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City of Dreams

November 16, 2017 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Douglas Preston ’78 in the unnamed river deep in the Honduran jungle

DOUGLAS PRESTON ’78 SAYS he keeps bank hours, writing from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. No dead-of-the-night or predawn creative marathons. The buttoned-down approach might be surprising given the risks he will take to get a good story. In 2015, Preston joined an expedition to see firsthand whether a 500-year-old legend was true. Was there a lost city of immense wealth hidden deep in the Honduran jungle? Indigenous tribes had spoken of this sacred city since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés. In The Lost City of the Monkey God, Preston narrates an adventure you couldn’t dream up (well, maybe in a nightmare). He and his fellow adventurers found an impenetrable rain forest, deadly snakes, a flesh-eating disease—and the remains of an ancient city rich with artifacts.

Pomona College Magazine’s Sneha Abraham talked to Preston about his search for a vanished civilization. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

PCM: What inspired you to go on this adventure?

Preston: I’ve been following this story for a long time. Honestly, I’ve never quite grown up. I’ve always thought that it would be exciting to find a lost city. When I was a kid I was always interested in reading about the discovery of the Maya cities, the tombs in ancient Egypt, the tomb of King Tut. I just loved those stories. But as I became an adult I realized, “Well, all the lost cities have been found, so that one childhood dream is never going to come true.” But then it did come true. So, I guess that’s why I was so intrigued by the story of this legendary lost city. It’s remarkable to me that in the 21st century, you could still find a lost city somewhere on the surface of the Earth. Amazing.

The head of a fer-de-lance, tied to a tree as a reminder of the jungle’s hidden dangers

PCM: What did your family think about your going on this particular adventure, knowing the risks involved?

Preston: Well, I didn’t tell my mother because I didn’t want her to worry, but she found out anyway. But my wife is just as adventurous as I am, and her problem was that she wasn’t going. She wanted to go!

To be honest with you, I didn’t realize just how dangerous this environment was until I was actually in it. Now, I’d been warned. People talked about it and I was fully briefed. But I dismissed those warnings, thinking, “It’s exaggeration. This is for people who’ve never been in a wilderness before.” I assumed they were giving us the worst-case scenario. I didn’t take it all that seriously. Then I entered that jungle environment and realized it was even worse than described.

PCM: Were you afraid when you arrived and you realized just how dangerous it was?

Preston: Oh, I wasn’t at all afraid in the beginning because it was gorgeous. It was amazing to be in a place where the animals had never seen people. They weren’t frightened of us. But where I had the come-to-God moment was when I saw that gigantic fer-de-lance coiled up that first night, highly aroused and in striking position, tracking me as I walked past.

The head of the expedition, a British SAS [Special Air Service] jungle warfare specialist, tried to move the snake but ended up having to kill it because it was so big. The fight was terrifying. That snake was striking everywhere and there was venom flying through the air. It was really shocking. After that, I felt a little shaky. I thought, “Well, this is sort of a dangerous environment, isn’t it?”

PCM: Are there many places in the world that are left unexplored?

Preston: There really aren’t. But even today there are some areas in the mountains of Honduras that remain unexplored. The thickest jungle in the world covers incredibly rugged mountains. When you’ve actually been in that jungle, you realize the steepness of the landscape and the thickness of the jungle make it almost impossible to move forward anywhere, except by traveling in a river or stream. You can’t get over the mountains. You just can’t get over them. You can fight with machetes for 10 hours and be lucky to go two or three miles.

And then, of course, there are all the snakes. The number of poisonous snakes in that area is staggering—and you can’t see them.

PCM: Are you in grasslands? What is the terrain like?

Preston: Well, it’s interesting that you mention that. Most of it is really thick jungle, but where there isn’t jungle, there’s high grass. It’s nine or 10 feet tall and it’s very thick-stemmed. It’s almost like wood. It’s the worst stuff to travel through. You hack away at it with a machete and you can barely make any forward movement. There are snakes hiding in the grass. They climb up into it so there’s always the chance of their falling down on you.

Wherever you are, when you move forward after cutting through with machetes, you’re stepping through leaves and debris that are lying on the ground. It’s two feet deep. You have no idea where you’re putting your feet.

So it’s a really frightening thing when you see just how common the snakes are in there.

PCM: Would you talk about places that are unexplored—like the lost city at the site known as T1? What do you think places like these, for lack of a better phrase, do for the human psyche? Specifically, what did T1 do for you as a group? And broadly speaking, what is it about these unexplored places that is important or significant for us as human beings?

Preston: There are layers of answers to that question. The first is that on a personal level, when you’re there, you realize just how unimportant you are. This is an environment that is not only indifferent but is actively hostile to you. It’s important, I think, for human beings to be humbled by nature once in a while.

On a much deeper level, these environments that haven’t been touched by human presence are extremely rare on the surface of the Earth. It’s vital for us to protect them.

Conservation International sent 14 biologists down into this valley, and they set camera traps. They recently brought those camera traps out, and they saw the most amazing animals—animals thought to be extinct, species that were unknown to science, and unbelievably dense numbers of big cats. There are mountain lions, jaguars, margays, ocelots. Apex predators.

And they’re everywhere in that valley. They’ve never been hunted by people. And what they prey on are animals like peccaries and tapirs, which are also heavily hunted by humans. There are so many peccaries and tapirs in this environment that they support a very large number of these apex predators. This is truly a rain-forest environment that is what it was like before the arrival of human beings and in equilibrium. It’s a beautiful thing to see that.

PCM: Did you feel that others in the expedition group were sharing the same sort of response to that experience?

Preston: Yes, I did. We had 10 Ph.D. scientists with us on this expedition. We had ethnobotanists, three archaeologists, an anthropologist, engineers and others. And all of them were deeply affected and impressed by what we saw. They had the scientific background to appreciate it on a deep level. While I was appreciating it on more of a layman’s level, they understood it on a scientific level, and it was extremely impressive to them.

