{"id":3845,"date":"2009-06-21T05:18:18","date_gmt":"2009-06-21T10:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/?p=3326"},"modified":"2009-06-21T05:18:18","modified_gmt":"2009-06-21T10:18:18","slug":"orinoco-elegy-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/2009\/06\/21\/orinoco-elegy-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Orinoco Elegy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(For Jack Stewart Kibbe, 8 October 1929 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 5 June, 2009)<\/p>\n

This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t one of Michael\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pithy, one paragraph obits, sorry.\u00c2\u00a0 And it seems almost cruel, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll grant, to wake the blog from its cryogenic sleep to post of yet another death, but my father was a longtime (though silent) fan.\u00c2\u00a0 He died at 79 a few Fridays ago, on my birthday (make that nearer 79.6575 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c he was an engineer, after all \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 ). While a private man, I think he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d graciously accept this post and the regard of people he knew of only by association, through this site.<\/p>\n

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His was a rich and varied, well-lived life.\u00c2\u00a0 The only son of a Fish & Wildlife fish cultuary, Jack was born in Deadwood, South Dakota, and lived with his parents, Ted & Myrtle across the upper midwest and later Albuquerque. As a young man he toyed with becoming a marine biologist but pursued engineering;\u00c2\u00a0 after serving in Korea as a B29 mechanic, he finally got his engineering degree at UNM in Albuquerque (during which time he met & married my mother) and went to Venezuela still a young man to play with big toys \u00e2\u20ac\u201c maintaining ore trains for U.S. Steel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Orinoco Mining Company \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and to explore a wild, young country.\u00c2\u00a0 His wife, Betty, intrepidly brought the 5-month-old me from Albuquerque by herself to join him there, and 15 months later came a second son, Doug.<\/p>\n

He freely shared this great adventure with us, in whom he instilled his fierce honor and abundant curiosity.\u00c2\u00a0 He outfitted an army-surplus Willys jeep with a hard top for cargo and long-range gas tanks and we made expeditions grand and small.\u00c2\u00a0 Both he and Betty were licensed to pilot a single-engine plane they co-owned with another couple, in which we flew to Angel Falls and remote fishing holes, landing many times on mere dirt strips or even open fields.\u00c2\u00a0 Generating uncountable sweet stories, we stayed there 20+ years, during which time he took charge of building the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first non-polluting, natural gas, iron-ore-reducing plant.<\/p>\n

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He put me through Harvard, Doug through Embry-Riddle Aeronautical and into the Air Force, followed our careers and life-choices assiduously.\u00c2\u00a0 He worked long and hard and with gusto, and retired in Albuquerque (kind of without meaning to) before 55.\u00c2\u00a0 Traveled with Betty from there to many places, such as here for our wedding, to Moscow and the Pacific Line Islands, and plenty of\u00c2\u00a0 places in between;\u00c2\u00a0 before health issues reduced his roaming radius, but even then he spent most of his days out and about when he could.<\/p>\n

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The last 15 years or so they enjoyed a rambling adobe (once owned by Opus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 creator, Berkeley Breathed) in the western foothills of the Sandias, where Jack ate his breakfast every day in sight of the mountains and the hummingbirds.\u00c2\u00a0 That house was full of his tinkerings, from tables built of picture frames, hand tools made from parts of other tools, and various\u00c2\u00a0a vista<\/em> plumbing and wiring projects \u00e2\u20ac\u201c just cutting to the chase, working within his diminishing physical limits using the undiminished mental creativity of a natural-born engineer.\u00c2\u00a0 An inveterate planner, he even laid out in a seven-page letter every detail of what to do after his death — 9 years before it occurred;\u00c2\u00a0 not least amongst what he left us.<\/span><\/p>\n

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From youth to death, the world fascinated him.\u00c2\u00a0 Beside his chair were many books on insects and birds, elsewhere on marine life \u00e2\u20ac\u201c he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d snorkeled many of the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s oceans in their extensive travels.\u00c2\u00a0 Binoculars and a telescope were everywhere, from windowsills to gloveboxes, be it for wildlife or weather, hot air balloons in the valley or fighter jets at the airport.\u00c2\u00a0 He knew how stuff worked, or worked on finding out.\u00c2\u00a0 He probably even knew more at a cell-tissue-level about his maladies than he let on to us …<\/p>\n

His wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t an easy death, but he accepted it unflinchingly, having first set foot on that long, slow slope many years before we knew he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d begun.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps even he was taken by surprise at the end by the swiftness, but we take that as a mercy.\u00c2\u00a0 By a gift of grace we were given to be there, made the most of it;\u00c2\u00a0 were open and generous with each other, released him with clarity and love.\u00c2\u00a0 Goodbye, dad, and godspeed.\u00c2\u00a0 Thank you for the gifts of my life and of your self.\u00c2\u00a0 I immensely love you.<\/p>\n

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(For Jack Stewart Kibbe, 8 October 1929 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 5 June, 2009) This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t one of Michael\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pithy, one paragraph obits, sorry.\u00c2\u00a0 And it seems almost cruel, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll grant, to wake the blog from its cryogenic sleep to post of yet … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}