My wife, a former student of his, introduced me to him some days before the beginning of my first semester. Gator makes a good first impression. He's tall. Too tall to keep the tail of any shirt tucked in. Bald head, well fed, I noticed his wire rim glasses appeared to have been stretched onto his face; the thin frames pressed tight against skin in a way that looked uncomfortable. He seemed oblivious to trivial annoyances, and intensely attentive to those he interacted with. Some people are infectiously happy. I'm not sure I would put the number any better than one in fifty. Ray Gates makes the cut.
On the first day of class, Gator surveyed the fifty or sixty freshman in the room to discern the number of those who had "hated high school biology". I voted yes, with the smaller third of the class, secure in my conclusion that my opinions of this particular "ology" were likely shared by a greater number than were inclined to vote.
I liked Gator but my expectations for his class were low. I'd carried with me not a single positive memory from high school biology. Here, on the first day of class, I began to reevaluate my judgements. I'd never seen a teacher so genuinely enthusiastic for his discipline. He referred to nature as the creation, and drew the corollary that we students, by our humanity coming at the peak of that creation, were therefore stewards of it. With this, I was able to reason a newfound responsibility for understanding the subject. Introducing the concept of ecology, a term I may or may not have ever heard before, Gator put the study of biology into a bigger picture than I had heretofore appreciated.
Presuming that biology meant learning organ systems, and parts of organ systems, and parts of parts, I had failed thoroughly to detect any profit from the excertion. I began, then and there, to question my carelessly acquired perceptions.
Mr. Gates, it took me a long time to adjust to a less formal name, described our first field trip, a "mud walk", planned as our first lab activity later that same week. "Wear nothing white", he instructed, and "nothing you care; if you ever wear it again". It sounded like an unexpected adventure to me and I looked forward to my first college science lab.
A few days later, something like twenty students gathered at the science lab for our Mud Walk. Dressed like a pack of hobos we'd all followed instructions, save the one clever fellow who wore all white. White shirt. White pants. White socks. White shoes. I was a tad envious of this fellow freshman who flouted sound advice. Why hadn't I thought of that? We climbed into a delivery van, just big enough, and made the short trip, standing,to a neighborhood forest.
Our hike through the woods started pretty much like any I had taken as a kid, when I'd strayed off my grandfather's farm and across the neighboring countryside. Except in this case, we had a professional guide. Gater stopped the reasonably attentive class at various waypoints so that he could rhapsodize on the qualities of each ecosystem component.
He described the pesky mosquitoes as part of "natures supermarket" and illustrated his point by catching a few, and eating them. We worked our way across open ground and were encouraged to consider the importance of transition areas between forest and meadow, which plants we might find in each setting, and how plant life influenced animal life.