The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  Ingerson is a complex man. He speaks about himself with such transparency that one forgets he is talking about contradictions. “As a physicist, I’m yin-yang,” he said. “I have the practical knowledge to do things. Knowledge in computers, electronics, telescopy, mechanics. I can build things and get them to do what I want. But on the other hand I’m basically a theoretical physicist who likes playing with ideas. But not to the exclusion of other things in life. Ideas by themselves bore me. If it came to choosing between ideas and people, I could do without theoretical physics.”

  Ingerson embodies almost to the point of caricature what it is to be a rational human being. He speaks in streams of calculations, variables, and weighted options. His emotions are quantized and assigned state-of-the-world probabilities. In a letter written to Doyne several years after leaving Silver City, Ingerson speculated about his west Texas gold mine: “I don’t believe there is $108 worth of gold in that hole. I would be willing to believe $5 × 106. With luck and proper organization, we would be able to get of that out of the various governments. Thus, one might expect that there is a chance of making a million dollars out of it.” A less rigorous mind might have guessed a million dollars. Ingerson derived it.

  If he led his charges into studying physics, he also instilled in them a healthy distrust for the profession. Ingerson’s own inclinations as a rebellious loner, combined with poor treatment at the hands of academic mandarins, gave him a restlessness, both intellectual and physical, that kept him on the move from idea to idea and place to place. He junketed thousands of miles in the Blue Bus and then farther afield to Europe and Russia. He shoved off overland to Chile for a year’s sabbatical, and then struck out from there to New Zealand, Thailand, Nepal, and on around the globe.

  As Ingerson worked his way up the ranks of the tenured professoriat, newspapers and magazines began to quote him as an expert on planetary syzygies and other astronomical phenomena. He made himself indispensable to his colleagues as the technician who could build anything they needed from rockets to solar collectors. At the brute level of manipulating technical ideas and machines, there are few people more at home in the twentieth century than Ingerson.

  While thinking of ways to free himself from teaching and strike out on his own, the problem always resolved itself into one of financial independence. “Money is the key to freedom,” he told Doyne and Norman. “There are two ways to make it, capitalism and theft.” The odds on getting caught at theft were too high. That left capitalism. Ingerson imagined founding a company, a kind of capitalist’s alembic in which he and his friends would transform ideas into gold. It would exploit inventions, concepts, and new modes of production—the ideas for which Ingerson possessed in abundance.

  After researching sources of funds, fiscal control, laws of incorporation, taxes, and patents, he generated a list of ideas to be exploited by his company. First, there was the family gold mine. Then, in no particular order, came rockets to Mars, digital high-fidelity amplifiers, slow-scan TV transmitted via radio waves, computer software for programming Isaac Asimov’s “positronic brain,” desk-top laser libraries, “system independent” houses built underground, computerized micromaps, dirigibles, and weightless cubes. “I have a notebook full of pretty damn good ideas,” he wrote to Doyne from Chile. “Some eminently exploitable.”

  Ingerson and his young friends talked for hours about turning inventions into money. If they started a company, how would they handle the division of labor? What kind of organization could function both democratically and efficiently? Ingerson imagined this enterprise formed around a community, an anti-entropic center resistant to “the fissioning pressures of society. I feel that man is a tribal unit,” he said. “We do better in families than in megalopolises.” He wanted to found his company in a place removed and self-sufficient, but still accessible to the flow of technology and ideas that Ingerson, as a “high technocrat,” thought to be, at this perilous stage in our existence, necessary to survival.

  As he wrote to Doyne in the mid-1970s: “Doom criers have existed before in all times and places. I shouldn’t be too pessimistic, but I certainly am not very optimistic about the future of civilization. I am beginning to suspect that the future may regard the sixties as the point where the world peaked out. We have been running a civilization based on the assumption of infinite supplies of cheap energy, cheap raw materials, and space on the planet on which to put more people. All of these assumptions are clearly straining at the moment. This in itself is not that bad, since I think that technology has the means to fix things. But I don’t think that the political process in any country in the world is in a position to take advantage of technology to produce a fix.”

