faculty before Bill Tremblay.
"Oh yeah," I said. "The Last Good Kiss." I had read that book a long time ago without even knowing the author had lived in Fort Collins. The hero is a private eye who drives all over the empty spaces of the American west in his old El Camino. It had somehow been inspiring to me.
Don lamented the sad end of Crumley, after he had gone to Hollywood and tried to get his screenplays produced there. He inferred that Crumley's writing had deteriorated sharply in those years possibly due to cocaine usage.
Don said he'd recently been back in Fort Collins and was greatly impressed the city's acquisition of the Soapstone property along the Wyoming border. It preserved a key mountains-to-plains segment of the ecosystem.
"Oh yeah," I said, "one of my best friends from high school was instrumental in shepherding the purchase of that. He's high up in the Nature Conservancy."
Then it came up that Pat, the woman next to me, had been married to a theoretical physicist. He had worked at Los Alamos before they moved up to Fort Collins, where he had been on the physics faculty at CSU. They got divorced because of the strain on their marriage there, according to her.
It also turns out that her physicist ex-husband was recently in the news as the man who started the Galena Fire last month, which sadly burned up even more of the area around Lory State Park in the foothills above town, scorching sections that had escaped the apocalyptic wildfires from the summer before. It turns out that his electric fence had been the culprit. Ironically the fire burned away from his property, leaving his house untouched while destroying neighboring properties.
"Ain't that how it always happens?" I said.
"Say, diid you ever know Sandy Kern?" I asked her, mentioning the name of another member of the CSU physics faculty.
"Yes, of course," she said.
"He was actually very influential in my becoming a physicist," I told her. "I had a key conversation with him right before I went to Willamette."
With those last words I halfway turned to Kim, hoping he'd catch them as a hint of my identity, but he was busy talking to other people at the table.
Pat mentioned the names of a few other people in the physics department at CSU.
"Actually Sandy is the only physicist I knew there," I said. "I really only knew him because of his wife Maxine, who was my high school drama director."
"Oh how's Maxine?" she asked with sudden curiosity.
"Last time I saw her she was doing very well." I explained that she and Sandy had gotten divorced, and that Maxine lived in New York City.
"At least the last time I saw her, she did," I said.
She asked me how long it had been since I'd seen her. "A ways back," I said. "In 2001."
"But I saw Sandy a couple years ago in Fort Collins," I added. "He was doing well. So are their kids."
"Yes, what were their names again?"
"Laura, and Michael," I said. "I went to high school with both of them. They were just older and younger than me. Laura lives in Australia and has kids of her own. Michael lives in Seattle, if I recall what Sandy said."
After that the conversation shifted I did more listening that talking. The other man at the table turned out to be Scott Russell Sanders, who was perhaps the most revered author at the entire conference. Over the next few days, many of the other people sung his praises effusively as a naturalist and as awriter about natural history and evolution.
At one point he was talking with Kim about a recent experience that I inferred that they had shared in Central Iowa, walking out among some virgin prairie that had been preserved there. It turns out that my late grandfather was highly instrumental in the preservation of those remaining sections of the prairie around Des Moines. Two years we scattered his ashes on one such piece in back of the high school where he taught.
Then Scott shared his experiences regarding a piece of former swamp in eastern Indiana near Fort Wayne that had recently been restored. It had been drained over a hundred years ago after the discovery of natural gas. When they restored the swamp, the original seed bank of native species sprung back to life almost by deep natural magic.
"I know that area," I said. "I was just there last year. My family is from around there. They came from West Virginia to set up glass factories around Gas City after the discovery of the natural gas fields there." My (other) grandfather had been born in nearby Blackford County.
After dinner, as the crowd waited outside the lodge for the evening program to start (a keynote address by Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild), I was standing by myself when Kim's wife approached me. Smiling, she told me that Kim was very curious about how we knew each other, and that he was definitely going to look up my blog.
At that point I realized that the gag had far outlived its purpose. So I decided to spill the beans.
"Actually I'm one of his former students," I told her, "from a long time ago. I took a couple of his classes at Willamette back in the 1980s."
She wasted no time in hurrying over to her husband to relay the information.
I watched as she told him. Then he looked at me at said, with a huge big smile.
"Chaucer!"
"That's right," I said.
"You're the rocket scientist, right?"
"That's me."
Then he added almost immediately, with an even bigger smile.
"You're the guy who traded his computer to some Shoshoni for a car in the middle of the Nevada desert!"
"Yup," I said, erupting with laughter. I couldn't believe he remembered that one.
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