The frog was caught by Jeremy and is on temporary loan to Emma, for inspection. It was returned to grass!

We are on the Chesapeake, with Jeremy wishing for more wind while Emma appreciates the peace! But Jeremy was an excellent sailor, even managing to lift a hull of a Hobiecat in Providence

Thank you, Nina, for getting married in Copenhagen! It gave us a wonderful opportunity to go on the St. Petersburg and enjoy some white nights.

Verena and Jeremy, along with David and Emma all came to Cole & Anthony's wedding in Marin in 2005. Some of us walked across the Golden Gate Bridge.

In Munich, at Nymphenburg, just after picking Allison up for a short holiday in Tyrol.

I met Jeremy in the most filthy, insane, and wonderful place on Earth...the Horton Lab at ESF. Becka had taken me on as one of her lab minions. All I wanted was to do my hours to get easy credits for my last semester at ESF, but it only took about a week for me to realize that I stumbled upon a place with the most unique and beautiful souls at ESF. 

Jeremy was of course the first person I met when I walked into Horton's lab to find Becka to officially sign up for the gig. He was eatting one of his disgusting cheese wraps and hunched over his laptop. Ugh...those cheese wraps!!! 

Jeremy was probably the first person in the lab that I felt totally comfortable to be as weird as possible around. I didn't really contain myself around anyone in the lab after that. The Horton lab was a place where I could wear my teddy bear t-shirts proudly and mouth trumpet for days. By the way, Jeremy was a terrible mouth trumpter.

One memory that is very vivid in my mind was a day in the lab when I wanted to make coffee. It just so happened that the filthy and overused coffee maker DIED when I decided to use it!! Coffee was a necessity in the Horton lab and when I finally stopped freaking out silently to myself I looked around at Jeremy to break the news. His face went from anger "oh my gosh, she must be killed" to sadness, and then determination. I think he fixed it... I don't recall because I got out of there before anyone else could come back to the lab.

Oh yeah, I titled this memory dog party. There was always random picture riddles on the chalk board in the lab, but one day there was one that I actually had to figure out because it was for the lab! There was a picture of a dog and something....a party hat? balloons? I have no idea BUT there was a dog... any who... I got so excited and screamed DOG PARTY!!!! Jeremy started laughing and shook his head. I finally figured out that it was LAB PARTY, but it will always be DOG PARTY to me. That is way more fun, am I right?

Jeremy was a gem. I am very sad he is gone, but I am very happy and proud to say that he was my friend. I will wear a teddy bear shirt, mouth trumpet, and do a little dance just for him. I would like to say I would cut a large chunk of cheese and melt it on a wrap in the microwave and douse it in siracha, but that is disgusting.  

 I can’t believe this is real.  It’s been weeks, and it still feels like shock and disbelief here on my end.  While I may run the risk of eulogizing here, I want to take some time to reflect on my relationship with Jeremy and the way that I remember him.

I knew Jeremy through Tom’s lab. My background was in forest ecology, but I had become interested in mycorrhizae.  That interest propelled me to find the Horton lab, where Jeremy was already working.  I say that I joined the Horton lab, but within three months I was joking that I had joined the Hayward lab. Tom was hard to get a hold of, he was busy in his office working on his book.  Tom had no lab work, but a ton of writing ahead of him, and he was teaching general ecology.  Jeremy, on the other hand, was in the lab all the time.  Jeremy wrote in the lab and had a mountain of lab work  (Jeremy always had a mountain of lab work).  As I started my graduate work, my molecular-biology toolkit needed work, and though I took classes, it was shooting shop with Jeremy that cemented techniques in my mind.  When I would encounter problems in my work, I went to Jeremy first, and that’s usually where the search would stop.  

Jeremy was a know-it-all.  I almost always find it impossible to get along with know-it-alls, finding them more arrogance than intelligence. Never with Jeremy.  Everyone who speaks of Jeremy will speak of his intelligence, and if I called him a know-it-all, it’s because he might have known-it-all.   He could be prideful, yes, but rarely arrogant.  He was self-skeptical to a degree that usually kept his pride in check.  He was not just self-skeptical though, he was skeptical about the world.  I consider this high praise, because too often in our society people take things in blind faith.  He never did.  While that skepticism may at times lead to cynicism, it stemmed from an inexhaustible well of curiosity.  The raw fascination he could bring to the most insignificant aspects of his work was inspiring.  I imagine him as child asking “why?” with numbing frequency.   

