Chapter 5: The Beaverhead

Chapter 5
The Beaverhead: High School Nerd
Dillon: 1952-55

The Lewis and Clark expedition made its way up the Beaverhead River, headed west, in 1804. After the expedition, Meriwether Lewis was appointed Governor of the Louisiana Territory, but things did not go well. Accused of incompetence, Lewis set out for Washington D.C. to answer complaints about his administration. On the way, he stopped at a tavern called Grinder's Stand, about 70 miles from Nashville, Tennessee, on the Natchez Trace. The next morning, servants found Lewis badly injured from multiple gunshot wounds. He died shortly after sunrise. His death has generally been considered a suicide, though the matter remains controversial. Thomas Jefferson, who appointed Lewis to head the Corps of Discovery, and who worked closely with him planning the trip, said later: “Governor Lewis had from early life been subject to hypochondriac [sic] affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, it was more immediately inherited by him from his father...While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind, but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by what I had seen in the family.”

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We moved from the Madison Range to the Beaverhead valley in the fall of 1952. The road from Twin Bridges to Dillon was unpaved, so it was safer to cut across the Ruby valley, turning off the paved road at Alder Gulch and picking pavement up again at Point of Rocks about 15 miles north of Dillon.

I was in a cast from my ankle to my hip, the result of a fractured tibia I got in football practice, early in the season in my sophomore year. I was generally terrible in any kind of varsity athletics but I went out to be with my friends and dutifully sat on the bench my freshman year. I was beginning to show a bit more promise my sophomore year, but the injury ended all that. I put the time and energy into study and into drama, where I had some success.

Being a new kid in school was hard enough, but being a new kid on crutches was worse. For some reason, a nerdy student with a great sense of humor knocked at my door and offered to spend time with me. His name was Bob Roby. His father was a mining engineer for Minerals Engineering Company, which mined tungsten him from the mountains west of Glen, 15 miles north of Dillon. He hired Bob and I to survey for the company in the summer of 1955, when Bob had been to college for a year and I had just graduated from high school. Bob was inclined to explore the limits of whatever freedom he had, and his first year of college had not gone well. I suspect we were hired partly to give Bob’s life some focus. Fifty-four years later, Bob Roby and I renewed our friendship through e-mail and he put me on to wonderul memoir, called Uncle Tungsten, written by Oliver Sacks the famous neurologist, about his life as a gifted, lonely adolescent in a family of chemists, physicists and doctors during and after WWII. Besides being a very good description of the discovery of tungsten, it is an excellent primer in the history of chemistry. It captures some of the romance and excitement of that field, and if such a book had been put into my hands when I started my chemistry major in 1955, I would have been a better student, or at least better motivated.

TUNGSTEN AND SURVEYING

In its pure state, tungsten is a steel-gray metal with the highest melting point of all the non-alloyed metals, and the highest of all elements except carbon. This makes it useful in high temperature applications, such as light bulb filaments and the nozzles of rocket engines. It is also among the densest of metals and therefore good for ballasting yachts and formula 1 race cars. Mixed with other metals, it is also extremely hard-- good for grenades and missiles. The ore we mined was called Sheelite, which is highly phosphorescent under black light. Good ore was said to "lamp hot." I remember crouching in a dark shack watching Bob's father run a black light over a fresh batch of drill dust. At the primary mine, near Browne's Lake west of Glen, Sheelite was blasted out of the side of a mountain, put into dump trucks and hauled a few miles down to a plant where it was ground up, mixed with water and other chemicals to make a slurry concentrated it enough to be shipped on to the next stage.

Since most of the known deposits of tungsten ore were at that time in the Soviet Union, its local production was subsidized during the Cold War, so I have Joe Stalin to thank for my surveying career, which I treasure. Some of the time we were at the primary mine and could ride out and home with Bob’s father, but our primary assignment was on another piece of land several miles from the main mine. Experimental drill holes and black light testing made it look like a promising source of tungsten, though it never panned out. The deposit had been worked in an amateur way by an earnest entrepreneur who still showed up once in a while. We called him Smiley. He had actually built a small concentrating plant before he lost his shirt and sold his rights to Minerals Engineering Company. He had moved in a couple of small cabins for his crew to live in, at a wide place in a beautiful narrow valley with high limestone cliffs above a small lake fed by a cold stream. Bob Roby and I lived in one of those cabins during the week, driving back and forth in a 1935 Chevrolet coupe that we had somehow acquired for $25. The insurance cost $35. We had a wood cook stove for heat and no electricity.

