The Time on the Gravel Roads

By Subhranil De

Part road trip, part nature hike, part journey of self-discovery, this evocative memoir follows the adventures of Subhranil De as he navigates a six-year quest to find a job that combines his passion for physics with his love of teaching.

Seeking escape from the drudgery and anxiety of academics, he sets out to explore less-traveled backroads and byways, from New York to North Dakota to Minnesota. Along the way, he finds solace in poetry, music, and introspection, as his professional life advances from researcher to lecturer to a veteran of the interview circuit—and at long last, a fulfilling position at a university nestled in the beautiful rolling landscape of southern Indiana.

Subhranil’s narrative seamlessly weaves together luminous descriptions of pure nature, deep reflections on the mysteries and wonders he encounters, and heartwarming anecdotes as well as wry observations about family, friends, colleagues, and the world of academia. The result is a holistic tapestry that is a celebration of a precious romanticism for life and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798823025591

Subhranil De

A native of India, Subhranil De has a Ph.D. in physics and is a physics professor by vocation. A self-proclaimed “poet at heart,” he considers writing to be a long-time, fond avocation. He is a gregarious individual with the spirit of a storyteller. At the same time, he is a worshipper of the mystical essence and the lyric beauty of the natural world, and his writing is often descriptive, evocative, and sentimental. He also enjoys pondering the many ineffable emotions involved in the process of understanding a scientific idea as well as engaging in a scientific pursuit—a domain where science often resonates with poetry and aesthetics. He has been a physics professor at Indiana University Southeast for the past fifteen years.

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© 2024 Subhranil De. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  05/29/2024

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2560-7 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2558-4 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2559-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024908086

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views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Leaving Rochester

Princeton

Troy

Akron

Grand Forks

Duluth

Arriving in New Albany

Preface

It has been more than a decade since I first had the idea of writing a book on this topic, namely experiences during the six-year period between finishing my doctoral studies and starting a professorial position on a tenure-track. While this was a time that was often stricken with the predictable anxiety resulting from the general uncertainty about the future, my own eccentric nature made it all the more turbulent at times. That is when I sought and found both delight and solace in frequent travels on backroads—in the beauty of what lay on the side of the road and at the end of the road, along with the sheer joy of the ride. Life itself felt much the same way. Similar to the travel on a backroad, on the one hand, there was thrill and there was anticipation, as well as unpredictable and uplifting encounters. On the other hand, I often did not know what awaited at the end of the rough journey that was constantly laced with a fear of getting lost. During this time, I would occasionally share road stories and other experiences with a few dear friends, many of whom later asked me to write a book about that unique phase of life.

In the first part of the tale, nature appears frequently in both its majestic and quotidian forms, along with my many reactions to them, and it remains the essential thread of the story. However, in the latter part of the book, human interactions multiply manifold, partly in the context of my role as a teacher, which provided me with a richer gamut of experiences and emotions.

It is also worth mentioning that this book is neither an accurate nor a complete historical account of events during that phase of my life. While my intention was to include primarily what was significant and what left an impression, I cannot assert that the narrative does not suffer from altered or false memory at times. Echoing poet Tagore’s words, I would admit that I occasionally even imbued the tale with the pleasant essence of my own mind. Fictitious characters, usually inspired by real ones, do appear as well. Three-quarters autobiographical is how I facetiously prefer to categorize my story.

It is also worth mentioning that the purpose of this book is neither to educate nor to edify. I thought I had a story to tell that might make a reader wonder and present him or her with a few smiles. If a reader happens to derive any inspiration from it, that would only be fortuitous and would simply echo the way I myself found inspiration in mundane things on the roadside as well as in everyday human interactions. To a prospective reader whom I do not know or may never meet, all I can say, paraphrasing Tagore’s words:

Do not ask to whom I dedicated a song.

On the wayside dust it lies around

For the one who could give it any worth.

Have you heard my message, and drawn it close to heart?

I do not know your name, but to you I dedicate

The fruit of my reminiscence.

Subhranil De

New Albany, Indiana, USA

January 2024

Leaving Rochester

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It was a cold December evening in 2002. I was in the passenger seat of a U-Haul, and my friend Arindam was driving. Along the roadside lay rolling hills covered in snow. Occasionally, their contours became blurred as tears welled up in my eyes. Within me moaned a heavy melancholy, made only heavier by the bleak scenery of a northern winter. We were on our way to Princeton, New Jersey, from Rochester, New York. I had successfully defended my doctoral thesis as a Physics graduate student at the University of Rochester and was presently moving to Princeton University for a year with my first post-doctoral position. Arindam was still a doctoral student of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He had kindly driven up to Rochester the previous evening to help me move and drive me to Princeton. His car was fastened to the rear of our U-Haul as we rode along, conversing intermittently. Somewhere close to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, I received a call from Abhishek, another dear friend in Rochester. Are you in the mood for a late-night cup of tea? he said facetiously. Then he added, now with a definite hint of a pang, These are all memories already, can you believe it?

