Chapter 6
The Bridgers: Chemistry Major
Bozeman: 1955-59

The Bridger Mountains are named for Jim Bridger, who at the age of 17,  left his home in Virginia to become a fur trapper and mountain man in the West. He was the first white person to see the Great Salt Lake and his descriptions of Yellowstone Park did much to publicize the area. When gold was discovered in Montana in the 1860’s, thousands of miners came north along the Bozeman trail and were attacked by the Sioux, Arapahoe, Cheyenne in the valley of Powder River.  In 1864, Bridger was commissioned to  find a longer alternate route to connect the Oregon Trail to the gold fields in Montana, one which would skirt the Indian country. He did this, and the trail was named after him. However, after the cavalry had pacified the Indians somewhat, Bridger himself always used the shorter route.

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I sat beside my father in the fall of 1955, as he drove me off to my new life. Along the way he gave advice about How to Succeed in College, which I think had to do with not getting behind in your homework. More startlingly , he told me about how he had suffered a “nervous breakdown” when he lived in Big Timber, and how he had gone to Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Mayo had decided that, among other things, his stomach was not generating enough acid, so he had to drink hydrochloric acid from a straw so that it did not corrode his teeth.  I am sure I listened politely, though my mind was on the life ahead.

We drove though the Tobacco Roots and past the Ruby Range, but I did not know the names of the mountains then,  only that they were blue and remote, serene, detached-- all the things I thought I wanted to be. I suppose I was no more callow and arrogant than many 18-year-olds going off to college (actually I would be  17 for a few months yet). I don’t think I was incapable of love, but, my determination to conquer overrode all my other emotions. I wanted to engineer, or at least ride, my own orogeny. I wanted to rise above the landscape.

COLLEGE DAYS

I came home as little as I could—at Thanksgiving and Christmas and for summers. I suppose there must have been a spring break as well. For the first couple of years I caught rides with friends, in particular a quiet boy Charles Hollensteiner who, like so many of my friends, dropped out during the first year, broken by calculus and homesickness. I  had trouble with calculus too and even had to repeat one quarter of it. But homesickness was not a problem. I loved college. Wherever I lived--dormitory, rooming house, or fraternity--I turned my desk into my kingdom. Early on, I bought an immense cantilevered fluorescent drafting lamp. I have a version of it still, and still love to turn off all the light in the room and work by its enchanted circle. I never missed a class. I took careful notes and then recopied them at night, comparing them as did so with the text--which I also outlined. I have some of those notes yet, written in a pale, tense, rounded print. I studied every night three or four hours, including Friday and Saturdays when there would be only two or three of us in the whole fraternity house, fellow monks in the service of the goddess of science, studying p-chem or organic, or differential equations. The smarter ones took hard courses and partied too, the slower or less driven changed majors, usually to education, but some of us knew we could succeed only by working hard, and we were glad to do the work. When the drunks came home after midnight, whooping it up, we watched with bemusement. We did not envy them their hangovers in the morning.  

When I did go home and had no ride, I caught the bus to Whitehall where my parents would pick me up. Sometime in my junior year, I bought my first car, a blue 1949 Plymouth, for $150. When it  developed a dangerous wobble, I traded it for a 1950 Chevy with a windscreen and a radio. It knocked badly when it was cold but hummed along when it got warmed up. When I left for the Navy, I warmed it up and sold it for $200 to someone I didn’t know. I loved those cars for the sense of independence they gave me. Like everyone else, I kept a, magnetized  can-opener with a triangular head—a church key—on the dash and used it to open cans of syrupy coke, an elixir for  the road.

THE ROCK

Back on the ranch, I would help out if there were work to do, but mostly I would mope restlessly about waiting for the day when I could head back to my room and my books and my desk and my friends. My mother would make me banana cream pie, because she remembered that I once said that it was my favorite.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I no longer particularly cared for it. When my mother would suggest that I call up my high school friends and go out, I would shake my head. I wanted to leave all that behind.

What I did do was climb the rock. I must have done this for the first time soon after I moved to the ranch. The cliff sloped down the east, where the beaver’s haunches would be, and the hill was covered with sagebrush at that point, so it was a fairly easy scramble up to top of the ridge and from there along the ridge to the top. The wind seemed to always blow, and always from the south, so I could stand near the top, a few feet back from the sheer face, braced against the wind, and look down on the little farmstead, the river as it curved to wash the base of the cliff, and the bridge that looked as if it were made of matchsticks. From the air, the buildings seem less of a shambles than they did from ground level. The place had a magnificent barn, large and sturdy, with a hip roof that was only starting then to deteriorate, and it acted as a kind of centerpiece.  High above my home, I rode the wind. From far enough away, I could feel curious about the people who lived there, in this modest scatterings of buildings tucked away in the shadow of a great rock. I would sit there sometimes for an hour or more, reluctant to come down and confront the shabby buildings at eye level

Following up on my modest efforts to find some coherence in my life, begun with the hollyhock indicator, I entered into a scientific relationship with the rock for I had just sense enough to realize that a magnificent formation, however much I despised the life it sheltered. When I had had a little trigonometry and physics  in college, I borrowed my father’s  transit and used my surveying experience to measure the angles to the base and height of the cliff and the length from my transit to the base. With two angles and one length, I could use trigonometry to  calculate the height of the cliff. I suppose I could still do it now if I had to. As I remember It came out to be about 186 feet. Then I threw by a stone off the top and timed its  fall to the bottom. Having learned in college physics that falling objects accelerate at 32 feet per second per second, I could confirm, in a rough way, my survey work.  I wrote it all up in what I took to be neat, scientific fashion on ruled graph paper—called Murray Paper—that science majors used for all their work. I’m glad it has been lost, so no one can check my work.