Bob’s father taught us how to set our transit up over a bronze section marker hammered in by the U.S. Geological Survey, and then to work out from that, driving stakes and moving the transit from one stake to the next, measuring the distance and angle back to the previous stake and forward to the next one. All the data was recorded in a book, in pencil because rain might cause ink to run. On rainy days then, we would transfer the data to complicated forms ruled with thin green lines, like accounting paper. Using trigonometry that had been reduced to algorithms that we did not have to fully understand, we would calculate latitudes (lats) and departures (deps) and azimuths on an old hand-powered calculator. This would allow someone at the main office to produce a detailed map of the area, on which the company could locate the test holes they were drilling. We measured our accuracy by running the survey in a loop a mile or so long and then shooting back to our original USGS bench mark. Ideally the numbers for that spot should match the numbers we began with. If the error were too great, we would have to go through the calculations until we found it. If it were not too great, it was distributed evenly among the hundreds of stakes we had set. Now I suppose it would all be done with geo-positioning satellites, more quickly and more accurately,

George Washington spent time as surveyor and so did Thoreau. It is training in observation and accuracy and even, rightly considered, in analogy. We find ourselves at a spot whose location has been already plotted: a particular spot in eternity. Then we strike out, moving from stake to stake, measuring, however unconsciously, the angles and distances back and then forward as best we can. Using formulas we do not altogether understand we calculate our progress, and we make a map we call our lives. At some point we begin to sense a need to close the loop, to seek the starting point. If the numbers do not match, we distribute the error equally. That is probably what I am doing here.

THE RANCH

That spring my father drove me back across the Ruby Mountains to Ennis to have my cast sawed off. My leg was a stick lying in a nest of hair. The calluses at the bottom on my feet dropped off like orange peel, and I could not bend my knee more than a few degrees. But I did my exercises faithfully, and as soon as I could, I got back on my bicycle, though I had to wire my right foot to the pedal to keep it from slipping off. I rode for hours through the streets of Dillon until I knew every side street and back alley. But just as I was beginning to feel at home in town, disaster struck. With a few dollars inherited from my mother’s family, my parents bought a quarter section eight miles south of Dillon, near the Barretts’ section house.

The ranch buildings were terribly run-down, hardly more than shacks, but the setting was lovely, at the foot a 180 foot cliff that rose straight up out of the Beaverhead River. Obviously, the river had cut through the cliff at that point, making a gap just wide enough for itself and later for the railroad and highway 10, the one that became Interstate 15 in the 1970’s. When I was taking geology as part of my training in chemistry at college, I became a bit of rockhound and even bought my own hammer. Going out to chip rocks and pretend to identify them was a cheap date. I dutifully chipped away at the rock decided it was basalt. I were not that far off. The official designation is andesite (named for the Andes), a volcanic rock consisting mostly of plaigiaclase and feldspar, like the low hills west of Dillon. This would make the rock shadowing my parents’ modest spread part of volcanic activity going on 50 million years ago as the Pacific plate slid under North America, in the process welding Northwestern Washington state to the continent with enough force to melt the underlying rock which then made its to the surface to eventually become a brooding presence in my life.

Lewis and Clark found the place compelling when they came through in 1805, though less for the spectacular cliff than for the rattlesnakes. The snakes had been there until just a few years before we bought the place. The owner, whose name was Harkness, told us how he got rid of them—by watching for a cloud of steam rising from the warmth of their den on a cold, still day and the planting a dynamite charge that blew bits of snake all over the homestead and left a white scar on the rock that is still there. I never saw a snake on the homestead side of the river, though there were still plenty of them across the river and snake hunters used to come out from Dillon and capture them in burlap sacks to sell to the people who made anti-venom.

From the hills surrounding the ranch, or from any place upstream, the cliff on the ranch side of the river looks like a beaver’s body—the little rodent head (in this case flat-faced), the long hump of his back sloping off into a tail in the rocky hills to the east. For this reason, people had called the place Beaver Rock, or Beaverhead Rock, and thus it laid claim to being a landmark recognized by Sakakawea when she was guiding Lewis and Clark through the country where she had grown up as a Shoshone, before she was sold to a French trader and taken to the Dakotas.

