Barry was born and grew up in New York City. His parents, Saul and Miriam, ran a mom-and-pop store in Greenwich Village that sold all sorts of hardware and housewares. Most of his ancestors had emigrated from Ukraine during the time of Russian programs on Jewish settlements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Sherr’s last name was originally multi-syllabic, but had been shortened to Sherr when the immigrants came through Ellis Island. Barry remembered an old relative who had served briefly in the Tsar’s army before emigrating.The man had personal stories about the pogroms.

Barry’s dad Saul was a tough, no nonsense guy. During World War II, his dad worked building Liberty Ships in New York shipyards. His dad said that one of his co-workers was a Nazi sympathizer. When an opportunity arose, Saul, working on a ship’s superstructure, managed to drop a heavy wrench on top of that worker’s head and 'accidently' killed him. When Barry was a young boy, a car came too close to him when he and his dad were starting to cross the street. Barry’s dad was incensed and dragged the car’s driver right out through the car's window to give him what for, which mightily impressed Barry. Another time, at the family dinner one night, Barry was giving his mom grief, which his dad didn’t appreciate. Saul threw a fork at Barry so hard it stuck into his stomach, which shut Barry up.

Barry also delighted in participating in getting the teacher’s goat in school.One teacher in particular was really dotty. One day all the students starting inching their desks up toward the front of the classroom when the teacher wasn’t looking.By the end of the period, all the desks were closely surrounding the teacher’s, which drove her nuts.

Both of Barry’s parents smoked, as did most people in the 1940’s and 50’s. Smoking was cool. Barry started sneaking cigarette butts and cigarettes from his folks as a pre-teenager, and kept up the habit until we had our kids in the early 1980’s.

While Barry was growing up, his family lived in a small apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and commuted to work at their store six days a week via subway. They hired a housekeeper to look after Barry in the afternoon after school and cook him dinner. Later Barry was a latch-key kid and said he liked to watch Perry Mason on TV to keep himself company. Another resident of the apartment building was the family of Penny Marshall, who went on to be a noted TV star. Penny’s mom ran a dance studio in the building, and Barry took dancing lessons there along with Penny. The Reiner family lived in a nearby apartment building; Barry remembers that Carl Reiner was a bit of an asshole to the kids in the neighborhood. A fond memory of that time was a local candy and soda shop, where Barry would get chocolate truffles and egg cream sodas. Barry also became a Boy Scout in an all Jewish unit for a brief time.

Although his parents weren’t very religious, his grandparents were, so when Barry was approaching his 13th birthday, he was enrolled in a program to get him ready for his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. He said the teacher was boring and the students cut up a lot. But he learned enough Hebrew to recite the Torah passage specific to his birthday. His parents had a gala celebration after his performance in the synagogue, with a feast for family and friends. One of the photos showed Saul sharing a cigar with his son, though Barry said his dad wouldn’t let him take a puff.

Barry took advantage of the great education of New York City schools, the Museum of Natural History, and youth programs like free youth symphonies held in Central Park. He went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, named for a 19th century New York City mayor and sixth governor of the state. Barry was involved in the drama club in the high school, and played a bit part in their production of The Importance of Being Ernest.

In the summer, his folks rented a house on Coney Island for a couple of months to escape the city heat. Barry loved to play in the ocean. While his father favored line fishing, Barry, who was enraptured by the adventures of Jacque Cousteau, made a do-it-yourself spear fishing gun, went diving off the local pier, and caught more fish than his dad did. Barry said those summer experiences and Cousteau gave him a keen interest in marine science.

When he was a teenager, Barry got a job working in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant near his parent’s store in Greenwich Village. He said the restaurant was owned by the New York mafia, and saw men he suspected were mafia often eating there. If a diner complained about his food, the waiter would take it to the kitchen, where the kitchen workers would often spit onto the corrected entrée before sending it back to the table.

Just before Barry went off to college, his family moved to the 13th floor of an apartment high rise in the Chelsea District of Manhattan, which was much closer to their store in the Village. Barry said he watched the World Trade Towers being constructed from the apartment window. (This same apartment building was used as a location for the 1999 movie 'Bringing out the Dead', which our son Aaron recognized from family visits to NYC when he saw the film).

Barry’s high school record was not that great, but his parents were determined that he would get the college education they had not. For some reason, they chose Kansas Wesleyan University, a small college in Salina, Kansas. A couple of other students from New York City were also enrolled in the college that year. One of them was a Chinese American named, probably not ironically, Peter Pan. Barry tried to get in touch with him before leaving, He dialed a number he had for the guy and asked if Peter Pan was there. After a pause, the reply game back: ‘No, but I can get Tinker Bell for you.’ Barry and the other students boarded a train in Grand Central Station and after a couple of days got off in an open landscape of fields and cattle.

Despite the culture shock, Barry enjoyed his years at Kansas Wesleyan. He roomed for a time with Peter Pan, who was always cooking rice on a hot plate in their room. Later Peter became a wealthy importer of staples from China needed by American Chinese restaurants. Barry and a group of friends established a co-op in the town where they cooked broasted chicken and hung out. His other memory was in a friend’s dorm room. The guy took out his pistol and gave it to Barry to handle. He assured Barry the gun wasn’t loaded. Barry playfully took aim at his friend, but just before pulling the trigger he moved the gun aside. BANG! The bullet tore through the dorm wall instead of his friend. No one said anything about the incident, but Barry never owned a gun.

Kansas Wesleyan, a Methodist school in the heart of the Bible Belt, required all students to attend a Sunday sermon in the chapel. Barry and the few other Jewish students there reluctantly attended. One Sunday a guest pastor started railing about the evil Jews. Barry and his fellow Jewish students looked at each other with relief; their deliverance was at hand. Pretending to be gravely offended, they got up and stormed out of the chapel. They never had to go to Sunday services again.

After getting his B.A. in 1965, Barry decided to go on to graduate school. One impetus of course was to avoid the Viet Nam draft. He was accepted into the biology department at Arizona State University in Tucson. A field that was really hot at the time was research on human hormones. Barry became interested in endocrinology. Researchers in the field were highly competitive and argumentative. Barry remembered one incident in which two of the senior scientists in the field resorted to fisticuffs to settle a dispute. While in Tucson, Barry rented a drafty old house with outdated electrical wiring. One night there was a tremendous thunderstorm and ball lightening rolled all around his bedroom. As the winter chill set in, Barry found a moribund sparrow outside his house. He brought it in, warmed it up, and gave it food. The sparrow stayed in the house all winter, flying around and waking Barry up each morning with cheerful chirping while sitting at the head of his bed. In the spring the bird flew away.

While Barry’s draft number hadn’t come up in New York, where there were lots of other potential draftees, he finally got the dreaded draft board letter while in Arizona. His parents contacted his childhood physician in New York City, who had treated Barry for rheumatic fever when he was a pre-teen. Barry remembered that he had to stay in bed all one summer, getting shots of penicillin every day. The doctor provided a letter saying that Barry’s heart had been damaged by the fever. Barry traveled to the induction center and went through the entire procedure. At the end, standing in his underwear, he produced the doctor’s letter. The recruiter took a look, handed it back saying they would take Barry’s mother before they took him, and coded him 4-F. Barry said that one of the other guys who had traveled with him on the bus to be vetted for combat seemed to have serious mental problems.The guy was mumbling to himself and making jerky movements all the way to the induction center. But on the way back to Tucson, after also being labeled 4-F, the guy seemed perfectly normal. He told Barry he was a drama student at the university.

The situation at Arizona State was not the best, so Barry moved to the department of zoology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence to complete a master’s degree. He continued to work in endocrinology, settling on a project to study thyroid hormones. To get enough hormones, he got fish thyroids from a factory preparing carp for food. He met a lot of interesting graduate students at the university, some of whom he kept up with over the years since. He also met his first wife, Carol, who was a co-student.Her family ran a small farm in Kansas. Barry remembered visits where he tried to milk a cow, had to use the family outhouse, and was amazed by how Carol could buck heavy loads of hay. They married and soon after got their master’s degrees in 1970.

Barry and Carol decided to move to St. Louis to find jobs. Barry had an uncle in St. Louis. Barry landed a position in the city school system helping science teachers prepare for coursework. One day his boss told him that a local community college needed a lecturer in human anatomy right away, and since Barry had a Masters Degree in zoology, he was qualified.  Barry went over to the school, and as soon as he showed up, he was led to a classroom full of nursing students and told – go to it. Barry had a lot of catching up to do, but he finagled his way through the material, including dissection of human bodies.

Eventually both he and Carol got bored with their work in St. Louis, and decided to go for PhD’s in ecology. Since the University of Georgia had the hottest ecology program at the time, they applied there and were accepted. Both wanted to do coral reef research, and asked Bob Johannes, a coral reef scientist, to be their major professor. But grants for reef research were hard to come by, so Carol wound up doing a theoretical project on reef ecology. Barry cast around and when Barry, Alice Chalmers, and Ev got a grant to study salt marsh nitrogen cycling, he took on rates of denitrification in marsh soils. A senior professor in the microbiology department had a major program on denitrifying bacteria, and helped Barry financially and as a mentor. Barry took up an innovative approach based on gas chromatography of nitrous oxide, a by-product of denitrification, and was one of the first researchers to use the method in field research. Bob Johannes left the university while Barry was completing his research, and Larry Pomeroy graciously became a substitute major professor. Barry defended his thesis in 1977. (Ev happened to be on his committee since they had been working together on the research project. Barry liked to relate that he asked Ev what questions she would ask him for the oral exam. She provided a list. Barry, a cynical New Yorker, was sure that those were the questions she wouldn’t ask, and didn’t bother coming up with answers. Of course Ev, a non-cynical southerner, brought up those very topics during his exam. He passed handily anyway.)

Barry and Carol lived separately while Barry was completing his research on Sapelo, and they grew apart and in the end divorced and went their separate ways. In the meantime, Barry and Ev were growing fond of each other, and island romance ensued.

Barry first met Ev when he was a graduate student at the University of Georgia in Athens as Ev was finishing up her PhD thesis. Barry suggested that Ev take a short term post-doc position at the Marine Institute on Sapelo Island that the professor he was working with, Dr. Payne in the UGA Microbiology Department, had available.  Soon After that, Ev was offered a research position at the Marine Institute. Then she starting casting around for funding for a research project having to do with nitrogen cycling in the salt marsh and estuary.

As it happened, Barry and another UGA graduate student, Alice Chalmers, also were interested in working on nitrogen processes in the marshes around Sapelo, but they had no grant funding for their research. Barry’s professor, Robert Johannes, put them onto a possible source of funding: a water resources agency that gave out grants for specific projects to treat wastewater. Barry, Alice and Ev came up with a proposal to evaluate whether salt marsh microbes could break down organic wastes and remove nitrogen nutrients from secondarily treated sewage sludge. This was not really such a hair-brained idea. John Teal, who had pioneered study of the salt marsh ecosystem at the Marine Institute on Sapelo, and who was then at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, had partnered with a colleague, Ivan Valiela, to do a similar study in New England salt marshes. Granted, Teal and Valiela doped their marsh plots with commercially sanitized and packaged sewage sludge. We proposed to use the raw product from a sewage plant. The project, amazingly, was approved, with stipends for both Barry and Alice to complete their PhD projects.

So, now the question was, how to get sewage sludge to apply to the marsh. The sewage treatment plant in Athens, Georgia, allowed us to collect some dried sludge. We asked Larry Pomeroy, the professor at the UGA who was in charge of a major research project in the Sapelo salt marshes, if we could borrow his research van to deliver the sludge to the island. We are not sure if we were entirely clear about what we were going to transport. Pomeroy said OK, and we drove the van to the treatment plant and shoveled up the dark brown material (which smelled slightly perfumy, not bad at all) into large plastic trash barrels. We left the next morning for the four-hour drive to the coast in time for the afternoon ferry to Sapelo. It was a warm day, and we drove with the windows open, not noticing the little winged creatures that were emerging from the trash barrels. But when we got to the coast and opened up the back of the van, a cloud of sludge flies exploded from the interior. After removing the heavy barrels, we tried to shoo as many of the flies out of the van as we could, without great success. When we returned the van to Athens, Pomeroy had it fumigated. After we spread the sludge out in trays in Reynold's old greenhouse on Sapelo to dry out so we could pulverize the stuff to apply uniformly to the marsh surface, we were surprised to see many baby tomato plants sprout up.Apparently tomato seeds go through human guts unscathed.

The sludge study allowed Barry and Alice to gain important information about how the salt marsh processed nitrogen nutrients. The cordgrass grew somewhat taller and greener on the sludge plot, some of the nitrogen was lost to nitrification, and most of the sludge was washed off by the tide. Barry did his research on denitrification in the marsh sediments, and used a new approach for sensitively measuring the process. However, we found that this was really not judged to be a good way to deal with sewage, since most of the nitrogen was washed out to the estuary by the tides. Barry and Alice did complete their PhD’s based on the sludge study. Since Bob Johannes had left the UGA for the South Pacific by then, Larry Pomeroy agreed to serve as his major professor as Barry finished up his thesis, despite the sludge fly incident.

We joked that living on Sapelo was like being isolated during a long space trip, since we couldn't get to the mainland regularly for supplies and entertainment. We had lousy TV reception, and a dicey electrical line across the marsh that often went down. Our groceries were ordered daily from a mainland store, Bluesteins in Darien, brought over on the afternoon ferry, and delivered to our door by a van. Sometimes the person taking the order at the grocery had trouble understanding accents that weren't southern. One researcher from up north thought he had ordered a 'cheap steak' for dinner, but got a tube of chapstick instead. Another wanted a box of matches, but was surprised to find a box of Kotex in his order that evening. One couldn't order ice cream, as it would be a melted mess by the time it was delivered. Ev had an old ice cream churn, and would deploy it to make ice cream on occasion; we were particularly fond of crème de menthe chocolate chip.

Getting around the island could be a challenge. There were only a few paved roads that Reynolds had installed in the south end. One ran from Marsh Landing Dock, through a beautiful grove of arching oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, ending at the main road along the south end of the island, from the Marine Institute to Hog Hammock. This road, sarcastically termed the 'Autobahn', was packed sand. Residents had old trucks brought over from the mainland. In the late 1970's, the Marine Institute still had several beat-up surplus jeeps, but these were often misused by visiting students who took them out on the beach and got them mired in soft sand. The battered white trucks available for field projects weren't much better. Once Barry was driving one of the trucks along the airport road, and when he inadvertently pulled up on the steering wheel it came right off the steering column. He was able to slow the truck and wrestle the steering wheel back onto its column before we went off the road.

During our years on Sapelo, there were pleasures. We could hang out on a nearly deserted beach, or go fishing, crabbing and clamming anytime we wanted. We would drive on rotted pavement and rutted lanes to explore the northern part of Sapelo. There was a barn and ruins of slave cabins made from tabby from a nineteenth century plantation built by a Danish sea merchant. In colonial times, settlers along the Atlantic coast used oyster shells for constructing walls of tabby stone, a kind of cement made from lime, sand, water, and crushed shells left over from oyster harvests. The name of this old plantation, Chocolate, may be a corruption of the name of a local Native American village called Chucalate. There were even older mounds of oyster shells hidden in the forest, left by the natives that visited the island in prehistoric times. We would collect oysters from the tidal creeks and leave smaller heaps of shells from our own oyster roasts under the live oaks. Besides the island deer and wild turkeys, small bands of cattle left from the Reynolds dairy operation roamed the northern end of Sapelo; on one expedition in the 1970's we encountered two long-horned bulls that look as big and mean to us as Cape Buffalo.There was an old white horse named Pete that wandered about; we saw him sometimes but never learned his story.

We would also go up to Hog Hammock to the little store Bennie and Viola Johnson ran. On the weekend the Johnsons would make slow cooked barbequed ribs with sides like Viola's wonderful cornbread. On the Forth of July, the Hog Hammock community would have a big shindig at Bennie's store. The elders of the community would spend all night slow roasting ribs over oak coals in a deep pit, telling stories in their native Geechee. The next day, people would come over from the mainland on a special ferry run, including McIntosh County Sheriff Poppell (one can read about the McIntosh County, the sheriff, and the civil rights movement in the 1970's in the 1991 book Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Green). There would be a day-long picnic with many southern delicacies.

We were also fortunate to get to know the master basket maker, Allen Green, who wove baskets from island plants using techniques brought to coastal Georgia by the original African slaves. One of these, a wide shallow basket called a fanner, was traditionally used to separate rice grains from the chaff by tossing the grains in the basket and letting the island breeze carry off the husks. The babysitter we hired to look after our two boys in their infancy, Yvonne Grovner, later learned how to make these baskets from Mr. Green. We also valued knowing Cornelia and Frank Bailey, and cherish the memory of spending a New Year's Eve at their house in Hog Hammock. Cornelia published a wonderful store of memories of her life growing up in Sapelo's Geechee community in her book: 'God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: a Saltwater Geechee Talks about Life on Sapelo Island. She remained active in the Hog Hammock community all of her life, advocating for the rights of the historic black community, and helping to start a commercial farming enterprise on the island with heirloom varieties of peas and sugar cane.

We were on Sapelo when former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter won the Presidency (the story was that when Carter told his mother he was running, she replied, 'That's nice dear, for president of what?') We celebrated Carter's victory by ordering from Bluesteins peanuts (the main crop of the Carter family farm) and green grapes (sour grapes for the Republicans), and enjoyed them around the big table in the UGMI library - the table on which we used to collate the 15 copies of NSF proprosals needed to mail off for review. During President Carter's term, from January1977 to January 1980, he and his retinue once came to vacation on Sapelo because the usual person he stayed with on St. Simon's island was under some sort of scandalous cloud.The Marine One helicopter landed on the Sapelo airstrip, and all the island residents (who had been carefully checked out by the Secret Service) were lined up to greet the Carter family. The Secret Service set up a communications center in one of the guest apartments, with the red phone handy. One day we were relaxing on Nannygoat Beach when President Carter came jogging by, followed by a jeep full of Secret Service guys.

After getting his PhD in 1977, Barry continued working on denitrification as a postdoc for Dr. Payne at the UGA in Athens. After bonding over sewage sludge, and living on an isolated and romantic island while Barry did his doctoral research, we fell in love. Marriage was precipitated by an offer Barry received from an Israeli scientist, Tom Berman. In 1977-79, Tom substituted as a professor at the University of Georgia for his colleague Larry Pomeroy, who was on leave working for the NSF. Tom met and befriended Barry. Finding out that Barry was working on nitrogen cycling, Tom suggested that Barry come to his laboratory on the shores of Lake Kinneret as a postdoc for a U.S.-Israeli joint study of nitrogen fluxes in the lake, the source of most of Israel’s fresh water. The fact that Barry was Jewish would make his participation easy; Barry could come to work at the lab as a new immigrant to Israel. He just had to show his certificate of circumcision by a mohel, a document his parents had kept for him. Ev could come also, if we were married. So, in the fall of 1979, on September 11 (unaware that 9/11 would later become infamous), we were married in the Athens courthouse, and a week later we were on our way to Israel.

When we first got to Israel, Tom had not arranged any place for us to stay during our time in the country.His kibbutz, Amiad, accepted us as temporary volunteers and let us bunk in a small room used for guest workers. But we had to earn our keep - the room and three meals a day in the kibbutz dining hall. They put us to work in the kibbutz's fruit plantations near the lake, and Ev also made breakfast, usually omelets, for the kibbutz workers in a small kitchen in the banana grove -

From a letter to Ev’s folks, dated Oct 19 1079 -
'For four days, we picked avocados, Granny Smith apples, and helped in the banana fields, preparing picked bunches for market, trimming banana blossoms so the bunches wouldn't grow too low, and Barry helped prop up trees knocked down by an early rain. The work wasn't too strenuous, but getting up at 4:30 am to be in the fields at 5 isn't our cup of tea. Work is usually over by 2 pm, though. The kibbutz also grows oranges, grapefruit, kiwi fruit, and cotton, plus having a plastics factory and the largest beef herd in Israel.' After a few days of our doing real 'field work', Tom brought us to Tiberias to meet the owner of a vacant furnished apartment in the town. The owner made sure that Barry really was Jewish, then allowed us to rent the apartment for the remainder of our stay.'

Since we had a couple of weeks before we could move into the apartment, we rented a car and took a trip around Israel.

From a letter to Ev’s folks dated Oct. 23 1979 -
'Barry and I just finished a 10-day, 2000 km trip around Israel in a rented car - no problems with roads or traffic - we didn't see any accidents at all. We left Tel Aviv and drove through Be'er Sheva (means seven wells) and into the Negev Desert. In Be'er Sheva we stopped at a Bedouin market & bought some hand embroidered cloth which the women sew into their dresses. We saw lots of Bedouin tent camps above Be'er Sheva, with flocks of sheep and goats and herds of camels. Below Be'er Sheva the Negev Desert looks like another planet - rugged hills and valleys in muted reds, browns, tans, and yellows, with cinder cones here and there and very little vegetation. We did see a small herd of ibex (wild sheep).'
We stopped at Eilat to see 'Coral World', an aquarium of typical reef fishes & invertebrates and an underwater observatory of the coral reef just offshore in the Gulf of Aqaba (or Eilat). The fish, corals, shrimp & other animals were extremely colorful & interesting. A highlight of the exhibit was a 'dark room' in which were shown corals fluorescing under UV lights, and a fish which has eye pouches filled with fluorescent bacteria which glow in the dark, really eerie. That night we slept out on a beach below Eilat along with hundreds of other Israeli campers. Barry woke up before dawn to discover he had been nuzzled on the head by a camel, one of a small group browsing around the campsite.
We went all the way down the Sinai Peninsula to meet a group of scientists camped just above Sharm-el-Sheik who were researching the coral reef system there. We spent a pleasant two days snorkling on the reef. After driving back through the spectacular mountainous scenery of the Sinai, we went to Jerusalem & spent a couple of days exploring the old city. Barry developed a fascination for shrines and we covered the Wailing Wall, the Holy Sepulcher, the Dome of the Rock, Mosques, King David's tomb, and the room of the Last Supper. I found them too ornate and touristy. The old city itself, with its crowded, narrow streets and multitude of shops was more interesting. We had met a former UGA student in Eilat who was at a yeshiva in Jerusalem & he showed us some interesting places. We bought a hand woven camel hair rug for $25, but could have had it cheaper if we bargained more.(note: while driving our small rental car around the Old City of Jerusalem,we inadvertently wound up in a cul-de sac that offered no apparent way out except driving down a broad stairway, which we did. We would up in the Arab market, the souk, and were immediately berated by angry shop owners. We manage to turn around and drive back up the stairway and into the roadways of the city.)
We also saw the Dead Sea Scrolls & toured the Knesset (note - in Tel Aviv).
We then took a quick tour of the north & saw the headwaters of the Jordan - very pretty spot. Now we are at last in our apt & back to work.'

Our apartment in Tiberias was open to the elements off the kitchen, where a small clothesline was strung, and off the small balcony. There was no washer and dryer. For all our time in Israel, Ev washed our clothes in the apartment bathtub (which we were lucky to have) and dried the damp things on the small clothesline. In the fall, when the dry summer turned to the winter wet season, the early rainstorms would clear dry dust from the air, and dirt-laden rain would plop down on the drying clothes.

From a letter to Ev’s folks dated Nov 2 1979 -
'Our apt is clean & spacious, and our landlord (all apts here are privately owned) left us enough furniture to get by with, and pots and pans and dishes & cups. The only inconvenience is no closets for clothes or storage. We thought our water heater was non-functional until a friend told us there should be a switch inside the apt to turn it on. Sure enough, the switch in the hall with the red light (we thought it was a night-light) controls the water heater. Electricity is so expensive that people turn on their water heaters 2-3 hours a day, which is sufficient. In many ways Israel reminds us of America in the '50s. There are lots of little kids - the society is very family oriented. There is also laundry hanging out to dry, many small shops, and few conveniences. There is also a plague of cats everywhere, especially in the open garbage bins. Horse drawn carts with rubber tires are a common sight. It is so incongruous to see one drawn up at a filling station to get jerry cans on the wagon filled with gas.The other day, a mule was wandering around town, apparently lost. Outside town, herdsmen drive flocks of sheep, goats & cows around the hills. We opened a bank account in town in which Barry's post-doc salary and my volunteer pay was deposited. The bank was open only a few hours in the day, in the morning and then later in the afternoon after a typical Mid-Eastern lunch break in the heat of the day. Israelis have no concept of queuing, and just before the bank opened in the afternoon, a mob of people would form around the door, jostling to be first inside. This was also true for the Egged buses that most people took to get around the country. When the bus arrived, an unruly mess of people would fight to get on. Ev  actually managed to get on the bus first, just once.'

We worked in Tom’s research group at the Kinneret Limnological Laboratory (KKL), on the shores of Lake Kinneret in northern Israel, for about 18 months. Tom arranged a small stipend for Ev as a volunteer in the lab. Our apartment in Tiberias was a few miles south of the laboratory, and we commuted with other lab workers in a sherut, a covered truck with benches in the back. We had both breakfast and lunch at the lab. For breakfast, one of the faculty, David Wynn, would bring fresh baked baguettes from a bakery in his home town of Zefad in the hills above the lake. Another member of the lab faculty, who was a Russian émigré and a famous poet in Russia, would make botz (literally 'mud' in Hebrew) or Turkish coffee on the stove in the lab's Hadar Ohel, or dining room, and everyone would bring out their vegetables and little containers of eschel, like a creamy yogurt. Soon we would all be chopping up our bell peppers, Persian cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions into an Israeli salad, topping the finely diced veggies with eschel, and enjoying the meal with fresh bread and butter. (This has remained a favorite breakfast, but with hard boiled eggs rather than bread, and with a mixture of low fat sour cream and yogurt substituting for the eshel.)

From a letter to Ev’s folks dated Nov 2 1979 -
'Work at the lab involves a lot of eating. People have a 'food allowance' at the lab as part of their pay, and eat breakfast & lunch in the lab kitchen, with lots of coffee drinking in between. All day we hear 'bonaveton' - 'good appetite' up and down the corridors. The food is bread, eggs, cottage cheese & margarine. People bring their own fresh veggies & fruit. We do a little work in with all the meals. We got along fine with English in the laboratory, but we knew hardly any Hebrew, and most people in Tiberias (named for the Roman emperor) didn’t understand English. Barry could sound out Hebrew letters from dimly remembered lessons for his Bar Mitzvah ceremony, which involved reading a passage from the Torah. He puzzled out the Hebrew letters of the sign over one of the larger stores near our apartment: Su-per-mar-ket.So now we knew where to buy groceries. At other stores in town, I would bring a note pad and pen, and draw images of what we were looking for, coat hangers for example. We did master some basic Hebrew, and discovered the origins of biblical place names.Jerusalem meant ‘ir-shalom’ or city of peace, Gethsemane, ‘get-shemen’ or ‘oil press’, Bethlehem ‘beit-lehem’ or ‘house of bread’, and Be'er sheva, 'beer-sheva' or ‘seven wells.’ I also enjoyed some of the Hebrew expressions, such as 'tinook' for baby (this sounded like an Eskimo term), 'en bayah' which meant 'no problem', and 'dovka' which expressed 'wouldn't you know it'.'

The other workers in Tom's group and in the Kinneret Lab were very friendly, and helped us enjoy our time in Israel. The lab's secretary, Rivka Hershcovitz, was a Brit who had very little Hebrew when she first came to work there, but by our time she was answering the lab's phone with a cheery 'Mabadah Shalom.' Ora Hadas, who lived on one of the earliest kibbutzim in Israel, Degania Alef, invited us to her kibbutz a number of times. Miriam Edelstein and Bonnie Gold were lab technicians who showed us the sights in northern Israel, including Nimrod's Fortress, ruins of an historic crusader castle at the foot of Mt. Hermon. Bina Kaplan hosted us in her house in Rosh Pina, and she and her husband Didi, who worked for the Israeli Nature Reserve, took us to spectacular places in the such as the Hexagon Pool, a small lake dominated by a wall of columnar lava rock where we went swimming.

On our time off, we traveled around the country. We became pals with a Canadian couple our age who were teaching English in Tiberias schools. We rented a car together to explore southern Israel. We camped out in the Negev Desert, and snorkeled over coral reefs in the Gulf of Eilat at the head of the Red Sea. Afterward we drove over to the Mediterranean coast and wound up in a city patrolled by Israeli soldiers armed with Uzis. The locals didn’t look friendly. It was Gaza City; we didn’t linger.

Barry and I also went on a tiyul, a trip, with other Israeli volunteers (Ev’s designation at the Kinneret Lab) around the country. We visited the Dead Sea and had fun floating in the highly saline water, and also hiked up to the hilltop retreat of Masada, where Jews had a famous last stand and committed suicide rather than submit to Roman capture. When we were there, a movie had recently been made, staring Peter O'Toole, of that episode of Israeli history, and the Roman army actors used the original ramp built by the actual Romans to storm to the top to find everyone dead, just as had happened historically. We also used the ramp for easy access to the top. (Coincidently, when we took our sons Aaron and Jared to Los Cabos at the tip of Baja Mexico in 2003 to celebrate their having graduated high school, we were surprised to see Peter O'Toole at a poolside bar at the resort we were staying in. It turned out that O'Toole was acting on a set of the film Troy. The movie was supposed to be made in Morocco, but there had been some problems so a few final scenes were filmed in the dry desert country around Los Cabos.)