PCM: When you open the book, it begins as an adventure story, but it turns into a history lesson and a biology lesson. Obviously, it’s still an adventure book, but there are many layers to it. You talk about the historic decimation of the population in the New World versus the lack of decimation in the Old World. Is what you put forth something that’s accepted by the mainstream? Obviously, the numbers seem to bear that out, but are other people talking about it in these terms?

Preston: Yes, I would say that the view I presented is the consensus view. However, it is controversial.

PCM: Would you talk about that?

Preston: Everyone agrees that there is a tremendous die-off among the indigenous people of the New World from Old World pathogens. The controversy is what percentage of people died. There are those who say, “Well, we don’t have solid evidence that 90 percent to 95 percent died. All these numbers that the early Spanish give us, they’re very unreliable.” But the doubters have not come forward with their own numbers. They just say it’s all very unreliable.

However, with no event in history are we given reliable numbers, especially that far back. It’s really a question of looking at all the evidence, the confluence of evidence, and coming up with the most reasonable interpretation. And the most reasonable interpretation, which is, in fact, the consensus, is that there was a 90 percent mortality rate from European diseases. That’s just staggering.

Of course, the big question is, “How many people were in the New World before the Europeans arrived? What was the population? We have very good numbers on what the populations were after, but we don’t know how many were there before. And, again, I think the consensus view is that the aboriginal populations in the New World were quite high.

PCM: Your group got quite the negative backlash from the archaeological community. How do you feel about that today? And do you still think those objections are primarily turf battles, jealousy, politics? Would you talk a little bit about that?

Preston (right) and Chris Yoder wading in the unnamed river

Preston: In my book I try to balance some of the legitimate objections with some of the ones that were not legitimate. To put it in perspective, it was a very small group of archaeologists objecting very vociferously.

The Honduran archaeologists who dismissed our findings were individuals who had been removed from their positions following the military coup in Honduras in 2009. The military removed the leftist president and then turned the government back over to the civilian sector, and they had new elections. A leftist government was replaced by a rightist government. In the process, several Honduran archaeologists lost their jobs and new archaeologists were brought in. Some of the dismissed archaeologists did not look with approval on our cooperating with the current government. On the American side, there were several archaeologists who specialized in Honduras who were upset that the discovery was made not by archaeologists but by engineers using lidar, which is an extremely expensive technology unaffordable to most archaeologists. They also objected that the expedition was financed not by archaeologists but by filmmakers. But since my book was published, along with several peer-reviewed papers on the discovery, the objections have ceased.

When archaeologists first heard about the discovery, they initially didn’t know anything about it. There were no scientific publications yet. They heard that a “lost city” had been found, and some reacted with understandable skepticism. But then when the scientific publications started appearing, the criticism ceased. As of now, almost a dozen archaeologists have worked at the site, all from top institutions—Harvard, Caltech—as well as archaeologists from Honduras, Mexico and Costa Rica. When the doubters read those scientific publications and saw the lidar images of the city, they realized, “Oh, wow, this really is a big find.”

The fact is the importance of this discovery isn’t just archaeological. It has stimulated the Honduran government into rolling back the illegal deforestation of this area and encouraged it to preserve this incredibly pristine and untouched rain forest for the future. That might be even more important than the archaeological discovery. Preserving that rain forest is crucial.

PCM: Talk a little bit about that preservation, because you write in the book about the encroaching destruction of these rain forests and jungles. Do you feel that the protection is going to be effective?

Preston: Well, it’s hard to say. Deforestation is a huge problem. The land is being cleared, most of it, not for timbering, not for the value of the logs, but for the grazing of cattle, for beef production. Because of this discovery, the Honduran government has finally taken steps to stop the cutting of trees and the burning of the forests in the area. And also they’ve taken measures to prevent illegal rain-forest beef from entering the supply chains. I was able to show that originally when we went into 2015, some of this rain-forest beef was going to a meat packing company that was selling through a long supply chain to McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King.

Now those three American companies weren’t aware, I don’t think, that they were buying rain-forest beef, because they were buying it several wholesalers removed, through intermediaries. I know that when I brought my evidence to the attention of McDonald’s, they freaked out and immediately sent people down to Honduras and tried to make sure that they weren’t buying rain-forest beef. Obviously, it’s a good business decision not to be accused of being behind the destruction of the rain forest.

PCM: How much of the site has been excavatied, and how many of the artifacts have been retrieved?

Preston: The city of T1 itself probably covers 600 to 1,000 acres. That’s a very rough guess. Only 200 square feet have been excavated. In that area, they took out 500 sculptures from a cache at the base of the central pyramid. There is so much more still in the ground. It’s just incredible. But the Hondurans are not going to excavate the city. They understand, everyone understands, that it’s much better to leave it as is. They’re not going to clear the jungle or anything like that. They’re going to leave virtually all the rest of it as is.

PCM: So much of it remains untouched still, but do you feel that the experts are gaining more knowledge about this culture that disappeared?

A sculpture of a “were-jaguar” found at the site of the lost city

Preston: Yes, this culture is so little known and uninvestigated that it doesn’t even have a name. They’re just the ancient people of Mosquitia. But they had a relationship with the Maya. It’s a very interesting question as to what the relationship was. The city of Copán is 200 miles west of the site of T1. After Copán collapsed, a lot of Maya influence flowed into the Mosquitia region. The ancient people of Mosquitia then started building pyramids. They started building ball courts and playing the Mesoamerican ball game. And they started laying out their cities in a kind of vaguely Maya fashion. But they weren’t Maya. They probably did not speak a Mayan language. They probably spoke some variant of Chibchan, which is a language group connected to South America.

There are so many mysteries as to who these people were, where they came from, what their relationship was to the Maya, and what happened to them. Now, the excavation of the cache hinted at what might have happened to these people, what caused the collapse not only of T1 but of all the cities in Mosquitia. But we still don’t know anything about their origin, where they came from, who they were. And we have only a vague idea of how they lived in this seemingly hostile jungle environment, how they thrived in that environment.

PCM: You mentioned global warming in the context of the flesh-eating disease you contracted, leishmaniasis.