  He also wrote, “The world is going to collapse around us in a few years, and when it does, I would like to be able to feel in my own mind that I had at least tried to stop it, even if I fail, which I surely will.”

  Ingerson understood that if nothing else, he was offering his friends a challenge. What would they do in the face of these contradictions? “I am more and more coming to realize what it is to be a dreamer. We love to think about things, dream, imagine. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, a real act of doing something major is too much trouble, because anything worth doing carries with it tons of shit which is no fun to do. A little kid loves to think about neat projects, and it doesn’t matter much to him that he doesn’t get anything done. An adult eventually loses that, which is really a crime, because of the pure practical problem of earning a living, until he finally loses his dreaming altogether and becomes an old fogey.

  “I have been very lucky on that score,” Ingerson concluded, “for I have fallen into a job that allows me to behave very much like a little kid, because the university pays me enough so that I can afford to get nowhere. The result is that I attract kids around me who, like me, want to stay a little kid, but so far none of them has figured out how.”

  When Ingerson moved to Idaho, Explorer Post 114 did less traveling and more racing of motorcycles. But it was time for all of them to think about moving on. Straddling Idaho’s western border with Washington, the University of Idaho dominates the town of Moscow, an outpost in the Clearwater Mountains halfway between Spokane and Walla Walla. Driving past the Tetons and up over the Bitterroot Range to the headwaters of the Snake, Ingerson had reached Moscow by steering the Blue Bus twelve hundred miles north along the Continental Divide. Doyne thought it a good trail to follow.

  As a high school junior he had been admitted early to the University of Idaho, although his mother, thinking he needed to acquire some “polish,” convinced him instead to attend a Catholic boarding school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Doyne lasted four days in Tulsa before flying to Moscow, where he moved into Tom’s attic and started college.

  But his mother was right. Doyne had no polish. He farted loudly in public and wolfed down large quantities of food. As a dinner guest at someone’s house he once consumed twelve pork chops and a bowl of scraps reserved for the dog. What he had instead of polish was a wide-ranging mind. He got turned on to ideas and pursued them with messianic ardor. The motor behind this restless energy, as a friend described it, was “a fear of boredom, of not reaching out and grabbing everything there is in life, reaching it and touching it and tasting it, a fear of skimming along the surface and waking up years or decades later to regret something not done.”

  At Idaho Doyne for the first time formally studied physics. The course that year happened to be taught by Ingerson. Simultaneously enrolled for his senior year at the local high school, Doyne found it “a schizophrenic life. I started growing my hair long and smoking marijuana and dating girls from both high school and college. It was a big year for dates. These were your classic affairs with a trip to the movies or a dance, and parking afterwards in the Blue Bus. But I made the mistake of falling in love with a Mormon girl, so that getting even a kiss took hours of maneuvering.”

  The Bus, a Dodge Sportsman van with a slant-6 engine approaching its sec
ond turn around the odometer, had been structurally modified so that it looked, at this stage in its life, like a cross between an artist’s atelier and a dump truck. A second story had been added to the roof and a kitchen built onto the back. The inside had been fitted with bunk beds, a carpeted platform, and storage compartments. The Bus slept eight comfortably, which it did once for two months, although on one record-breaking occasion no fewer than thirty-seven Boy Scouts had squeezed inside.

  In 1969, with social solidarity afoot in the country, even someplace as removed as Moscow, Idaho, voted no to the Vietnam War by blowing up the ROTC building. “I knew it was lightweight, anyway,” said Doyne. “After a year in Idaho I wanted to get out and hit the big time, go where things were really moving and shaking. I wanted to meet degenerate drug-crazed hippies and intellectuals. I also realized I had to get away from Tom. Move out on my own and develop my own identity.” Ingerson had appeared in Doyne’s life as father, brother, teacher, and friend. So one can imagine why the emotional currents ran deep.