Some dear friends would miss me, yes. However, not everyone who knew me in Rochester was equally upset with my departure. I was known to have crude manners and a rambunctious personality. And when I did pay heed to the norms of polite society, I often did so only reluctantly. Naturally, some people found me annoying, even insufferable. Not everyone appreciated my brand of humor and occasional acts of mischief, and possibly breathed a sigh of relief when it was time for me to leave town.

To me though, as a whole, it had been six colorful years. Presently, too many sights and sounds from my stay in Rochester played within me a tender phantasmagoria. Throwing the long throws with a Frisbee on the campus quadrangle on sunny days; the morning when we were playing soccer on the bank of the Genesee River and suddenly all of us got startled by the honk of a passing barge; the evening when inside the Eastman Theater I was captivated by the sublime airiness of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for four winds, causing me to retain my spellbound silence deep into the night.

Now, sitting in the U-Haul, Arindam and I sporadically reminisced about the previous night, when he had already reached Rochester, and I had celebrated my birthday with a group of dear friends at the home of my friend Arup and his gracious wife, Sohug. She had made a delicious chocolate fondue—my friends knew that I was a miserable chocoholic. The convivial gathering had, however, been fraught with an unmistakable air of adieu, and my friend Rama had sung a wistful Tagore song. "So long as you are here, within my heart, your companionship grows without bounds," echoed the lyrics. Amid the playful banter that had filled the evening hours, I had surely felt the sadness of impending separation. From not only the town of Rochester and my friends there, but also someone with whom I had been the night before. She and I had celebrated too, swinging side by side at the local park, under a soft late-night snowfall in the village of Honeoye Falls. Presently, while I rode in the U-Haul on my way to Princeton, within my mind’s frame, her eyes glowed vividly. Two familiar, blue eyes. Delicate snowflakes had melted over those eyes, adding to the yearning therein.

Genesee—a euphonious name. It means beautiful valley in the Iroquoian language. I would occasionally murmur the name during my stay in Rochester while crossing the river or playing soccer on its banks. The previous summer when the tall, orange daylilies had bloomed on the roadside, I would drive past the lush, wavy meadows all the way to Honeoye Falls. I would swing alone in the park, or perhaps sit on a terrace overlooking the little falls on the Honeoye Creek, or just walk under the decorative flower buckets that hung over the sidewalks of Main Street. During these moments, I would wonder what life after graduate school might be like. That anticipation, in turn, would bring a due amount of apprehension.

A crucial juncture in life like the present one was also one of introspection. I love physics because it is a beautiful pursuit of the timeless and the placeless. My father is a theoretical physicist, and I had been blessed with his guidance when growing up. My own fascination with physics can be traced back to a near-total solar eclipse that had happened in Calcutta during my boyhood days. After explaining how an eclipse happens, Father had captured the image of the crescent sun on a piece of paper with a simple pinhole camera. The way an event of celestial grandeur, with the use of the crudest of apparatus, could be made to leave an echo within the quotidian walls of home had evoked a sense of wonder that had never died within me.

At a young age, I had also learned the stories of the giants who shaped the fields of physics and mathematics. Newton and Euler, Einstein and von Neumann, among others. These stories were fascinating as well as humbling. Hence, I had never grown an exaggerated notion of my own aptitude but still would enjoy the occasional intellectual challenge that I could embrace with my modest abilities. Through high school and college, I had been the kind of student who would ignore the straightforward homework but rather tackle a harder problem and spend sleepless hours trying to solve it even if it did not matter for a course grade. I would also occasionally coin my own challenge problem or perhaps try to solve an existing one using some original method. And sometimes such an endeavor would lead to some delightful intellectual adventure that was not too trivial after all, leaving me with a humble yet unadulterated feeling of triumph.

My peers in college used to say that I explained physics ideas well, while I felt that the process of trying to explain a physics concept to someone else let me grasp it better myself by often exposing loopholes in my own understanding. Moreover, to be able to convey a subtle idea to someone else is a joy, and so is to infect someone with a passion for a beautiful thing that also conveys truth. Due to these reasons, I had always thought of teaching as a fulfilling process, which, in turn, had kindled within me the aspiration to teach physics as a college professor someday. The fact that I had been a successful graduate student teacher at Rochester had fueled that ambition further.

