Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
2.2
The Story of the Author Nielsen
During and following the Great Depression (1929-1939), I spent my early youth
living in the developing town of Phoenix located within the arid, dusty region of
Arizona in Maricopa County across which the dry bed of the Salt River has been
existing for centuries. Today, my memoirs actually agree with the statement, “The
most important affair in our life is from how we earned the fi rst dollar in our child-
hood or as teenagers,” creatively derived by Kutílek who invented and fi ctitiously
quoted a famous economist named Antonio Usurero.
While behaving and minding my parents and doing a few designated chores in
and around our 2-bedroom wooden home, I never thought of working for money
because my whims for occasional extra enjoyment were always bought with a few
cents given to me by my parents. Some of my friends having rich parents were given
weekly allowances to buy ice cream, candy, and junk. But without spending a penny,
I enjoyed walking through uninhabited desert regions observing plant and animal
life together and also picking up archeological artifacts from Hohokam Indians that
I always found on different kinds of soil surfaces. During any of my treks, I often
saw javelina, burros, coyotes, wolves, turkeys, buzzards, as well as smaller creatures
such as turtles, lizards, rattlesnakes, horned toads, scorpions, tarantulas, ants, spi-
ders, centipedes and millipedes, crickets, earthworms, etc. Having also frequently
found archeological artifacts on and below soil surfaces, I saved arrowheads made
of fl int, stones shaped and used as tomahawks, various grinding stones and bone
awls, pieces of turquoise jewelry, ceramic and adobe fi gurines, and fragments of
decorated pottery.
As the depression gradually ended, my desire steadily expanded to enjoy costly
activities. Without wanting to further empty the pockets of my parents, I sought any
kind of a job to earn some money. Luckily, a part-time job suddenly appeared that I
could do each day after school and on weekends. Surprisingly, the surroundings of
my fi rst paying job were similar to those encountered on my treks walking on dry
soil through the dusty desert environment. Working indoors in a retail store fi lled
with topics, baggage, and suitcases that were continually being covered by dust
blown into the store from unpaved streets and fallow soils in the sunbaked vicinity,
I earned my fi rst dollar repeating what I had already done for years outdoors in the
desert. In both cases, I sorted, picked up, individually dusted off, and rearranged
each of the objects. In the desert, they were living organisms or artifacts at or near
the soil surface. In the store, they were topics and baggage that I nicely rearranged
after dusting each of them and also after removing lice and silverfi sh potentially
harmful to the topics as well as killing unwanted insects, spiders, and rodents.
My fi rst full-time job also involved dusty conditions - digging and sampling
soils across farmers' fi elds to ascertain defi cient levels of plant nutrients and also
searching for unwanted pests that reduce crop yields. By the time I was about to
fi nish high school, I was happy breathing dusty air while digging in dirt working
with farmers. After telling my father, who was a farmer during his entire life, that I
had decided to study agriculture in college, he gasped and emphatically said,