But there was a problem. Another formation, that I knew as Point-of-Rocks, lay about the same distance north of town as we were south. It too resembled a beaver, though far less accurately. Some people called that Beaver Rock and claimed it was the rock she had remembered. Sometime in the 70’s, the state was called on the resolve the matter. They wrote to my parents asking if they had any information that would help. They did not, so point-of-rocks won out, and today a roadside sign identifies it at Beaver Rock, and my parent’s ranch is demoted in Lewis and Clark scholarship to Rattlesnake Cliffs, where the explorers ate lunch, presumably watching carefully where they put their feet.

I could not have loathed the place more had it still been ankle-deep in rattlesnakes. That was too bad, because owning a place of his own had been my father’s dream since he had been a boy, and I should have been happy for him. I didn’t know it had been his dream, because he did not share his dreams with his children. But I could have asked, or I could guessed, or I could have just been a little more flexible. My mother must have known, and willingly (I assume) used most of her small inheritance to make her husband’s dreams come true.

JOSEPHINE

That was the kind of person she was. Quietly and resolutely adventurous, she had grown up in Wilmette, Illinois. She was born in 1909, in Philadelphia,, across the street from Independence Hall, though I don’t know what her parents were doing there or how they got to Wilmette, a middle-class suburb north of Chicago. Her father ran a small advertising agency there. His biggest account was Quaker Oats. I am sure she did not invent their logo, which had a man holding a box of Quaker Oats, with its label of a man holding a box of Quaker Oats, and so on into infinite regress. Staring at the box, which would have been a fascinating exercise in metaphysics in any case, was made more fascinating by the family connection. I can still catch myself today, staring razor in hand, at my reflection disappearing into the two mirrors on opposite sides of the bathroom where I live, as I used to do at the barbershops which always had, when I was young, mirrors on both sides of the room. Aristotle thought infinite regress unacceptable and brought it to a halt with the idea of a first cause, and Aquinas was happy to identify that first cause with the Old Testament YHWH. Later, as an undergraduate struggling to liberate myself from religious faith and justify fantasizing a life of bohemian self-indulgence, I pondered infinite regress again and--wiser than Aristotle and Aquinas combined--came to a different conclusion, one that made, not all the difference, but a lot.

I know my grandparents were not wealthy, but they had a comfortable house at 812 Prairie Avenue and enough money to send both my mother and her brother to Northwestern. He went on to get a Ph.D. in mathematics, and she earned a degree in classics in 1931. She never told me why she chose classics, and of course I never asked. But she always defended her choice by saying it made her life more interesting. I suspect it also made it more endurable. She was fond of quoting in Greek, the Homeric phrase, “These things lie in the lap of the gods.” One of her Greek teachers was N.C. Scott, who wrote a book about the New Testament that still sits on my shelves. I don’t suppose undergraduate degrees in classics were any more salable then than now, but she found a teaching job in Big Timber, Montana, where she could stay with her cousin, Florence (Bradford) Utermohle, who had made a difficult marriage to a German immigrant named Herman. There she met my father, who in his college pictures is almost devilishly handsome and who walked with a limp. She may well have used her reading of Homer in the original Greek to identify my father with Hephaestus and to see his limp as a symbol both of his underlying vulnerability and his ambition in overcoming obstacles.

HOW I DID NOT ADJUST TO RURAL LIFE

My aversion to rural work had already begun with my summer fallowing, and the ranch took all that tension to a higher level. I had begun to adjust to a city life though I don’t think it was a very healthy one, playing pinball and shooting pool after school. Now I had to catch the bus after school and ride it in the morning. The bus came all way from Farmstead, 28 miles south of Dillon and I was the second to the last stop on the way into town. The other students riding the bus seemed hulked and sullen in their blue and gold Armstad jackets. I must have seemed to them the eternal nerd. Sometimes they would casually tip my books out of the hand as I made my way down the aisle, but most of the ostracizing was covert--giggling and pointing while I say stony-faced. One of the girls, who had a terrible bleeding rash on her hands, got a crush on me and told her friend so in a note, which another student intercepted and read out loud. It was only kids’ stuff, no worse than what any adolescent has to endure, but I it made it easier for me to be miserable.

