It recently dawned on me that I never posted the story of some events that unfolded early in my tenure in Aberdeen.
The university that would eventually become my alma mater used to run a program called Saturday Academy, later re-named STEM Academy. The program, which usually ran on Saturdays, provided local middle and high school students the opportunity to learn about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from folks who were associated with the university. Over the years, I took a class about astronomy, another about bats, one about engineering, another about ham radio, one that toured a circuit board factory... Over the course of several years, I probably participated in eight or ten different classes.
Around 1999, as I was planning to pursue a career as a Navy submariner, one particular event grabbed my interest: a professor had participated in a scientific cruise aboard a U.S. Navy submarine, and would be discussing his experience as part of the program. Obviously, I signed up for the event.
Professor Tim Boyd deployed as part of the SCICEX program, a five-year-long research collaboration between the Navy and the academic community to study Arctic ice. While the Wikipedia listing omits it, I'm fairly confident that Dr. Boyd's expedition utilized USS Parche, the same boat that was famously modified to participate in Operation Ivy Bells, an extended mission to tap Soviet communications cables in the Sea of Okhotsk. That story was related in the 1998 book Blind Man's Bluff, and the True Spies podcast recently did an episode on the operation.
I never bothered to look Professor Boyd up while I was an undergrad. My designs on a Navy career eventually dissolved, and my actual career took a pretty abrupt detour that eventually took me to Scotland. Then, in early 2013, I was stunned to read that Professor Boyd had relocated to Scotland in 2007 to work at the Scottish Association for Marine Science. In January of 2013, he was apparently struck by lightning while walking his dog near Oban.
More than a decade later, it still feels unsettling that this man that I'd met so briefly would die in such a bizarre fashion, and that I would be so relatively close to him when it happened. I sent a note back to the States offering to represent the University at his funeral, but received no response. While our acquaintance was brief, I'll never forget the opportunity he provided for me to learn about his expedition aboard one of America's nuclear submarines.
