On Rick Herreid

1.
My friend, Rick Herreid, died on Friday, November 1, 2019.  Four days earlier, on the evening of the 28th of October, Rick collapsed in the YMCA locker room in Austin, Minnesota.  He could not be revived despite the use of a defibrillator and CPR.  Rick was transported to St. Mary’s Hospital where he was treated in Intensive Care.  After several days, it became evident that Rick’s brain was badly injured and he could not be revived to any semblance of his vibrant personality and penetrating intelligence.  When the respiration tube was removed on the morning of November 1, he died almost immediately.

2. 
Rick was tall and slender. He enjoyed excellent health before the cardiac attack that destroyed him.  There were no harbingers warning that he was about to mortally stricken.  His passing was an evil marvel – in the few days before he collapsed, Rick had hosted an elaborate dinner party and spent much time with friends and family.  His last illness was a sort of nightmare, a wholly unanticipated, paralyzing shock.  It’s dubious to draw morals from the death of a fellow human being, but Rick’s demise surely stands for one important proposition: no one holds tenure on this earthly existence and death lurks always amid the living.  If we were capable of holding this truth close to our hearts, perhaps, all of us would live our lives in a radically different way.  But the cruel paradox of human life is that those notions most integral to grasping our precarious toe-hold on existence are also the most difficult and painful to grasp.  An idea that should give our lives meaning and urge us to daily acts of kindness and devotion is also one that could leach away our courage and make our days barren.  The thought of death is like gazing into the sun: mortal eyes are unable to bear its profundity and awful radiance. 

3.
I met Rick more than 35 years ago.  A few months earlier, I had become friends with Terry Dilley, an instructor at the local Community College in Austin.  Terry was a lifelong companion and someone that I deeply admired.  He led a Great Books group, offered through Community Services, and modeled on the discussions encouraged by Mortimer Adler, the professor at the University of Chicago.  I had come to Austin to practice law and was, more or less, alone.  At first, I was skeptical about the benefit of attending Terry’s Great Books discussions but, at last, I overcame by bashfulness and doubt and joined the group.  In those days, the group met in a classroom at the Community College and sat in circle at desks that we dragged into that formation.  The group was studying the short fiction of Thomas Mann, preparatory to reading Death in Venice. 

I had studied German literature in college and had a degree in English literature.  I was arrogant and brash in those days, disrespectful, I’m afraid, of the opinions of others.  At the first session that I attended, I spoke a great deal and dismissed what others had to say.  I wasn’t confident that I was much of a lawyer and was still learning my craft at that time, but I knew a lot about literature and, after accustoming myself to the group, wasn’t hesitant to express my opinions.  Needless to say, I came across as a boor and bully: Rick Herreid, who attended that discussion, later told me that he and his wife resolved that they would quit the group if I persisted in coming – I was an irritating member dominating what was supposed to be an informal group conversation.  I guess that they decided to grit their teeth and see if they could bear my company because they stayed with the group – indeed, for more than 30 years.