Preston: Two thirds of the expedition came down with leishmaniasis. The valley turned out to be a hot zone of disease. When I got leishmaniasis, of course, I became very interested in it because it’s a potentially deadly and incurable disease. You find it’s suddenly a rather intense focus of your interest! Epidemiologists have predicted the spread of leishmaniasis across the United States. There was a paper that looked at best-case and worst-case global warming scenarios for the spread of leishmaniasis into the United States. Even in the most optimistic, best-case scenario, leishmaniasis will spread across the United States and enter Canada by the year 2080.

In the entire 20th century, there were 29 cases recorded in the United States, and those were right on the border with Mexico. Since then, leish has been found across Texas and deep into Oklahoma, almost to the Arkansas border. It’s a disease that we are going to have to deal with in the future. There’s no vaccine. There’s no prophylactic for it, unlike malaria. It’s transmitted by sand flies which feed on any number of mammals, from rats and mice to dogs and cats. Sandflies are about the quarter of the size of mosquitos. You can’t hear them. You can’t feel them biting. They come out at night. The disease is very difficult to treat.

PCM: How your current health? You mentioned in your book that the disease is coming back, but you haven’t told your doctor.

Preston: It unfortunately does seem to be coming back. This is not unusual for the strain of leish that we all got. I finally photographed the lesion that is redeveloping. But I haven’t sent it to my doctor yet. I just don’t have the guts to do it.

PCM: So what price are you willing to pay for a story? If you’d known beforehand what would happen, would you have still gone?

Preston: Yes, I would’ve.

PCM: You would’ve?

Preston: Yeah, I would’ve. Honestly, as a journalist, I’ve put myself into some dangerous situations, and if this is the worst that’s going to happen to me, I’m probably ahead of the game. I’m lucky. I would do it again. Look, leishmaniasis is not the worst thing that can happen to you. A lot of people are dealing with a lot worse, like cancer and things like that. So I’m doing just fine.

PCM: Would you go back?

Preston: Well, I would if they discovered something really cool. This culture apparently buried their dead in caves as opposed to in the ground. In this jungle, ground burials are gone. The soil is so acidic that there would be nothing left in terms of bones or remains. But they do find spectacular necropolises in caves in this region. Archaeologists are now exploring the valley for caves, where they hope to find burials full of extraordinary artifacts. That would be an amazing find. I’d go down for that.

The Lost City of the Monkey God
by Douglas Preston ’78
Grand Central Publishing 2017
366 pages | 35 photos and maps
Hardcover $28.00
Paperback $15.99

Imagine. Create. Engage. Together.

November 16, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

Starr delivers her inaugural address.

THE FOLLOWING ARE excerpts from the inaugural address of President G. Gabrielle Starr:

During the morning-long Inauguration Symposium, Dominic Mensah ’20 discusses a student empowerment program he helped found in Ghana.

“We discover. We create. And every discovery begins with a question, an observation, something that piques the human imagination. As a community we test our knowledge, engaging deeply with our fields, our peers and the world beyond us. We don’t close our eyes to critique, to alternate possibilities, to the reality that we may be wrong. And the ultimate result is something new in the world: a new idea, a new solution, a new molecule, a new policy, a new work of art, a stronger community.”

Starr poses with four chairs of Pomona’s Board of Trustees—from left: Stewart Smith ’68, current Chair Samuel D. Glick ’04, Starr, Jeanne M. Buckley ’65 and Dr. Robert E. Tranquada ’51.

“We have a voice—indeed, many voices—what will we say, and how will we say it to the world? When this College was launched ‘the world’ meant something different. Our place, now, is different. We must decide together what that place will be. We have stood for access. We must stand for equity and inclusion. We have stood for principle. We must stand for nuance. We are smarter than slogans, smarter than simple binaries, smarter than the world always knows. We can be humble. We can open our voices to the world. We can shape discourse now. Listen to each other. Hear each other. And, please, mark these words: As one Pomona, we realize the future of our own making. Thank you, let’s celebrate each other, let’s party, and then—let’s get to work.”

Inaugural Messages

Starr is hooded during the installation ceremony.

Leading up to her inauguration, President Starr went online to ask alumni and parents to share stories, memories and thoughts about their own Pomona experience. Here are a few excerpts. Others are available here.

“Pomona College offered me unparalleled opportunities as a first-generation, low-income, undocumented student. I was able to attend Pomona College cost-free, study abroad and visit 11 different countries, engage and partner with the surrounding communities to bridge socioeconomic barriers, think critically about what I was learning in the classroom and how to best apply such knowledge to better my home community.”
—Sergio Rodriguez Camarena ’16

Chair of the Board Samuel D. Glick ’04 applauds after the completion of Starr’s official installation as Pomona’s 10th president.

“I hope I can meet you next year at our 60th, for you also exude that openness that meant so much to me then and has allowed me to persevere in my efforts to guide a broken world toward a saner future.”
—Carolyn Neeper ’58

“When I think about what Pomona means to me, I think about one particular conversation I had with my son, Franklin, early on during his time at Pomona. We were talking just before he was scheduled to go meet with a family friend who was visiting Pomona as a prospective student. I asked him, ‘If he asked you what the best thing about Pomona is, what would you say?’ Without hesitating, he answered, ‘I am surrounded by people who care about me.’”
—Sarah Marsh P’17

Starr speaks after the installation.

Starr receives congratulations.

“Pomona College wasn’t just a great educational experience. It was a new perspective on a bigger, more diverse world of different cultures, national and global politics and society, in general—a total game changer.”
—James Blancarte ’75

“Pomona and her people quickly became my adopted family. The people I met, experiences I had, and opportunities I realized served me well as a student and have continued to be a source of support and inspiration during my 37 years (ack!) as an alumnus. I look forward to a new chapter in Pomona’s storied history under your leadership, and I can’t wait to meet you in person. Remind me to show you my Cecil Sagehen tattoo.”
—Frank Albinder ’80

During the reception following her installation, Starr speaks with Assembly member Cristina Garcia ’99.

Darkness falls as diners enjoy a community picnic and party on Marston Quadrangle.

Partygoers enjoy a game of ping pong on a lighted table.