My attempt to bring science to bear on what I took to be my impoverished life was more successful than my attempt to do the same art. Perhaps because I was dating an art major, I took an introductory art class and became much enamored with  the colorful geometry of the Dutch artist Modrian. The homestead had at one time been thoughtfully landscaped so that different flowering shrubs bloomed sequentially. But it had been terribly run down over the years and the yard was mostly mud, especially between the rattle-trap back door and the sagging outdoor clothes line. On a bit of open wall along that path, I nailed bits of lath in irregular rectangles to make what I thought of as work of art: Trellis, after Modrian.  I probably tried to explain who Modrian was, at least to my mother.  Then I used the farm truck to  get a load of flat rocks, which I arranged as stepping stones my mother could use to cross the mud on  her way to hang out clothes. I arranged them, of course, in an artistic manner. I may have been planted ivy I thought might grow up the trellis. But of course the rocks soon sank in the mud and the ivy did not survive in the shaded nook. But the lath stayed there through a couple of painting of he house, testimony to my pathetic attempt bring civilization to the back country while resolutely  overlooking or demeaning the life that was there.

THE MODERN

Sometime in my freshman year , I heard the siren song of Modernism, in the form of a Dave Brubeck. recording. I suppose it must have been in the dorm where I spent my first year, on a high-end stereo owned by Gene Shumacher, a bright boy from Billings, who was majoring in physics. The summer after my freshman year, I special ordered an album of 45’s and brought it home.  It had “Take the A Train” on it. I played it for anyone who would listen, enjoying their looks of  horror and confusion. I  drank  the sound  in great gulps. After 10 years or so I stopped listening to Brubeck and even stopped listening to jazz altogether, but I went on drinking from that same fountain—the fountain of Modernism—for another 50 years. Modernism   gave me my identify, separating me from my parents and my faith but opening up a new world.  Teaching it gave me a living for 36 years. It gave my life what shape and direction and intensity it had, though it nearly killed me.

It is hard to say what I heard in that music. As I listen to it now, Paul Desmond’s tenor saxophone hovers on the borderline between enchanting and irritating. Most songs begin with Brubeck’s comforting chord progressions, but then comes the tenor sax, playing what seem to be scales. The album cover says the song is “Stardust” or some other familiar song, but where is the melody? Then, when you are about to give up, there it is, but with half the notes embroidered in mini-scales. Listening to it then, I somehow sensed that history had turned a corner and that I had turned with it. I dimly recognized it as my ticket out of town.

What is modernism and why did so many in my generation find it attractive?  One comprehensive handbook, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism defines it as “a style of writing prevalent between WWI and WWII, though sometimes applied more generally to the whole period from 1890 to the present.”  That same source says that  modernism “signals a revolutionary break from established orthodoxies, a celebration of the present, and experimental investigation of the future.”

So that was part of it. Like Rock ‘n roll was for the next  generation,  progressive jazz (and by extension modern art)  was music  I knew my parents would never like. Part of its point was its difference from what had gone before. But my adolescent rebellion was riding the wave of a much larger cultural rebellion that was modernism itself. Richard Ellman, in a landmark anthology, called The Modern Tradition, cites Lionel Trilling’s essay, which, Ellman says, “singles out a radically anti-cultural bias as the most important element of the modern imagination.” The past will not do. Something better has to be found.  But that could not have been all of it. There had to have been something more to keep me drinking from that fountain for so long.  I have come to identify those things as difficulty, remoteness, and formality. Those became my watchwords for many years.

CHEMIISTRY AND GIRLS

For awhile I did try to keep  my last romance from high school going, writing letters back and forth, but that soon dribbled away in misunderstandings. Then I tried for awhile to revive an earlier romance but the girl had a steady boyfriend and was on her way to marriage. Any meaningful dating was simply impossible without a car, so  at the end of my freshman year, I joined a fraternity, largely because I was told I could borrow a car from the brothers, but of course when I needed a car, which was on weekends, the brothers did too, so it never worked out. Without the satisfactions of necking, without a woman’s hair in which to bury my face, without the intoxicating taste of lipstick, without the sweet rustle of the multiple petticoats that girls wore then,  I grew more and more lonely.  I began to take long driven walks through campus after midnight, often ending at a little pond behind the chemistry building. It was surrounded by huge pine trees and I would lie on the thick bed of needles, and watch the moon move through the tops of the trees until I was chilled and sleepy enough to go home and sleep for a few  hours before my 8:00 class.  

