Rodney

Journal Entry
September 5, 1999

I first met Rodney on a conference call.  Actually, you could say that I actually didn’t’ met him at that time but was introduced to him.  I was during a conference call for a new project at work and the representative from the USDA wanted to conference in a guy from his office, Rodney.  I didn’t know at the time but I was to develop a friendship and find a kindred spirit in Rodney.  Over the next week or two after the conference call I exchange some email with Rodney, strictly on a professional level.  It was a couple of weeks later that I actually met Rodney.  To kick off the project a meeting was scheduled in Fort Collins Colorado at the USDA office there.  I had never been to Colorado, much less any part of the mid west so I was looking forward to the experience. 

At the time a young guy, Mat, was working for me and we decided to go a day early to Fort Collins so that we could check out the area.  We arrived Saturday evening so we had all day Sunday.  On Sunday morning Mat and I got up and decided to drive up into the mountains for neither of us had seen the Rockies before.  What a site they were, they put the mountains in Virginia to shame, although that is not entirely so as they are just.  Where the mountains in Virginia are green, rolling, and covered with trees the mountains in Colorado are steep, rocky, snow covered, much, much higher and intense different, but that is another story. 

Well, anyway, on Monday we went into the USDA office to discuss the project.  We had previously arranged to meet Rodney at 8:30 in the morning so we showed up right at 8:30 and signed in and the receptionist called Rodney’s office and to find he wasn’t in yet.  We didn’t haven’t long to wait for Rodney showed up a few minutes later.  I, coming from the DC “don’t waste time, jump right in, get going” mindset was somewhat setback when Rodney suggested we go get coffee first.  Well it didn’t take me but a few seconds to adjust and I said sure, sounds good.  What a flash back that experience was. 

You have to put it in perspective and go back in time.  First the perspective, Fort Collins is a college town, the primary business and whole orientation of the town is the college.  Now the back in time.  I grew up in just such a town, Gainesville Florida.  Not only that, but for the first six years after high school I worked at the University in a place that was so much like the place that Rodney worked that I seemed to be stepping back in time. 

Well anyway, when Rodney suggested we go to around the corner to a coffee shop I seemed so natural to me for that that’s what I would have done whey I worked for the University if I had guests.  Well what a dejavu experience that was.  We went down the block to a café that was something out of the 60’s.  It was all painted up with a mural on the outside wall of fairy tail painting of Gomes, towers, streams and princess.  On the inside it was rustic home made tables and kinda of that feeling that it hadn’t had a really good cleaning in a while.  Behind the counter was a guy that looked like some college dropout, around 40 with a scraggily beard but you know he probably had a PHD and probably could not leave the town after getting it and stayed on working there for the past ten years.  So we had coffee and some superficial conversation before heading back to the office.  Well that was my first real introduction to Rodney. 

That first morning coffee was what I remembered the most, the rest of the day and meetings were just business.  Although I conversed with Rodney off on and on over the next couple of months via email it was just business.  It wasn’t until a couple of months later that I next met Rodney. 

The last week of the Phase one of the project we planned a trip to Austin Texas to install and demonstrate the system at the state office there.  Rodney flew from Colorado to Austin to meet us.  The demonstration was some what of a disaster but that evening Rodney, Brian and I went out to dinner and had some really interesting conversation.  Let me back up and tell you about Brian.  Brian was a contractor that was working for me who had developed some of the system that we were demonstrating.  Brian and I had some minor but interesting conversations during the course of the project and I had begun to respect and develop somewhat of a liking for him.  I must admit that at first when my boss brought Brian in as an “expert” I was somewhat, how should I describe it, pissed off?  I think my ego was hurt for I thought of myself as the “expert” in our group and my boss had bought this outsider in as an expert. 

Well over the course of a couple of weeks of the project I begun to realize the Brian did know some things that I didn’t know but on the other hand he wasn’t such the “expert “that he was bought in for.  By the time we were to go to Austin Brian and I had develop some what of a respect for each other and had begun to, I think, actually like each other.  We had some real interesting conversations about all sorts of scientific subjects. 

Well that night Rodney, Brian and I went out to eat and had a few drinks and had some really interesting conversations about all sorts of things, Y2K, environment, mathematical patterns, radio telescopes, dolphins and so on.  Actually I think that Rodney and Brian hit it off better than I did but I think that we all three developed a comradeship with each other.  With that being the end of Phase I of the project not much happened for the next month. 

Come the first of September the USDA wanted to discuss Phase II of the project and so once again I went to Fort Collins.  This time there were several people from other states meeting with us and we met at the USDA office by Rodney promptly at 8:00 am, I was quite surprised.  The meeting went well and around 4:30 Rodney came up to me and asked about what my plans were.  I had made plans early that day to go to dinner with the group from Austin Texas who I had developed somewhat of a friendship with.  When I told Rodney this, he seem somewhat flustered for I think that he had hoped that we could have got together.  I suggested we get together the next night and he agreed. 

Back when we were in Austin one of the things we talked about was his radio telescope and I really wanted to see it so the next day we were able to finish up our meeting early and I left with Rodney and went to his home.  Rodney is this really down to earth type of guy and I pictured him as living in a cabin in the mountains.   Well on the way to his house we made a couple of turns in the city and in a few moments entered into his neighborhood.  As if he was reading my mind about my picture of him living in a cabin in the mountains he made a comment about him living in suburbia USA.  Well he had a very nice house, wife and two teenage kids, a daughter and son.  We spent some time looking at the VLF radio telescope which I thought was really neat. 

After a while he said he had another experiment in his basement and we went down to see it.  It was an experiment to detect and record fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field which I really found interesting.  Although I found it amazing what he had created, my scientific nature found several flaws in the experiment.  Still, I thought “wow, this is really neat”.  When I was younger, much younger, I had read Scientific American and it had a section called the Amateur Scientist which had experiments much like this and I used to dream of doing them.  I also was really into electronics and made many electronic gadgets.  What Rodney was doing seemed so much like the things I used to do it almost may me cry.  If I had stayed on working at the UF, married, and had kids, I would have been so much like him.  It was a life I longed for, a life I missed.  Later after dinner and he told me how the politics of the organization he worked for caused may of the people to leave but some, such as himself, stayed on.  Man, did that hit home with me,  I was one of the ones that left.  I could imagine myself as a Rodney if I had stayed.  After dinner we went to a meeting on Astro-photography and saw slides of stars and galaxies taken with a telescope.  This was just the type of meeting I used to go to when I worked at the UF.  It seemed so comfortable, so relaxed.  It made me long for a life that could have been.

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