Dramatic lighting on the front of Bridges Auditorium reveals banners with the College mark, the inaugural logo and the theme of the inauguration—”Imagine. Create. Engage. Together.”

Dancers take over a lighted dance floor under the stars.

Dancers with a colorfully lit Bridges Auditorium in the background.

Photos by Carlos Puma and William Vasta

A Reunion to Eclipse All Others

November 16, 2017 by Lew and Chuck Phelps ’65 Comments Off

Close-up of the total eclipse. Photo by Tom and Judith Auchter, digitally enhanced by Lew Phelps ’65

WE LOOKED TO the west across the vast plain that lay at our feet, far below the high summit we had recently ascended by ski lift. An ominous wall of darkness rushed toward us, enveloping everything in its path. Someone muttered, “Sauron, the Lord of Darkness, comes now in all his might!” We all then turned from this foreboding view to the sky above to watch the most astonishing and spectacular event in all of nature. This was the moment for which the two of us had been preparing for seven years. Totality had begun for 200-plus Pomona College alumni, their families and friends, in the Pomona College Solar Eclipse Reunion of 2017.

Sagehens watch the slow progress of the moon across the sun from their mountain perch. Photo by Robert Gaines

A hundred families, all of whom shared some connection to the Pomona College Classes of ’64, ’65 and ’66, had assembled atop Fred’s Mountain in western Wyoming. We had flown or driven to the area in the days before, ridden a mile-long ski lift to the top of the peak and watched with growing excitement as the dark disk of the moon gradually ate its way across the surface of the sun.

In just over two minutes, the total portion of the eclipse was over. Light began to return to the sky. Laughter and excited chatter filled the air. Some of us wept from the pure joy and power of the experience.

The 47 Eclipse

One fun aspect of this venture, the Phelps twins said, was the opportunity to infuse Pomona’s mystical number 47 into communications related to the event. In their first written description of the event to classmates, they wrote, “Numerology savants will note that at our location, the eclipse event ends at exactly 1:00:00 p.m. on 8/21/17. The sum of those date and time numbers equals 47! What’s more, the exact geographic location of the top of Fred’s Mountain is N 43.787° W 110.934°. The digits of that latitude/ longitude position also add up to 47!”

We, the authors of this article, are identical twins, both graduates of Pomona College in the Class of 1965. Back in 1991, after jointly experiencing an awesome six minutes and 45 seconds of total solar eclipse in Baja Sur, Mexico, we began thinking about a good place to view the eclipse that would pass completely over the United States on Aug. 21, 2017. About seven years ago, we began to deploy what was then a relatively novel tool, Google Earth, to find an ideal spot for viewing the 2017 eclipse. We plotted the path of totality across the U.S. and then began “walking across the landscape” at high magnification, starting on the Pacific coast.

We came first to a fire lookout tower in central Oregon, smack on the path of totality, but a long, difficult hike from the nearest Jeep trail. We kept looking. The Palouse region, east of the Cascade Mountains, looked promising from a standpoint of cloud cover — the nemesis of all eclipse watchers — but the landscape was tedious. Moving farther east, just as our digital exploration crossed the state line from Idaho into Wyoming, we found a ski lodge.

The ski lift up Fred’s Mountain brings more participants to the reunion. Photo by Alex Bentley and Hunter Bell

Hello, Grand Targhee Resort.

The more we looked at this location, the more interesting it became. The resort sat at 8,000 feet, at the base of a 10,000-foot peak called Fred’s Mountain, with a chair lift to the top. Just east of Fred’s Mountain rise the magnificent peaks of the Grand Tetons.

This skier’s paradise, we realized, might provide a truly unique eclipse-watching opportunity. From atop Fred’s Mountain, with very clear air, one might be able to see the shadow of the moon racing across the 100-mile-wide valley floor below. We calculated that at 1,662 miles per hour, it would take only a bit more than three and a half minutes to cross that breadth, all in view from our aerie-like perch.

Sagehens watch the moon’s shadow race across the valley floor. Photo by Martha Lussenhop

After kicking around various ideas for how best to make use of this seemingly unique site, we decided—shortly before the 50th reunion of our Pomona Class of ’65 (Thor)—to see if our classmates would be interested in an informal class reunion built around the eclipse. The response was enthusiastic. With a goal of completely filling the resort’s 95 rooms, we first solicited sign-ups from our classmates and then expanded the proposal to our two “adjacent” classes, ’64 (Dionysus) and ’66 (Pele). And so we brought together the god of thunder, the god of wine and ritual madness, and the goddess of fire, volcanoes and capriciousness—quite a volatile mix. From those three classes, we drew enough participants to fill the entire ski resort, counting spouses, children and grandchildren of classmates.

Then came two years of intense planning, including two inspection trips to the resort, negotiations over fees, menu planning for group dinners, contracts with vendors, identifying speakers (what would a Pomona gathering be without strong intellectual content?) and much more. We even included four nights of “star parties”—opportunities to view gorgeous objects in the night sky through telescopes operated by experienced amateur astronomers— organized by Franklin McBride Marsh ’17.

The eclipse reaches totality above the Grand Teton Mountains. Photo by Robert Gaines

We approached the resort’s management well before they had a clear sense of the enormous enthusiasm that would later emerge for the Great Eclipse of 2017. Thus we were able to negotiate a very favorable deal—a four-night-minimum stay at only modestly higher-than-normal room rates. In the months just preceding the eclipse, commercial tour operators were asking—and getting—three or four times as much per person in nearby Jackson Hole, Wyoming. On eclipse day, rooms in a Motel 6 in nearby Driggs, Idaho, were going for $1,000 a night. In the last year before the eclipse, as people began to focus more on the upcoming event, the resort’s marketing team received inquiries from numerous other groups, including eclipse-chasers affiliated with Brown and Oxford universities. Sadly for them, but happily for us, Pomona College got there first.

