In the summer of 1958, when I turned 12, I asked Mom, “Why do I need to pack blue jeans for our Colorado vacation?” Talk about naïve and ignorant, and that would be me!
In the Dallas summers, with temperatures frequently exceeding 100 degrees F, my brother James and I wore only underpants and shorts when we played indoors or “down by the creek.” (Turtle Creek, which flowed into the Trinity River) Only when we went to a store fancier than the M E Moses dime store seven blocks away did he and I put on a T-shirt and shoes and socks.
Mom and Dad drove our new, fully packed, two-tone Chevrolet Brookwood station wagon the 800-plus miles to a two-story wooden house on Elk Avenue in Crested Butte, where we stayed for the better part of two weeks. Ever heard of Dramamine? If you rode in that car in the summer with the windows up, the air conditioning on, and Dad smoking a cigar, you’d learn quickly to swallow a Dramamine pill, or die.
James and I slept upstairs, with no furnace operating while we stayed there. In the mornings, we’d stay burrowed-warm under the covers until Mom called us down to the breakfast (fried trout, except for our first morning there), where the wood-burning stove had done a blessed job of keeping the kitchen and adjoining table warm. Early in the morning of the 4th of July, a huge clap of thunder gently awakened us; only later in the day a local informed us that the old miners setting off a case of dynamite on the side of a mountain had continued the tradition.
Most mornings our Dad (Dr. Joe Billy Wood, not “Joseph William”) would take either James or me trout fishing. Dad would fly fish, and we would use spinners. We always caught a good mess of trout, but within the limit. We’d return to the Elk Avenue house for lunch – guess what, more fried trout!
I also recall Dad driving the open jeep with all five of us (no seatbelts), including our favorite sister, Liz Ann, along the East River to the abandoned silver-mining town of Gothic, where along the way we’d hop out of the jeep and walk a few yards off the road into a hilly meadow full of wildflowers, mostly Columbine and Indian Paintbrush.
Most afternoons Dad would take one of us boys fishing, and when we returned to Elk Avenue, guess what we had for most suppers – more fried trout. Our sainted mother, Margaret, didn’t complain much, but cooking fried trout three times a day on the wood-burning stove drove her beyond the pale.
Occasionally we would have supper in a smoky little café-bar, where Margaret and Joe Billy would have a beer and something to eat (not fried trout). My favorite part of these excursions was the nickel dill pickles in a huge glass jar on the counter. My least favorite experience there was the cigarette-cigar-pipe smoke that burned our eyes and forced us outside into the fresh, cold air. Thank goodness for the blue jeans.
We had permission to fish on several ranches nearby. Sometimes after Dad parked the jeep, we’d walk across high-grass meadows to reach the creek or river teeming with trout. Occasionally, I’d step, or rather fall, into a little stream of water, and I wondered what the stream was. It had no apparent source of water. Little did I know then that I’d fallen into a flowing irrigation ditch! And now (2017) I am “an esteemed member of the Ancient & Honorable Order of the Water Buffalo.”
Joe Tom Wood and Holly at their wedding.
It took 20 years – high school and college, marriage, 10 years of practicing engineering in Texas, and one son and then three daughters – for my love of Colorado to bloom into our move to Evergreen, Colorado, in October of 1979, after two-week vacations to Colorado, by car, during the summers of 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1979. And then Holly gave birth to three more, Colorado-born daughters in 1979, 1983, and 1985.
Joe Tom sharing kisses with his daughter’s dogs Turtle (black) and Roo (brown).
Joe Tom Wood, P. E., co-founded and served as president of Martin and Wood Water Consultants, Inc., from its inception in 1991 until the beginning of his retirement in 2015.
Joe Tom made very good grades at Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas, enjoying courses in mathematics, geometry, and the sciences, and history especially. But when he went to Stanford University in 1964, his grades suffered, maybe because he didn’t study well until near the end of his junior year when he started taking graduate courses in anything having to do with water. Knowing at the end of his senior year that he was to be classified I-Y by his draft board back in Dallas, he earned his master’s degree in civil engineering by March of 1969 in, believe it or not, Nuclear Hydrology. Joe Tom created his own master’s curriculum, approved by a committee of professors, and he found that Stanford’s motto, “Die luft der freiheit weht” – “The Wind of Freedom Blows” – to be true, as said committee endorsed his curriculum, including a course named “Germany in the Twentieth Century,” taught by an eminent professor named Gordon A. Craig. Having found not much work to do in nuclear hydrology, Joe Tom began his engineering career in Texas in the field of water resources engineering, including water rights work.
Joe Tom and his child bride, Holly (she was only 20 years old when they married in June of 1967), moved to Colorado in 1979 with four Texas-born children and one in the oven. In the course of the next six years, Holly (and Joe Tom) had two more native Coloradoans, finishing out with one son (first born) and six daughters.
Joe Tom learned quickly that water rights engineering in Colorado differed greatly from that in Texas, mostly in terms of detail and time step. He also learned to read, understand, and interpret water decrees (at least to his own way of thinking). And he began to appreciate more and more the historical significances of water decrees. He keeps up with water issues by reading WEco’s Fresh Water News and serving as a member of WEco’s publications committee. But today, he wants to share with you the beginning of his love for Colorado.
Print