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| ISBN-13: | 9781504040655 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 287 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Eudaemonic Pie
By Thomas A. Bass
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1985 Thomas A. BassAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4065-5
CHAPTER 1
Silver City
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
Niels Bohr
Down in the red desert country of southwestern New Mexico, Silver City is famous, or at least notorious, on several counts. Geronimo lay low in the nearby mountains while Billy the Kid shot his first of many men. Herbert Hoover, fresh out of Stanford, got his start in Silver City as a mining engineer. Fifty years later, the struggle of workers and their families at Empire Zinc was featured in Herbert Biberman's classic film Salt of the Earth. Violence of a different sort, abstracted from cowboys and Indians, confounded local residents on the morning of July 16, 1945. They woke to the blast and peered through rattling windows to see the glow of the world's first atomic bomb, exploded two hundred miles to the north on the lava beds of the Jornada del Muerto.
On the southern edge of the Gila Wilderness, Silver City straddles the threshold, at six thousand feet, between forest and desert. The Continental Divide, after wandering through the Black Range of the Mogollon Mountains (pronounced muggy-OWN), zips through town on its way headed due south into the Sonoran Desert. A city of twelve thousand souls, the seat of Grant County and biggest way station for a hundred miles in any direction. Silver — as the residents call it — is pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
A thousand years ago the Mimbreño Indians wandered into this pleasant stretch of upland desert and called it home. The land had much to recommend it. Forested with Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, the ten-thousand-foot peaks of the Mogollons gave rise to the three forks of the Gila River, along which the Mimbreño built cave-side dwellings and painted frescoes of a landscape rich in arable fields and wild game. The Indians farmed the valleys and chased the game south into countryside that tipped from xeric woodland — filled with scrub oak, mountain mahogany, juniper, and piñon — into bushier terrain of creosote, jumping cholla, and yucca, before dropping finally into a howling desert of dry playas and alkali flats. At the base of the mountains lay a favorite camp for these hunting parties, a stretch of springs and native prairie that the Spanish, on their belated arrival, named La Cienaga de San Vicente, the Marsh of St. Vincent.
The affixing of saintly place names accompanied more serious incursions by the Spanish into the Gila Wilderness. They sold the Mimbreño into slavery and ordered all resisters killed in a war of extermination. A Spanish officer engaged in this civilizing mission discovered what the Indians had long known about the area's mineral wealth — that copper could be harvested here from underground veins as thick as ferns. He returned in 1804 to open the Santa Rita copper mine, an original act imitated by successive waves of hard-rock miners up from Mexico, forty-niners out from Boston, gold rushers down from Leadville, and a later band of enthusiasts whose metallic fever ran so high that in 1870 they rechristened St. Vincent's marsh with the more promising name of Silver City.
The town has faded and got a bit ragged around the edges with shopping plazas and subdivisions, but much of it still appears as it did in its heyday a hundred years ago. Built higgledy-piggledy on hilltops and along elm-lined streets are the brick homes of old miners who hit a vein and subsequently called themselves bankers. Imposing structures, with Victorian porches, mansard roofs, Gothic turrets, and widow's walks, these houses command vistas across the desert scrub to the flanks of Geronimo Mountain.
Looking from the second-story windows of these houses, one spies on every horizon the presence of minerals. Due east, under a monolith known as the Kneeling Nun, stretches the mile- long pit of the Santa Rita copper mine. Its ore — exploited multinationally right from the start — was originally transported four hundred miles by mule train into Chihuahua. Now, mined by Kennecott and Mitsubishi, the shipment goes to Japan. The twin stacks of the mine's smelter rise over the nearby town of Hurley, and to the north squat the equally dusty houses of Hanover. In Silver City itself the hills are littered with mine shafts and tailings from abandoned veins, while directly behind the County Courthouse a still-active manganese mine chews away at the face of Bear Mountain.
Out beyond the scraping and digging on which its fortunes were founded, the view from the high ground in Silver City gives way to unpeopled prairie. This is welcome ground to big dreams. Out of it spring self-reliant souls. An old part of the country, discovered and settled long before the Pilgrims disembarked from the May-flower, it is also among the newest, with the feeling of being a frontier, a border territory, unsettled and wide open to chance. Here one finds the last avatars of the American mythos — cowboys and Indians, hard-rock miners and barroom confidantes — with room enough still for them to stretch out and dream the old dreams of freedom and independence.
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1952, James Doyne Farmer, who goes by the second of his two given names, which is pronounced like a variant tone row, D?-an, was six years old when he and his family moved to Silver City. They settled into a mild neighborhood spiced with Mexicans and college students while James Doyne Farmer, Sr., who goes by the first of his two given names, reported to work as an engineer at the Santa Rita mine. Doyne by then had already read his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, and over the next few years Mrs. Lynch, the town librarian, would lead him in an attack on the rest of world literature. During her summer reading contests, the number of stars he acquired for the consumption of texts — from Dostoyevsky through Hemingway and Huxley to Tolstoy — was second only to Kitty Kelley's.
"Then in sixth grade," Doyne told me one day as we were driving down Las Vegas Boulevard on our way to play roulette, "I pooped out. As a kid I was plump, had a fierce temper, and didn't get along well with other people. I decided I had to work on my personality."