If romantic despair defined one pole of my early college life, then the chemistry building was the other pole. The two of them were probably not more than 20 yards apart. When I visited the campus last, in the summer of 2002, the building had been turned over to Earth Science and now given a new name.  I took at least one class there every quarter for four years.

Classes were generally in the morning, labs in the afternoon. We wore plastic aprons over our v-neck sweaters, and our hands were always blotched from sulfuric acid or potassium permanganate. The lab was a closed world, full of smoke, acrid smells, and at least a glimmer of mystery. We would arrange the beakers and stoppers in the manner  prescribed and plod= along the paths generally laid out for us so that we might glimpse some of the wonder of those who had discovered those paths. In the case of qualitative analysis we were given  powders or vials and told to identify them. The first test was always to dip in a platinum wire and hold it in a Bunsen burner. Cadmium burned yellow, another element burned violet, and so on. Then the harder work began—dissolving the substance and adding things to see if it would form a flocky precipitate. When we had an answer, we would take it to the instructor, Dr. Woodruf, who would be wearing a white lab coat over orange corduroy pants and a green sports coat. He would browse through a greasy stack of index cards and tell us whether we were right or wrong. If you were female and pretty, you got hints—at least that was the legend.


On the front wall of every classroom hung a huge periodic chart, which listed all the elements in order of their atomic weight.  It was an icon, like the crucifixes  that hang in the classrooms of Catholic schools, like the Gilbert portrait of Washington that hung in every classroom in grammar school. These things were presumed to yield mysteries in layers as one started at them, and no doubt they do.  I still keep a couple of versions of the periodic chart handy. The standard version, laid out in squares, besides being on the wall in front of us, was printed in the end papers of our Freshman chemistry texts, that I still keep on my shelves.  In those days the charts listed the 92 elements that  occurred naturally plus  six that had been artificially created.  Now there are 118, many of them unnamed. Our version was laid out in eight columns. In the left column were oxygen and things that combined with it in equal amounts.  To the far left were the inert gases, also called “noble” because they distained to combine with anything. The elements in each column were roughly similar in appearance and had arcane resemblances at the atomic level.  When Mendeleev worked out the chart in the 18th century, there was a gap where no element existed, and the chemists used that fact to discover  Gallium within a few months.  The chart not only recorded empirical knowledge, it went beyond it. It gestured toward a deep structure in the universe.

In other words, on a piece of paper, 8 inches by 10, someone had been able to compress an immense amount of information and also to hint at an order in the universe. I  was fascinated by it and still am. I keep a couple of versions of the chart on the shelves near me as I write these words. How could anyone not be fascinated glimpses of  an elegant, invisible matrix which somehow generated our messy visible world. When I came to read the poems of Yeats and Eliot and still later the book of Matthew, and when I was staring at the early x-rays of crystals, I would have the same feeling—that Things were Connected and, that their connectedness was the most important thing about them. I could have easily taken the next step, to connect my shallow, liturgical experience of God with these hints of mystery and order implied in the Periodic Table.  I could have conceived of order in the universe from the top down.

SCIENCE AND FAITH: A SLIGHT MISSTEP

But I did not, for I had become determined to lose my faith. Why people lose faith or find it is a deep mystery, so deep that perhaps the hints of predestination in the book of Romans only begin to explain it. In my case, it happened, so far as I can tell, because I was deeply impressed with two roommates,  gifted students who would breeze through their homework and ace test after test. They were deeply skeptical about religion  but also curious. They would lie in their bunks at night and talk about a religion they had invented out of the syllables of their last names: Shrimach.  I would lie in my bunk and listen with utter fascination and envy. Not only could they score 20 points more than I could on tests, with seemingly one-third the work, but they could converse endlessly and eloquently about ultimate meaning. I don’t remember much  about the actual system. I suppose it must have been some sort of blend of Buddhism and humanism. It was enough to shatter my fragile religious faith like glass.

Perhaps from them, perhaps from somewhere else, I got hold a crude version of Darwinsim and began to see that order in the universe could be seen coming from the “top down” OR from the”bottom up.”  That is, order in the universe could be explained by a creator, but it could also be explained by chance. The universe might work because some divine mind had made it to work, or it could be simply the result of trial and error. In a random universe, atoms would keep bumping up against each other, and some of those combinations  would produce a stable molecule. Enough bumping molecules could eventually produce the mind of Einstein. As I think about it now, it seems absurd. Imagine all the parts of my 1949 Plymouth being turned in a drum, like bingo counters. No matter how many eons the drum turned, would the parts ever cohere and produce my car? But I did not think in such concrete terms.  I had read somewhere that the odds against order being generated by trial and error  were so astronomical that there could not have been enough time for it to happen, and  I clung to that argument like a man clinging to life raft, though really, I was trying  to drown.

Finally, in my junior year, in a sunny corner of the second floor of the library, I was reading a book I had picked at random from the shelves, as I  often did. There I found revealed the possibility that time was infinite. The universe could have always existed and if it had, surely there would be enough time for these random bumps to have taken place. The door to a life without God opened, and I fled through it in a moment.