That Damn Project

I don’t remember much in the way of scholarly details, but I can see our classroom: long tables and stools instead of chairs, the chalkboard before us, more space than content, leaving us plenty of room to think and consider. It was a science lab, equipped with Bunsen burners and safety goggles, though we didn’t do that kind of science. The long bank of windows looked out across the hard, mostly dirt field that the state champion football team left to us soccer players—a site for sore ankles. And then, just beyond the tired goal, a corporate headquarters out on the horizon, rectangles designed not to stand out in a way that meant they did.

When my family moved to northern New Jersey in 1976, the farms and old estates were turning the area’s still-rural edges into suburban office complexes, actual ponds replaced with engineered flood-retention basins in parking lots. I didn’t understand it at the time, but even though I could find my way to school and the pizza place and eventually learned how to drive to the big city (New York, maybe twenty-five miles away), I didn’t know where I was. That changed in large part with Mr. Caprio’s class. “It’s time,” he would announce, as we sat on our stools, “for that damn project.”

Pens and pencils clattered and spilled to the floor, and out came our maps, as our group of young geoscientists snickered, let’s face it, over that word: damn. The project wasn’t damned, obviously. Calling it such was a joke, but the joke was disarming. With damn, Mr. Caprio beat us to the punch; you couldn’t call this painstaking, weeks-long assignment anything worse. The joke was mischievous, too, which is how I remember Mr. Caprio. Even back then, I think I might have understood that he had gamed the class. We would explore the subject matter regardless of how we felt about it, and the subject was the geophysical world. The class was called “Earth Science.”

“That damn project.” This was how Mr. Caprio said it, and, importantly, how we heard it, though to repeat, it was a joke. Because by damn, he meant dam, a barrier built to hold back water, the water being water in our area and in particular the largest local river, which back then I probably could not have found, much less named. But when I recall his voice now, I have in mind a crisp April morning, and I remember how I felt then, which was charged. The classroom door closes; stragglers just barely slip in. Mr. Caprio takes his seat at his desk, dressed like most male teachers in those days, in khakis and a tweed blazer, an Oxford shirt and tie. In spring, when the ground thawed, the jacket disappeared.

He took attendance, and the way I remember it, he might not have called names, a telling act, as attendance could be a kind of proving ground for both student and teacher, a potential site for complicated power alignments. He skimmed a list, nothing to it. To avoid attendance, or transform what it was, was to avoid conflict right off, or deflect it, and to offer power to the students: of course, they were there!

He was relaxed, as a high school friend I talked to the other day confirmed—like an uncle. It was understood (at least by me) that we were going to hear stories about and descriptions of things that were unusual and maybe extraordinary, or could be, like volcanoes and the earth’s shifting tectonic plates and the cause and effect between the two, plate tectonics being a relatively new theory in the 1970s. The stories would also be about places that weren’t like the fields outside our classroom window. He was talking adventure!

I don’t remember the other work we did, though I recall a big project we had to complete, and maybe a final exam. My friend built a weather station, and when the weather station failed, he then spent hours at the library, looking back through weeks’ worth of weather reports, which says something about either a student’s determination or a teacher’s expectations, or both.

It’s That Damn Project that stays with me—I think of it all the time, in my work as a writer, when I teach, or in thinking about the world—but the story that I remember above all comes in second: a story about a prank.

He was working in New Mexico, if I have it right. This was Mr. Caprio and another young geologist, and, best I can figure, this was the 1950s. They were doing exploratory geology, for the U.S. and for oil companies. On the outskirts of a small town was an extinct volcano: a volcano that, to be clear, while still resembling a volcano, doesn’t volcano anymore. There are a lot of volcanoes in New Mexico, big and small, and I’m guessing—or hoping, actually—that this was one of the smaller ones, perhaps in the Jemez Mountains, to the west of Santa Fe. One day, the two young geologists drove up into the hills, dumped some old tires in the volcano’s cone, lit the tires, and drove back into town.

Is there a chance I am completely misremembering this story? That I am conflating or confusing? Oh yes—but this is how I remember it: volcano and tires. Please note that putting tires in a dormant volcano is not something I recommend, because what I do know from my own life experience is that while it takes a while for a tire fire to get going, once it does, the smoke is thick and black. And of course, if you live in a town with a volcano, and if you forget just for even just one minute that the volcano is extinct, or even dormant, then you might be just a little bit—well, exercised is a word that comes to mind, and, no, I don’t know that I ever heard what happened afterward. When I imagine an ending, I picture two exploratory geologists getting run out of town.

Did our earth science class hear numerous prank-free stories from Mr. Caprio? Yes, for sure, as well as challenges: if we figured out how to store electricity for extended periods of time in a way that did no damage to the world, we would not only have our future finances worked out, it would be a game changer for all humanity. But to be clear, when I first heard the volcano story, I was a teenager and thus prank-aware. Tires in a volcano: mic drop.

Of course, when I read his obituary, and do the math of years, I see that it was, to use an un-geologic phrase, a different time. Mr. Caprio grew up in the town he eventually taught in, but went into the army during WWII; where he went for that, I do not know. Now that I am past Mr. Caprio’s age when he taught me, I see the way we carry places with us, the way histories are played out in surveys and land claims and control of rivers. The tenth-grade me would not have thought to ask. My cousin had been in the Vietnam War, but he was older and somewhere in California. Yet only a year later, I walked into the post office to register for the draft. We did it more for student loans than having an idea about Soviet troops in Afghanistan, where, it turns out, the landscape is very similar to that of the American west: beautiful high mountains, low valleys, and arid conditions.

