That was about it for my re-immersion in the world of science, or so I thought. I took the afternoon off and we drove the kids up to Deep Creek Lake for the weekend. It's very scenic up there in the springtime, and I remember that in another lifetime, Suzie and her family had frequently gone camping up there. Now Suzie wouldn't be camping at Deep Creek.
In no possible way would I ever want to take Marilyn camping. No matter how much enjoyment I would get in watching her fumble around in the woods, it couldn't possibly match the overall nuisance she would prove.
I knew this for an absolute fact, and a certain portion of my psyche, the dark and demented portion, longed for the day when she would attempt camping. The deal we had made back when she told me she was pregnant the first time was that I would do boy stuff and she would do girl stuff. So, I would be the adult with Charlie in the Boy Scouts, and Marilyn would join the Girl Scouts with Holly and Molly. Charlie was already a Tiger Cub, and I was his designated adult. Charlie was finding this to be loads of fun, and was looking forward to when he was old enough to go camping overnight, when he made it to Webelos. I was looking forward to the day when Marilyn had to go camping with the Brownies, or whatever age group of girls went camping. With any luck, one of the other parents would make a home movie, and I could bribe them into giving me a copy. I would be willing to pay a serious bribe to get movie footage of Marilyn stumbling around in the wilderness!
For this weekend, however, we simply stayed at a lakefront cabin and did some hiking and tourist type stuff. Sunday afternoon we drove back to Hereford and hosed off the kids and then put them to bed for a nap. Monday Marilyn would pick up Dum-Dum from the kennel and I would go back to the office.
By the end of the week, however, science reared its ugly head again. Harry Johnson called. "Doctor Buckman, I wanted to call again and thank you for coming to the symposium, and for dinner afterwards. I hope you didn't get home too late."
"Nothing I wasn't expecting. Thank you for calling."
"Do you remember how we were talking about what you could do to help me?", he asked.
My brow wrinkled at this. Either I had forgotten this part of the conversation, or Harry Johnson was a better salesman than I had figured. "I remember telling you I wasn't ever going to run for office."
He laughed at that. "I remember that, too. No, I'm talking about other things I could do to bring the problem to the public's attention."
That part I remembered. "Okay, I remember talking about that. Did you have something in mind?"
"We could write a book!"
I stared at my phone for a second. It almost sounded to me like Johnson had said something about writing a book. "Excuse me?"
"I said we could write a book."
"That's what I thought you said. For a second there I thought Timothy Leary had gotten loose with the LSD again. A book?"
Harry laughed. "I'm serious. Let me explain. Last fall I was approached by Simon and Schuster about a book on infrastructure. I turned them down. I tried to get started, but it was a disaster. You could make it better, a lot better."
"I am definitely thinking that Timothy Leary is on the loose again."
"Give me a chance. Let me talk to you about this. Please."
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, but I agreed. The earliest that we could meet was Thursday after lunch. Harry agreed to drive to my office this time, since I had driven to see him previously. I let Grace know I had an appointment.
On Thursday Professor Johnson showed up at our offices around 1:00 PM. I had given him the directions, but I never really explained what the place was like. My intercom buzzed and Grace said, "Mister Buckman, your appointment is here."
I hit the button on my phone and said, "Out in a second." Then I stood up and left my office, going down the hall. I found Johnson in the lobby, looking around in a somewhat bewildered fashion. "Harry! Good to see you again!" I held my hand out to shake his.
"Carl, thank you. What is this place? What do you do here?", he asked.
I smiled. "Remember how I told you my degrees were in applied math?" He nodded, and I continued, "Well, the application is money! We're a private venture capital firm."
"Wall Street? That sort of thing? And the company is named after you? You must be pretty important, then."
I smiled at that. "You could say that. I'm the majority owner. Come on back to my office."
"How come the receptionist didn't call you Doctor Buckman?"
Trust a scientist to worry about titles. One place I worked, on my first go, was a research lab, where the size of your desk was based on your college degree. Lab techs didn't get a desk, lab techs with an associates degree got a rickety standup desk, a bachelors degree earned you a four foot long desk with drawers on one side, a masters upgraded you to a five foot desk, and PhDs had a six foot desk with drawers on both sides. "I'm lucky she said 'Mister.' Most of the time it's Carl or 'Hey, you!' We're pretty informal around here."
Once in my office, I directed Harry over to the lounge area, where I had my couch and the armchairs. "Okay, shoot! What's this about a book?"
Harry explained his ideas. Last year, in 1986, he had been approached by the non-fiction arm of Simon and Schuster, the publishing house, about writing a book about infrastructure and economics based on a series of papers he had written. At the time, he had turned them down, because it was obvious that what they wanted was something he didn't know how to write. Like I had said the other night, they needed something in layman's terms. They came to him because he was a leading authority in the field.
They came back to him last month, shortly after the Schoharie Creek Bridge on the New York State Thruway was washed out. The time was right for a book on the subject. I actually knew a fair bit about this, since in my previous life, I knew about the bridge. Unfortunately for the sake of the book, the collapse was not due to poor maintenance, but because unprecedented flooding had washed the supports out from under the bridge. Ten people died.
The more Harry talked, the more I warmed to the subject. In a way, it reminded me of my valedictory speech, which had been reread at the reunion a few years ago. Taxes are what we pay so we can have bridges and roads and sewers and water and stuff. This shit is boring and expensive and nobody wants to hear about it, but it is also important!
I sat there and listened, and about the time when Harry began to repeat himself, I held up my hands and made the Time-Out gesture. "Okay, I think I am getting the gist of this. Now, how do you see this book working? Break out the relevant sections. What makes this book special? Why should anybody buy this book?"
Harry Johnson was not accustomed to thinking like this. In his academic world, you wrote dense papers with arcane stuff for fellow specialists, published it in specialized journals, and talked about things to other specialists. I had never written a book either, but my life had never been the pure science and engineering lifestyle. Harry began stumbling through some ideas and slowly a vision began forming in my mind.