Professor Holmes' Website

I enjoy teaching, and believe that I am doing (with my wife) really exciting, important research (see my Vitae and to read about my recent, (as yet) unpublished research go to http://www.economics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/holmes/). I must consciously limit the time I spend doing these things in order to have fun and stay healthy. Maintaining both my physical and financial health, I find an unpleasant duty - but I do it and, so far, have done it pretty well.

I have lived an adventurous, unusual, and fun life. To me having fun is not just going with my wife to plays, concerts, or fine restaurants - which like most people we do and do enjoy - but it is having exciting adventures, preferable with my family. In particular, I enjoying nature in all its raw power as well as meeting and becoming acquainted with people who lead much different lives than that of a college professor.

I hope that for my students (and others) who read these pages and see the accompanying photographs take away a lesson; you need not define yourself just by your career and the work you do - you are capable of other experiences. I believe that it gives you confidence to realize that you could make your living doing something else. You can develop other dimensions of yourself that may cause you to be more satisfied with the life you live. It is important not to become bored. As an undergraduate in college, I was shy, naïve and fearful. I consciously, with difficulty and slowly, changed myself. I have not been afraid of much for some time. I seek new experiences, and enjoy relating to unusual people, often in out-of-the-way places. Courage is something I believe anyone can develop - painfully perhaps - if you want to. I believe that you will be happier and more fulfilled if you develop these other dimensions of yourself and I want to encourage you to do so by my example. Think of it!! If an old man. of age 70, can go kayaking and camping for a week on the Waccasassa River/swamp which has alligators, poisonous snakes (I take protection),and lots of poisonous creepy crawlies, and if he can buy and ride a mule for the first time in his life (albeit it was a very, very short ride which totally satisfied my need for this experience), then surely a younger person, such as you can try something new and out of their ordinary routine. You might ask “how did I get this way?”

As a kid growing up in Indiana I hunted, trapped, and had a dog and a variety of farm animals, including horses from the age of nine on.

As an undergraduate at Wabash College I spent one summer selling magazines around the Midwest and the magazine crew stayed in flophouses. The next summer I spent working and studying in Chicago and lived in a shared, awful room on skid row with a classmate and my best friend, Frankie Correll, who was a genuine tough, but unquestionably had courage. I met people from the roughest edge of society (drunks, derelicts, ex-convicts, and criminals), and learned how to relate to them and not fear them. I realized that "there but for the grace of God and good fortune, go I". I also learned to protect myself.

I became a gold prospector while a PhD student at the University of Chicago in order to do something besides hunt (deer and bear) in the wildest mountains of California, and later in southwest Colorado. I ran a gold dredge (after learning to scuba dive, NAUI) and owned a hard rock mine. In the late 70s I had a contract to dredge for gold in the Trinity Mountain wilderness in Northern California. My mining claim near Silverton Colorado was jumped the first year of my marriage to Pat and we had an interesting summer in the high country of Colorado and its courts. ( I lost, which was actually lucky given that the price of silver fell by 95%.)

The waterfall and 25 foot deep pool where I dredged. My sons John and Mike learned to gold pan and horse camp.

There's a picture of Mike leading the two horses and the tough mule, Sunny, that bucked me off. Sunny later rolled approximately 300 yards down a mountainside destroying all my camping gear, panniers, and a pack saddle, but not injuring himself in the least (he would need to go over a high cliff to do that. I think).

There are also pictures of my son John holding a board from a slush box I made 40 years ago with my name carved on it in front of a neat old cabin in perhaps the wildest part of Colorado. This is on Lime Creek between Silverton and Durango. This is the most beautiful area I have ever seen in the world. There is a gorgeous picture of twilight mountain taken from an old sheep camp there (the sheepherders lent Pat and I a horse, a large tent, pack saddles, and we sometimes rode with them the second summer of our marriage.) There are also pictures of John and I mountain biking on our "Hummer" bikes. I usually ride my bike all winter in Buffalo, with a studded front tire. The rear one slips and slides and add zest to a winter day.

I now horseback ride and camp in western New York (see the folder "Western NY horse camping" for pictures of John and I camping in Alleghany state park this last year, and a picture of me on one of my trail horses in the Amherst NY nature Park - in which you can get seriously lost and will rarely see another person). It is about 4 square miles with no roads or many trails, and no bears or mountain lions unlike the other places I've camped (including Alleghany). I highly recommend both parks for hiking. If you are interested in camping I wrote up a guide for a group of my wife Pat's Canisius College students, who wanted to camp in Alleghany state park, which you may find useful and/or interesting.

I have sailed and lived aboard various sailboats, after 1980 with Pat and the kids, in the Chesapeake, Florida Keys, the Gulf of Cortez, and now we gunk hole the North Shore of Lake Erie in our Allmand 31 - a very comfortable, seaworthy boat. Pat and I spent the first summer we were married sailing the Fl. Keys. You can see pictures of our sailing recently in Florida and on Lake Erie in the folder with that name.

I have canoed/kayak camped all across the US; Indiana, Ill., Mo., California, Florida, North and South Carolina, Virginia, and New York. My favorite and in my opinion the most beautiful is the Waccasassa River in Florida, between routes 24 and 19 (unfortunately I have no pictures of this part of the river). The file with that name has pictures of the trip I took in 2007 with two of my TAs enjoying the swamp/River. John, and another UB professor who is adventurous (fairly unusual in academics) joined me for another expedition for the week of spring break 2009. These pictures are only of the lower, tidal Waccasassa.

Since getting my first position at Purdue University in 1964 I have owned one kind or another of camper or RV and wandered all over the US and much of Canada. Currently I own a RoadTrek which you can see in one of the Waccasassa pictures. Similar to when we primitive camp, when we travel we do not plan where we will sleep at the end of the day - Pat and my kids have always joined me on these sailing, road trips, and camping trips (Pat has, understandably, lost her enthusiasm for primitive camping.)

have also camped, hiked, ridden horses, snorkeled, kayaked and/or sailed in several foreign countries; Australia, the Bahamas, the US and the British Virgin Islands, Belize, Honduras, Mexico, Canada, and England.

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  Kayaking the Lower Wac
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  Camping in a county park

Before meeting Pat, I was a visiting professor in Australia and, after getting a speaking tour along the East Coast, I wandered up that coast and then around the outback in a camper van for several months in the early 70s, visiting the Opel mines, the dingo fence, I shot kangaroos, ate emu eggs, and snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef. I brought home an antique dingo trap and two dingo Pelts and had a lot of trouble and fun getting them through customs.

I have hunted and shot in many states starting, of course, in Indiana where I grew up.

Pat is writing a book about some of her travels and adventures with me entitled "He Didn't Promise Me a Rose Garden". I'm pretty confident she believes I delivered on that promise. A couple of pictures of Pat and my family are in the folder with that label.