For our speaker series, Pomona College sponsored two Pomona faculty members—Professor of Geology Robert Gaines and former Brackett Professor of Astronomy Bryan Penprase. And from the ranks of our alumni, we added Ed Krupp ’66, director of the Griffith Observatory in L.A.; Larry Price ’65, part of the team that proved the existence of the Higgs boson with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Barbara Becker, historian of astronomy and spouse of Hank Becker ’66; and James A. Turrell ’65, the world-famous artist who manipulates light and space.

Speaker Series

The Phelps twins have made electronic presentations from the reunion’s speaker series available to donors who give $47 or more to the Phelps Twins Solar Eclipse Fund for Science Internships at Pomona College, created by reunion participants following the event. The presentations, which combine audio recordings with synchronized copies of the accompanying PowerPoints, include “Aliens in the Ooze,” by Pomona Geology Professor Robert Gaines; “Chasing Cosmic Explosions,” by former Pomona Astronomy Professor Bryan Penprase; “Devoured by Darkness,” by Ed Krupp ’66, director of the Griffith Observatory; “The Scientific Discovery of the Century,” by physicist Larry Price ’65; “Risky Business: The Search for the Soul of the Sun in the Shadow of the Moon,” by historian of astronomy Barbara Becker; and “The Art of James Turrell,” a conversation between Krupp and noted light-and-space artist James A. Turrell ’65.

To our considerable relief, the morning of the eclipse dawned with almost completely clear skies. You can plan for a thousand details, but there is no way to control the weather. We had selected the site in western Wyoming for two reasons—the unique view and the area’s encouraging history of mostly clear skies in late August. The historical record proved predictive, but if the eclipse had occurred four days earlier or three days later, we would have been rained out, so we were also lucky.

On eclipse day, the air to the west was darkened by smoke from vast forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. As it turned out, however, the smoke enhanced our eclipse experience. Thanks to the haze, the lunar shadow presented itself to us as an immense 60-mile-wide wall of darkness (some saw it as a wave) that seemed dense, solid and impenetrable. The sight of what appeared to be a huge physical mass moving toward us at twice the speed of sound was awesome—indeed, frightening—and even more dramatic than we had dared to hope. As we stood there at the only vantage point in the world where that unique view was available, we couldn’t help imagining what the experience might have been like for people before science provided an understanding of the event.

Lew and Chuck Phelps, both ’65, embrace at the end of the event. Photo by Alex Bentley and Hunter Bell.

The appearance of the sun during totality is as different from a partial eclipse as (literally) night is from day. All the phenomena one hopes to see during totality made an appearance atop Fred’s Mountain. The glorious halo of the solar corona was much more expansive and detailed than the two of us recall from the 1991 eclipse we saw in Baja Sur. Atop Fred’s Mountain, we observed Bailey’s Beads, the fiery red dots that appear on the rim of the moon at the beginning and end of totality as the sun peeks through valleys in the mountains and craters that rim the moon’s edge. The “diamond ring” apparition as the sun emerged from behind the moon was spectacular. Our bodies’ shadows became extremely sharp-edged as the sun became almost a true “point source” of light just before totality. A beautiful magenta aura caused by prominences erupting from the sun’s surface appeared just before totality ended. Alas, the shimmering and beautiful “shadow bands” that can appear just before and after totality were not much in evidence on the summit of Fred’s Mountain, although more-so to several dozen of our group who stayed at “base camp” at the resort to watch.

Most of our group had never seen a total eclipse previously, and for days afterward, the listserv that we had established for the group was populated with messages such as “Still quivering!” We received thank-you notes filled with phrases like “experience of a lifetime,” “unforgettable,” “amazing adventure” and “spectacular event.” One participant wrote, “The majesty of the eclipse escapes my ability to describe. … It will live in my memory forever.”

Such is the power of a total solar eclipse.

Sagehens at Work

November 16, 2017 by Jeff Hing Comments Off

CHECK OUT THIS VIDEO about the budding careers of six recent Pomona graduates, from across the nation, who are working to make a difference in a variety of fields:

Field Garthwaite ’08 of Los Angeles, was an art major. Today, this entrepreneur is the founder and CEO of Iris TV.
Marybel Gonzalez ’09 of Denver, Colo., was an international relations major. Today, she’s an on-air reporter for Rocky Mountain PBS.
Ellen Moody ’06 of New York City was an art history major. Today she’s assistant projects conservator at the Museum of Modern Art.
Guy Stevens ’13 of Kansas City, Mo., was an economics major. Today he’s coordinator of baseball analytics for the Kansas City Royals.
Scott Tan ’16 of Boston, Mass., was a physics major. Today he’s a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at MIT
Dr. Kara Toles ’07 of Oakland, Calif. was a Black Studies Major. Today she’s an emergency medicine physician working at several sites, including the UC Davis Med Center. (See “Life and Death in the D-Pod.)

Stray Thoughts: Excelling Wisely

November 16, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

G. Gabrielle Starr POMONA IS EXTRAORDINARY. We remind ourselves of this proudly when we marvel at the brilliance of our students and faculty, the accomplishments of our alumni, the talent of our staff, the amazing marks Sagehens leave on the world. How many high-achieving people, people who never give up, do we see every day?

What a wondrous thing! Yet I wonder something else, too. How much room do we give ourselves and each other to slow down? To choose which amazing thing we are going to do—today? There’s a lot of pressure on everyone to take advantage of all of the gifts and opportunities in front of us. We advise each other to excel.

Maybe we can talk about excelling wisely.

Sometimes people ask me for advice, and this column seems a good place to give some, if you’ll let me. Most of us acknowledge that you have to seek balance in life; equally, we acknowledge that finding such a balance is hard. This truth deserves more than lip service. We need to tell ourselves and each other that we can achieve and excel without taking every drop of energy from our reserves. That we all need to take some time to laugh.

Parents, friends, professors, bosses, coworkers and mentors routinely use language that raises expectations: We challenge, we press and we exhort. Even this magazine—always full of stories about people doing extraordinary things—can sometimes seem to be ratcheting up the pressure to achieve. There’s good reason for all of that. Everyone needs to be reminded that they can do great things. But we also need other reminders. Creativity requires freedom, space and room to grow. And achievement isn’t the only thing that adds meaning to our lives.