  That summer Doyne bought a Ducati 250 for seventy-five dollars and rebuilt the engine. Using a pair of hiking boots as “Chinese foot brakes,” he biked in ten days from Idaho to Los Angeles, where he caught a plane for Venezuela. He spent the summer working in his father’s iron mine and returned that fall to begin his first year as an undergraduate, with sophomore standing, at Stanford University.

  Of all the places in the world to look for drug-crazed hippies and intellectuals, the San Francisco Bay Area in 1970 was undoubtedly the best. “I spent my sophomore year smoking dope, meeting lots of people, chasing women around, being existential, frustrated, depressed, going through a big identity crisis, growing my hair.” Doyne’s other diversion that year was the blues harp, which he played in a local rock band.

  “I screwed up sufficiently my first year at Stanford that I was put on academic probation and considered quitting. A friend named Dan Browne and I were thinking of moving to San Francisco and opening a smoothie stand, or going into the house painting business. Then we thought of motorcycle smuggling.”

  On arriving at Stanford, Doyne had moved into Jordan House, the old Delta Delta Delta sorority, which the university had leased to “a bunch of aspiring hippies. There were thirty-five of us in there in a cooperative living arrangement. You could call it a commune. We did our own cooking and managed our own business affairs.” When it closed for the summer, the Jordan House community shifted over to its sister establishment, Ecology House. To save on rent, Doyne and Dan Browne camped out back in the parking lot and set to work on the first phase of motorcycle smuggling: the rebuilding of a BSA 250. Doyne drove the bike later that summer to Guadalajara, where it blew a rod and was traded for a dysfunctional Vincent Black Shadow, which was crated up and shipped to Norman in Juárez. So much for motorcycle smuggling.

  Before buzzing off to Mexico, Doyne was rebuilding the gearbox on the BSA when someone came over to introduce herself as a former resident of Jordan House, now returned to Stanford after a year out of school working in New York City. The name Letty Belin was already familiar to him. He had first seen it on cleaning out a closet and discovering a pile of homework for a course on computer programming. The homework was Letty’s. It was marked with straight A’s. Doyne had heard other stories about this brainy fair-haired girl, and she too had been informed about the wild guy camped in the parking lot. “It was just one of those times,” said Letty about their first meeting, “when everything absolutely clicked right from the beginning. I have a pretty misty-eyed vision of the whole summer.” An aspiring motorcycle smuggler and a daughter of the Boston aristocracy falling in love with each other in the parking lot of Ecology House …. Those were unusual times.

  It was Letty more than Doyne who looked native to the golden West. Tall, with a boyish figure and straight blond hair framing a classically proportioned face and sensuous mouth, she moved through life with presumptive ease. The A’s on her computer homework were merely part of a long string of accomplishments that ranged from calf-roping prizes in summer camp to a Phi Beta Kappa key. Gracious to a fault, if her new friend had no polish, Letty had plenty to spare.

  Usually dressed in blue jeans, Oxford cloth shirts, and running shoes, Letty managed to look Cos Cob trim, yet slightly frayed, like a once-tended lawn reverting back to its natural state. Born in 1951, the youngest of five children, a product of the Shady Hill School in Cambridge and St. Timothy’s outside Baltimore, coming from a family of lawyers, educators, and servants high in the realms of public policy, Alletta d’Andelot Belin was trying to get away from what she called her “easternness.”

  She and Doyne made a physically striking couple. But they also cared about community and politics and leading the examined life, for which they were willing to jettison the old values of class and prejudice, as well as the old models for sexual division. Everything was up for grabs, to be thought out item for item in searching for new forms of social organization. Hoping to engage their talents doing something nervy and smart, they were looking for their break.

  Instead of dropping out of school, Doyne moved back into Jordan House with Letty and spent his junior and senior years at Stanford “getting serious. I was going to give physics one quarter of trying hard to see how well I did. Either I made A’s in all my courses, or I was going to quit.” Declaring himself a physics major this late in his career meant that Doyne had to take five required science courses every quarter. This was the toughest major on campus. While grinding through classes in quantum mechanics and statistics, he found them “incredibly competitive. No one would talk to you about the homework assignments, and no one asked any questions in class. It wasn’t the cool thing to do. Once again I felt schizophrenic. I was living in a commune, but taking all my courses with science jocks. I was hanging out with artists at night and nerds by day.”

