Not The Retiring Type - Graham Davis
This article describes life after retirement for former biology professor Graham Davis '49. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: Morris, Tom, "Not The Retiring Type," ECU Report, March 1993, Volume 24, No. 2.
The adventures began for Graham Davis when he taught his last class at East Carolina University in 1989.
The former ECU biology professor has spent the quiet years of his retirement doing anything but sitting still.He has hiked across Fiji, New Zealand and Australia, gone scuba diving in South America, done research on a rare species of fish in Alaska and worked as an observer on a fishing boat in the Bering Strait.
"What else is there to do," he sais as he leaned against a pole on the dock at his home near Blount's Creek. "I plan to stay on the road as long as I can carry a backpack."
Davis, 67, is a free spirit who rejects the normal conventions of retirement. Leave the golf and senior citizen trips to those who enjoy them, he says.He prefers the environment of lonely roads and youth hostels to condos and easy chairs.
Davis said he is often mistaken for a senior citizen on his travels, but doesn't let that slow him down.
"I went to this museum near the capital of Fiji, and at about the same time a bus of senior citizens pulled up," Davis said."I went up to give the guy my 50 cents and he said, 'You don't need to pay.It's already paid for.' I said, 'I'm not with the group.I don't associate with senior citizens.'"
Davis means no disrespect. He just likes doing things his way, as he has done since he concluded a 30-year teaching and research career at ECU.
Charles Bland, chairman of the ECU biology department, said he was surprised when Davis began his world travels. But many of Davis' ECU colleagues have taken to living vicariously through him.
"It was actually exciting to see somebody do that and it's encouraging to anybody like myself who is looking down the road to retirement," Bland said.
Davis still returns home after each trip to write reports on any of the research projects he is working on. He also tries to stop in and give a guest lecture on his work at the ECU School of Biology.
But other than that, Davis stays to the road. His house on Nevil Creek off the Pamlico River is more like a way station than a home. He simply has a severe case of wanderlust with no cure in sight.
That's what got him to take off for New Zealand in 1989, where he toured the country by bus, rail and ferry. From there it was on to Australia where he got a one-way ticket out of Sydney and headed south.
At each stop, Davis continues to confound the natives. He neither looks nor acts like a geriatric tourist.
During a bus tour of the Blue Mountains near Sydney, the driver cautioned Davis about taking the tour hike.
"We stopped at one place with a lot of walking down the mountainside and around and the bus driver looked at me and said, 'Are you sure you should make this walk?' Everybody else was in their twenties and I said, 'I think I can make it.' I got back and I was the first one. He asked me, 'Did you make the walk?' I said, 'Yeah, I just got back.' He just stood there staring at me.
But Davis wouldn't have it any other way. He stayed at youth hostels throughout his travels in New Zealand and Australia.
"You get to meet a different group of people and it doesn't cost much," he said. "Most of the people I met in Australia weren't from Australia.
"Staying at youth hostels, you meet an interesting group. Most of them were typically just out of college. They'd say, 'Where you from? Where are you going?' That was the typical routine.
"I suspected I was the oldest one."
The hostels cost about $6 a night and Davis lives off sardines and rice to make ends meet.
When his travels came to an end, he went in search of new opportunities. He looked into some volunteer research work that would pay him room and board and began the first of three summers working in Alaska.
He spent the first summer surveying salt marsh on a remote island off Juneau, which is on the southern area of the main peninsula. During the second summer, Davis worked out of a glacier ranger district surveying marsh communities in glacier river valleys.
The first two summers allowed him to work in his area of expertise. He was one of the first researchers to look at the environmental health of the Pamlico River, having done extensive research into the sea grass populations in the river and the nearby Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds.
During the third summer, he got involved with some unique research about an Arctic fish species. He went to Fairbanks and reviewed the existing literature on Arctic char, a freshwater fish related to the salmon family. The species is the only fish found in the remote cirque lakes, which are formed at the head of glaciers.
Some of the lakes are accessible only by helicopter, and the waters have never been fished.The only people who have visited the lakes are the scientists who study them.
Looking at a fish species wasn't exactly Davis' area of expertise, but he knew he was working with some unique data.
"I wasn't too interested about it because I realized I was reaching the highest level of the Peter Principle, or highest level of incompetence, because these were fish and I was into sea grass," Davis says.
"As time went along, I was excited about what I was doing. These fish are something else. They're in a class by themselves.As far as we know, they're the only species in these lakes."
Davis spent a few weeks staying at a campsite near a lake in the Kiglualk Mountains.He was there in the middle of August but the temperature never got higher than the 20s.As summer stretched into fall, Davis completed his research with the Arctic char and began looking for another adventure.
He had seen a notice in the ECU biology department that the Alaskan fishing fleet was looking for observers. Davis got in touch with the program and ended up on a 180-foot crabbing boat in Dutch Harbor off the Aleutian Islands.
Davis made sure the boat complied with fishing regulations regarding size limit, species limit and fishing in assigned areas. He also recorded biological data such as size of by catch and size of standard catch.
The boats used crab pots much like fishermen in this region, but the pots were bigger and they would fish as many as 600 different pots.The boats used hydraulic lifts to get the pots out of the water.
"It's kind of funny," Davis said. "You're up on the bridge and the skipper is doing the same things as the crabbers in skiffs down here."
But there were some differences. The crabs were worth $25 each and weighed an average of six and a half pounds.
Davis has been home since November and he's beginning to feel a little stir crazy, so it's only a matter of time before he packs his bags again. He is looking at Argentina or perhaps an island near Guam.Then again, there's always a return trip to Alaska.
"I'm ready to go again," he said. "I'm trying to decide.I'd like to go back and catch another boat."
Editor's Note: The text is reprinted with the permission of The Daily Reflector in Greenville. Graham Davis received his undergraduate degree from East Carolina in 1949.
