A Letter from Patty
In February of 2008, the U.S. Arctic Research Commission met at the University of Colorado, and I got to give a speech to this distinguished group. Putting the Center's slogan, "transforming hindsight into foresight," into action, I presented several major lessons, drawn from the history of Western American exploration, that might provide useful guidance for research in the Arctic.
How did I get this welcome invitation? Because I have known Mead Treadwell, the head of the Arctic Research Commission, since he was a student at Yale in the 1970s.
Life with the Center of the American West is an ongoing and always gratifying reunion. On a recent trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, my husband Houston Kempton and I were pleased to look up at the door of a pleasant place where we had stopped for coffee, as two excellent friends of the Center - Denny and Joy Swanson from Steamboat Springs - walked in. In airports and restaurants, I am forever running into friends I know and value; sidewalks in Manhattan and Washington DC prove to be pleasantly populated by former students and fellow panelists from various workshops and conferences. It is a pretty rare speaking engagement when I don't discover ten old friends in the audience.
When I began teaching I did not foresee providence's kindness in carefully placing and positioning old friends and associates for unexpected reunions, and thus universities held their commencement ceremonies over my protest. I had grown fond of and used to the company of people who had suddenly moved into the unsettling category, "graduating seniors." It was hard not to take their departure as a personal loss.
But then it turned out that they had not, actually, vanished. A nice feature of appearing in a televised documentary or writing an op-ed piece for a newspaper is that the e-mail inbox will suddenly be stocked with notes from one-time students now fully transformed into accomplished friends. And, meanwhile, the admissions officers will have been hard at work, presenting me with an abundant, replenished supply of new friends-in-the-making.
I have, in other words, finally been able to make my peace with graduation, and to accept the comings and goings, the departures and returns, of young people.
In the last few weeks, the Center has undergone its own internal version of the commencement ceremony, as Elaine Tucci, our managing director since September of 2005, moved across campus to serve as the Director of Transforming Energy and Markets at the University's Energy Initiative. From adding a great deal of spiffiness to Center publications to arranging clearly the roles and duties of each staff member, Elaine had a very happy effect on our operations.
One of Elaine's prime achievements was the hiring of Kurt Gutjahr as events coordinator in the summer of 2006. In Kurt's temperament, a rare combination of congeniality and efficiency comes together. In managing a project, he looks far ahead to anticipate challenges and problems, producing a happy consequence: since he has us so well-prepared to deal with trouble, trouble usually does not bother to appear.
In his new role as managing director of the Center, Kurt brings two hard-to-match assets: he has lived in and closely observed key Western locales - New Mexico, Oregon, Montana, Nevada, and of course, Colorado - and he brings fine academic credentials to bear on his work at the Center. With an MFA in Creative Writing from the prestigious University of Iowa program, Kurt has taught courses in Western American literature and organized workshops of Western writers. Every time that I have mentioned a notable Western novel to Kurt, he has more than matched me in familiarity with that particular book... and yet I hold to the hope that I will sometime stump him.
Departures and arrivals, partings and reunions, continue to shape the Center of the American West, as well as the region we study. These transitions give us the occasion to reduce hypocrisy and enhance credibility by exercising precisely the kind of adaptability, flexibility, and agility that we try to encourage in our fellow Westerners.
