Jim Mehegan taught geology at Riverside Community College
from 1996 until 2004, when he died of a heart atttack in July during
a trip kayaking the Colorado River. I have had many teachers and
colleagues whom I have respected immensely, but Jim combined excellence
in teaching and commitment to the life of the institution in a
way precious few do.
6 August 2004 Remembering Jim
It has been 13 years since I received a phone call as deeply saddening
as the one I received from Karin Skiba a few days ago. That phone
call, like Karin’s, was to inform me that someone I cared for
deeply had died. That phone call, 13 years ago, wasn't a surprise.
Erich, my closest friend since fourth grade, had been depressed and
alcoholic for several years before he took his own life. Learning
that Jim had died left me speechless.
Perhaps it shouldn't have. I remembered the observation Virginia
McKee-Leone made about Jim after going on one of his many geology
field trips a year ago: “Jim’s won’t die of old
age,” Virginia had observed. I knew that Jim had “health
issues.” He spoke matter-of-factly about the regular injections
his arthritis required. Only a few weeks ago I learned that Jim was
diabetic. But Jim didn't wear his health issues on his sleeve; we
should all be so healthy as Jim. On more than a few occasions, I
invited Jim for dinner or for a party, but on every occasion, Jim
had a date with a surfboard, a kayak, or a hiking staff. Just a few
weeks ago Jim was joking about the concussion he’d received
for a moment’s inattention while kayaking on the Kern River
the previous weekend. None of us knows when our heart or brain may
give out, from a heart attack or a stroke; Jim didn't know. All of
us would live longer, other things being equal, by living as active
and vital a life as did Jim.
Jim was a great teacher, and I know this the way we all know whom
of our colleagues is truly committed to and the master of his craft:
from the students we share in common. Jim’s students were more
varied than are most of ours. They included the college President.
They included many of his teacher colleagues who went on Jim’s
geology flex trips. I count myself lucky to have gone on one of those
trips. And like all natural teachers, Jim never stopped teaching.
We couldn't have even the shortest of conversations about my home
in the San Bernardino Mountains without discussing earthquakes, debris
flows, or decomposed granite. During one of our last conversations,
Jim had been teaching me about the number of human communities built
in proximity to active volcanoes, and the belief of geologists that
sometime in the next century, one million human beings would die
as a result of living too close to a volcano that only seemed to
be sleeping. This is to say that Jim knew that human beings live
close to death, and should live, as much as they can, with the future
they cannot avoid.
Jim was supposed to spend his fall semester teaching abroad on RCC’s
fall Florence, Italy program, and as those who knew him knew, he
began buying books (and geology books are evidently anything but
cheap) and educating himself about Italian geology and vulcanology
long before he was selected to teach in Italy. Even had he not been
selected to go to Florence, he would not have thought the money invested
in those books to be wasted, since they took their place contributing
to his own broader command of his field.
In yet another way, Jim was an ideal colleague. I grew up in the
1960s and have always maintained what many would consider a naïve
belief in the potential for human beings to work together democratically.
My friendship with Jim constantly confirmed that my idealism was
not completely naïve. For in addition to being a stellar teacher,
in the classrooms of RCC and the Grand Canyon, Jim was also a stellar
colleague in those venues where faculty seek to fulfill their obligations
to the institutions which make it possible to follow their intellectual
muses. Jim was active on both the academic senate and our CTA executive
board. Jim understood that as human beings we wear many hats, and
Jim was a committed member of both the RCC Academic Senate and RCC
CTA branch. The positions he argued that the Senate should advocate
were distinct—though not inconsistent or conflicting--from
the role he advocated CTA should pursue. I disagreed with Jim at
times, but I never had reason to doubt either the sincerity of his
point of view or its cogency. Yet Jim was also deeply respectful
of his colleagues whose teaching or research kept them distant from
the democratic obligations of our institutional responsibilities.
To a degree that I think exemplary, Jim respected others, and always
understood that respect was not predicated on agreement. When Jim
left his tenured position at CSUSB, his department chair refused
for two years to accept his resignation, insisting that he remain
on leave. Jim got along with the President and administrators of
the college, though he sometimes questioned the way in which they
led the college. During the final stages of contract negotiations
this past spring, Jim spoke clearly of the importance of faculty
supporting the work of their negotiation team, even though he had
been critical—and even briefly resigned from the executive
board—over his principled concerns about the appointment of
that team. Being human, we will all continue to disagree with one
another—we would be lucky indeed to disagree as articulately
and respectfully as Jim’s example demonstrated to us.
I'm pretty sure Jim was not religious, though it may be that it
was creationist geology that galvanized Jim’s understanding
of religion. On the few occasions that I spoke with him about Greg
Burchette’s idea that RCC should offer a course on evolution
that would look at the subject from both the perspective of the natural
sciences and varying religious cosmologies, Jim was very concerned
that the area of expertise of those two very different disciplines
be kept distinct. So I close with a passage from Annie Dillard’s
book, For the Time Being, which seeks to be true to both
the world that science presents us and that religions teach us to
interpret:
“I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground
in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet
trod his figure’s blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue
shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow,
or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain
to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the
green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the
earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it
always does in every season peeling the light back: The earth was
plowing the men under, and the spade and the plow. No one sees
us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The
green fields grow up forgetting.
“Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap
like shingles. We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall.
Once we get here we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked
under. While we breathe we open time like a path in the grass.
We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present.”
It is a false cliche that none of us are irreplaceable. Certainly
we can hire a new geologist. Another teacher will go to Italy in
Jim’s place; his department will choose a new chair and a new
Senate representative. CTA will initially appoint a new Vice President.
The persons who are appointed to those positions will know or will
learn that they have “taken Jim’s place” only in
the most superficial of ways. Jim cannot be replaced, though perhaps
each of us might learn and dedicate ourselves a bit to doing better
what he did so well. That would be the most fitting tribute we could
offer.
[Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (New York:Vintage, 1999),
203.]
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