First I was an Aggie

After a marvelous four years at West Virginia University, I asked around. “Where is the best school for someone in Wilderness Recreation Management?” I had somehow graduated with honors, and was eager to go on for a Master’s Degree.

The answer was Texas A&M. While I was hoping for Colorado or somewhere with a bit more topography, I applied and was accepted. This time, I was actually to be paid as a Teaching Assistant, which helped with the finances. Recently married (not to the curly blond-haired damsel but to a dark-haired schoolteacher from Wheeling), we loaded up a U-Haul behind her Chevy Nova and headed to College Station, Texas. I optimistically packed my cross-country skis.

The land of Lady Bird’s blue bonnets and indian paint brush. Meadows and ranches. Prairie. Nary a hill in sight. What had I gotten into? The tallest mounds were created by fire ants? Oh, my Lord. Those rascals were nasty!!!

The day after we arrived, there was a snowstorm, and I got to use my skis on the meadows surrounding campus. My wife spent the morning trying to explain to the locals that one needed to slow down a bit on roads covered with a thin layer of snow and ice.

I soon realized I was not in West Virginia any more. The military “Corp” of Texas A&M paraded about campus in uniform, with tall riding boots and a superior air. I was astonished to see them dropping their trousers in the men’s room to insure their shirt tails hung absolutely straight. One chewed me out for not holding the door for a young lady – who was about thirty yards behind me as I plunged into the cool air conditioned Student Union one afternoon. Couches of cowhide lined the Union halls. Good thing they still had beer!

Along the edge of campus was University Drive, and a collection of saloons and beer joints and rib “cages” called Northgate. I felt at home there, particularly after I discovered Bottle Cap Alley – a depository representing the thirst of generations of Aggies. I have no idea how many bottle caps were there, but it must have been a foot deep – all those years ago. I often thought a great engineering puzzle might be to estimate the number of caps. I can only hope the drifts are deeper now. It made a lovely scrunching sound as you walked the alley. I am working on my own small replica in California.

While I was there, a train accidentally dropped a few boxcars off the track near campus. Students ran, I am sure, to perform any required heroic rescue. However, when they discovered that the errant rail cars were carrying beer, dreams of heroism devolved into visions of drunken glory, and a chain of students worked to liberate as much fluid as possible.

Sadly, school authorities took a dim view of this exercise.

I soon found out that beer helped, but was not sufficient to stay cool during the grueling summers. I would take a shower and walk out of the apartment, only to be drenched in sweat before I could make it to the air conditioning of our campus building. 

My professor upbraided me for calling him Bob shortly after I arrived. “Hutch” had not warned me about this! Informality was clearly not the local style.

I found myself working on a study of Big Bend National Park backcountry hikers and learning about Marine Fisheries, the focus of our lab. We would head to the Galveston docks, asking fishermen “Would you rather catch one BIG fish or ten LITTLE ones?” Occasionally the reaction was “You’re joking. You must be an Aggie!”

We studied fish rodeos (who knew?) along the Gulf Coast. Redfish were a big deal. I compiled a list of fishing carnivals and rodeos and roundups all along the Louisiana and Texas shore. And I surely did not know some rodeo folks used spearguns.

We used to retreat to a coastal house in Galveston for the evenings. I remember one gynormous shrimp boil. The massive pink wave, drained and dumped on butcher paper, plus the challenge of shelling everything you gulped down, washed down with a Shiner Bock, made for a memorable evening. I called up my mother later to tell her about the marvelous new food I had discovered – barbecued ribs.

At the Marine Lab, we studied the fishing activity around thousands of Gulf oil rigs. While fisherfolk loved to tie up near an oil rig and drop a line, the policy at the time was that when an oil rig stopped producing, it was cut off at the ocean floor and hauled away for scrap in a nearby ship channel like Galveston. If the rigs were dropped, instead, to become an artificial reef? Oil companies would save a lot of cash. I’m not sure who funded the research, but rig operators were very helpful in capturing data on many thousands of fishing boat observations we were compiling. Minerals Management Service, in Louisiana, funded the study. 

One of the graduate students in the lab was running computer analyses on the rig data, and complained that it just did not make any sense. I won my Aggie “spurs” when I observed that the number the computer was trying to explain was just an arbitrary oil platform number. The computer made a lot more sense after that.

I was visiting New Orleans, during a terrible storm, to collect some additional information for our research when a passenger plane slammed into nearby suburban Metairie, victim of a vicious microburst. It was terrifying, as I had come into the airport from the same direction the day before.

My professor went to New Orleans that summer to work more closely with Minerals Management Service and let my wife and I stay in his spacious home as “care-takers” – with a swimming pool! We jumped at the chance, although I began to regret my decision when he took his cat – but left the fleas.

I learned that Aggies are the butt of about 80 percent of the jokes in Texas. And the hills of eastern Texas are over in Hill Country, that unique zone around Austin. I later theorized after I had spent some time in Austin that it was a large region deposited by aliens a few years ago, unlike almost anywhere else in Texas.

At Texas A&M University (TAMU) I did get a chance to question Secretary of Interior James Watt on why Ronald Reagan’s administration cut not the Federal, but the state dollars in the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Were they converted Federalists?

His answer was as weaselly as I had anticipated. I can remember standing at the microphone in a large, dark auditorium while my adrenaline surged frantically.

Later Secretary Watt described a task force he had assembled:

We have every kind of mix you can have. I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent!

James Watt, 1983

Oh yeah, that’s him. Sound familiar?

My wife got a job teaching in the nearby town of Snook, Texas. Friday Night Lights burned bright there. They had a local rodeo that we enjoyed, hanging out in the bleachers and being about the only ones there that were relatively unknown, although my wife was soon very familiar to the junior set.

Our neighbor was a roughneck who worked the oil rigs. I was surprised that there was one right next to our housing. Day and night, teams of those roughnecks would thump and clank, pulling up pipe and then dropping it back down the shaft, section by section, shattering the slumber of decent hardworking students. The neighbor, who worked varied shifts, wasn’t too sympathetic when I grumbled about the noise. He had a small child, and spent many of the nights he was not working combing the local cow pastures for Psilocybin mushrooms; anything to make ends meet. I don’t think he noticed the noise of oil rigs anymore.

One afternoon his young daughter was playing in the front yard when she began screaming frantically. The apartment complex erupted as we all came rushing. The poor child had stepped on a fire ant nest, and they boiled up over her legs, stinging brutally. I gained a new respect for those dirt patches around the landscape with their signature central entrance. 

After a year, the allure of the wildflowers was wearing thin (Sorry, Lady Bird). I found there was a project afoot in Grand Canyon, and the Professor (who was not Bob) asked me if I was interested. Was I ever!

It took a while to get the official job offer, but I was raring to go. Topography never sounded so good!

We loaded up the car again (no U-Haul this time) and headed across Texas. And on. And on. It’s a big durned state. And not damned either, if you know what’s good for you. Finally, the mountains of El Paso (real mountains!) loomed against a setting sun. We were off on an adventure!