We were able to take a couple of trips out of Israel, too. Bina and Didi Kaplan introduced us to an interesting couple, the Ferris's, living in the hill town of Rosh Pina north of Lake Kinneret, Barry Ferris happened to share the same birth date as Barry. He was a physician who substituted for doctors in the US when they took vacations or sabbaticals. Then he would come back to his home in Israel. His passion was oriental rugs. He owned a small plane, and would fly to various towns in the Middle East to check out old rugs, so he had lots of contacts in the region. In the spring of 1980 he invited us to share expenses on a private trip to Egypt. He had traveled there in his plane before, but since Egypt and Israel were not on good terms following the 1967 war between the countries, he always had to land in Cyprus first.Egypt didn’t allow direct flights from Israel. However, in March of 1979, the two countries had signed the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, and apparently Egypt was eager for Israeli tourists. While we were flying over the Mediterranean, Barry Ferris contacted the Egyptian aviation authorities and was able to get permission to fly directly to the Cairo airport without stopping first in Cyprus. We may have been the first flight from Israeli to do so.After a tense time in which Barry Ferris initially mistook an Egyptian military facility for the commercial airport, we landed. Then there was confusion when the airport officials wanted to know who the pilot was, since Ferris didn't have on an official uniform. But with the proper baksheesh it was all worked out, and we were able to enter Egypt and see the major sights: the pyramids, a tour of the bazaars, mosque, and underground of old Cairo with a museum friend of Barry Ferris, the mummies and other antiquities in the Egyptian Museum, and then a plane trip south to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings where we rode donkeys to visit several of the tombs, including the famous one of King Tut with only the stone sarcophagus remaining in it, and the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut farther down the Nile. We later went on a guided tour of the ancient ruins of Greece with a lab friend, Miriam Edelstein; highlights were the Parthenon, the site of the original Olympic Games, and the ancient sanctuary of the Oracle of Delphi.

In the summer of 1980, Barry parents, Saul and Miriam, came to visit. They booked a tour of Israel, and after the tour spent some time with us in Tiberias. We took them around the lake and to Jerusalem to see the sights. They enjoyed walking around the old city.

While we were working at the Kinneret Lab, Tom introduced us to a female scientist, Utsa Pollingher, who told us of her observation that during the decline phase of an annual bloom of a large dinoflagellate in the lake, there was a secondary burst of tiny non-photosynthetic flagellates. She wondered what caused these little heterotrophic flagellates to grow up. Tom said we could work on this problem as a side-study. We used some dried dinoflagellate material from a previous year’s bloom, and added lake water with bacteria and flagellates. It turned out that the dinoflagellate armor plating, the theca, was composed of sugary carbohydrate, and that lake bacteria eagerly used the thecal material for food. Bacteria-eating flagellates then grew up, consuming the bacteria and releasing nitrogen and phosphorus waste chemicals into the water that both bacteria and phytoplankton could use for further growth. This was a classic example of the microbial food web keeping nutrient elements cycling around in an aquatic ecosystem.

At that time, hardly any attention had been given to the possible importance in aquatic food webs of heterotrophic protists, single celled eukaryotes ubiquitous in both fresh and marine waters. Larry Pomeroy had highlighted their role in his 1974 'Changing Paradigm' paper in Bioscience, based on work he and Bob Johannes had done in the 1960's in the Georgia estuary.  In 1982 a Danish scientist, Tom Fenchel, published an influential series of four papers on heterotrophic, bacteria-consuming flagellates in a coastal marine system. This was an emerging research topic that we were eager to pursue.

Soon after we returned to the Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, from which Ev had taken a leave of absence, we obtained an NSF grant to study heterotrophic flagellates in the Georgia estuary. With the grant funds we acquired an epifluorescence microscope, which allowed us to detect and enumerate bacteria and flagellates after the cells had been preserved and stained with fluorochromes that caused them to light up when illuminated with light of specific wavelengths. Epifluorescence microscopy was a new approach in aquatic microbiology in the early 1980’s. With help from colleagues, including our Israeli mentor Tom Berman, Barry developed a method to concentrate and then stain estuarine bacteria using a fluorescent dye. When the fluorescently labeled bacteria (FLB) were added to an aliquot of estuarine water, the flagellates in the sample would ingest the bacteria, and after processing a sample of the water for microscopy, we could visually observe FLB inside the flagellates. In this way we could document consumption of bacteria by the flagellates.

We were surprised to find that many small ciliates in the estuarine water samples also fed on the added fluorescent bacteria. We counted as many as forty dyed bacteria in food vacuoles of the ciliates. Marine ciliates in the plankton were supposed to feed only on algal cells, not on bacteria. But these were tiny ciliates, some only about 10 to 12 microns in diameter. We submitted a paper on the abundance of these small, bacteria-eating ciliates in the estuary. The Danish scientist, Tom Fenchel, an expert on aquatic ciliates as well as flagellates, was a reviewer of the manuscript. His main criticism was that the existence of ciliates as small as 10 microns in size was as incredible as that of a one centimeter sized mammal. We wrote back to the journal editor that a newborn pigmy shrew was about one centimeter long. Our small ciliate paper was published.

With our lab technician Julie McDaniel (married to another scientist at the lab, Ron Kiene), we went further, staining cultures of marine phytoplankton with the fluorescent dye and looking for ingestion of the stained algal cells by flagellates and ciliates in estuarine water.

Working on heterotrophic protists was productive, and we were invited to visit other laboratories to use our FLB technique. We went back to Tom Berman's lab in Israel to use the method with the freshwater flagellates we had begun our research with. We were also invited to the laboratory of Fereidoun Rassoulzadegan at a lab on the French Mediterranean coast at Villefranche-Sur-Mer. We had a great time in France, enjoying the cuisine, and exploring that part of the coast, including Monaco, which was just up the road. We had our little boys with us then, and had a lovely young babysitter who introduced them to yogurt, Nutella, and common French phases, which unfortunately didn't stick long in their heads.

Although we were on a remote barrier island only reachable by boat, we had a vibrant social life with the other faculty and technicians living on the island at that time, and with the African American community in Hog Hammock in the middle of the island. After we returned from Israel, Barry and Ev, being a faculty couple, were assigned a house in Shell Hammock, a cluster of houses with a communal well about a half mile from the Marine Institute. There was a line of four houses. We lived in Shell Hammock 1. Our neighbors were Chuck and Nina Hopkinson, then next were Steve and Becky Newell, and then at first Dave and Sherry Whitney, and after they had left, Roy Robertson and his wife. Bob and Janet Fallon lived in the Sears House on the other side of the Big House. The Sears House was built by Reynolds from a kit sold by Sears Roebuck. Roger Hanson and his family had lived in the Sears House in the late 1970's, but by then they had moved to the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah. Later, after the Fallons left the island, Ron Kiene and his wife Julie McDaniel moved into the Sears House. Julie was our laboratory technician for several years.

Soon after we got back to Sapelo from our time in Israel, Barry saw an ad in the Darien News for border collie puppies for sale. We both had dogs in the past, and Barry really wanted one for the island. We didn't really know about the breed, but when we went to the mainland to check it out, we found the cutest black and white ball of fur, so of course we came back to the island with our new puppy.  We named her Yofi (YOH-fee), a Hebrew word everyone in Israel used to mean 'That's nice.'  (e.g. "We're going on vacation next week.' 'You are? Yofi.') It turns out that border collies are full of energy, and Yofi was no exception. Yofi had many adventures on the island. She loved going to the beach. When you said, "Go beach?" she cocked her head and perked up her ears. When Barry wasn't tossing a tennis ball for Yofi to chase in the surf, she would turn to shepherding the schools of tiny fishes that congregated in the shallow sloughs on the beach at low tide. People who saw Yofi running and jumping around the sloughs would ask whether the dog was a bit crazy. We would explain that she was expressing her champion sheep dog bloodline as best she could. She also herded sand flies and ghost crabs. One of Yofi's pals was the Hopkinsons' golden retriever, Claw (short for Crabclaw), who lived next door to us. Yofi and Claw had a system for chasing tennis balls on the beach.  Claw, being a retriever, would run determinedly straight to the ball and bring it right back. Yofi, in the meantime, ran a longer, curving course, but since she was faster, she would arrive at the ball sooner. She would always wait for Claw to get the ball, and they would both run back together for another throw.

Yofi had another pal, March, a brown mixed breed who was the Whitney's dog. In the morning, a yapping at our porch door meant that March was outside, asking Yofi to come out for an adventure. The two would disappear down a dike running along the marsh fronting our backyard and would often be gone all day. When they reappeared at dinnertime, they were usually indistinguishable, both a dark chocolate from the marsh muck covering them from nose to tail.

 One day Yofi had a run-in with a cottonmouth snake. She was bitten in the pit of her foreleg during one of her forays into the marsh, and fortunately managed to crawl to the road to the lab before collapsing. When our neighbor Nina Hopkinson found her, her front leg was enormously swollen and oozing blood and pus. We had no idea what had happened, but when we got Yofi to a vet on the mainland, he quickly discovered the wound was from a snakebite. Yofi was treated with antibiotics to minimize infection, but her leg took weeks to completely heal. After that, we all became much more careful when venturing into the marsh or swampy areas.

We also bought a 24 foot sailboat that we were able to tie up at the Post Office floating dock halfway up the island by the airstrip, on a tidal creek that ran into the Duplin River. Raccoons that frequented the salt marsh seemed to appreciate our little sailboat. Once, after we spent a day washing up the boat in preparation for a weekend sail, the raccoons must have decided to celebrate our clean boat by throwing a party on board that night. When we arrived bright and early the next morning to depart, muddy raccoon paw prints were plastered from stem to stern, even way up the rigging. Fiddler crab claws and carapaces were scattered all over the cockpit and cabin roof. After another hour of scrubbing while muttering at the inconsiderate buggers, we got underway. Then came the final raccoon salute; when we raised the main, several large droppings fell out of the sail and splattered all over the newly cleaned deck.

We had been trying to start a family, with no success. A colleague, Larry Atkinson, a chemical oceanographer at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, and his wife Ann, had adopted a baby through an agency in Savannah, and they were helping with classes for prospective adoptive couples. Larry and Ann told us about the program, and encouraged us to check it out. So we applied and participated in the adoption class, just to see. Well, about nine months after we had started the process, we got a call from the agency. There was a two-week old, blue eyed. blond baby boy waiting for us in Savannah. We were on the next ferry over to the mainland, and soon were cradling the tiny bundle. So that was Aaron, our older son. Dovka, wouldn’t you know it, about nine months later, Ev became pregnant with our younger son, Jared, who in due course was delivered in the same hospital in Savannah where Aaron had been born. Barry had been scheduled for months to participate in an international study of the microbial ecology of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. He left for that expedition, along with Chuck Hopkinson, a couple of days after Jared and Ev came home from the hospital. Of course, the grandparents were champing at the bit to see the new baby and help out with toddler Aaron. First Ev's parents came down. They were supposed to stay a couple of weeks, and then be relieved by Barry's folks. But the Sherrs couldn't wait, and flew down from New York after just a week. There was an uneasy few days with all four grandparents, then Ev's folks left in a huff, her mother popping Valium. Really, Ev could manage okay on her own, and was glad when they all left.