The turning point had arrived earlier that summer. Suffering as much from the cure as the disease, Doyne was confined to bed with rheumatic fever for months of total inactivity.
"I became very depressed. When no one came to visit, I decided there must be something wrong with me. I went through a complete self-reappraisal and made certain vows. When the teacher asked a question, I would no longer raise my hand. I would do whatever I needed to become popular. From being loud and boisterous I became quiet and shy. I spent sixth grade learning the technique, and seventh and eighth grades perfecting it. By ninth grade I was back to some kind of balance, but in the meantime I had made a lot of friends."
In sixth grade Doyne also committed himself to pacifism, although this project fared less well. It met insurmountable obstacles down at the paper shack, where he reported every morning at five o'clock to fold the day's delivery of El Paso Timeses. At that hour the only people awake in Silver City are the paper boys, Mr. Shadel the baker, the police (who are actually fast asleep in their patrol car), and the female boarders over at Millie's, a Victorian structure on Hudson Street that was reputed, until its recent closing, to be the best whorehouse in New Mexico.
Since Route 180, the main road through Silver City, runs from nowhere in the north to pretty much nowhere in the south, anyone stopping at 5:00 A.M. to ask directions from a paper boy was most likely looking for Millie's. It was only two blocks from the paper shack, but a quirk of local geography made the town confusing to visitors at that hour of the morning. The marsh on which Silver City had been built provided an oasis on the edge of the desert. But every summer when it rained, flash floods would rush out of the Mogollon Mountains and rip down the middle of Main Street.
Forced to abandon this misplaced thoroughfare, the town watched it metamorphose into something called the Big Ditch. The Ditch today is a canyon scraped down to bedrock sixty feet below those buildings that have yet to collapse into it. "For many years," reported the local newspaper, "the Ditch has been the literal 'jumping off place' for petty thieves and miscreants who were running from the law, and many a wretched 'wino' has sought the privacy of its dark green shadows." Millie presided over the eastern, less savory side of the chasm. In that direction lay Madame Brewer the witch's house, the barrio, the dump, and the desert. Not that it was much better on the other side of the Ditch. Here too were Mexican adobes and desert scrub, although perched above them on a hill was the campus of Western New Mexico University. The only "good" part of town lay to the north in Silver Heights. But none of the characters in this story comes from that part of town.
At 5:00 A.M., when not directing traffic around the Big Ditch, Doyne reported to the paper shack for his daily lesson in Satyagraha. The other paper boys fancied themselves tough customers, the two orneriest being James Wetsel, who tooled around town in a car he called his "pussy wagon," and Herbie Watkins, who was Wetsel's goon.
"Their big thing was to beat the daylights out of me every morning," Doyne said. "I'd walk in and one of them would tackle me. They'd take off all my clothes and throw them outside in the snow. Being a pacifist at the time, whenever they did anything I'd go limp. I had read something in the sixth grade that convinced me that was the best response to violence. But it didn't work very well."
It was also in that busy year that Doyne encountered the most significant influence in his life. He was attending the weekly Boy Scout meeting when someone stood up and introduced himself as Tom Ingerson, a physics teacher at the university who wanted to help out with the troop.
"I homed in on him immediately," said Doyne. "I didn't know at the time what a physicist was, but I knew it was some kind of scientist, and that that's what I was going to be."
After the Scout meeting, walking home with Ingerson, Doyne told him how he wanted to be a physicist. The two of them — a twelveyear-old kid and a twenty-five-year-old college teacher fresh out of graduate school — recognized an immediate attraction for each other: the gravitational pull of minds equally restive. They began what Ingerson described as "hundreds and hundreds of discussions about everything under the sun. In a town where the average random kid thought only about going to the mines or becoming a shopkeeper, Doyne and I were bored for much the same reasons."
Something about this man intrigued Doyne, and on later visiting Tom's house, he got an intimation of what it was. "Filled with a mess of books and tools and Salvation Army furniture, the house was completely disordered inside and out, and somehow this really impressed me."
Tom Ingerson's anomalous presence in Silver City was due to a mixture of romance and political miscalculation. On finishing high school in El Paso, Texas, Ingerson, another son of an engineer, spent an alienated four years at Berkeley before going on to do graduate work in physics at the University of Colorado. While nearing the end of a dissertation on Einstein's cosmology and the theory of general relativity, he went looking for a job. This was 1964. Sputnik and the cold war had the country crazed for scientists. They could snap their fingers and walk into laboratories anywhere from Boeing to Bell. Colorado was a good school, Ingerson a bright fellow. He should have gone places. Instead, he went nowhere.
His letters remained unanswered. No one interviewed him. In his naiveté, he took the matter personally and got depressed. It was only years later that a friend at Motorola showed him the bad news in his file. A strong-willed loner like Ingerson may have been ignorant, or he may even have courted disapprobation by naming Frank Oppenheimer as a reference. But even at that late date, the reputation of Robert Oppenheimer's brother as a fellow traveler made him leprous company. Having him recommend you to a prospective employer was like announcing a contagious disease.
