A Serendipitous Meeting With An Old Friend Yesterday Morning
Sorry folks, no birds today. This post is personal. Another apology for the quality of the following photos. I like to think I’m pretty skillful with a DSLR camera and big honkin’ lens but I’m a complete doofus with cell phones and it shows. I first met Brooke Williams back in the mid 1980’s when I worked with his wife Terry Tempest Williams at the Utah Museum of Natural History. The three of us became good friends in part because we shared a passion for wilderness and wild critters and appreciated the importance of education in spreading the word and the passion. And we just liked each other’s company. As the years passed both Terry and Brooke became acclaimed authors, educators and environmental activists, first moving to Castle Valley near Moab, Utah and now splitting their time between Castle Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts where Terry teaches at Harvard. Brooke spent a significant portion of his conservation career with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) and now teaches at Colby College in Maine. So for many years we mostly lost touch with each other. Then completely out of the blue in July of 2012 I ran into them again in the middle of the Montana wilderness where they, along with wilderness advocate and grizzly bear expert Doug Peacock and author and environmental activist Rick Bass, were involved in teaching graduate students for the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Institute. We had a joyous reunion on the porch of a rustic old cabin involving wine, lots of…