Raising babies on Sapelo was pretty easy; we were able to hire a baby-sitter, Yvonne Grovner, from the island community during working hours, and it was only a short walk from the lab to our house. Our dog Yofi quickly adopted Aaron and Jared as her personal flock, and kept careful watch over them. There were other small children on the island. The Hopkinsons had two daughters near to Aaron and Jared in age, and the Fallon's had two young boys, the older, Dan, about Aaron's age. The kids often had play dates at each other's houses or on the beach. Aaron and Jared also played with Yvonne's son J.R. and with kids that the Bailey's fostered at their home. The beach was a great default place for the kids to run around and splash in the shallow beach sloughs. When the boys were older, we took them fishing at Marsh Landing dock or up at a bridge crossing Cabretta Creek in the northern part of the island.

We had to be careful of the large rattlesnakes and alligators on the island, which were a danger to small children and dogs. We didn’t see many rattlesnakes, but then we didn’t go out of our way looking for them either. One time though, our neighbors two houses over, Steve and Becky Newell, had been gone for a couple of weeks. The grass and weeds around their house were getting a little high. We had been saving their newspapers while they were away. When they returned, Ev walked over with Aaron, Jared and Yofi to deliver the papers. Just as Becky answered the front door, Ev spotted a good sized rattler curled up by the doorstep only a foot away. Ev screamed at Aaron and Jared, who were waiting with Yofi some distance from the house, to run away. The snake, upset by all the commotion, started gliding down the walkway. The Newells and Ev rushed out the backdoor, circled around, and Steve killed the rattlesnake with a shovel. Another rattlesnake story involved a technician who liked to run on sandy trails around the island. On one run, he noticed one of his tennis shoes seemed a bit heavy. It was, due to a medium sized rattler that had struck as he passed and managed to get its fangs stuck in the bottom of the shoe. He just kept on running, and the snake finally dropped off. Our other experiences with rattlers were gustatory. When nuisance snakes were killed on the island, their meat didn’t go to waste. Either southern fried or barbecued, the cooked flesh is a lot like the breast meat of chicken, except for those funny little rib bones.

Alligators were often seen migrating between the freshwater pond by the Marine Institute and the salt marshes where the gators would hunt for fish and small mammals. One evening Ev was driving our Toyota pick-up truck from the lab to our house in Shell Hammock, with Aaron in the passenger seat, when what looked like a log by the side of the road suddenly reared up - it was an alligator that took exception to our truck going by. That scared the bejeesus out of Aaron. Another time we saw an alligator crawling past our house to the marsh, but we were all inside. The kids took their revenge by teasing alligators in the pond. Standing on a small bridge that spanned one part of the pond, they would cast out floats at the end of their fishing lines onto the water surface, and then slowly reel in the floats. The alligators, mostly young ones a few feet long, would swim after the bobbing floats as they were pulled over the surface. Yofi was usually along to keep an eye on the boys. One time she started to sit down on the bridge, but her hind end missed the boards, and she fell into the pond right on top of a four-foot gator. Both were surprised. Yofi frantically paddled to shore while the alligator took off in the other direction into the pond.

Of course, insects were a constant nuisance. Residents on Sapelo Island divided the year not by weather, but by bugs. Spring and fall were biting gnat seasons, summer was biting fly season, and mosquitoes, which bred in the salt marsh as well as in fresh water, were basically around all the time except in the coldest part of winter. Tiny midges, known as sand gnats or no-see-ums (they really are hard to see), swarmed around docks, beaches and marshes in the spring and fall. They went for one's face, especially the eyes. The greenhead fly, a large tabanid with bottle-green eyes, hatched out of salt marsh soils in late spring, about the time when the no-see-ums died down. Tabanid flies take a chunk of flesh when they bite. Deer flies, small black flies resembling house flies with striped wings, also bedeviled us in summer with painful bites. Of course, there were cockroaches scurrying around our houses, and not just at night. The large flying palmetto bug roaches had no problem crawling around the walls and taking off across the room during the day.

Sapelo Island was lousy with ticks of all kinds. The largest was a gray tick with a black head that swelled up with blood to the size of a big pea. Our border collie, Yofi, used to get these ticks on her all the time. If we didn't notice the ticks while they were on the dog, the ticks would fill up with blood and then fall onto the floor. One day Aaron, who had begun to toddle around the house, found one of these and put it in his mouth to see what it tasted like. The first thing we knew, Aaron ran in with blood dripping down his chin. We thought Aaron had hurt himself until we saw the deflated tick body on his tongue. Aaron had two teeth at that time, on either side of his upper gums, so with the blood dripping he looked like a baby vampire. This was a great baby gross-out story.

The kids did enjoy chasing after fire flies with their flashing bioluminescent abdomens during summer evenings, something that we don't have on the West Coast.

During those years, there were a lot of research projects carried out both by the Marine Institute staff and visiting researchers. We had a savvy director in Don Kinsey, who maintained good relations with The Sapelo Island Research Foundation and with bureaucrats at the UGA in Athens. We often had parties at our various houses. Most memorable were the Thanksgiving dinners we were permitted to hold at the Reynold’s Mansion, the Big House, using the huge kitchen to cook the turkey and prepare other dishes, and then gathering around the long table in the dining room for our feast. This was the same table where Reynolds, in his time, has hosted the first Sapelo scientists, including Larry Pomeroy, and their wives at sumptuous dinners. Afterward, we could go downstairs to the game room, its walls decorated with paintings of pirates, and bowl in the two bowling lanes.

When Aaron and Jared were old enough for school, that was another story. There was no island school; kids had to commute to the mainland. They started early in the morning with an island bus that collected the youngsters and brought them to Marsh Landing dock. Next was a 15-minute ferry ride to Meridian Dock. The children boarded a county school bus small enough to turn around in the narrow parking lot at the mainland dock. Then, they were loaded off that bus and onto a larger bus that delivered the students to the mainland school. At the end of the school day, the process was repeated. It took 45 minutes each way, an hour and a half commute every day. It was especially hard on kindergarteners and first grade students.

So, in 1989, we began applying to positions off the island. We had two interviews, one at the University of New York at Stony Brook, and one at the College of Oceanography at Oregon State University. Living on Long Island, near the hustle and bustle of New York City, wasn’t appealing after our rural life on the Georgia coast. However Corvallis, Oregon, the hometown of Oregon State University, seemed like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, perfect for raising children. When we were offered a jointly shared position at OSU, we quickly accepted, and moved to Oregon in the summer of 1990.

Now at an oceanographic institution on the west coast, we needed to adjust our research focus from our previous work in southeastern salt marsh estuaries. One obvious research theme was study of the well-known upwelling ecosystem off the Oregon Coast. OSU operated one of the UNOLS (NSF-operated) ships at the coast, the R/V Wecoma. We had several projects studying bacterioplankton and heterotrophic protists in this coastal system, with two PhD graduate students carrying out their research in offshore waters.

The first, Marcelino Suzuki, came to us the year we moved to Oregon. He was Brazilian, but ethnically Japanese. We joked that he partied like a Brazilian, but worked like a Japanese. He was amazingly intelligent, and picked up English incredibly quickly. In short order he became involved in the lab of a marine microbiogist, Steve Giovannoni, who was pioneering molecular genetics approaches to study of marine bacteria. Marcelino's innovative projects involved development of an assay for sensitively measuring effects of flagellate consumption of marine bacteria on rates of ammonium regeneration, and a study of how flagellate bacterivory affected bacterial community structure using molecular genetics. He is now a distinguished professor in biodiversity at the Sorbonne University (easily adding French to his other language proficiences).

Our second PhD student, Krista Longnecker, was also a gung-ho go-getter who combined molecular genetics and flow cytometry in her research. She studied the genetic composition of bacteria in the Oregon upwelling system which had more or less DNA in their cells, and which had active electron transport systems, Krista is now a research specialist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and has expanded her research interests to organic chemistry of marine and freshwaters.

We also had several productive research associates in our laboratory. Juan Gonzalez, a Spanish scientist, had worked with us as a student at the Marine Institute on Sapelo, and came to work with us for a couple of years at our new lab at Oregon State University. Juan actually flew in his fiancé from Spain to be married on the grounds of the Benton County courthouse in Corvallis. Lars Tranvik, a Sweden aquatic ecologist, had a year-long post doc with us to follow up on the discovery that heterotrophic flagellates were able to ingest high molecular weight organic matter as well as bacteria. Later Gordon Wolf, who had been working on DMS cycling with our Marine Institute colleague Ron Kiene, set up in our laboratory to extend his studies. Gordon soon got into another interesting line of investigation, the idea that a common marine alga reacted to grazing by marine protists by producing DMS as a chemical deterent to grazing. He went on to collaborate with other investigators, including another post-doc in our lab, Michael Steinke, and Suzanne Strom to flesh out this novel line of study.

Barry had one more innovative idea about how protists detect prey - an investigation of the biochemical basis of signal transduction in protist cell membranes in their response to chemical molecules (such as DMS or chemicals from prey organisms). Our graduate student Aaron Hartz used specific inhibitor compounds to investigate the extent to which cell signaling mechanisms were involved in chemosensory response and predation by two free-living marine protests that were easy to culture in the lab — a bacterivorous ciliate, Uronema sp., and a phagotrophic dinoflagellate, Oxyrrhis marina. Aaron found inhibition of detection of algal prey in chemotaxis experiments when cell signaling inhibitors were added to the protist cultures. So that worked out. Then, we went further to see if these heterotrophic protists could also respond to light signals emitted from algal prey, using one of our 'lab rat' protists, the dinoflagellate. Although O. marina is non-pigmented, Aaron was able to show that the protist does have an expressed photo-synsensitive pigment, rhodopsin, in its cell membrane. That meant the dinoflagellate could detect light signals. Using a clever experimental set-up, Aaron was able to show that the dinoflagellate responded differently to various wavelengths of light, and to illuminated algae that were either fully pigmented or bleached by pre-treatment with intense light. The results clearly showed that at least one phagotrophic dinoflagellate responded to light signals from algal cells. Subsequently, a post-doc, Diego Figueroa, did genetic analysis of a number of other dinoflagellate species, and found gene sequences for rhodopsin in most of them. We couldn't take this intriguing line of inquiry further without a larger, better equipped lab, unfortunately.