So Ingerson found himself banished to the hinterlands of southwestern New Mexico. His one and only job offer came late in the season from Western New Mexico University, the old Territorial Normal School, which, in spite of its new name, was still primarily a teacher's college. Taking up his duties at WNMU as the sole member of the physics "department," Ingerson consoled himself with a number of thoughts. Roughened into mesas and wilderness tracts, this was country he already knew and loved. Once out in the middle of it, he could keep himself amused. He devised a long list of projects and schemes, the most romantic of which involved a gold mine in the Jefferson Davis Mountains of west Texas. A sixteenth-century Spanish mine, the claim had come into Ingerson's possession via his uncle Jim. This grizzled prospector, with a degree from the yarn-spinning school of life, had told his nephew a story of fabulous riches. No less than nineteen tons of gold had supposedly been saved from ambush and buried somewhere under his mountain.
Ingerson's other uncle, Earl, a geologist at the University of Texas, called the story hogwash, but the newly hooded Doctor of Physics believed strongly enough in his golden legacy to describe it as "the reason I moved to Silver City in the first place."
Ingerson is the quintessential physicist. Possessed of a resonant, slightly didactic voice, he can discourse at length on any question pertaining to matter and motion. There is not a mechanical, electrical, computational, or cosmological problem toward which he has not directed his powers of ratiocination. The simplest inquiry garners his total attention. An offhand remark about differences in color film, for instance, will spark him into delivering a minilecture on spectroscopy and the psychology of color perception. During one such discussion, interrupted for twelve hours by other matters, Ingerson resumed his comments at precisely the point where they had broken off. "That's just the way I am," he said. "I like to complete a line of thought."
Ingerson's blue eyes shine out of a broad face that reddens easily with humor. But from his domed forehead down to his track shoes, his entire demeanor bears the mark of being dictated by rationality. Compact and solid, his body looks as if it might have been designed according to sound energetic principles. Ingerson dresses in layers of long- and short-sleeved cotton shirts that can be seasonally adjusted, and no social occasion merits the slightest change in attire. He travels with backpack and bedroll and recommends, when pressed for space, the omission of all inessentials, such as toothbrush handles and toothpaste.
"I'm a physicist," he said, "because every other way of looking at the world is too difficult for me. In physics we abstract things into simple systems, and if the world doesn't fit, we just lop some of it off and get it simple enough for our models. This is really very easy to do, even though most people think physics is hard."
The night he and Doyne first met and walked home together from the Boy Scout meeting, they talked about Ingerson's gold mine and how, with as little as seventeen million dollars from it, one could build a rocket and travel to Mars. "Tom thought the space program was being utterly mismanaged," said Doyne. "Old farts like Wernher von Braun were making stupid rockets, but he knew the way to do it more cheaply and efficiently." While still in high school, with chemicals ordered from advertisements in the back of Popular Science, Ingerson had built and fired dozens of rockets for launches of up to five miles across the desert. Later, in college, he had worked summers at the White Sands Missile Range testing larger rockets. "You have to remember," said Doyne, "that Tom knew what he was talking about."
Doyne soon found himself enrolled as the charter member in what would become Ingerson's major Silver City diversion. One day the young college teacher declared his residence open as Explorer Post 114. A duplex stationed under a clump of Chinese elms lining a tributary to the Big Ditch, Ingerson's house was quickly overrun with boys soldering radios, practicing Morse code, stripping down dirt bikes, and tuning the engine on a Dodge van. Christened the Blue Bus, this vehicle would carry the peripatetic Ingerson and his extended family thousands of miles, from Alaska to the Andes.
Their first trip was to Boulder, Colorado, where the Explorers accompanied Ingerson for the oral defense of his dissertation. Once bitten with wanderlust, they spent every free moment after that touring the Gila Wilderness and Sonoran Desert. At Christmas they traveled to Mexico and during the summer made longer trips to the Yucatan, Panama, and Peru. When not on the road, they spent their time in Silver City raising money at auctions, turkey shoots, car washes, demolition derbies, and a yearly fair known as Gold Rush Days, in which the Explorers re-created a town full of Indians, assayers, sheriffs, prospectors, and claim jumpers searching for hidden caches of golden rocks. "My personality is basically synergistic," said Ingerson. "I don't do much by myself. But together with someone else, things happen. My greatest pleasure in life is seeing other people have a good time."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Eudaemonic Pie by Thomas A. Bass. Copyright © 1985 Thomas A. Bass. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PROLOGUE • Glitter Gulch,ONE • Silver City,
TWO • Rambling and Gambling,
THREE • Driving Around the Mode Map,
FOUR • Radios from Other Planets,
FIVE • Debugging,
SIX • The Invention of the Wheel,
SEVEN • Strange Attractors,
EIGHT • Exploring the Envelope,
NINE • Lady Luck,
TEN • Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions,
ELEVEN • Small Is Beautiful,
TWELVE • Magic Shoes,
THIRTEEN • The City of Computation,
FOURTEEN • Rebel Science,
FIFTEEN • "Dear Eudaemons",
SIXTEEN • Cleopatra's Barge,
EPILOGUE • The Intergalactic Infandibulum,