by Jeffrey J. Gawad, MSc, Technical Resource Manager, ADWR
During my years as a student at the University of Arizona, Tom Meixner was one of the professors that had an outsized influence on me. I worked for two of my undergrad years as an assistant with Tom’s research group, where I supported field efforts for four of his graduate students and did some water analyses in the water chemistry lab. As a graduate student, Tom was the liaison with the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources Students Association the year I served as its president (2011/2012 academic year) and sat on the committee for my master’s degree. Tom’s influence in my life extended far beyond the classroom, and there is one instance in particular that highlights the type of person he was, so I’d like to share that now.
In the summer of 2006, Tom assigned me to help one of his doctoral students collect water samples for stable isotopic analysis of deuterium and δ18O from some streams and precipitation in Sonora, Mexico, proximal to the small village of Pueblo de Alamos. We were investigating inner-annual variation in the contribution of monsoon rainfall to baseflow in streams, so we timed our trip to coincide with the onset of the monsoon. The assignment took two weeks; we stayed at a host house with another group from a Mexican university investigating rainfall variation within several specific pixels of their Doppler radar system. It was a great trip.
Upon arriving at the host house, I was a bit distressed to see two parakeets living in a tiny wooden cage that didn’t even provide room for them to stretch their wings simultaneously. Over my two weeks there, I would spend time with them after work when the day was finished. When it came time to leave, I could not see myself walking out the door and leaving those two parakeets behind in that cage, so on the morning of our departure, I woke up early and released them in the garden. The release went well, and the birds flew away and hopefully survived. I anticipated that there would be consequences for releasing pets that belonged to a person to whom I was a guest. Still, I had decided that those consequences in my life would be small relative to the difference freedom would make to the parakeets!
When I returned to the UA a few days later, Tom called me into his office. I was expecting him to reprimand me by telling me that the condition of the parakeets was none of my business because I was a guest in their house, and I should understand that different cultures see animals in different ways and that the right thing for me to have done was to ignore the dire situation that the parakeets were living in and get on with the work that we had traveled to do. Instead, Tom chuckled and said something about me making him the bad guy. He told me very explicitly that he agreed with my decision to release the birds and then asked me why I waited until the last day to do it. He said by waiting until the last day, I had absolved myself of dealing with the consequences, which wasn’t right. He mentioned that the release may not have gone well and asked what I would have done if one of the birds had been injured as it was released. Then he said that the owner of the parakeets should have had the opportunity to confront me about my actions so that the issue could be resolved in Mexico and not arrive back at his desk, thus making him the bad guy because he now has to speak with me about it. He also mentioned that speaking with the owner of the parakeets may have caused some of my ideas about animals to influence them, and by releasing them on the last day, I missed that opportunity. The last thing he told me was that it is always important to try and do the right thing but to remember that there are different methods for accomplishing the same goal and that even though all methods achieve the same goal, the consequences of each can be very different. In other words, just trying to do the right thing isn’t enough. We’ve got to find the right way to do the right thing.
My respect for Tom grew immensely at that moment. That experience illuminates just the type of person Tom was. He was what I call pragmatically compassionate. His heart was huge, but he never allowed its influence to drown out that of his pragmatic self. To think that a man like that would meet his death violently and in the place where he worked to nourish the hearts and minds of so many is difficult to bear, especially in light of Tom’s most recent bout with leukemia, which only went into remission a couple of years ago. He was about as good of a person as a person can be and will be sorely missed.