After coming to Oregon State, we also looked north for new projects. In 1990 most studies of marine polar ecosystems were being carried out in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Good infrastructure, in terms of NSF logistics, ships, and land-based research facilities, was well established down south. Arctic research, however, was more ad-hoc, with NOAA scientists focused on fisheries in the Bering Sea, and a few American and Russian ice camp expeditions in the high Arctic. There had been surprisingly little comprehensive research in the Arctic Ocean, although this was certainly an important and climate-sensitive region of the earth. But that was about to change, and we were fortunate to get onboard with developing arctic research programs.

Soon after we arrived at OSU, we learned about a major project gearing up: the Arctic Ocean Section (AOS). Two icebreakers, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Polar Sea, and the Canadian Coast Guard’s Louis S. St. Laurent, would carry an international group of marine scientists to the North Pole and back.This would be the first time that any ships from North America would reach the pole. We submitted a proposal with a fellow OSU oceanographer, Dr. Patricia (Pat) Wheeler, to participate in the AOS expedition. Our part would involve sampling water along the cruise tract for phytoplankton as measured by chlorophyll concentration, for major nutrients needed by phytoplankton to grow, and for abundances of microplankton. Our project was approved by the National Science Foundation, and we lined up a technician to accompany Pat on the 6-week cruise. At the last minute, though, our helper had to bow out due to a parasitic infection she got from eating under-cooked fish. It was too late to find someone else. Since the technician was female, and cabin assignments had already been made, Ev was the logical person to go in her place and bunk with Pat.

In 1997-98 Barry and Ev, again in collaboration with Pat Wheeler, were funded to participate in another multi-national expedition, the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA). This year-long project was conceived by atmospheric scientists and physical oceanographers to evaluate heat flux to and from the ice and water in the high arctic for a full year.Biological oceanographers were able to take advantage of the program as an ancillary project. The plan was for a Canadian Coast Guard ice breaker, Des Groseilliers, to be intentionally stuck into the ice pack in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. Crew rotations would take place by flights of Twin Otter planes from Deadhorse, the center of oil production on the North Slope of Alaska. This time Barry was the one who participated in the ice research, while Ev stayed home.

In the first week the expedition’s designated survival and safety officer, who had supervised the construction of the landing strip on the ice for the Twin Otter planes, had a heart attack. He had to be evacuated. Now there was no survival expert for the scientists and crew with limited experience working in such a harsh environment. Fortunately there were no critical emergencies, and the scientists were able to carry on until a replacement could be flown in.

When they first arrived at the SHEBA ice station, scientists, including Barry, were amazed at how thin the sea ice had become during the summer of 1997. The bottom of the ice floes had melted away, taking with it the normal community of ice algae and small animals that served as food for zooplankton and fish swimming underneath. That year marked the start of a continuing decline in the thickness and extent of the arctic ice pack that will likely eventually result in a completely ice free Arctic Ocean during late summer.

While living and laboratory space was onboard the Des Groseilliers, data collection was done on the ice surrounding the ship. The atmospheric scientists deployed instruments on towers, with data loggers placed in lightweight wooden huts and tents set up on the ice floe. Continuous information on weather conditions, temperature, and light levels was collected. The scientists, including Pat and Barry, responsible for monitoring ocean life and chemistry needed something more substantial to work in. A hole had to be drilled through the ice pack and kept open so bottles could be sent down for depth profiles of ocean conditions beneath the ice. A study structure on the ice was required to shelter the sampling hole and to store the sampling bottles and other equipment. The Canadian scientist in charge of ocean biology sent up a steel shipping container to position over the hole in the ice. The atmospheric scientists, many of whom had participated in previous ice camps in the Arctic, had a good laugh over that. Bets were taken as to when the biologists’ shipping container, much heavier than their huts and tents, would break through the ice and be lost in the ocean. The biologists were advised to cut an escape hatch in the top of the container to allow a quick exit when that happened. The biologists shrugged and named their ice lab ‘Blue Bio’ after the bright blue color of their container.

As it turned out, that winter a fierce storm shifted the pack ice so much that many of the atmospheric scientists’ installations had to be taken down and moved, while the Blue Bio weathered the storm and moving ice pack just fine. Later on, however, during the summer, the Blue Bio lab did have to be shifted over to a thicker part of the ice floe after numerous melt ponds formed around it.

One of the scientists involved in SHEBA was a Russian, Igor Melnikov, who studied algae that grew on the bottom the Arctic ice pack. He had been involved in several Russian ice camps, and did some underwater diving under the ice. He helped build an ice block igloo on the ice near the ship. Several scientists, including Barry, celebrated the 1998 New Year by crawling through the narrow tunnel entrance of the igloo and imbibing various spirits. Barry said he got so disoriented he had trouble finding the igloo's opening to crawl out again. We hosted Igor in our house in Corvallis a couple of years later, laying in a gallon of vodka that we put into the freezer, which is how the Russians like to drink it. Igor called it Vitamin V. By the time Igor left a few days later, the gallon of vodka was empty.

A few years later, Barry and Ev participated in another NSF-sponsored expedition in the western Arctic Ocean: the Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) program, led by long-time arctic researchers Jackie Grebmeier and Lee Cooper. Our part of the project was to evaluate ciliate and heterotrophic dinoflagellates in terms of abundance, as consumers of phytoplankton, and as food for zooplankton. We collaborated with colleagues Carin Ashjian at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Project, and Robert (Bob) Campbell at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. We took part in four six-week cruises, two in 2002 and two in 2004. This time, Ev went on the cruises, which took place using the newly built U.S. icebreaker, Coast Guard Cutter Healy. The scientists and technicians flew up to Nome, Alaska, to meet the ship. Since the crew was a day early, several of the scientists, including Ev, decided to hire a 4-wheel drive vehicle and explore the tundra outside of town. They were on the lookout for the herd of musk ox known to patrol the hilly terrain. They spotted a large brown mammal in the distance that might fit the bill, and drove off the gravel road to a promontory for a closer look. After getting our binoculars on it, they suddenly realized that it wasn't a musk ox after all - it was a very large grizzly bear! They beat a hasty retreat back to the vehicle.

During the spring cruises, and during the summer of 2002, the pack ice over the Chukchi Sea and open Canada Basin was extensive. As the ship steamed north from Nome in spring the scientists were greeted by groups of walrus lounging on ice floes, and in summer by gray whales spouting and diving to feast on benthic animals in shallow waters of the Chukchi Sea just above the Bering Strait. Farther north in the permanent polar ice pack, the scientists saw ringed seals and polar bears, including a bear that played with the settling trap floats that had been placed at the edge of an ice floe. However, in the summer of 2004 the ice had almost completely melted away in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The dark ocean water, free of its frosty cap, was several degrees warmer than normal. One day the Healy crew spotted a polar bear swimming far from land, heading out to sea in search of the vanishing ice cap and its seals. Everyone hoped he was able to make it, though the ice edge was many miles away.

Two other arctic projects followed the SBI program. In 2005 and 2006, we collaborated with Carin and Bob and several other colleagues to study ocean conditions off the North Slope of Alaska. The goal of this project, part of an NSF Arctic Natural Systems program dubbed Study of the North Alaskan Coastal System (SNACS), was to evaluate why bowhead whales stopped to feed off Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of Alaska, during their annual spring migration from the Pacific Ocean to summer feeding grounds in Canadian coastal waters. Bowhead whales feed on small planktonic animals with a mouth full of hair-like baleen filters, and had been traditionally hunted by the local natives for thousands of years

For a change, instead of a ship we had a land-based laboratory, at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC) facilities.The BASC labs were in quonset huts and wooden buildings dating from a World War II Navy facility. Scientists were housed in old Navy dormitory huts, and ate in the cafeteria of the local community college, a newer structure on the grounds of the former Navy base.

A boat was needed to sample the physical and biological properties along transects from around Point Barrow to the coastal Beaufort Sea off the North Slope, Carin lined up R/V Annika Marie, a small research boat owned and captained by a former marine technician, Bill Kopplin. The boat was stored during winter in Prudhoe Bay at the North Slope oil fields. Equipment was acquired that could be lowered by the boat’s winch or by hand to determine the salinity and temperature profiles of the water column, and to sample the water chemistry and plankton. Since a main focus of the project was to see whether krill and copepods, the main food of the bowhead whales, were more abundant near Point Barrow, a 1-meter net was deployed to collect zooplankton.

The Annika Marie was stationed in Elson Lagoon, a shallow embayment on the lee side of the point, and could only venture out when the seas were fairly calm. As strong blows were common on the North Slope, there were many down days. Calmer days meant all-day cruises, from early morning to late in the evening. Carin, Bob, their colleague Steve Braund and a technician would come back to the lab exhausted. During the cruises, they kept going on coffee brewed on the ship’s tiny stove, and on pop-tarts and chips, which they felt was only proper as the acronym of the NSF program was SNACS. After they returned We would go to work processing the collected samples for immediate or future analysis. Ev did go out on a cruise once, but got deathly seasick from the tossing of the boat. Then we were even more grateful for prior expeditions on large ships cruising through the polar ice pack, where the ship-based labs were nearly as steady as those on shore.

During the Barrow project, we had to sample in August and early September to avoid interfering with the native community’s whaling seasons in spring and fall. There was not much ice during summer. One season a young polar bear wandered into the community of Barrow and had to be shot. We were enthralled by the shorebirds, geese, and ducks that bred on the tundra. In 2006 there was an outbreak of lemmings, which tunneled all through the low-growing tundra vegetation. Snowy owls were in abundance, too, raising their nestlings on the abundant little rodents.