The house and buildings themselves were run down, but the house, once it was cleaned up, was not that much worse than what I was used to. My mother never worked, and my parents were scrupulous about living on their income, so I always seemed to live in a house that was shabbier than those of my friends. When we lived in Ennis, we had indoor plumbing in only one of the three houses we lived in and I slept in an unfinished porch in our house in Dillon, but my friends didn’t hold it against me, and as long as I had my friends, I was fine. But everything about the place nudged me toward despair. There was a rickety bridge across the river, supported in the middle by a pier that tipped at a dangerous angle, so just driving across it was frightening. I could still drive to town for play rehearsals, and usually I could take the family car, a 1950 Chevy that was presentable enough. But occasionally I had to take the farm trick, a beat-up 1948 International with pillows on the seats to protect the passengers from the springs that stuck through the cracked vinyl covers. The cab was littered with tools and it smelled of old oil. When my mother offered to host a birthday party, I was at first incredulous and then contemptuous.

At first ranch work seemed only an extension of what I was used to. Chores were slightly more elaborate than caring for the 4-H lambs in the back yard. Harvest and haying were only slightly more elaborate than seed time and summer fallowing and harvest on the Madison. Some of it was better. An old broken down team of horses came with the farm and my father fattened and doctored them until they were sleek and nimble. I loved to drape the heavy, sweat-caked leather harness over them and guide them gently along ahead of me on a mowing machine or a dump rake. We still had the little orange Case tractor, probably could have mowed or raked faster, but I think my father enjoyed doing things the old way. I think, too that he was offering my and my brother some gifts—gift of rural competence and a glimpse into a vanishing way of life.

In some ways it did work. Despite my adolescent grumpiness, I did learn something—two things really. I learned to work, or I made a beginning. I remember my parents talking to some ranch friends about a young man from the east who had been sent out to west to toughen up. They were complaining that he did not know how to work. I was puzzled. How do you not know how to work. But later I got it. Knowing how to work is much more than knowing the skills. Those can generally be acquired. But any job—even digging a ditch--requires rock-bottom skills that have to do with pacing yourself and not giving up. Anyone can do anything as long as the day is cool, their tools are sharp, their enthusiasm is running high, and the flush of novelty is on the job. But knowing how to work includes knowing how to keep going when the sun grows hot and the tools grow dull and the mosquitoes come out. In the rural world, the penalties for quitting are immediate and severe.

I also learned some more rural lore: how to harness a team of horses, how to drive that team of horses around a field to cut or rake hay, how to set a canvas dam in an irrigation ditch, how to ease a horse into a horse trailer by rigging a temporary chute out of lariat rope, how to sharpen a sickle, how to change the oil filter on a tractor, how to give a cow a shot, how to put the thick rubber bands on a calf’s scrotum so the testicles would wither and fall off, how to heat up the branding iron and sear one’s ownership into a calf’s skin, how watch the veterinarian pregnancy testing the cows by inserting his arm (covered in a long rubber glove) into the cow’s vagina, how to use a portable flame thrower to burn dead weeds from the irrigation ditches, how to build a hay stack with either loose or baled hay, how to cut new threads into a bolt, how to do simple oxygen/acetylene welding, how to recognize a 3/8th inch bolt so I reach for the right size of nut the first time.

It should have worked. I should have been grateful for those skills then, as I am now. I should have been pleased and proud that my father was passing his legacy onto me. I should have put up with his short temper and monosyllabic ways. One conversation, the right conversation, at the right time, would have tilted the landscape the other way.

THE DAWN OF DARKNESS

Instead, over the coming months, I sunk deeper and deeper into depression and began, for the first time, to fantasize taking my own life. I was quite serious. I knew exactly where I was going to do it—in a little weeded space behind the bunkhouse, just 150 yards from where Meriwether Lewis might have strolled into the weeds, lost in his own melancholy thoughts. I knew what I would use: my father’s .22 rifle, with its hexagonal barrel and lovely heft. I may have even taken the gun out in the space and rehearsed. Only fear—and perhaps social stigma—held me back.