I worked with him for years in that lab. While I usually showed for a few hours of microscopy or molecular work and then spent a few hours looking at the results at home, there were several ten or twelve hour days in the lab with no one else but Jeremy.  Our daily interactions could seem dark to an outsider.  Jeremy was not the only skeptic in the lab;I have the same cynicism, and when my macabre humor collided with his scathing doubt things could seem very dark on the surface.  

This is the part that’s hard to talk about, and hard for me to remember with the fondness I remembered it a month ago.   It all feels so different now 

I would come into lab, and Jeremy would be there.  Jeremy would get to lab early and leave late.  We would greet with some jokes.  He would say something like “Hey Franklin, I see you didn’t take my advice and kill yourself last night,” and I would say “You didn’t listen to me either, you didn’t drown in a sewer,” or some similar nonsense. We had a lot of these macabre interactions.  He called the razor blades in the lab “graduate-assistants.”  When the ependorf tube company sent us a decorative mascot, he quickly armed it with a hypodermic needle and pained its face into one of mania.  Like I said, things could get a little macabre.   

 Things could never stay so dark though, and after our usual “hellos,” what would follow was usually our observations from the outside.  “I saw some Armillaria on the way in,” or “there are some Crucibulum out in the cemetery,” for example.  While those days had dark moments, what I remember most from those times in the lab is laughter.  Jeremy wore a smirk whenever he would crack a joke.  I remember many days with him hunched over the computer, his brow twitching while he concentrated on his work. 

We could really get into some strange areas of mycology.  Like the absurdity of scientific names in the field.  We were once asked so find ten mushrooms of different genera for a class.  Jeremy and I set out to find the opposite, one mushroom that through its history has belonged to ten separate genera.  Such a rebel.    

I have many fond memories of foraging for mushrooms with him.  Most of my the forays started the same way.  It would be fall usually, sometimes during summer, and Jeremy would want to start sometime mid-miring.  We’d drive out, sometimes a couple hours, sometimes we’d just meet nearby, and we’d spend usually three four hours in the field.  He always found the craziest edibles.  He found a stalked puffball once that neither he nor I could find any description of within our region.  He found a Calvatia gigantea once that was only as  big as my thumb, gigantea indeed!  My favorite foraging experiences with Jeremy though, were the couple that would happen in the middle of the workday.  He would tire of his work, or he’d notice I was struggling with focus, or the weather would just be uncommonly nice, and he’d demand that we not stay in our lab, but go to the cemetery to collect mushrooms while we had the chance.  

We took a class on lichens together.  We each loved the fungal aspect of lichens, but were neither of us had the talent for lichens that we did for mushrooms.  I remember hunting for lichens with Jeremy.  Again, we went to the cemetery.  Theoretically, in the graveyard, we could look at granite tombstones, marble tombstones, and trees where we would find lichens, some species specialized to one substrate, others more generalists and found on everything.  What sticks out in my mind, is how we spent twenty minute looking at this white crust, each of us asking “is this a lichen?”  We pulled out our pocket lenses and went close in to examine it.  After a  long while, Jeremy took a step back and started laughing.   I asked what was going on, he looked at me, stopped laughing for a second, and said “Franklin, it’s bird shit.”  

I have so many more rich memories.  Our time together at the mycological society of America.  Times spent woking with the mycology class on beer.  Identifying mushrooms deep in the morning.  Finding Uranium in the dirty lab.  The list seems almost endless.  In my time at ESF I might not have been close to a lot of people, but one of the people who was closest to me was Jeremy.  His passing pains me. His impact on my life was in no way small.  

