November 2010 Archives

One of my first official duties as Director was to attend Ryan Brown’s funeral. In the summer of 2000 I was doing research at RMBL and teaching the field ecology course. At the time I was a faculty member at Truman State College in Kirksville, MO, though I had just accepted the position as Director and started performing duties while I finished out the fall semester at Truman.

Ryan came with me to Gothic that summer and helped coordinate several research projects, including one on ant-tended butterflies and another on ant-tended treehoppers. He was particularly interested in butterflies and helped design and implement an experiment on the strategies butterfly larvae use to attract ants in order to ward off parasitic flies and wasps. It was as much his experiment as it was mine and I ended up writing the research up and putting Ryan’s name on the paper posthumously to honor that contribution.

Ryan was one of those people for whom Gothic was perfect. He was surrounded by people like himself who loved biology. Perhaps more importantly than that, I could see that he was drawn to an environment in which people were actively engaged in a wide range of issues, only some of which involved biology. He started that summer by treating me very formally and would often address me as Dr. Billick— I was a professor of biology and so was a “Dr.”. But eventually he start thinking of me as more of a peer and began engaging with me on a wide range of issues— he would quiz me on current events he was reading about in the NY Times. Seeing Ryan in Gothic is one of the things I love about Gothic. It’s hard to explain, but it’s something I’ve seen many people experience.

That Labor Day Weekend Ryan fell from the top of Gothic Mountain. I had returned to Truman to teach, but having graduated the previous spring, Ryan was taking a little bit of extra time to hike and have fun. There is no way that words can capture the emptiness I felt when I received the phone call about his death. But death cannot, and should not, define a person. While Ryan’s life ended prematurely, those of us who knew him and went through that period of grief must remember him for all of the wonderful things he did and the positive impacts he had. And so ten years later I take this time to remember his smile and his probing questions about politics. I remember working with him in the field and wondering what direction his life was going to take. Friends of Ryan’s placed a cross on Gothic Mountain and that cross still looks out over RMBL, through the snows of winter, the greening of spring, the frenzied activities of summer, and the golds and reds of fall. Ryan, you are remembered!