  In 1973 Doyne graduated from Stanford wearing a gorilla costume. This was done in punning deference to the Viet Cong, but the San Francisco Chronicle missed the point. They pictured him on the front page as an example of student frivolity. “I’m a Yippie,” he later told me. “My global strategy is to bring it all down. I think it’s impossible to work in the system and keep your nose clean at the same time.”

  Doyne had done well enough at Stanford to get into several graduate schools in physics. But one spin on his motorcycle around the University of California campus at Santa Cruz convinced him to move fifty miles down the coast to the shores of Monterey Bay. “I was planning to be an astrophysicist, although I was still having doubts when I came to graduate school. Did I want to be a physicist or not? I wasn’t at all convinced it was the right thing for me to do.” He again faced a long grind through courses in differential geometry, general relativity, and other subjects pertaining to the motion of bodies inter- and extragalactic.

  “I’m the kind of person who can sit and think about a problem for twenty-four hours, until finally a switch goes off in my mind and I get it. Or sometimes I dream the answer. But I totally panic when someone puts a sheet of paper in front of me and gives me an hour to get the solution written down.” Doyne’s first hurdle in getting a doctorate in physics was a day-long battery of exams. He spent a year preparing for them by learning how to pace himself through mock tests. At the end of his second year at Santa Cruz, he was the only member in a class of six to pass the exams.

  “At that point, I was feeling really on top of it, good about physics and good about myself. I was accepted by George Blumenthal as his student, and was headed down the road to becoming an astrophysicist like him, when I took off that summer for a Forest Service job in Libby, Montana. That proved to be the start of my rambling and gambling.”

  Norman Packard, meanwhile, had also launched himself from Silver City out into the great world. Declining scholarships from Cal Tech and Stanford, he opted instead for Reed College in Portland, Oregon. “I was attracted,” he said, “by the thought of becoming a Renaissance person.” The smaller community at Reed seemed m
ore welcoming to a pianist- physicist and singer of Gregorian chants. Already an accomplished musician, Norman found Bach’s Goldberg Variations the perfect antidote to occasional bouts of depression. He also took on the project, while studying Eastern philosophy, of developing a Zen self absent of ego.

  The summer before leaving for Reed, on his way back to Silver City from a Rolling Stones concert in Albuquerque, Norman had driven off the road in a near-fatal car accident. He emerged from the hospital six weeks later with a piece of metal implanted in his leg and the emaciated look of a prodigy run amuck. He weighed 130 pounds and was still limping on a cane when he arrived for his first year of college.

  “As I hobbled around campus, I immediately started a lot of rumors about who I was. I had skipped the first year of physics, and there were reports afoot about my being a genius. A skinny cripple doesn’t have the easiest time breaking into college, but Reed has a high tolerance for weirdos in general. So I wasn’t that out of place.”

  At the end of his third year in college—expecting like Doyne to make his fortune in the card parlors of the West—Norman also embarked on a summer of rambling and gambling.

  2

  Rambling and Gambling

  No one can possibly win at roulette unless he steals money from the table while the croupier isn’t looking.

  Albert Einstein

  In August 1975, at the Oxford Card Room in Missoula, Montana, Doyne Farmer introduced himself to the world of gambling. Nominally working that summer as a building inspector for the U.S. Forest Service—an assignment for which he had neither expertise nor reason to call on any—he had sat down to read A. H. More-head’s Complete Guide to Winning Poker. After memorizing the book from cover to cover, he emerged from his bivouac on Lake Koocanusa an accomplished poker sharp. His only problem lay in the fact that having never before played the game, his grasp of its actual mechanics was a bit weak. He fumbled his cards and dealt the deck wrong way around the table, but in five nights of gambling at the Oxford, he cleared more in poker winnings than his entire summer’s salary from the Forest Service.