These impulses came on me, off and on, for the next twenty years and did not entirely abate until I was 37, and, as they say in the Pentecostal tradition, found the Lord. The next time they nearly overcame me was when I was in the Navy, so overwhelmed by responsibilities I fantasized escape by quietly slipping over the fantail at night in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They were still a part of my life even after I had children, but my sons supplied me with the first rational argument I could think of against suicide—that it was a terrible legacy to leave one’s children. After I had that thought, I knew I would not in fact take my life, and that knowledge diminished the impulse but did not take it away.

When I come across first-person accounts of suicide attempts, I usually read them, but I find found them either hysterical or remote, even when they written by very accomplished writers. It is very hard to make sense of suicide. From the outside it seems preposterous. From the inside, seems inevitable, even rational. After all, I hated myself. Why should one not what to kill the thing one hates? The urge to live seems to be embedded in the cells, and when the cells declare against you, there seems to be no appeal. There is no sadder verse in the Bible than the one in Matthew 5:13: . If the salt has lost is savor, how shall it be salted. It is another case of iron lines drawn in the dust. When I was sick, I could look over to my healthy self across a unbridgeable chasm, like Lazarus calling out to Dives, and when I somehow found myself on the sunny side, my old sick self seemed unreal, something I might have made up, less than a memory.

Of course, I did not think of seeking help or of talking to anyone. It never entered my mind. I knew my mother to be sympathetic and my father to be wise, but my mother had been schooled in British reserve, my father in Western stoicism. Talking about one’s unhappiness was not in the family tradition. There were no such things as school counselors. I would not have embarrassed my friends by sharing something so personal. That trend runs pretty deep. In my novel, completed in 1985, the protagonist thinks “whatever can be concealed can be endured.” Certainly this is a characteristic I have tried to overcome and have been assisted mightily by my wife who has done much to encourage communication while still respecting my basic nature.

Though I have continued to struggle against clamming up in the face of pain, there is still part of me of that thinks Western stoicism and British reserve are not altogether bad things. Certainly it is possible to err in the other direction. The sweaty, programmatic sharing of the 1960’s is probably a world well-lost. The sharing of pain actually seems to increase in poignancy and intensity when shared indirectly, by body language, irony, and voice inflection. Heard melodies are sweet, says Keats, though what me means by saying that those unheard are sweeter, I cannot say.

HIGH SCHOOL DAYS

And so I made way through high school. Common sense or cowardice defeated my Werther side at last. I studied hard, got good grades, earned some recognition for acting in school plays, and running for office in school politics. I spent wonderful evenings with Wanda or Dorothy or Marjorie or Sharon, parked under the stars on hills overlooking my little town, lost in the scent and texture of the other sex. There were rumors that one could go further than neck-up petting, but I had no desire to go there. I was not sure how any of that worked, but I knew that babies came of it, and I knew I was not ready for babies. I knew there were things you could use to ward off babies, but they seemed unreliable and complicated. I might drive home aching and half-doubled over, but I never lost control.

I was one of a small number of students who carried a sack lunch to school and ate in the social science room. Other students went home or were given money to eat downtown. During noon hours, we could go downtown and listen to 45 rpm records in a sound-proof booth: The Crewcuts, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Rosemary Clooney, The Gaylords.. Religion itself was strictly a social affair, part of what I did. My mother was a good Episcopalian, from Anglican stock. Two of her grandfathers had been Episcopalian priests. One of them had performed her wedding. When there was an Episcopal Church anywhere near, she went and she took me. When were there was no Episcopal Church, she went to whatever was available. Sometimes, but not often, my father went along. I went to Sunday School and in due course was confirmed, became an acolyte and went with my friends to meetings of the Episcopal Youth Group. Most of my friends went there or to a Methodist church down the street that had less stained glass. I didn’t know any Catholics, I didn’t know anyone whose family did not go to church. I enjoyed the solemnity and rhythms of the liturgy and took my acolyting seriously. I had no religious curiosity that I remember, but I was concerned with doing things right. If someone said it was irreverent to chew the Host, I didn’t chew the Host. If I ever said a prayer I can’t remember it.