At Rochester, my doctoral work had been on theoretical and computational statistical mechanics. Dr. Yonathan Shapir at the Physics Department and Dr. Eldred Chimowitz at the Chemical Engineering Department were my thesis advisors. I had also learned a due amount of computation techniques from Dr. Steve Teitel in Physics. Eldred had been more than a scientific advisor though. Originally from South Africa, he was a colorful, passionate man. Besides doing science, he played the piano, and enjoyed literature. In him, I had found a friend and a mentor. Occasionally, I had received from him a well-deserved rebuke as well, since sometimes I would devote a little too much time to social and extracurricular activities instead of science. Then, one day, close to the date of my thesis defense, in the course of a conversation in his office, he had said, Life has many jagged edges, but there always lurks the possibility of turning up a pearl.

The seemingly unavoidable, impending post-doctoral research phase presented me with questions. First, I had always disliked the sense of drudgery that comes with a demanding, stringent routine. The notion of rigorous discipline had always aroused in me a feeling of antipathy. Another thought that plagued me equally was that physics is not the only thing that I enjoy in life. Among other things, I love poetry. While it is true that through my high school and college days I had spent many of my late night hours engaged in physics or mathematics, it is also true that on many such nights I had been engrossed in poetry, reveling in the lyrical, wondrous world that it uncovers. When poetry strikes, it only makes sense to leave everything else aside. At heart—and more than anything else—I am a poet. My good friends periodically warned me that my poet’s temperament might come in the way of a demanding and rigorous professional position. Hence, my upcoming stay at Princeton was certainly a formidable prospect.

Five years earlier, during my first summer in Rochester, still palpably homesick for India, I would sometimes walk to a quiet arbor on the verge of my apartment complex. Under the trees, I would sit on the soft grass to be willfully captured in the wavering net of light and shadow, and read Tagore’s poetry. During the years that followed, I had introduced several people in Rochester to Tagore’s English Gitanjali, while frequently ruminating on the very first poem I had learned from that historic book: I know not how thou singest my master! I ever listen in silent amazement... Presently, at the end of life’s memorable phase in Rochester, I had dedicated my doctoral thesis to none but my master.

And here we were—Arindam and I, presently on our way to Princeton.

One thing that was reassuring was that my old high-school friend Indranil was to be my neighbor in New Jersey. He was working as a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company near Princeton. He and his fiancée, Priya, lived in an apartment complex in the town of Plainsboro that was a fifteen-minute drive from Princeton. Indranil had found me an apartment in the same building. Having a friend with shared boyhood memories as my neighbor was one of the bright things to look forward to, despite the knowledge that the boisterous days of graduate school filled with play and laughter were behind me for good.

Arindam and I reached Plainsboro late that night. Indranil was awake, and we all spent the night at his apartment. The next day, while Arindam was still there, one major chore to take care of was to unload the U-Haul. My apartment was on the first floor and had a French window, in front of which stood a bare cherry tree. We opened the French window and started moving in my mostly ordinary belongings that I cared to bring from Rochester. However, among them was a green crate that was far less ordinary. It was filled with music CDs, mostly Tagore and Mozart—a panoply of poetry and music.

After we returned the U-Haul, Arindam took me to rent a car. Then he said goodbye and took off for Philadelphia. I drove to the Princeton campus. My life in Princeton had started.

Princeton

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Owing to the many photographs I had seen before in brochures and on the internet, Princeton’s oddly charming campus did not present any big surprises. Amid the somewhat pretentious architecture spanning styles from various eras, the Engineering Quadrangle came off as more prosaic. My post-doctoral appointment was in the Chemical Engineering Department, and Dr. Pablo Debenedetti, my to-be advisor, was the chair. I found my way to his office and met him. He seemed like a warm-hearted, charismatic man, and definitely had an aura of sagacity. He gave me some research papers and briefly explained their content. Then he took me to my office, which I would be sharing with other graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, and I disliked it immediately. It was a room in the basement without any windows, and furthermore, it was filled with a humming noise that came from the cluster of research computers kept there. I realized that it would be a huge challenge to motivate myself to wake early every morning and come to spend the bulk of my day in that dungeon. Soon I found out that indeed the nickname for that room in the building was the dungeon.

That night, I started reading the research papers Pablo had given me. These would be the starting point of my research, which pertained to supercooled water. It is a well-known fact to both physicists and chemists that water is an atypical substance in a variety of ways. Most liquids contract upon freezing, while water expands—hence ice is lighter than liquid water. On the other hand, far below its freezing point, liquid water can be cooled without freezing in the absence of impurities. That is when it is called supercooled—a state in which it presents further surprises. In the course of educating myself on the topic, I also ended up learning that supercooled water exists in the water droplets in clouds in considerable amounts. Part of my prospective research concerned studying the dynamics of supercooled water—how, for example, the arrangement of water molecules within the supercooled fluid evolves with time. I found the research project interesting. It involved ideas from both geometry and statistical mechanics.

