When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. John Muir
I first crossed paths with Ed Eschner in the late 1980s in Las Vegas when we and a few hundred other scientists and technicians worked for Lockheed doing environmental and ecological research--a paradoxical union not at all lost on us. From my first conversation with him about his beekeeping and other passions, I knew Ed was someone with special qualities. There was a certain sense of his at once being firmly grounded, possessing a powerful spirit, and having an ease and grace about him you rarely see in people.
When I was struggling with attempting to convince the corporation to fund an environmental-agricultural learning center on a farm I once was lived on in the Hudson Valley in upstate NY, he cheered me on and offered continual encouragement. And when he was struggling with the dilemma of being offered a slot on a field crew to go sampling in Alaska following the Valdez oil spill or to yield to pressure and stay back in Vegas to work on a project report, I'd like to think my encouragement at least in some small way helped sway him to decide to head north. That report got done when he returned, but he had been to work in Alaska first!
Ed soon left to take on the challenges and risk of creating and growing a course curriculum at CCSN, while I stayed on for several more years. I saw him maybe only once or twice early on since then (my loss, of course), but I loosely kept tabs on him--as many of us former Lockheed employees do on each other both in Vegas and throughout the country--especially through his good friend of many years, Bill Cole, with whom I shared an office for a good while. It was Bill who first told me of Ed's illness and while I am sure he did not show it to Ed, it was evident it profoundly affected Bill.
One night, back during the time when I was living on that farm in upstate New York--perhaps a decade before I ever met Ed--I was at a local dive bar when a guy I had never met--a leathered biker Viet Nam vet mountain of a man named Fritz who lived in a school bus down a country road with his second wife--struck up a conversation with me over a couple of beers. Before we parted, Fritz bestowed upon me a marble, explaining that he and a group of friends carried them, because if you have a marble, you haven't lost all your marbles. But, to be a marble-carrying member, he said you have to either be gifted a marble or find one out in the world somewhere, but you cannot buy or take one. There is more to it than that on a spiritual basis, but it is difficult to describe here. He told me I could gift marbles to others, and that I would know who these individuals are by a gut feeling. The reason I mention all this now is that this happened over 25 years ago, and I still carry a marble, and over those 25 years I have only gifted marbles to 4 people who I felt possessed that certain spirit that Fritz said I would know when I met them--Ed was one of those four people.
To Ed's family and friends, please accept my condolences and know that his loss is felt at great distances and depths, but so too is his sprit.
Mark Silverstein