This issue of the magazine is, as usual, about some amazing Pomona people, but it’s also about the sometimes blissful, sometimes thorny relationship between the work we do and the lives we live. It’s about achieving lifelong dreams and coping with life-or-death stress. It’s about life-changing choices and what happens when everything falls apart.

Most importantly, the stories in this issue are about dealing with timeless, and timely, questions. I hope you pause and give yourself permission in your work, your studies and your relationships to make the life you desire.

—G. Gabrielle Starr
President of Pomona College

Letter Box

November 16, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

“Hidden Pomona” and the Whartons

Hidden Pomona I was recently visiting my mother (Mayrene Gorton Ogier ’49) in Atascadero, Calif., and noticed the cover photo of the Spring 2017 issue of PCM depicting Pomona’s first Black graduate, Winston Dickson 1904. The magazine was doing secondary duty under a flower pot, but the water-stained photo nevertheless looked familiar. And indeed, it depicts Dickson boxing with my great-uncle, William Wharton 1906.

Then, inside on pages 28 and 29, was a wonderful double-page photo spread of Dickson a year and a half after his graduation, socializing with the 1905–06 Pomona College football team—evidently relaxing and recounting plays following a hard-fought game. (In those years, Pomona routinely beat USC, among others.) The gentleman immediately in front of Dickson in profile with his back to the camera wearing a disheveled suit coat is very likely Seaborn Wharton 1901, who stayed on at Pomona as football coach for a number of years before returning to Tulare, Calif., to manage the family farm.

The two gentlemen sitting in the dirt talking with Seaborn and Dickson are almost surely William, who was team captain in 1906 and strikingly handsome, but who tragically died in a mining cave-in soon after graduating, and likely, Charles Greene (Charley) Wharton 1907, my grandfather, who later became a urologist in the Sierras silver-rush town of Bodie, Calif., and then in downtown Los Angeles, after graduating from medical school at Bowdoin. All three of them were distinguishable from their Pomona mates by their six-foot-plus height and wild curly hair—as was their sister, Minnie 1902, who taught school in Pomona and was vice president of the Pomona Alumni Association after World War I.

If I knew how to communicate with those Whartons now, I would ask about Winston Dickson, as per the wishes of the hosts of the “Hidden Pomona” podcasts, who had little information to work with aside from old photographs. The Wharton family surely knew him very well.

By the way, that early 19th-century Wharton family “thing” about Pomona College (the entire family moved to Claremont for a decade so the children could attend) has persisted. If my children had matriculated at Pomona as I hoped they might (they chose Princeton and Occidental instead), they would have been the 31st and 32nd extended Wharton/Alexander/Ogier/ Gannon/Wyse/Wiederanders family members to do so (counting also my father, Walter T. Ogier, who chaired the Physics Department for many years). To further the Pomona cause, my grandfather, Charley Wharton, and my grandmother, Aileen, in addition to being substantial direct donors to Pomona during their lives, also contributed financially and otherwise to the successful passage through Pomona of my siblings, Thomas Ogier ’82 and Kathryn Ogier Lum ’88. How I managed to miss Pomona’s siren call is not clear.

—Walter C. Ogier
Williams College ‘78
Winchester, Mass.

I Do Belong

Pomona College Magazine Summer 2017 cover I’ve been meaning to write since reading the touching, inspiring article by Carla Guerrero ’06, “I Do Belong Here,” in the Summer 2017 PCM. Then, this week, President Starr asked us to write our Pomona stories to her, and I responded. It was only right that I also write to you, for it was Carla’s story that inspired me to be in touch with Pomona College again after over 60 years.

In 1952–54 I was a freshman and sophomore at Pomona College. As the only Japanese American in my class (there were two other Asians—no Blacks or Latinos) and coming from an immigrant, working-class family in Los Angeles, I was very aware I did not fit at Pomona in terms of race or social class. I was even invited to join the International Club. I suppose the well-meaning people who invited me did not understand that people of color were not necessarily born outside the U.S.

Your story, the information that more than 50 percent of this year’s new class are domestic students of color and President Starr’s appointment fill me with joy. Pomona has always been a fine academic institution. I’m glad it is also moving toward being a welcoming home for multicultural students who reflect the current demographics of our country.

Congratulations and thank you to Carla and others who were part of the wise group of people who brought President Starr to Pomona College.

—Amy Iwasaki Mass ’56
El Cerrito, Calif.

I was very touched by Carla Guererro’s column in the most recent PCM entitled, “I Do Belong Here.” I graduated from Pomona in 1998, and as I read her piece, I was transported back to my days as a student. I could completely relate to her experience as an awkward first-gen Latina daughter of proud immigrant parents trying to find her place at Pomona. Like Carla, I found a good group of peers, and with the support of wonderful faculty and staff, I thrived. The excitement she described at the hiring of Gabi Starr as Pomona’s new president is felt well beyond Claremont. I’ve talked to many of my Pomona friends, and we all agree—we’re so very proud of Pomona and can’t wait to see how President Starr will influence and inspire the entire community. Thank you, Carla, for writing a piece that truly captured not only a shared experience of the past but also a shared enthusiasm for the future of the college we love.

—Juliette Cagigas ’98
Whittier, Calif.

The Mind of a Psychopath

I enjoyed reading the article titled “How to Understand the Mind of a Psychopath” in the Summer 2017 PCM. I was impressed with 2017 graduate Kaily Lawson’s view on cognitive science and what goes on inside the mind of what many consider to be a “serial killer.” I found it interesting that many prominent figures in today’s society have traits found in psychopaths.

Now, when it comes to famous serial killers whose acts spurred an utter disturbance among Americans, it is hard to determine how the legal system should treat these individuals. An example of this is Ed Kemper, infamous as “the Co-Ed Butcher.” Although he was found guilty of his horrible crimes and received seven years to life in prison, he turned himself in to the police and ultimately felt remorse for what he had done. In his most recent parole hearing, he rejected attending it because he deemed himself unfit to return to society. He suddenly recognized that his crimes were morally wrong and confessed his guilt. But what caused this sudden change in intuition? Lawson obviously has a great interest in this branch of psychology, and I completely understand when she says there’s a “continuum” for psychopathic traits, where people may be placed on a spectrum of “good” or “bad.”

