the adventurer

& the dusty, forgotten boxes in the corner of the garage.

story time circa 1964. broadcast on local KABC 7 5:30 am in celebration of a Father’s Day past, photo courtesy of middle sis.

my dad was a geologist.

and an adventurer.

we grew up thinking everyone’s dad had a gold pan and rock hammer in the car trunk.

made regular stops at rivers & roadcuts.

that everyone’s dad collected samples of sand in empty soda pop cans.

~~~

my dad rarely spoke about work at the dinner table.

he disliked workplace politics.

he was more interested in everyone else’s day.

when he decided to retire following a nasty 1990’s DOGE-style big oil restructuring, dad requested the return of his entire archive of work files.

following a lengthy review by who knows who, dozens of boxes arrived on the doorstep to be stacked in the corner of the garage.

boxes virtually untouched in the intervening years.

~~~

with some trepidation I lifted one of the dusty lids last week.

what would I find?

what exactly went on at The Lab?

what did my dad really do?

prying the lid off random box #1 revealed hundreds of pages of reports and memorandums dating from the mid 1960’s.

it appeared that dad was evaluating an in-house computer system capable of mining, manipulating the company’s vast geologic data resources.

the reports also answered the question of dad’s fascination with sand as he was working on computer modeling of the geological processes of sand formation and depositions.

& developing programs capable of estimating underlying geological features to assist with drilling.

and, much to my surprise, dad was also envisioning a “chat-GPT-style” human-type-in-question & computer-typed-back-response.

early AI for company geologists.

& considering the digital treatment of qualitative data not readily quantified.

scratching the surface of the past.

time travel is time consuming.

~~~

sometime in his 90’s I asked dad if there was anywhere he would still like to go if he could.

he thought about it and recounted a story about a trip he had taken as a teenager with his family into the jungles of Ecuador somewhere near the border with Columbia, possibly visiting a worksite of my grandfather who was the structural engineer for the Ecuadorian railroad.

visualizing the specific topography of the valley, natural landmarks and a winding road, he relived the unfinished adventure in his mind.

scouting the riverbank at a rest stop he remembered seeing a beautiful glowing green stone settled beneath the clear waters midstream just as his father beckoned him back to continue the journey.

he was convinced that an emerald deposit could be located somewhere upstream and that he would be able to navigate a return to the long lost locale based on his memories.

what I didn’t realize at the time was the secret gems waiting to be unearthed amongst the forgotten papers in the dusty corner of the garage.

have a wonderful Father’s Day weekend!