I can’t claim to know Jeremy well, but we have spent several days hiking around in native Hawaiian forest and I can say he was extremely knowledgeable, diligent and a pleasure to be with. He seemed to seamlessly fuse work and play and we spent many happy hours even in the rain covered in mud. The last time I saw Jeremy I was enthusing about some mushrooms we had outside of our office. I had stopped by his desk on campus. He was the kind of person always willing to help you and talk through your questions. Via a description alone (my photos wouldn’t load), he knew the genus “Probably a species of Chlorophyllum”. I said, “They looked delicious whatever they were” he said “my advice, don’t eat them. You’d be OK, but you’d be sorry.” We talked about the next time we’d be going in the forest and how I couldn’t wait to go again. I will miss his wisdom and enthusiasm for all living things. Goodbye Jeremy

Upon first meeting Jeremy I was struck by two things: his apparent intelligence, and the fact that he was wearing toe shoes, which I’ve always thought are gross. My girlfriend (Becka) had just joined Tom Horton’s lab at SUNY-ESF, where Jeremy was completing his PhD. Though I had my own office in another building, I quickly began spending my working hours in Tom’s lab. I did not choose to work on cluttered lab benches surrounded by carcinogens because the Horton Lab had better coffee. I did it because of the burgeoning lab culture of intellectual curiosity and absurdist humor fostered in large part by Jeremy.

The Horton Lab during these years was a strange and beautiful corner of the universe, replete with strange (and kind of beautiful?) characters, and Jeremy was undeniably at the center of it. Regardless of time-of-day I knew I’d find Jeremy sitting contorted with a block of cheese in his hand, machines moving and humming all around him, running some R package he’d just written. Just the sight of Jeremy at work was impressive to someone who’s own research boils down to sticking laundry baskets in the woods to see what falls in. But Jeremy had very little ego. He was always willing to share his much-coveted knowledge with others. I saw him do it every day. And he was patient; enduring even laboratory 2LiveCrew marathons with a smile. He loved his work, and the people he worked with loved him.

Four years after meeting Jeremy, I stand by my original assessment that toe shoes are gross. I could now go into great detail about his intelligence, his compassion, and his humor, but these qualities are well-known to anyone acquainted with him. My conversations with Jeremy will shape my thinking about the world around me for the rest of my life. I’m beyond grateful for the time I was able to know him, and deeply saddened that this time was cut short.  

Taken by Jeremy September 2nd 2015.

This is the Newport Cliff Walk on August 10th, some 20 minutes after Jeremy had spotted a sea turtle and explained what a rare occurrence this would be in Rhode Island. In the same week he found enough edible Amanita sp. in Weetamo Woods (close to Tiverton) for us to have an excellent dinner. Not a mushroom for beginners. How am I to know what I can safely eat without being able to e-mail a picture to him? 

Let me add a typical Jeremy e-mail:
"I'm back in Honolulu, again, after a few weeks on other islands...always something of a mixed bag being back: time to recover from fieldwork and generally relax after being in a tent for 3 weeks, but also the end of the fun and craziness of strange places. 

My phone charger is still on Kauai (It wanted a few more days of vacation; who am I to deny it?) but it'll catch up with me on Tuesday--should be more in contact after that!

Much love,

--Jeremy"

I met Jeremy during my senior, his junior year at Carleton. I was his TA. I don't remember much about our interactions at Carleton, aside from both of us being smitten with a little tree frog he found during a class field trip. But Carleton was a small school. I knew of Jeremy as the person who dragged a roadkill deer to his house, and knew how to find morels in the arb. Jeremy later shared with me that he remembered when I displayed some photos in the Bio department and labeled one simply "orange mushroom". "You seriously didn't know that was chicken of the woods?" he asked.

Jeremy and I reunited by coincidence when I also joined Tom Horton's lab at ESF, and quickly became friends. We spent hundreds of hours together in that lab. He taught me to do molecular work, and helped me troubleshoot when it went awry (as it always does). I'd come in on a Saturday morning, and he'd be there happily running stats and watching a live webcam of a hummingbird nest. As a lab, we ate obsene amounts of microwave popcorn and drank way too much coffee. We went on forays in the woods to find mushrooms, and one very memorable lab trip to the quarry. The four of us formed a very very strange lab group. We even had a lab mantra that we'd sing in unison.

I felt lost without Jeremy when he left Syracuse for his trips to tropical islands or the mountains, and finally when he left for his postdoc in Hawaii. Jeremy was brilliant and witty and adventurous, but he was also a really good friend to those of us lucky enough to get to know him.

