Meet Walter

We’re back in Connecticut and enjoying life. I accompanied son-in-law John up to the top of the mountain at the back of Kent where granddaughter Cassie was riding. She’s becoming an accomplished horsewoman and it has been our pleasure to watch her become an interesting young woman.
While Cassy moved her horse down the hill to the paddock for the night, I met up with the land owner.
Walter is O.M. That means Old Money. Generally speaking, O.M. people never flaunt their wealth. He (and they) wears the oldest clothes. Yesterday, his flannel shirt pocket was ripped and hanging down. His trousers were worn so thin you could count the threads in the knees. The zippered part was threadbare. Walter is a man of indeterminate age – except I would guess he is in his early to mid 80s.
He’s probably the most interesting man I know – and I’ve known some great men.
Walter is/was a nuclear scientist. He’s now a farmer, sitting on the top of his mountain with his old farmhouse looking a bit the worse for wear, much like his shirt and pants. His corgi dogs nuzzle and nip at his feet. His hands are badly wrinkled and the blood doesn’t circulate too well in his extremities by the looks of the dark color of his skin. But he has a mind. Oh, what a mind he has.
Every time I’ve spent time with this fine old man I come away in awe. He speaks Russian fluently, and he has taught himself to speak the Gaelic.
We spoke yesterday about Putin and he is quite clear in his thinking about the thinking of this angry Russian. “It all stems from what we did in Kosovo,” Walter said. “We took that away from the Serbs and gave it to the Albanians.” Walter explained that the Serbs, being Slavic, are much more akin to the Russians. And Putin, being an old KGB man, found that unforgivable. Now, with Russia’s new-found oil wealth, he’s game to flex his muscle by pushing into Georgia.
Walter told me about being on a U.S. team that went into Russia back in 1994 in an attempt to help the Russians with creating a safety system with all of their loose nukes. After a week of working alongside the nuclear scientists and military people, Walter attended a party at which the vodka flowed with its usual Russian gusto. He rose and gave the only toast from the western scientists in Russian. He said he spoke about how Russian naval ships and personnel had come to the aid of San Francisco during the fires of the 1890s when San Francisco was in danger of being destroyed. The navy men came ashore and helped put out the fires. He tied this mutual aid pact to their current trip.
“After the toast a short man with white, white hair came up and hugged me,” Walter said. “He had worked alongside Sakharov on Russia’s nuclear development. He said to me in Russian, ‘I love you’,” Walter said.
Our conversation floated along to Henry Kissinger, who lives in Kent. Walter knew him when he first came over from Germany in 1936. He related how Henry had an affair with a Nazi offer’s widow at the end of the war. That Henry. He’s quite a guy.
Walter has strong opinions about nuclear power for energy generation. He says the world has a much harder time tracking the pollution caused by carbon and suggests we really are quite competent to track nuclear waste and by-products. And, he says, if you coat Uranium 238 with another element which he named, it reduces the half-life of the waste to 50 years, instead of thousands of years.
If I were Barack Obama, I know I’d want Walter’s mind to play a role in my upcoming administration.