In 2006 the high school in Barrow inaugurated a football team; their initial game was played while we were there on a field prepared near our laboratory. Since this was the first time American football was played above the Arctic Circle, CNN sports news reporters flew up to Barrow to cover it. Of course we joined the locals to watch. Our coats seemed drab beside the brightly patterned padded jackets worn by the natives. At half time, cheerleaders, more warmly dressed compared to usual football entertainers, performed traditional Eskimo dances. The Barrow team was so excited by their first win that they tore off their shoulder pads and helmets, ran across the gravel road to the beach and jumped into the frigid ocean.

Following the project on the North Slope, Barry and Ev teamed up with our colleagues once again for research in the Bering Sea. The Bering Ecosystem Study (BEST) was another large, multi-investigator program in which fisheries scientists and oceanographers collaborated in examining the impact of dwindling spring ice packs on fish and marine mammal stocks in this important region. The reality TV show ‘Deadliest Catch’ about the crews harvesting king and snow crabs in the Bering Sea gives a pretty good idea of the harsh conditions in this subarctic ocean. About half of the total U.S. fish catch (including pollock, halibut and salmon as well as crabs) comes from the Bering Sea, due to the amazing algal blooms that start each spring at the edge of the melting winter ice pack, and then follow the ice pack as it retreats north. These intense diatom blooms initially support hordes of copepods and krill, fish food in the plankton, and then the diatoms sediment en masse to fuel the worms and clams that nourish crabs and bottom-feeding fish. A worry is that with climate change, the winter ice pack will become less extensive, and will melt sooner in the spring, disrupting the intensity and timing of the spring diatom blooms on which Bering Sea fisheries depend.

Even though we were supposed to evaluate the effects of diminished sea ice, the first two seasons had unusually extensive winter sea ice, and we found few spring blooms. In 2010, our spring cruise was scheduled a month later, and we sampled intense diatom blooms. Our data underscored the importance of both sea ice and plankton diatoms to Bering Sea food webs. We also found that large heterotrophic dinoflagellates and other protists were major consumers of diatoms. As climate change proceeds, further research in this productive ocean will benefit from the project’s detailed background on how Bering Sea systems operated under historically normal conditions of extensive sea ice during spring.

In 1990, our family moved from the subtropical barrier island of Sapelo, with its broad sandy beaches and warm, calm Atlantic Ocean water, to a wildly different landscape on the opposite side of the continent. Oregon is ruggedly mountainous, with tall snow-covered peaks in the Cascade Mountain Range and massive lava flows from both old and relatively new volcanic activity. We were aware of the danger of Northwest volcanoes when we followed the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington, just over the Oregon border, while we were in Israel. The Oregon climate is also much cooler than Georgia's. Oregon has a cool, rainy winter and warm, dry summer, with brief spring and fall seasons. Unlike the weather in Georgia, where afternoon thunderstorms were common, we hardly ever heard thunder or saw lightning when we lived in Corvallis, and the rain was hardly ever a downpour, usually just a fine mist. There were no hurricanes to worry about, although occasionally there were some pretty terrifically gusty winds.

The Oregon coast is over-the-top picturesque: craggy headlands forested with fir and spruce, pristine public beaches, and historic lighthouses. The Pacific Ocean, however, is not hospitable to swimmers.The water is always frigid; sneaker waves and rip currents often claim the unwary. Also, during the summer upwelling season, the beaches are typically covered with a cold fog. Not to mention the tourists that jam Highway 101 up and down the coast all summer. We soon learned that fall, when the upwelling fogs abate and tourists depart, is the best time for locals to visit the coast.

Even so, the coast became our favorite place for mini-vacations. Newport, a town in the middle of the Oregon coastline, was where the OSU research ship, Wecoma, was docked at a coastal marine lab on Yaquina Bay. We also visited the University of Oregon's Institute of Marine Biology farther south in the community of Charleston on Coos Bay. Linda Shapiro, who had been a Duke graduate student and who had defended her PhD thesis on the same day as Ev did, came to Oregon to be the director of the Coos Bay lab soon after we moved to OSU. We visited the lab several times, and were able to stay in one of the lab's visiting scientist houses. On one trip, the kids found a stray black and white kitten that we adopted as a family pet. Just south of Charleston is Shore Acres State Park. This park, overlooking jagged sandstone cliffs, was once the grand estate of pioneer timber baron Louis Simpson, and has a lovely formal garden featuring plants and flowers from all over the world and a traditional Japanese pond. Pacific Ocean waves crash onto the cliffs with tremendous plumes of spray.

From Coos Bay, we traveled to other points south on the Oregon coast. There is a unique petting zoo, the West Coast Game Safari. in Bandon, which takes in and sometimes breeds a variety of wild animals for other zoos. A special attraction is that visitors are allowed to visit with baby zoo animals. Aaron and Jared got to pet black bear cubs and tiger cubs. A variety of animals - deer, goats, pigs and donkeys wander around free on the grounds of the zoo, and kids could pet those too. The kids delighted in cuddling a skunk (fortunately de-scented). Farther down the coast was Prehistoric Gardens, where life-sized replicas of dinosaurs and other ancient animals are artfully placed among tall conifers and dense ferns along a winding path. We also went on a offshore fishing trip on a boat docked in the Charleston harbor, on which Ev and the kids got violently seasick, but Barry dutifully managed to pull in a couple of salmon.

Newport was only about a 45-minute drive from Corvallis, and we often went over, especially when there was a heat wave in the Willamette Valley. The Oregon coast is always much cooler in summer. Our favorite spot on the coast remains the Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area just north of Newport. The historic lighthouse is sited on a basaltic headland originating from a major lava flow from the Columbia River plateau 14 million years ago. Just off the lighthouse is a group of basalt rocks where seabirds, notably common murres, Brant cormorants, pigeon guillemots, and western gulls nest in noisy, guano-covered colonies during the spring and summer. The birds don’t have to fly far to catch small fish and squid to feed their nestlings; the coastal ocean is very productive during the upwelling season. Below the headland is a narrow beach made up of gray cobble stones worn smooth by waves constantly crashing on shore. At low tide one can delight in the starfish, anemonies, barnacles, and other marine life exposed in tidal pools. Farther out, harbor seals lounge on low-lying rocks, and occasionally a gray whale spouts just offshore. After exploring the cobble beach, we would picnic in a quiet shelter, watching surfers in wet suits hang out in the ocean waiting for a wave.

Another place we liked to visit on the coast was the Oregon Aquarium, just south of Newport. The kids got to see Keiko the killer whale during the whale's brief stay at the aquarium before being released in the wild. The exhibits focused on local sea life: tide pool creatures, fish, sea otters, seals, and after Keiko was gone, his large tank was transformed into a walk-through tunnel with sharks and kelp fish swimming overhead.

We enjoyed the Cascade Mountains too. In the summer, there are plenty of lovely hiking trails. One of our favorites was the trail up Iron Mountain in the Old Cascade range. In July there are spectacular wildflower displays along the trail, and at the top a fire lookout station with great views up and down the mountain range. In the fall when most tourists had left, we would rent a house in Sunriver for a few days to explore the sights in Central Oregon. In winter we went to Hoodoo Ski resort to let the kids learn to ski and snowboard, and also stayed in Sunriver a couple of times for the kids to use the ski slopes of Mt. Bachelor. We visited Crater Lake during winter when the historic park lodge was closed, but after the kids had left home, we went back to stay in the lodge on Crater Lake for a couple of days.

We went farther afield with Jared to explore northeastern Oregon. We visited the Painted Hills, part of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. These eroded hills, layered with red, yellow and grey clay beds, formed 35 million years ago when the landscape was an ancient river floodplain. We also stopped in at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center near Baker City, where the tracks of wagon trains are still evident in the dry soil. Then on to the artist and cowboy town on Joseph in the high Wallowa Mountains in the northeast corner of Oregon. Joseph is famous for its many sculptors, and sculptures depicting frontier life in Oregon are on every corner. We took the tramway up to the top of Mt. Howard, where we fed the tame ground squirrels and admired the view. Jared and Ev took a horseback ride along a mountain trail. Then we went to a weird rodeo in nearby Enterprise, Mule Days, in which the parade, calf roping, and even dressage events were on mules rather than horses.

A second trip with Jared took us to the channeled scablands of eastern Washington State. Deep canyons, or coulees, were carved by tremendous ice age floods from ice-dam impounded Lake Missoula. When the lake's depth got high enough to break through glacial dams, a catastrophic flood, carrying gravel and large boulders, would scour the landscape and pour through the Columbia River channel all the way to the Pacific. The most dramatic feature was Dry Falls in eastern Washington, a 300 foot high, 3.5 mile long precipice formed during the floods. There is a huge boulder in the Willamette Valley, Erratic Rock, which was deposited far down the Willamette River floodplain during one of these impressive flood events.

While we lived in Corvallis, our family took advantage of the proximity of Portland to the north and Eugene to the south. One of our favorite places to go in Portland was OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. The museum has lots of hands-on learning experiences for the kids. In summer, OMSI sponsors science camps for children. Aaron and Jared went on two of these. One was to Astoria to learn about Oregon's early history. They visited a reconstruction of Fort Clatsop, where Lewis and Clark overwintered on the Columbia River in 1805-06. They inspected the crude log cabins, saw how salt was made by boiling down seawater, and watched costumed rangers demonstrate the firing of muskets. On another OMSI camp adventure they rafted down the John Day River, learning camp skills and cooking their own meals.

We also liked to visit the city-block sized Powell's Book store in northwest Portland, and the shops and restaurants of nearby 23rd Street in the Pearl District. Our favorite there was Kornblatt's, a kosher deli and restaurant nearly as good as those Barry remembered from New York City.

In Eugene the major draw was the summer Saturday Market, a hippy-central event infused with the sweet smell of marijuana. All sorts of tie-dyed fabrics, jewelry, pottery, and other crafts were on offer, but the best part was just watching the crowds. The first time we went, we saw a young woman walking around with two white rats on her shoulder. The nearby 5th Street Market with its funky shops and bakery was a must too, as well as the Eugene REI store. Later, a subsidiary of the famous Voodoo Donuts shop in Portland opened up in Eugene, with its deeply weird take on custom donuts. Not far from Eugene is the summertime Oregon Country Fair, a festival of hippie-dom with entertainment, body painting, breast-bearing, and vegetarian cuisine. We went twice with the kids to expand their horizons.