Rick Herreid was a couple years older than me and worked as a chemist at the Hormel Company in the firm’s research and development department.  My first impression of him was that he was skinny and very blonde with pale skin, a tall, bony fellow with an attractive, voluptuous wife.   Rick and his wife, Karen, were polite, well-spoken, obviously highly educated – it seemed to me that they were quintessentially suburban, the sort of college-educated people you might meet in Edina or Plymouth or Woodbury.  There was something conventional about them, an aspect of conformity that you meet in people who have gone to good schools and are now working for big corporations.  At that time, Karen was a stay-at-home mother.  Both of them seemed to be working to make a happy home for the children in their family.  They were churchgoers, polite, even welcoming to me, although I understand, now, that the initial impression that I made on them was a poor one.  I was very full of myself in those days, a necessity, I suppose, for one embarking on the practice of law in the field of litigation.  I didn’t know, then, what I didn’t know – in other words, I thought my wisdom was sufficient to all things, but, of course, I wasn’t wise at all.  At first, I mistook the suburban virtues that the Herreid’s embodied for dullness, a stolid, unimaginative stance toward life.  Objectively, Rick was already a better man than I – he had a better education at a private school (I had attended the University of Minnesota), a better, more stable and highly paid job, an attractive wife who doted upon him, a nice house and the outlook for a good future.  I was unhappy, lonely, fearful of the requirements of my job, and defensive about my shortcomings.  And I was, also, secretly and deeply suburban myself – I had been raised in Eden Prairie and the way that Rick led his life was intimately familiar to me, something with which I had grown-up: the mother as homemaker, father as bread-winner, children precocious and, even, artistic, everyone comfortable exactly as they were.  I fancied myself an intellectual explorer, a kind of Byronic hero, but I was really just a scared boy.  The fact that Rick and Karen were suburban in their fundamental outlook, ultimately, made them attractive to me.

4.
I don’t know what my life would have been like if my rude arrogance had destroyed the Great Books group.  (After all, I met my second wife, the source of all my happiness, in that Group.)  But the group persisted notwithstanding the insult I posed to its integrity and, in fact, we have resolved that the Great Books will continue in Rick’s honor now that he has passed away.  This Fall, we read Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and, then, some stories by George Saunders preparatory to discussing Lincoln in the Bardo.  Since we had a couple of nights open, I suggested that we read Juan Rulfo’s spectral Pedro Paramo.  The book jinxed our group.  One important member took a job three-hundred miles from Austin.  For his farewell, Rick hosted a meal for all group members and their spouses.  Because he was a food scientist, Rick was skilled in the culinary arts.  The meal was very fine, featuring pork loin, cooked to perfection (he was unafraid to serve the meat pink at its center) with a sweet apricot sauce.  The feast was memorable, served in Rick’s beautiful house located on a hilltop at Seven Springs outside of Austin.  His home is filled with elegant mementos of his travels abroad, including a beautiful painting from Bosnia showing the bridge over the Drina – we had read Ivo Andric’s book of that name in our Group a few years earlier.  Near the kitchen, there were photographs of Rick on a beach near Manila in the Phillipines, canvases of Norway and the harbors of northern Germany, and over the couch in the living room, a splendid painting of prairie in western Minnesota or the Dakotas, a shack on a slope bright with wildflowers.  When it was light outside, deer could be seen in Rick’s backyard together with big, russet-colored wild turkeys.  After dinner, Rick served us liqueurs – shots of aquavit, Jaegermeiser, Grand Marnier.  The dinner was a great success.  A week later, Rick collapsed at the YMCA.  At the hospital, Karen told me that she still had leftovers from that meal in her refrigerator.

5.
It was my impression that Rick’s courtship of Karen involved treks in the wild, camping on rocky ground and canoeing across turbulent lakes in the Boundary Waters.  In his own way, he was an adventurer, although modest about his exploits.  For a time, he owned a sailboat and, like many men who are scientifically inclined, was probably fascinated by the geometry and physics that allows a sailing vessel to tack against the wind.  After his retirement, Rick traveled to Patagonia and rounded Cape Horn, sailing the mountainous seas off Tierra del Fuego on a sailing ship owned by a French couple.  (He said that he didn’t know French but quickly understood the commands shouted at him in that language – when you go sailing, the skipper of the vessel is always screaming at you to do this or that and, if you ignore his orders, a boom will likely crack you in the skull or sweep you overboard.)  The sailing ship explored the glacial fjords and cruised near the twisted dwarf forests in the sheltered inlets.  Sometimes, savage gusts of wind would roll through notches in the sawtooth peaks overlooking the fjords and crash against the ship’s sails.  It must have been a wonderful and fearsome adventure, although Rick was the soul of modesty and had that profound reticence as to speaking about himself that characterizes many people of Scandinavian heritage.