Once again, I enjoyed reading this article, and I hope Ms. Lawson finds success in her future career. I also wish her the best in her efforts to influence public policy in today’s legal system.

—Jules Winnfield
Inglewood, Calif.

Extreme Individualism

The summer issue of PCM contains three letters from readers shocked by the simplistic right/wrong mentality of the modern occupants of Pomona College. I studied philosophy with Fred Sontag and W.T. Jones in the ’50s and sang in the glee clubs. But for the last 15 years I have been a student of Sanatana Dharma, the timeless path of the ancient riches in India. Before that I was interested in Chinese thinking for decades.

My background leads me to see what is going on at Pomona as an extreme form of individualism in the still-adolescent culture that is the United States. What we need today is the ability to open our hearts to everyone and use our minds to try to understand what our hearts tell us about others. Pomona is of course a bookish place.

I take issue also with the idea that climate change is the major issue. Doris Lessing’s futuristic novels suggest what the world might look like after catastrophe: They are lost but surviving. However, I would say that the major issue is the fallout from unregulated socially irresponsible capitalism and our apparent inability to live together in a crowded landscape without resulting in wars between city blocks scaled up to nations.

There are so many good people in America, although one might think money is the main value for most people. So I also hold the thought that Trump may save us yet by pushing us so close to self-destruction that we may suddenly experience a mass epiphany and find in our midst unknown new leaders who can lead us, hopefully without too much humor about how foolish we were to be taken in by our dogmatic old beliefs.

—Thomas (Megha) deLackner, ‘58
Concord, Calif.

I hope certain letter writers in the Summer 2017 PCM learn someday that what they call “political correctness” is simply treating those different from them with basic dignity and respect. They should try it sometime. They might learn a few things that four years at Pomona evidently failed to teach them.

—Bruce Mirken ’78
San Francisco, Calif.

Correction

In your obituaries in the Summer 2017 PCM, you listed Robert Shelton as Robert “Bob” H. Shelton ’47. He was always known as “Robin” Shelton at Pomona. I should know because I married him.

—Miriam Cross Shelton
Laguna Beach, Calif.

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.

Working Dog

November 16, 2017 by Mark Wood Comments Off

THE NEWEST MEMBER of the Campus Safety team wags his tail lazily as he strolls across campus, pausing to have his back stroked or his ears scratched. But don’t be fooled—Officer Red Dogg is hard at work.

“He’s built more for comfort than speed at this point,” says Campus Safety Director Stan Skipworth, who adopted the 10-year-old beagle mix from a rescue organization, “but he is actually certified as an emotional support animal, and he’s had some modest training for that.”

Skipworth had been considering adding a canine to the staff, and when he happened onto Red, he decided it was worth a try. “He’s such a good-natured dog, and I thought it would be a nice way to build on our community-oriented policing policy.”

The response, he said, has been remarkable—and not just when Red is out patrolling, wearing his official ID collar and his Campus Safety insignia on a red-and-black bandanna. “We actually get several visitors a week who come here specifically to see Red and pet him, and then they go on to class,” Skipworth says.

Red really earns his keep, however, when people come to Campus Safety to make a report. “He doesn’t do real police work,” Skipworth says, “but he’s our official greeter, and when people who’ve had a bad experience come in to do a report, he comes and sits with them, and I think he makes a real difference.”

Sagehen Now Part of Rock History

October 27, 2016 by Staff Comments Off

Sagehen Pride is now part of the very landscape of California.

Four years ago, while still at Pomona, geology-physics double-major Benjamin Murphy ’13, did his senior thesis on a geologic formation in Eastern California near Mammoth Lakes. Thanks to a serendipitously-located road, Murphy and his mentors, geology professors Jade Star Lackey and Robert Gaines, came up with the idea of naming it the Sagehen Formation.

A few years and some revisions later, their paper was recently published in the Journal of Sedimentary Research, making it all official.

Geologically speaking, the Sagehen Formation is a package of coarse-grained sedimentary rocks (sandstones and conglomerates) that were deposited within a lake in the Long Valley Caldera in California between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago, according to Murphy, now in his third year in a Ph.D. program at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.

How did they manage to name it after our mascot? A newly discovered formation must be named after some local landmark that is as near as possible to the “type section”– the place where the formation is best exposed and representative, says Gaines.

It turned out that Sagehen Road was one of the only named features anywhere near the type section. “Once we realized that, there was no need for discussion! It was obvious that it was both scientifically appropriate and awfully fun,” says Gaines.

For those new to Pomona, nobody is quite sure how the sage hen, also known as the sage grouse, became our mascot a century or so ago. A sizeable bird with spiky tail feathers, the sage grouse ranges over much of the West, but is not found in the Claremont area. In fact, the region where the Sagehen Formation stands is one of the only places in California where these birds roam, making the name a rock-solid choice.

Book Talk: Migrants in the Crossfire of Love and Law

October 25, 2016 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

01-crossing-the-gulf-mahdavi-book In her new book, Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives, Associate Professor of Anthropology Pardis Mahdavi tells heartbreaking stories about migrants and trafficked mothers and their children in the Persian Gulf and talks to state officials, looking at how bonds of love get entangled with the law. Mahdavi talked to PCM’s Sneha Abraham about her book and the questions it poses about migration and families. This interview has been edited and condensed.

PCM: Talk about the relationship between family and migration.

MAHDAVI: Our concept of family has been reconceptualized and reconfigured in and through migration. People are separated from their blood-based kin; they’re forming new kinds of fictive kinship in the labor camps or abroad. Some people migrate out of a sense of familial duty, to honor their families. Sometimes they get stuck in situations which they feel they can’t get out of because of their family and familial obligations. Other people migrate to get away from their families, to get away from the watchful eyes of their families and communities. Families are not able to necessarily migrate together, and children are not able to migrate with their parents; they’re in a more tenuous relationship now than we would recognize when we look at migrants really just as laborers.

