Eulogy for John Borchert

Because photography is such an integral part of real Geography, it is fitting to frame these thoughts about John in three images; figuratively, so we don’t need to worry about the projector bulb burning out, or focus. The first slide, please.

Ah, there we are, fifteen of us, arrayed around a surprised husband and wife sitting in front of their new double-wide mobile home in Circle Pines. Grasping the edge of the slide, we see May 1975, etched in the cardboard. It’s the end of a Saturday afternoon, and we’ve just trundled off a yellow school bus, this group enrolled in the second quarter of John’s wonderful Twin Cities course. Looking carefully, you can see the tired bus driver at the edge of the picture, relieved to have a short break from hours of John’s zigzag commands.

We’ve stopped here so John can make a few points, or more accurately, so that this couple in their early 60s can make the points. This is vintage Borchert, of course, visiting with regular folks in an ordinary landscape. The couple explains to the class why it made sense to buy a trailer after they retired. Articulately, and in their own terms, they disabused most of us of our stereotypes about what kind of people live in trailer parks. John, visible in the middle ground, knows all this, of course. That’s why we stopped. Next slide, please.

Oops, this one is a bit blurry. That’s your narrator’s minivan, whizzing down the Dallas North Tollway, a red Jaguar passing John and Jane and me. The edge of the slide reads February 1997. John and Jane are on their way back from Tucson, Arizona, and they’ve stopped for two days in the Big D. This time, I’m leading the field trip, through the affluent north Dallas suburbs. We’ve already pulled over many times, John jumping out to photograph the excesses of subdivisions in Plano, capturing the Italianate villa deposited on the Blackland Prairie, and lots more.

Sneaking out of work before this picture was taken, driving home, a pang of anxiety grabs me. Yikes, I think, now I’m in charge of the field excursion, with John as student? But the stress is brief. I know what to do. A quarter-century earlier, he equipped me. I can still read the landscape. Mercifully, we don’t need to deal with deconstruction or spatialized ontology. Back home, with Jane and Linda in our kitchen, John declared the tour a huge success. Next slide, please.

Great. Perfectly composed picture. Soft lighting, a verdant background. It’s John, Jane, and me enjoying lunch on the deck at Cedarcliff. The slide’s margin reads August 2000. Good focus. What catches our attention, what is sharpest in this Sunday picture, is that twinkle in John’s eye. You see it in nearly every picture of Professor Borchert. It’s a trademark glint, bespeaking wisdom, happiness, and enormous curiosity.

Here, John was describing plans for their upcoming trip to Iceland and England. In fact, the shutter clicked just after he framed landscape evolution in the Lake District. John knew what he wanted to see, and he already knew a lot about Cumbrian places like Keswick and Grasmere, but he also knew that there would be surprises, too. Like every other part of John’s scholarship, this European vacation was all about asking basic questions and formulating thoughtful answers.

If you plot the time series of those pictures, you will see the pattern of increasing contact in recent years. Most of these were northbound e-mails, often with an attachment of data showing some aspect of the airline business that was sure to intrigue John. A week or so later a reply arrived, a glistening nugget in an electronic in-box otherwise clogged.

And four times a year, to John and others, I dispatched a summary of my previous three months of travels – wandering through St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, or Osaka Kansai Airport, or with good old boys in Brady, Texas – in an effort to show John that I could still write something that resembled field notes. He urged me to collect and publish them someday. That, too, was John: always encouraging his students, his peers, everyone he met.

Though I departed academic geography in 1983 for the airline business, not a workday ends without me reaching back to John’s lessons. An hour after learning of his death, I was studying a spreadsheet showing large losses across TWA’s route network. He would have been proud of my ability to quickly convert columns of numbers into patterns on an imagined route map.

Like most of you, God has blessed me with abundant time to learn from many teachers. Professor Borchert was the greatest teacher I ever had.

Rob Britton, Fort Worth, Texas