With friends, Rick explored World War One battlefields in France and Belgium, traveled in Mexico, visited the Philippines, and toured Moscow and Leningrad – the difficulty in Russia, he told me, was that the subway signs were all in Cyrillic and it was hard to decipher destinations in that script.  He explored Budapest and central Europe and, once, hiked on trails in the mountains in what was previously East Germany, searching for prospects that Casper David Friedrich painted.  Once, Rick’s wife, Karen, went on a church mission trip to Tegucigalpa in Honduras.  I probably don’t have the details of the story right but, as Rick told me, he flew to Honduras (or wherever this happened) and, then, set off on a hike up the slopes of a steep and slippery volcano.  He had a guide, an Indian girl, I think, and, of course, she was well accustomed to the altitude, the suffocating humidity in the cloud forests, and the slick, muddy trails.  She lead the way up the mountain at a lethal pace and, before they reached the top, Rick was too tired to continue – of course, he was jet-lagged and working in a sedentary job at that time and probably not in his peak condition.  (In fact, I expect he had more stamina after he retired than before –simply because he had more opportunities to exercise.)  It was typical that Rick told this story about his travels, an anecdote that is mildly self-deprecating – but I would maintain that if he couldn’t complete this arduous ascent, pretty much no one else that I know would have had any greater chance of success.  (He was built like a long-distance runner.) 

A photograph recently posted on Facebook shows Rick with Karen in rain gear squatting next to big wet boulders that are adorned with diadems of green and blue lichen.  The hikers are alone on a vast moor covered with reddish-brown heath.  The moor stretches down to a icy-looking finger of water, the inlet of a cold northern ocean.  It looks like an arduous, even scary hike.  Rick is grinning.  In photographs, he is always grinning.

6.
Rick was a chemist.  He spent his entire career, so far as I know, employed as a scientist in the Research and Development laboratories of the Hormel Foods Corporation.  His work was proprietary to this employer, I suppose, and, therefore, a little mysterious.  I know that he worked on removing the flatulent properties from certain sausages manufactured by Hormel.  Sometimes, he labored in the plant, perfecting industrial processes involved in meat packing.  I think he may have been marginally involved in Hormel Foods efforts to market catfish products – an enterprise that was almost comically disastrous.  Toward the end of his career, Rick worked with the formulation of a product called SPAMMY.  This is described as a “fortified poultry-based spread”.  The product, compounded one supposes from beaks, legs and other turkey byproducts, is pink, a granular paste; I’m not sure what it tastes like, although the potted meat is said to be highly salubrious, rich with vitamin B12 and D, important nutrients that are lacking in the nutrition of poor children living in Central America.  With the assistance of the USDA, Caritas and Food for the Poor, many thousand cans of this product were distributed in Guatemala to alleviate famine in that country. 

After he retired, Rick’s brother, an accomplished architect, designed a separate, free-standing laboratory building located about a dozen yards from the Herreid home.  In the laboratory, there are maps of Tierra del Fuego and pictures of sailing vessels.  The central conference room has the floor-plan of a Kekule structure, that is the benzene ring that is the fundamental generative form in organic chemisty.  (A Kekule ring is six-sided with covalent bonds to hydrogen extending from each of its corner carbon atoms.)  Friedrich Augustus Kekele was a German organic chemist who specialized in the study of aromatic hydrocarbon compounds.  For many years, Kekule worked to identify the matrix of atoms that establish the resonant characteristics of these compounds.  Keklule gave different accounts of the process that led to his description of the Benzene Ring that now bears his name.  Most famously, when honored in 1890 by the German Chemistry Society, Kekule said that he had dreamed the ring, envisioning while asleep the worm Ouroboros devouring it’s own tail – this dream led him to postulate the six-sided carbon matrix that is the basis of all of the aromatic hydrocarbons.  By Kekule’s account, he probably achieved this insight in 1862 and first published his findings in a French journal of chemistry three years later.  Many commentators suggest that the picturesque anecdote is a legend invented by Kekule, a kind of origin story. In any event, the template of Kekule’s benzene ring provides the floor plan for Rick’s laboratory building.