           Jeremy was 6 years older than me. I only ever saw him when he came up to the cabin in the mountains, and we would go traipsing around the countryside. Most of this took place when I was around 12-14 and he was 18-20. Of course to my prepubescent self he was a hero. He was resourceful, brave, knowledgeable, and seemed to befriend the nature that surrounded us. He was the perfect balance of mentor and friend. I didn’t realize until I was much older how much patience and care he had with me. When I was 18 I would certainty not want to spend my day wandering around the woods with a 12 year old. But Jeremy did, and didn’t think twice about it, showing a level of maturity that was honestly beyond me when I reached that age.

            One thing we really liked to do was go sailing in his tiny two-man sailboat. We would go out to the reservoir and spend the afternoon gliding along the water while he filled me in on exactly how the zebra mussels reproduce or something that you would be hard pressed to find in an encyclopedia. Jeremy just kinda knew that stuff.

            This became a habit when he came to visit, one I looked forward to, especially because there weren’t any “adults” around (the boat was too small) and it was just us, two guys kicking it on the open waves. I never missed a chance to go. Of all of these peaceful afternoons, one sticks out in my memory.

We were far away from the car on the other side of the reservoir when the sky began to open, and big heavy drops started to fall. In Colorado, storms can come without warning, and they can come with violence. We (he) realized pretty quickly that we needed to get back to shore, cause the wind was really picking up. About halfway back it got really hairy, water started to come into the boat, and the rain was slicing down into our eyes. I was honestly starting to get a little worried but I tried not to show it. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he formulated a plan. He was going to drop me off on shore, and try to tack against the wind to get back to the car. I was relieved to be getting off the boat, but still dreading the walk back along the slick shore without much rain gear.

On the shore he draped his heavy jacket across my shoulders and set off, as I began to walk along the shore. I thought he would tack out into the open water, where the danger of crashing against rocks was less, and the wind wasn’t as extreme, but he stayed near the shore the whole way, even managing to slow his pace to not lose sight of me. There were a few close calls for him because of it, but even when he could’ve let me out of his sight for a minute he didn’t. Even though he was the one in danger, he was making sure I was on the right path.

When we eventually got back to the car and strapped the boat down we sat shivering in the car, blasting the warm air. I remember thinking that I should’ve been disappointed that it rained, or angry that I was so cold, or even mildly put out that we had to go home now. But I wasn’t. It was exciting. It was fun. It was something I would remember forever

Not sure who is going to read this or even if anyone is going to read this, but I’m sure if you do you can recognize a little bit of Jeremy in it. It might seem trivial to someone else but to me in this moment it really means a lot and it feels really good to write.

Love you Jeremy

Jeremy was my primo dive buddy.  We dived the world together, starting in Tabago when he was 12.  The Red Sea in Egypt, Scapa Flow in Scotland, the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California, the St. Lawrence Seaway on the US/Canadian border—these are just a few of the places we dived.  As a little boy, Jeremy flailed about in the water in equipment that was too big for his skinny little body, but as he got older, bigger, and stronger, he became not only a proficient diver but a beautiful one—sleek and still, like an elegant fish, in communion with the natural world.  Other divers would often comment on his underwater serenity and effortlessness—it was that remarkable.  At the end of a dive, when I would say how much I had enjoyed the “orange coral” or the “striped fish,” he would list off the proper names of the dozens of forms of sea life he had seen, as knowledgeable and engaging a naturalist in the water as he was on land.  Our last dive trip was to Kauai in March, and our best dive was at Koloa Landing—103 glorious minutes that seemed to last forever.  I will always treasure my memories of Jeremy gliding along beside me, watching over me, guiding our way.

The last time that I saw Jeremy was at an intersection in Manoa. I wasn't quick enough to roll down my window and say hi but I noticed how serene he looked in that moment. I think that every time I saw Jeremy he was smiling. Although my time with him was short I know that he had a kind, kind heart and sharp mind.

Thank you for everything Jeremy!

Annicdotes about Jeremy are too many to list.  But watching him dig out a rental car stuck in feet of snow at his Family's cabin stands out in my mind  His resourcefullness, intelligence, and fortitude stand out in my memory--words that, to me, describe him perfectly.