Yet another long winded story, no happy ending.
If you think
meteorites are rare, they pale in comparison to the once in a lifetime
opportunities that leave you saying why didn’t, what if or I wish for the
remainder of your all too brief existence.
After
purchasing the Kimberly Meteorite Farm, we set out on the task of building a
place to live. Starting with a wheat field, we had a well drilled, electricity,
phone and a double wide mobile home brought out to the site. Gives
you a very great appreciation for the settlers that first came to this land in
the late 1800s without the infrastructure of the modern world.
Ill always
remember the 2 geology students that came by the day the home was delivered,
with GPS in hand, they drove up to our home (still in 2 pieces) looking for the
Haviland Crater. They said, we got to the dead end and we were going to turn
left, but we saw this house up here and thought it was closer to the
coordinates. If they had come one day earlier, they would have turned left and
visited with my neighbors.
After we had
a place to live, we set up our small meteorite museum by the generosity of
Next, we
wanted to do something with the Haviland Crater. We started contacting as many
scientists as we could think of, mostly we got good idea, good luck with that
or there’s nothing left, you’re wasting your time. Heard more than once,
something should have been done before now. True, but you can only do what you
can when you can. The small crater was excavated in 1933, shortly after Eliza
Kimberly’s passing and 1200lb of meteorite removed. Over the years, treasure
hunting ensued and then finally the hole was filled in and farmed over. When we
first purchased the place, you could still find small pieces of meteorite and meteorode on the surface after a good rain. Dr. Carlton
Moore was my go to guy to get specimens analyzed and ask questions about
meteorites in general, he never left me hanging (if you ever end up reading
this, thank you Dr. Moore).
(And , young master Lewis and his phd
spheres).
May be hard
to believe, but back in 1994, the internet was well known in the
academic/government communities but it was really just getting started in the
public at large, phone lines and good old 12K modems, wow. But we started
sending out emails, mostly you got nothing back and
were left wondering: Did it get through? Did I offend someone? Is anyone out
there?
Then one day
I received an email, Dr. Gene Shoemaker, couldn’t believe it. He independently
had thought the little crater was worth a second look. What to do! We looked at
our financial situation and realized we had spent so much on the land auction, setting up a homestead and small museum, the
project would be beyond our means at the time. Keep in mind our goal isn’t to
just dig up the crater again to get some more meteorite,
it is to excavate and preserve the site as a permanent attraction, that means
buildings and facilities. Given the general response we received from the
academic community, it didnt seem likely that
applying for a grant would have been feasible, another what if?
So, I took a
job at Texas Instruments in 1996-97 to generate the funds to carry out this
project properly. TI was very generous, a great company to work for and being
the only biophysicist at a major semiconductor corporation
made me surprisingly popular for biosensors. And, whats the harm in waiting a year to excavate the crater?
We stopped farming operations and what’s left of the crater has sat there since
the 50s, as long as Dr. Shoemaker is interested well generate the funds and get
this done in right!
About the
time I felt we could take on the crater challenge, we had some family health
problems that in hindsight, we should have anticipated but really caught us off
guard. If you have never visited a nursing home, you might want to drop in to
one sometime, it will probably be an epiphany and I guarantee the people there
will be happy to talk to you, to anyone.
And of
course, the accident:
Dr. Gene Shoemaker died
Why didn’t we
go ahead with the crater excavation, what if the Shoemakers were in
D.I. Stimpson, all rights reserved, 2007