On a couple of occasions, Rick ushered me into his laboratory.  There were big hooded ovens, several spectrometers and chromatographs for qualitative/quantitative analysis, scales, centrifuges, and various burners.  Chemistry is descended from alchemy and the place had a hushed mystic aura about it.  I have no idea what experiments Rick conducted there.  As my readers will conclude, many aspects of this story are more than a little unclear to me.  There were aspects of Rick’s interests and pursuits that are unknown to the world.  I suppose that this is true of everyone.  I should have made closer and more detailed inquiries when he was alive, but, of course, like all of his other friends, I suspected that he would survive to a ripe old age.   


7.
He cooked for people.  He made sausage at home.  He worked with the church ladies on Wednesday night to serve food to families whose children were attending confirmation or who had come to St. Olaf for choir practice.  The meals served at the church were without charge to the public and, in fact, many times, the children of Sudanese refugees to Austin were present at the table.    A free-will offering supported the venture.  Mysteriously, there was always enough money donated each Wednesday to continue serving free meals to those from the community who came to the Church.  I will leave it to your imagination to consider how it was that money was always provided in sufficient amounts to continue this community service.

Once, when I was in trouble, I needed friends to help me move my books – it was mostly books – from the miserable apartment where I was living.  Rick spent all day lugging the boxes of books between the apartment and my new house.  (Others, including Jim McDermott, also helped and they deserve credit as well.)  As a reward for their services, I baked two racks of ribs in the clean oven of my new house.  The ribs were pre-cooked and slimy with barbecue sauce, probably packaged in this way by an affiliate of the Hormel Company

I shudder now to think of how I mismanaged that meat.  Rick would have known better.  In the summer, he served at the cook-shack on the County Fairgrounds, a primitive café with screen doors and white-washed walls like something at a summer camp in the North Woods.  Although the Men’s Brotherhood is supposed to operate the fairgrounds’ dinner hall, it always seems to be run by big, bossy post-menopausal women.  Rick worked there, sometimes 10 or 12 hours at a time.  People said that he was an honorary “Church Lady” because of his willingness to labor hard and long in the Church kitchens. 

One Summer, I saw him there.  I think he had given me meal tickets.  The Mower County Fair takes place in the first or second week of August and it is always hot as blazes.  The cook shack was sweltering with some elderly farmers nodding over cups of coffee in white porcelain mugs.  It was after the noon rush and the air in the shack smelled of roast beef – the most popular thing on the menu was beef with gravy slopped over two slices of white bread.  I think I ordered a hamburger.  Rick brought the food to my table.  He looked warm, but wasn’t sweating profusely.  I guess he was acclimated to heat.  Big, drowsy flies butted their heads against the screens on the doors and windows.  Air was supposed to draw through the windows but it was still outside and stagnant in the white-washed dining room and, when the breeze stirred, it reminded you that there were pig barns nearby and stalls holding white-faced steers. 

Rick was carrying a dishrag.  He sat the table with me for a few minutes and we chatted.  Then, he went off with his rag, swabbing down the tables where people had finished eating.

8.
His mother died when she was 59 and so Rick thought it prudent to retire at 60.  He was well-off and could do what he wished.  Sailing around Cape Horn at the uttermost tip of South America must have been one of his lifelong dreams.  In the dead of Winter (which is Summer in the Antipodes), he flew to Buenos Aires and, then, Ushuai, the Patagonia port from which ships embark for Antarctica.  He had booked a working vacation as part of the crew of a French sailing boat.

