Forty years ago right now I was between my junior and senior years of high school trying to decide what I was going to do for a living.

I knew that I was going to college after high school, and for that matter, I knew that I was going in the fall.  I only had half days my senior year, so I had registered for the community college to get a jump start on my college "career".

My old high school, prior to renovations, at night.  Up until my last year of high school I'd been on the swim team and saw a lot of the building from this prospective as we had early, early morning practices and evening practices too.

In 1980 I wasn't sure what that career would really consist of.

Earlier, when I was in grade school and junior high, I'd thought I wanted to join the Army and have a military career.  Even by junior high, however, that desire was somewhat waning and by the time I had entered high school, and the immediate post school world became more real, that desire was rapidly diminishing.  I still thought of entering the service, but probably following graduating from college and maybe not for a career.  Indeed, at that time my immediate plan was to go to UW and join Army ROTC, although I'd avoid JrROTC in high school.   The loose thought, at the time, was that I'd major in wildlife biology and after a stint in the Army, I'd either get out and get into the Wyoming Game & Fish Department or make a twenty year career of the Army and then do that.

I didn't do either of those things.

In 1980 I knew that what I wanted was an outdoor life.

What I really loved was hunting, fishing and being out in nature.  I didn't want to be indoors.  I didn't at that time even know how to tie a tie, and as my high school graduation the following year would show, I was in the class of people who were so unfamiliar with formal clothes that I couldn't wear them and look unnatural. 

Next month will be the 30th anniversary of my admission to the bar.  I've worked indoors now for thirty years.

How did that happen?

It's weird looking back as even now that's really not apparent. 

What I do know is that I changed my views on attending UW in the fall by August of 1981.  I went down to the orientation and didn't like it, so I enrolled at Casper College instead.  I enrolled, moreover, as a geology student as my father had related to me how there were a lot of guys around with wildlife management degrees who didn't find work, and I didn't want that to happen.  My plan then was to do two years at CC and then go down to US and I still planned on enrolling in ROTC. 

Me as a geology student.  I'm one of those people in the photo.

However, the same summer I enlisted in the National Guard for a six year term of enlistment. That really wouldn't have kept me from joining ROTC but by the time I went down to UW two years later I knew that I really didn't want an Army career.  It wasn't that I didn't like the National Guard, I did.  It's that I didn't need to be an Army officer to know what being an Army officer was like, and that I had no interest in that as a career.  The Guard served me really well in a lot of ways, that being one of them.

Geology was my choice as it was still outdoors.  Living in a state in which extractive industries are such a big deal, it seemed like a safe employment choice. But the bust cycle was setting in even by the time I was getting ready to graduate from CC and it was fully in by the time I was ready to graduate at UW.

Geology building class room, 1986.

Law school as an option first occurred to me as a suggestion from a CC professor.  I didn't know it at the time, but the professor, a history professor, was a licensed lawyer.  I was surprised by it as I conceived of studying law as being really difficult and lawyers as being really smart, but I did toy with the idea a bit.  In part I did that as my father was a professional and an outdoorsman and so were a lot of his friends.  I was also worrying, by that point , how employable I was going to be. And I knew, by that point, that getting a job in geology meant going on to grad school and I had real personal doubts about whether I'd be able to get in, and if I did, whether I'd be able to make it through, geology grad school.

Frankly, I could have on both points, but at that point in time I labored under the burden of scholastic myths more than reality.  When I did take the geology GRE I did really well and in retrospect the worries were self created.  The same year I took those I took the LSAT, not really expecting to do well, but I did.  I told myself that if I got into law school, and I only applied to one, I'd go.  I did, so I did.

M110 howitzer.  I was an artilleryman.

I didn't know any lawyers personally when I went to law school and I never bothered to ask them anything about what being a lawyer was like. That was an odd way to go about that, I guess, but then in the thirty years of doing this, I've only been asked what practicing law was like by young people perhaps two or three times.  Indeed, of younger people I remotely know whom I know to be interested in the law, none of them have asked me nor, to my knowledge, any other lawyer.

But then I never asked any game wardens what being a game warden was like.  In later years, when speaking to them, a couple of them have related a daily life much different than I would have anticipated.  And for that matter I never spoke to any geologist either.  I had spoken to soldiers, however, just because in those days it seemed like most men had been in the service.

And so, thirty years, thousands of depositions, lots of trials, and countless office hours later, here I am.

Is there a moral to this story?  I don't know that there is, other than like the they sing in Truckin:

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me
Other times, I can barely see
Lately, it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been 

Or maybe that's just lame.

It's funny how we get where we are going sometimes without realizing that we're getting there, and when we get there, we're not only a lot further along than we realize, but it'd be pretty hard to get back.

Amen, amen, I say to you,j when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.

John  21:18.

None of this, I suspect, is uncommon.