So I drifted toward graduation—doing my homework, acting in school plays, inhaling the sweet perfume of this girl or that, doing what I had to do on the ranch, but separating myself emotionally further and further from what I saw as an ugly life in an ugly place. I behaved despicably. One Sunday after church, I was still in my white shirt when we were having dinner. My mother stared at him and remarked how much I looked like a Greek god when I wore a white shirt. I could have done a hundred things: grinned and said Thanks Mom, or gotten up and kissed her on the cheek. Instead I bolted to my room, changed out of my church clothes into my shapeless ranch dungarees and returned to the table with a sullen look on my face. I knew I was behaving badly though I could not stop and could not say why. Even now I can only guess that I was trying to say to my parents: You made me into a rural urchin, look upon me as a rural urchin. So long as I live here, I will be the lowly thing you have forced me to become. The thing you have forced me to become must die, but in order for that death to be complete, I must become, on the outside, that thing completely. My only hope is a complete chasm between my inner and outer selves. When I leave this place, I will unzip my outer skin and step out of it completely and out of my inner purity I will weave myself a new identify, that will owe nothing to anyone. If I am to have any other identify, I will achieve that in another time, in another place, by my own power.

THE WAY OUT

I appeared to be rejecting my mother, but it was myself that I rejected. In order to reject myself I had to reject all things rural, all things Western, all things impoverished: the deep smell of fabric thick with dirt and used motor oil. It did not have to be that way. If my mother, or especially my father, had called me aside after dinner and said, “That was a very peculiar thing you did, and it hurt your mother very much. I am curious about why you did that.” No doubt I would have grown sullen and silent, but then he could have said, “Well, I know it is hard to explain why we do anything, but I think you should think about it, and when you have an answer I hope you will come and tell me. Until you do, the car keys are off limits. We will drive you where you need to go. And now, go out and apologize to your mother.

Instead, I sulked and plotted my escape. The agency for doing that was college. I murmured the word to myself as Juliet might have murmured Romeo.

I even chose a major, chemistry, by my junior year. That seed was planted early, perhaps when I was 7 or 8 and my uncle subscribed to a service that sent me an experiment each month in a little pasteboard box. Then, when I was nine or ten my mother took me to Marshall Fields in Chicago and told me I could pick up a toy within a certain price range. For reasons I can’t remember I chose a chemistry set, made by Chemcraft. They came in different sizes and complexity, like boxes of crayons, so I was able to find one—probably the Junior--within the limits set. In those days, they were made by the Porter Chemical Company in Haggerstown, Maryland, near where my sons would live with their mother after we separated finally in 1979. After 1961, Lionel made them, along with electric trains. Perhaps I was attracted by those square, thick glass bottles of crystals and liquids that could be arranged in neat rows. Some chemist with a nose for nostalgia still makes available on the internet the experiment books and the lists of chemicals supplied with each set, so I know that the junior kit had 14 of those: powered sulfur, sodium carbonate, sodium bisulfite, and 11 more. It had a little alcohol lamp, whose tiny flame could be enhanced by blowing on it through a glass tube, and a tiny spoon. With the junior kit, you could do 305 experiments. Probably by the time I got to the Beaverhead, I had upgraded with my own money to the Senior set, which could do 561 experiments, but surely not to the Master, which could do 716. I was not one to go for broke.

I set up shop first in a stuffy upstairs bedroom in my second house in Ennis and then, when we moved out to the Ranch, I set the chemicals up in neat rows on orange crates in front of the window in a bedroom I shared with my brother, kind of a lean-to really, that had been added to the original log home. It leaked rain and was freezing in the winter, but pleasant enough in the summer. Outside the window were hollyhocks and lilacs. One of the experiments told how to make the hollyhock leaves into an indicator—a substance that changes color to indicate pH. I did that one frequently, perhaps sensing it was the one gesture that brought together the two parts of my life that were otherwise so far apart.

I also had the gift of a good chemistry teacher, Mr. Golde, bald man with a slight German accent, a good sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye. He would do simple experiments for us in class, mixing two substances and then waving a glass stirring rod over them until they changed color after a time delay. Because of him and because of Chemcraft, I toured the Chemistry building when the seniors went overnight on Career Days, to what was then Montana State College in Bozeman. The students there blew us little glass swans full of colored liquid and showed us rube-goldburg devices that turned water into juice. That was enough. I was hooked. Bozeman and chemistry it was.

When I left for college in the fall of 1955, I thought of myself as fleeing for my life. I hardly came home on breaks and as soon as I graduated I joined the navy and asked for assignment to ships that would take me to the other side of the world.