Under sail, the vessel rounded Cape Horn and, then, explored the glacial fjords of Tierra del Fuego.  Rick later told me that he didn’t know French and, of course, the French are too proud to admit that they know English.  He said that he was sworn at daily in French, this sort of abuse characteristic when one takes passage on a sailing boat – there is icy rigging to manage and booms that swivel perilously and, of course, the seas were fearsome.  At night, the people on the boat cooked elaborate meals and drank red wine.  Sometime, the little vessel entered channels dissecting the mountains, rocking on cold waves between glaciers.  Rick said that the greatest peril came from the saddles or low places in the rocky spines of the mountain ranges.  Sometimes, wind would find its way through those passes and a sudden titanic squall would rush like a banshee down into the fjord and, almost, set the ship on its side in the frigid sea.

After this adventure, his journeys were a bit more conventional.  But I’m told he had booked passage on the Queen Mary and planned to cross the sea in style – he liked to be on the water; after all, his forebears were Norwegian, Vikings, I suppose.  He had plans for a trip to Italy as well at the time that his heart went lethally haywire.  From evidence posted on Facebook, he spent each weekend with his grandchildren in Minneapolis or Madison, Wisconsin.  Now this is all ashes and dust.

There is a Mexican saying: God laughs when men make plans.   

9.
It’s hard to write about Rick Herreid for two reasons. 

First, I knew him for 35 years.  Time and familiarity have blurred his figure.  He is like the weather or the streets in my town, something that I have know for most of my life and, therefore, taken for granted.

Second, Rick was almost perfectly virtuous.  Descriptions of his goodness slip into maudlin hagiography.  He was even-tempered, highly intelligent, disciplined, kind, and generous.  Favorable adjectives can be heaped in mountainous piles without really being sufficient to the man.  I never heard him say anything bad or unfairly critical of a friend.  (He had no enemies.)  In a small town like Austin, a rude or cruel remark travels on the wind.  Rick didn’t conduct himself except with the highest honor.  Any unpleasant memories that I have about him arise from my own conduct, my own foul tongue, stupid things that I might have done or said in his presence.

10.
Once Rick and Karen gave a party.  The theme of the party was how completely boring they were.  Simple goodness is boring.  Doing good isn’t a successful theme for a writer.  The reader will soon conclude that the author of a treatise about a good man is either lying or ignorant.  But this would be incorrect.  Some highly intelligent people are arrogant – Rick was not.  Some people do good in the hope of a reward – this was never Rick’s motive.  Most highly disciplined and accomplished people are driven by fear – but Rick was fearless.

11.
When his children were little, Rick prepared home-made pizza on Friday nights.  He brought home fresh pepperoni and made the dough from scratch to delight his kids.

Once, with his brother, he took a class about building wood-fired grills for cooking bread and pizza.  He applied his learning to build a wood-fired oven at his family’s cabin on the St. Croix.  The oven is fantastically over-built, comprised of massive pillars of masonry on an immense concrete base.  It is sheltered by a heavy, gabled roof.  Every part of the structure is huge, even, ominous. 

The cabin on the river sits on a wooded terrace above the water. The view is extraordinary, the great reach of the river, the bluffs on the Wisconsin side towering over the blue flood, steep slopes cloaked in impenetrable woods.  The property abuts a State Park and so no one can encroach upon the land’s southern boundary.  A steep, sharply twisting gravel track leads down the cabin.  Although the place is only a mile or two from the summer cottages and restaurants of Afton, and, maybe, 10 miles from downtown St. Paul, the site feels primeval, a remote clearing in an undisturbed forest guarded by mountainous terrain and the vast, surging river. 

A thousand years from now, someone will discover the wood-fired pizza grill, the huge concrete pad and the pillars of brick and the heavy masonry vaults comprising the oven.  The archaeologists will surmise that ancient people conducted strange religious rites at this place.  What was the huge oven used for?  Were there human sacrifices?