What I gleaned from Mr. Caprio’s obituary in 2005 was that he went to college after the war; that he studied in New Mexico; that he went to graduate school also in New Mexico, studying geology. In my own life, writing about different places and landscapes, I happen to have spent time studying the geology of the Colorado Plateau, and I’ve seen old geologic reports cite Mr. Caprio’s paper on the water resources of the western slopes of the New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains, written in 1960, three years before I was born. This would most likely be when he was working in the field, during what I will call his “Volcanic Era.”

What I learned studying that very same stretch of the West myself (coincidentally, or maybe not) is that there’s a long history of violence in the American west: cataclysmic violence that erupted mountains, and the violence of extraction by energy and mining companies. The U.S. military only began to store and build its weapons in the west after a huge explosion in 1926 destroyed the original arsenal back east, the cache struck by lightning. That first major U.S. arsenal was on the Picatinny Ridge in northern New Jersey, about a half-hour drive north of our school.

What I learned from being in Mr. Caprio’s class was the physical sense of the world, the feeling that it had been constructed slowly and dramatically—and that it is still being constructed, every day. Seeing how the world made itself was important, as was knowing that the world is still constructing. It is flowing, shifting, moving, alive.

In that sophomore year, the stories kept coming, along with various assignments, but That Damn Project was special, and I realize I’ve been working on it ever since. The idea was simple: on a U.S. Geological Survey map, we dammed the biggest river, the Passaic, which drew a giant U around where we lived and ended up in the Atlantic. We dammed it on paper, which meant drawing a line that represented a dam, and then we imagined water backing up behind the dam—the damned river!

With pencils, we shaded in what started as a pond, then, as the water level rose and the imaginary dam was extended, we moved up to the next higher contour line, a notch of twenty feet at a time. As our pencils shaded a bigger and bigger area, the pond became a lake, then a bigger lake. In a few days, we lived in an archipelago, the school on a high ridge, like the adjacent corporate campus. As we continued, our high school world was sinking fast.

Mr. Caprio was taking us through the origin story of the (to us) barely visible marshes that were behind the supermarket or out on the municipal outskirts, as well as the small streams that we knew from our teenage existence, in backyards and parks, in the woods behind the town library. These were the faraway places close to town, adventures in the everyday world.

We were learning the landscape’s history, and we were learning it backwards, because about 15,000 years before, the Wisconsin glaciers that had earlier pushed down from the cold north suddenly began to melt—thus creating prehistoric glacial Lake Passaic. At three hundred square miles, Lake Passaic was huge, the land area of New York City. The pressure that the ancient ice dams and massive lake exerted on the then-surrounding mountain ranges would shift the course of rivers and eventually create what would become strategic mountain gaps, feeding settlements and railroads and then the highways that, between 1980 and ’81, carried us high schoolers to rock concerts at Madison Square Garden.

By the end of Mr. Caprio’s dam project, we came to see that we were all still living in Lake Passaic, the water mostly gone. The lake was still receding, as it continues to recede now, and in the bottom of the lake are modern wetlands, the old lake’s glorious marshy remnants. For the high school me, this suddenly explained the existence of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a giant edge-of-town marsh that had once been the planned site of what was to be the largest airport in the U.S.

I now see that That Damn Project had to do with hydrology, but I would never have referred to it that way then. We learned to see the area’s watersheds—i.e., the region drained by a particular river. Today, the work might be categorized as environmental science but the word environment was not ubiquitous then: the Environmental Protection Act, born under the Clean Water Act signed by Richard Nixon, was only nine years old; conservation was still the popular term, but I don’t remember Mr. Caprio referring to either. I just remember being thrilled at seeing the contemporary landscape anew through the history of water.

I went on to college, studied politics and literature, and took no earth science, but then I got a job on a newspaper in Passaic, New Jersey, maybe thirty river miles downstream from our imaginary dams—and suddenly realized I was in Lake Passaic, covering council meetings and bank robberies from an ancient past that never ended. It was a daily news world connected by water: water for drinking, water for living, water that must go somewhere, a reason I wrote my first long pieces on sewerage and flooding, hot topics. To say that That Damn Project had prepared me for my newspaper job is an understatement. Ditto teaching college science (Let’s take out our maps!), graduate writing classes (What’s missing from our maps?), and taking time to look at where we live—at how the land and the water that runs through it didn’t just invent towns and cities, but protects or threatens them still. The idea now, as it was when I was in tenth grade, is to disassemble our default ways of seeing, to switch out (here in the twenty-first century) all that tech companies offer us in terms of fastest routes and shopping convenience for a more intimate experience of the world, past and present.

Not too long ago, on returning to the map of our town, I remembered that the corporate headquarters outside our classroom window was a research campus of (then) Exxon. The year I entered ninth grade, a scientific officer at the oil company sent a letter to the petroleum staff that was based across our soccer field, discussing his recent research regarding what was being called “greenhouse gas,” a warming of the atmosphere caused by an increase in carbon. “Present thinking,” he wrote then, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” By man, he meant humankind, of course, and he pointed out that modeling the atmosphere is complicated, as true then as now—in part for the ways the atmosphere is liquid, like water.

It reminded me that the world, after all, is damned, but it is also a gift and a marvel. It speaks to us, if we listen. And then, too, we are always speaking to the world, with our actions, of course, but also our attention, our focused thoughts. Mr. Caprio taught us how to slow down, how to concentrate and be patient while also staying charged and lighthearted—how to let the world have a say.

Copyright 2025 Robert Sullivan

Robert Sullivan is the author of many books, including Rats, The Meadowlands, My American Revolution, The Thoreau You Don't Know, and, most recently, Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer. His work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and A Public Space. He is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 2024, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature.