Last week, Ray Semlitsch died and so many of us lost a beloved mentor and adviser. Though his family loved him more and knew him best, he was a really important person to so many of us and we loved him dearly. Rest in peace, Ray.
Ray
Semlitsch was a friend of frogs and salamanders and humans, and to many a mentor, a colleague, and a Jedi Master.
The Psalmist wrote “I will lift up my eyes to the hills, / from where
will my help come? / My help comes from the Lord, / who made heaven and earth.”
The hills and forests and wetlands may well ask the same of us “From where will
my help come?” And the answer has been,
at least in part, “It comes from Ray.”
Wes Jackson
of The Land Institute has said “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your
lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”
Ray wasn’t going to get it all done in one lifetime, because he did
think big. The old Semlitsch lab may remember
Ray saying at a lab meeting that he was a “chainsaw ecologist” and that if you
wanted to really know what was happening to amphibians when the forests were
cleared, you had to experimentally clear the forest with randomly assigned treatments. I remember thinking (in my youth) “Nice idea.
Totally crazy.” But he took
what seemed like a crazy idea and over time found collaborators and funding,
and really became a chainsaw ecologist asking questions with a slew of students
and colleagues at a scale few others have attempted and providing answers that
will better protect the wildlife he dedicated his career and life to. Ray could
turn outlandish ideas into reality and he was full of ideas.
Ray’s
students and colleagues are part of the legacy of his career--he showed us how
to be open to the ideas that seem impossible, how to provide solid experiments (with
true replicates!) and how to analyze data that will be useful to policy-makers,
to help preserve and protect more of the natural world in the face of a growing
human population and climate change. I
have been trying to remind myself to be thankful for the time Ray did have on
earth and that he was so freaking efficient with it. He has inspired a
generation of students and it’s hard to put into words what Ray means to us.
Ray was a
gifted scientist, but we remember him because he was so much more than that—he
feels like family. He had a statistically significant, positive effect on our
lives. Ray was welcoming and generous.
When you walk into the Semlitsch lab, you have to pass right by Ray’s
office where he was most often working at his desk with his door open in a
standard attire of khaki pants and button down shirt with little stripes on it.
He’d exclaim “Travis!” or “Allison!” (or whoever you were) as you passed by
like he was so thrilled to see you even though you may have walked through the
door of the lab every day for weeks or years. I’m not sure why he was so happy
to see us, but it made you feel like you belonged.
Although Ray
liked things a certain way (there are stories of him advising students on how
to mow the lawn around the cattle tanks—first circling clockwise, next time
counterclockwise), that was advice--he did not try to control his students or
the important stuff—he let us find our own way of doing things—everything was a
collaboration. Some of the students were
and are superstars and some of us didn’t really know quite what we were doing
or where we were headed—but either way, he could work with that and he took you
as you were. He was not exasperated by
questions that may have seemed naïve or simplistic or completely trivial. I
remember calling him in an unexplainable panic to ask if I should staple or
paper clip materials for a job application—and he just cheerfully and
definitively answered “Staple!” without making me feel like he was busy
figuring out how to cut down forests for science.
The poet
Mary Oliver writes “When death comes / like the hungry bear in autumn / when
death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse/ to buy me, and snaps
his purse shut…I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?”
Ray was in
all things curious—new statistical analyses or new techniques, they didn’t faze
him—he was young in spirit and mind. As
he passes from this life to the next, I can only imagine him taking that
curiosity with him. None of us knows
when our time is up. Ray’s time feels
cut short, but he used his time wisely: he
conducted many studies and wrote many papers (more than 241 by Travis Ryan’s
count); he was generous and kind to his students and colleagues; he loved his
family dearly; he was respected and loved by many; and Ray was not lost, but
found, as you could read at the bottom of each email he sent. When I think of him I cannot help but
smile.