We used to gather at the cabin in the first weekend in November.  It was a stag party and the purpose was watch what might be called examples of extreme cinema.  This meant soft-core pornography and ultra-violent Japanese films, Asian horror pictures, old monster movies and Westerns.  Two films were particularly memorable: Audition by Takashi Miike and Michael Haneke’s disturbing Funny Games.  The films began mid-afternoon on Friday and continued until exhaustion ended the exercise, usually around 3:00 pm on Sunday.  Rick used his wood-fired grill to make pizzas for the party.  I recall those pizzas as the best that I have eaten.  The crust was light and flaky, almost like pastry, with a faint flavor of sweet wood ash.  The oven was shockingly hot – it would bake a pizza perfectly in about 90 seconds.  After firing the oven, it remained hot enough to cook food, even without adding additional fuel, for about 48 hours.  The heavy masonry walls and vaults retained heat long after the fire was extinguished. 

12.
I came to St. Mary’s Hospital about an hour before the cardiologist removed the tube that was breathing for Rick.  Rick was inert.  He had become a graven monument to himself.  Like a knight of the faith in some Gothic cathedral, he seemed to rest on the hospital bed like a stone tomb.  The respirator apparatus was like a chivalric helmet somehow shifted down from his pale brow to guard his jaw and throat. The family was present and, then, a chaplain entered the room to lead a brief prayer.

Until that morning, I had never really grasped how tall Rick was, his sheer size.  He rested on the sepulcher of the bed like a fallen oak tree and his motionless hands were like great mallets.  For the first time, I noticed that he had the powerful hands of a blacksmith.

13.
Before the technicians removed the respiration tube, I leaned close to Rick and whispered in his ear.  I touched his forehead.  He brow was cool and his flaxen hair felt silky.  Of course, I had never touched him before, except to shake his hand.  Men must keep their distance.

14.
Driving home from the hospital, the water in the air changed to snow.  The freeway roamed over the grey, empty land.  The falling snow was immaterial – it made transparent veils and shrouds that flickered in the air, evanescent disturbances gone almost before you could see them.

15.
On the afternoon that Rick died, I took my dog for a long walk.  We went along the boulevard to the bridge over the dull lead-colored river and, then, along the path between the Catholic cemetery and the stream.  Gravestones glistened in the mist and the little bronze statuary group of Jesus blessing the children looked particularly forlorn against the grey, lightless skies.  The day was monochrome, its only color supplied by Halloween decorations, orange pumpkins and witches with green haggard faces, black cats and the ice-white apparitions of skeletons.  Frolicsome Death was near, carousing in the trees and falling leaves.  Sidewalks were littered with brown-gold maple leaves.  Each shapely leaf was marked by some kind of blight – hectic black marks on the upper sides of the leaves, sometimes doubled like a Rorschach pattern.  I brought several of these leaves to my office.  They sit on my desk as I write these words.

16.
On the morning of Rick’s funeral, I dreamt that I was driving to a city on a river.  On a map, a pin had been dropped at the lodging where I planned to spend the night.  I took a short cut and found that the road suddenly dropped away below me, making a descent steep as a roller-coaster to the river.  Perhaps, the city was Pittsburgh, the place where Rick was born, a tongue of land overgrown by skyscrapers between rivers and bordered by high, brown bluffs.  At the bottom of the hill, there was no bridge but it didn’t matter, my eye now was carried across the churning water.  I wanted to turn my head to see if I was on a ferry, but I had no head to turn.  I was now nothing but vision.  The opposite bank of the river loomed ahead, a ravine silver with a tiny cascade.  The hillside arrested my forward motion.  My dwelling was beyond the hill.  Above, a mountain was eroded into strange pinnacles and there were trails amid the steeples and turrets of limestone where people were strolling.  I wondered where I had left my car, my luggage, my body.  Then, I was awake and opened my eyes and saw the white Eastern sky, a pale, luminous void, the morning of the day of my friend’s funeral.

Saturday November 9, 2019