Laws complicate those relationships. Laws on migration, citizenship and human trafficking create a category of people caught in the crossfire of policies—and those people are often women and their children, and often they are trapped in situations of illegality.

PCM: Would you tease out the question of migration versus trafficking? That is something you’re exploring in your book.

MAHDAVI: I think it’s a real tension that needs to be teased out in the larger discourse. That’s the central question. What constitutes migration? What constitutes trafficking? It’s very difficult and that space is much more gray than we think. We’ve tended to assume that women in industries like the sex industry are all trafficked. We assume if there’s a woman involved, it’s the sex industry; if it’s a minor, it is trafficking; if it’s a male, if they’re in construction work, that’s migration. But that’s just not true. Trafficking really boils down to forced fraud or coercion within migration. It’s kind of a gray area, a much larger area than we think. The utility of the word “trafficking” really is questioned in the book. How useful is that word? The very definitions of migration and human trafficking are extremely politicized and depend on who you ask and when. Some people might strategically leverage the term, whereas other people strategically dodge it.

Some interpretations have positively elevated the importance of issues that migrants face; other people might say that the framework is used to demonize migrants or further restrict their movement.

PCM: What’s an example of a policy that affects these issues of migration and trafficking?

MAHDAVI: The United States Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) is one policy, kind of a large one, to the extent that the report ranks all the countries into tiers and then makes recommendations based on their rankings. And sometimes the recommendations that the TIP report makes actually exacerbate the situation instead of making it better.

For instance, the United Arab Emirates is frequently ranked Tier 2, or Tier 2 Watchlist [countries that do not comply with minimum standards for protecting victims of trafficking but are making efforts], and the recommendation is that there should be more prosecutions and there should be more police. Now, the police in the U.A.E. are imported oftentimes, and from my interviews with migrant workers, it’s often the police who are raping sex workers and domestic workers. So you double up your cops, you double up your perpetrators of rape. So that is a policy that’s not helping anyone.

Other policies are more tethered to citizenship. They don’t have soil-based or birthright citizenship in the Gulf. Citizenship passes through the father in the U.A.E. and Kuwait. Citizenship also passes through the father in some of the sending countries, for instance, up until recently Nepal and India. So that means a domestic worker from India or Nepal, five years ago, who goes to the U.A.E., perhaps is raped by her employer or has a boyfriend and gets pregnant and has a baby, that woman is first incarcerated and then deported because as a guest worker she is contractually sterilized, and that baby is stateless because of citizenship laws that are incongruent.

There is a whole generation of people that have been born into this really problematic situation.

PCM: You write about “children of the Emir.” Who are they?

MAHDAVI: So, “children of the Emir” is kind of the colloquial nomenclature given to a lot of the stateless children. They could be children of migrant workers, children who oftentimes were born in jail; maybe they were left in the Gulf when their mothers were deported. They may have been left there intentionally. It’s not clear, but they’re stateless children who were born in the Gulf. And some of them are growing up in orphanages; others are growing up in the palaces. There was a lot of tacit knowledge about these children and rumors that the Emir or members of the royal family are raising them. But nobody could find the kids. Nobody knew where they were or if it was actually true that they were being raised in the palaces or not. That was rumor until I conducted my research and I was able to confirm that by interviewing these children. And it is true that some are raised in various palaces, given a lot of opportunities, and treated very well.

So now many of them are adults, living and working in the Gulf but still stateless. Recently there’s been a slew of articles that have indicated that some of the Gulf countries, the U.A.E. and Kuwait included, are engaging in deals with the Comoros Islands where, in exchange for money to build roads and bridges, they are getting passports from the Comoros Islands. Initially it was thought that they would just get passports to give to these stateless individuals, but the individuals had to remain in the Gulf. However, a closer look at some of the contracts indicates that some of these stateless individuals who are being given Comoros citizenship actually will have to go to the Comoros Islands, which is a very disconcerting prospect for many stateless individuals in the Gulf. And for people who are from the Comoros Islands, they are now thinking, “Oh, our citizenship is for sale,” to stateless individuals who are suddenly told that they are citizens of a country they’ve never even heard of.

PCM: You write about something you call “intimate mobility.” What is that?

MAHDAVI: Intimate mobility is kind of a trope that I’m putting forward in the book. Basically, it’s the idea that people do migrate in search of economic mobility and social mobility—which is obvious to a lot of people—but people also migrate in search of intimate mobility, or a way to mobilize their intimate selves. For example, they migrate to get away from their families in search of a way or space to explore their sexualities. Some form new intimate ties through migration. For others, their intimate subjectivities are challenged when one or more members of the family leave. My book is asking us to think about how intimacy can be both activated and challenged in migration.

PCM: What does it mean to mobilize one’s intimate self?

MAHDAVI: There was a young woman who migrated, who left India because her parents wanted her to get married in an arranged marriage. But she left because she saw herself as somebody who would not want to marry a man. She identifies as a lesbian, and so she migrated to Dubai so that she could explore that sexual side of herself. So that’s some of the intimate mobility I’m talking about.

On the flip side, I talk about intimate immobility and I talk about how people’s intimate lives, as in their intimate connections with their children back home or their partners back home, become immobilized when they are in the host country. Their intimate selves are immobilized because they can’t fully express their love for their children or for their partners. And also women who are guest workers or low-skilled workers legally cannot engage in sexual relations so they can’t as easily engage in a relationship.

Pardis Mahdavi is associate professor of anthropology, chair of the Pomona College Anthropology Department and director of the Pacific Basin Institute. Crossing the Gulf is her fourth book.

Critical Inquiries

October 25, 2016 by Staff Comments Off

You can always find some of Pomona’s most distinctive courses among the array of Critical Inquiry (ID1) classes offered each year to introduce first-year students to both the rigors and the pleasures of academic life at Pomona. An intellectual rite of passage, ID1 classes require new students to think, talk and write about some interesting, often cross-disciplinary topic. They also give Pomona faculty members an opportunity to create something new based on their own interests and passions. Here are a few of this year’s new offerings.

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