Of course Corvallis has its own festivals. In summer there is Da Vinci Days, a combination of science and art, with again all sorts of kid-friendly exhibits, a Kinetic Sculpture Race, entertainers on various stages, and science lectures for the public. In the fall, there is the Fall Festival of arts and crafts, where we bought one of a kind furnishings - notably a lamp made of rocks, a coffee table and a small table with painted tiles. There was also a mountain near Corvallis in the Coastal Range, Mary's Peak, managed by the US Forest Service. In the summer one could walk up a trail to the top, surrounded by lovely alpine wildflowers, and with views of tall peaks in the Cascade Range. For a time in the 1990's, the road to the top would be regularly plowed in winter, and people could come to play in the snow that piled up on the summit.

In the years just before we retired, we took two major trips overseas. In September 2009, we traveled to Israel and Paris, with stops in New York City going and returning. Aaron accompanied us on our trip out as far as NYC, and drove us to visit Barry's parents graves and Teddy Roosevelt's estate, Sagamore Hill on Long Island.

The impetus for Israel was that Jared, who had just finished college and had nothing to do for the summer, became a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz for a couple of months. He got to wield a plasma torch in the kibbutz shop, listen to the calls for prayer in the nearby Gaza Strip, and take a trip with a couple of other volunteers to the Dead Sea. At the end of his stay, we came over to pick him up and travel around the country to visit old friends and sights from our time working at the Kinneret Lab in 1979-81. We had a great time. Then we flew to Paris for a few days, to satisfy my long-held objective of visiting the Louvre. We roamed around other major tourist places, including Notre Dame, and on our 30th wedding anniversary had a pleasant evening boat ride down the Seine.

In 2011, we (well Ev at least) enthusiastically joined a birding group for a month-long tour of Australia. The group's leader, Fred Ramsey, was a fixture in the local chapter of the Audubon Society to which we belonged while we were in Corvallis. Fred had lived for a time in Australia and had led several other birding tours to that country over the years. We flew to Sydney - a 14-hour trip - and were shuttled all over eastern and northern Australia to visit notable birding hot-spots. Of course the group spotted a ton of unique Australian avifauna, including colorful parrots, dainty fairy wrens, multiple honeyeaters, and the infamous black swan. We were also fascinated by the flora, most of which is also endemic to Australia; some species have survived in the temperate rainforests for over a 100 million years. We were watchful for the many venomous snakes and spiders for which Australia is also famous. We saw an echidna, a dingo, and many fox bats, crocs and kangaroos. We were in wildlife heaven.

Barry and Ev retired from our faculty positions at OSU in 2012. Looking back, we feel fortunate to have participated in the rapid growth of oceanography, and especially of marine microbiology, from the 1970’s on.Our careers in marine science were full of excitement. The greatest adventure, however, was contributing to new discoveries about ocean systems.

In 2014 we were invited to the one-year memorial service for our mentor and long-time colleague Tom Berman, who died unexpectedly while hiking alone in the Galapagos Islands the previous year. The service was to be held in July on Tom's kibbutz, Amiad, in Israel. What the heck, we decided to go, despite the ongoing rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip. When Barry happened to tell our long-time colleague Bill Wiebe, now retired from the University of Georgia and living part-time in Portugal, of our plans to visit Israel for Tom's memorial, Bill decided to come with us. Bill had known Tom since the time Tom was on sabbatical at the UGA in 1978-79, and their daughters had played together back then. The three of us traveled by rental car around northern Israel for a week, while staying in the town of Rosh Pinna in a really nice guest hotel converted from an old farmhouse. The memorial service at the kibbutz was special, and we visited old friends and places fondly remembered from our first stay in 1979-1981 when we were doing research on Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) in Tom's laboratory.

The following year we made a major decision - to finally move from our house in Corvallis. We had been debating where we would wind up in retirement. We were rattling around in our two and a half story, four bedroom Corvallis house, plus going up and down its two flights of stairs was getting hard on the old knees. What precipitated our move from Corvallis to a resort area near Bend, on the east side of the Cascade mountain range, was an article in the July 20 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine: "The Really Big One: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when." The article cited work by our colleague in COAS at OSU, Chris Goldfinger, who had been working on Great Cascadia Earthquakes for years. Goldfinger had become increasingly alarmed about the potential damage such an earthquake would cause, and the article laid it all out. We had thought that the greatest threat would be to the coast, due to major shaking plus a tsunami that would arrive within minutes. But, according to the article, there would also be extensive damage to infrastructure in the Willamette Valley. The quote that grabbed our, and other readers', attention, was: “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” That included Corvallis. Ev had been worrying about such an earthquake for some time, but that statement put her over the edge. Of special concern was the fact that we had recently learned that our house in Corvallis was sited on top of the local Corvallis fault, and we had noticed cracks in the driveway and garage pavement from the fault's slow creep. Who knew how that fault would behave in a Great Cascadia Earthquake.

So, we got to work, first going to the resort community of Sunriver, near Bend, to look for a house that we liked, and after finding one, putting our Corvallis house up for sale. Cleaning out 20 plus years of saved stuff was hard work, involving multiple trips to Goodwill and the recycling center, plus filling three dumpsters with unusable junk. We were fortunate to find a couple with two teenage kids who wanted our house. Then, three weeks of frantic packing. We actually had a simultaneous closing, buying the place near Sunriver with funds from the sale of the Corvallis house, although legal complications (of which there were many) made the deals touch and go for a while. One problem: our new home has a well, and an OR state law requires a well water test for levels of common pollutants and bacteria before a house with a well can be sold. But nobody had gotten around to testing the water, something our real estate agent in Sunriver discovered as the sale date neared, and he had to scramble to get a test result (showing the water was just fine) in time.

`Just after our move to central Oregon, in 2016 The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) chose us for one of their honors, the R.C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award, based on our decades-long joint research career in marine microbiology. When we got the call about the award, after a moment of stunned silence, Barry, who was on the phone, replied: "This is a joke, right?" A few more exchanges later, it seemed it wasn't. We could think of many of our colleagues equally deserving; we were retired and hadn't gone to any scientific symposia in several years. We weren't even members of ASLO any longer! But to no avail, they had picked us, and we decided that our graduate students, who took the trouble to nominate us (without us ever knowing a thing about it), deserved to see us have the award.

So, we were slated to go to the annual summer ASLO meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in June to accept the award plaque. Santa Fe is quite a pleasant town; that was fine. Now, it happened we had a made long-standing promise of a visit to a good friend of ours who lived in Alamogordo, in southern New Mexico. Lorene Howard had been the librarian of the University of Georgia Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, Georgia, when we had begun our research on marine microbes. In 1990, Lorene had traveled with Ev and our two young boys in our Volvo station wagon from Georgia to Corvallis, while Barry and a UGA new ecology PhD, who had decided to go to Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, drove a moving van with our furniture and lab equipment, and our dog Yofi, across the country. We had promised year after year to come see Lorene, but somehow just never did. A map of New Mexico showed that a half-day drive from Santa Fe would get us down there. We could finally make the visit after the meeting. In addition, Ev had a cousin, Bill Brown, living in Questa, just up from Taos in northern New Mexico. Another look at the map; we could drive up from Santa Fe one morning, have a short sojourn with Bill and his wife Nancy, and then drive back in time for dinner with friends in Santa Fe. Three reasons for a trip to New Mexico, perfect! After the meeting, we had a very pleasant time with Lorene in Alamogordo, perusing the Museum of Space History and local pistachio groves

In 2017 we had one more unique experience - viewing a total eclipse of the sun. The path of the 2017 eclipse would pass through the middle of Oregon on August 27. Corvallis would be in the path of totality, but unfortunately Bend and Sunriver were just a bit too far south. So we arranged to travel to Springfield, just east of Eugene, where son Jared was working as a medical technician, and on the morning of the 27th go with him up to Albany, close to Corvallis, to view the eclipse. Jared was excited, and made an eclipse viewer out of a box that his guitar came in, and adapted his camera to take photos at totality. We set up in a side parking lot of a Target store along with several other families, and had a great eclipse experience, including the spooky twilight at totality. The next day we went to the Oregon coast to visit two of of our favorite places: Cape Perpetua, with its CCC-era rock walls and lookout and dense spruce fir forest; and the cobble beach, lighthouse and seabird rookery at Yaquina Head, where we spotted a spouting gray whale.

After our New Mexico trip in 2016, we settled in to life in rural Central Oregon. Our new home was on an acre of land next to the Deschutes National Forest, a dry woodland dominated by ponderosa and lodgepole pines, with an understory of drought-tolerant shrubs: antelope bitterbrush, green manzanita, and wax current. Although we moved to avoid damage from a major earthquake, our new location was not without hazard. Forest fires are a real worry, and in the summer of 2016 there was a small wild fire about a mile from our neighborhood, but it was quickly contained. Smoke from larger fires in Oregon and Northern California blanketed our region for days in subsequent summers. We also were in proximity to the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, a major tourist attraction but the site of multiple volcanic eruptions over several hundred thousand years. A major eruption 75,000 years ago formed the Newberry Caldera, which contains two lakes that attract boaters and fishermen. The Oregon Cascades has a number of volcanoes, some of which could still be active. So we had moved in volcano-central, which does provide dramatic geology. There was even a small cinder cone from the historic Newberry eruptions a short walk from our house.

A major downside to our new location was the winter snows. We bought a snow thrower when we moved in, but didn't expect the several feet of snow that fell that winter. We barely kept up, and the snow accumulated and fell of the roof to block a side door and piled up against the windows. The next summer we had snow guards installed on the roof to retard the slippage. In February 2018, though, there was a 'snow-pocalypse' in which several feet of snow fell all at once, too much for our little snow thrower. Fortunately, a neighbor with a massive snow mover he used in a mountain resort he manages came to our rescue, and cleared our driveway and the local road so we could get out. Snow is beautiful, but it can be quite a nuisance .