This article marks 16 years of writing Our Ocean Backyard stories and is my 417th column. I will admit when I began writing these columns in April 2008 with Dan Haifley that I wasn’t sure it would last beyond a year. But not a week goes by when there isn’t another coast or ocean issue to write about.
When it comes to the coast and the ocean, there is always going to be some good news and some bad news. This depends in part on what you read or who you listen to. Most of you have probably heard many times that there are those who see their glass as half empty and others who see it as half full. Then there are also those whose glass is broken and others whose glass is overflowing.
I have to admit that as a father, a grandfather and also a teacher, that I nearly always see my glass as overflowing. Think of this as sober optimism. To be able to share my life with an amazing and beautiful woman, live in a pretty remarkable community surrounded by people who mostly share similar values, being a professor at the University of California, the world’s greatest public university, and working with people who are trying to make a difference, including young students trying to sort out their lives and futures; what is there not to be positive and optimistic about?
This year marks my 55th year teaching at UC Santa Cruz and over these years I’ve had about 17,000 students in my classes, many of whom still live and work in Santa Cruz. These students have entered a variety of professions and occupations, including city, county, state and federal government agencies, teachers and professors, doctors and attorneys, winemakers and water agency managers, writers and artists, and even geologists and oceanographers.
While I can’t take credit for those students and what they’ve accomplished, seeing their career paths and achievements keeps be energized and motivated to continue teaching. On occasion, I get emails from people who read this column, with comments, reactions, questions about the stories and requests for future columns. This also keeps me writing about our ocean backyard.
In the summer of 1968, as I was close to finishing my doctorate dissertation in oceanography at Oregon State University, I was recruited by what was then Humble Oil (now Exxon-Mobil) in Houston, Texas, to consider a job in their exploration program for offshore oil resources. I had been invited to Houston to make a presentation on my work.
Literally the day before I was going to get an airline ticket to Houston, I picked up the phone and it was one of my former professors and a mentor from my undergraduate work at UC Santa Barbara. Aaron Waters was a highly respected senior geologist who had been hired at the newly opened UC Santa Cruz campus and charged with building an Earth Sciences Department. He told me he thought they had a position for an oceanographer.
I was well along on my dissertation, and had skipped a Masters degree, but hadn’t even finished my third year of graduate school. As I was explaining this to Aaron, he said “Gary, you already know more about that area of the deep sea than anyone else, finish up and get a real job.” Instead of flying to Houston, I flew into San Jose and was interviewed the next day by Dean McHenry, UCSC’s founding chancellor. I got a job offer to start as an Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences with, a salary of $9,000 a year, which after the life and salary of a graduate student, was pretty enticing. I finished my doctorate in three years and arrived in Santa Cruz in September 1968 at age 24.
Looking back at the serendipity in our lives, I could just as easily have gone to Houston, Texas, and had a totally different life. I feel extremely fortunate that Aaron Waters and Dean McHenry had faith in me and my potential at 24 years old and gave me the opportunity to start on this amazing adventure that I’ve enjoyed ever since.
For some historical perspective, the year I arrived at UCSC, Lyndon Johnson was president of the U.S. and Ronald Reagan was governor of California. When I began teaching, I was just a few years older than my students and now I’m 60 years older. Every year presents a new generation of students and new challenges. About 20 years ago, I had a student come up to me after my first lecture in a large oceanography class to tell me that her mother and father had taken my class. This took me back initially until I realized that at that point, my first students would have been in their fifties. About 10 years ago, now I had another student come up after class to tell me that her grandmother had taken my class. I now just try to wear this as a badge of honor of sorts.
I also believe in aggressive incrementalism, or keeping things moving forward, making some progress every day on those things I feel are important. So far, so good.
Gary Griggs is a Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. He can be reached at griggs@ucsc.edu. For past Ocean Backyard columns, visit https://seymourcenter.ucsc.edu/ouroceanbackyard.