During the following days, I was slowly adjusting to the new setting. In about a week, I bought a second-hand car. Also, this was the first time in my life I was living all by myself. Since I had always been a night owl, waking early in the morning turned out to be a struggle as expected, although the clamorous quack of migrant geese flying overhead often broke the silence of dawn. While on campus, staying in the dungeon felt claustrophobic. Quite often, I would have to get a breath of fresh air at a bower by a pond in the building courtyard, or take a brief walk on the nearby Nassau Street. One cold night, following some research-related studying on the topic of supercooled water, I was driving back home close to midnight. On my way, I was crossing the Millstone River when I saw the moon shine on the frozen water. I smiled to myself, musing water, ice, cool water… However, the timeless beauty of moonlight over ice touched a heartstring in its own right. After getting home, I decided to take a nap, and the image of the moonlit river came back in my dream. When I woke up, while still lying on my mattress laid on the floor, I saw a band of bright moonlight right next to me. Shaken by a jolt of celestial delight, I stood up and looked through the window blinds for the moon in the sky. Much ado with the moon and moonlight—that is so silly of me, I mused in the moments to follow. And that is when it dawned on me—amid the duties and trifles that filled my waking hours, there was an overarching sense of loneliness that resonated through my newfound phase of life. Indranil’s occasional company was refreshing, and one weekend I visited Arindam in Philadelphia as well. However, they too generally stayed busy—Indranil with his new job and Arindam with writing his own doctoral thesis.

Sometime in February, I made plans for my first visit back to Rochester for a long weekend. This was to be my first long drive by myself, and before the trip I had noted down directions from MapQuest on a sheet of paper. On a cold Friday afternoon, I started that long drive on US Route 206 from Princeton. Unfortunately, I missed a turn for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which resulted in my driving a long distance in the wrong direction. At one point, it started snowing, and the snowfall became heavy quickly, which slowed me down further. By the time I reached the Rochester area close to midnight, in place of the scheduled six-hour drive I had actually been driving for more than ten. I was exhausted. However, the moment I took the final exit on the long-familiar Elmwood Avenue, I felt the embrace of something utterly dear. It had only been less than two months, but I had missed this happy place every single day I had been away. My friend Soumya and his wife Sathi were waiting for me, and shortly afterward, there was an impromptu late-night get-together of friends at his place. Apparently, my friends had missed me too. For a brief hour the boisterous laughter of graduate school days was back.

A huge blizzard invaded the region on Monday. On Tuesday, at one point in the afternoon, I was driving back on Interstate 390, surrounded by a vast expanse of undulating, snow-covered scenery that lay bright under a clear blue sky. I crossed the Susquehanna River several times. Susquehanna—another euphonious name, I mused. After the evening fell, I began reliving the feelings of leaving Rochester. Amid that emotional state, somewhere close to the Pocono Mountains, I took a wrong turn again. I ended up driving for at least a couple of extra hours before reaching back to Princeton late that night.

Due to my foolishness, the drive on the first trip back to Rochester had been awful. When I shared the story with my friends, some of them gave me the good advice of leaving behind my crude ways of navigating. Buy a freaking road map, Arindam yelled at me on the phone. And I did. The kind that contains one US state per page. And in the course of this transition, I got into a new, silly habit. Amid my physics research, listening to music and coping with several trifles of life, I would occasionally sit down and look at the pages of the road map, especially the states of New York and New Jersey, and wonder what all these places—the cities, towns, hamlets, lakes, and streams actually looked like. Back in Rochester, when I had traveled in a group of friends to the Adirondack Mountains or to other parts of New York State with the campus soccer club, or even made my short lone drives through the outskirts of the city, I had found enchantment in much of the roadside scenery. In light of that memory, when I looked at the intricate network on the pages of the road map, it spoke of a world that allured with promise. Quickly, a new desire started brewing within me—the desire to travel to Rochester on a more rustic route made up of only backroads, so that I could stop and touch something on the wayside when I wanted to. When I told this to Abhishek, he explained how this was simply the old way of traveling.

While nurturing thoughts of impending travels in the old way, I kept engaged in my research project on water. In the course of the study, I learned that the familiar yet odd property of water that it expands upon freezing is not only responsible for icebergs floating on oceans and thus having caused countless shipwrecks through the course of history, but it also had a profound role to play in shaping our planet. Through the eons, liquid water oozed in through the rocks, then expanded upon cooling, thereby crushing the rocks with pressure. Then the ice melted again, and froze again, and the process of pulverization continued, thus producing fine soil at the end. Hence, this property of water and ice is responsible for much of the soil on Earth’s surface. While I found this new knowledge intriguing, I stumbled on another fact about water I had not known before. The fact that most of the water on Earth was not even here during the formation of the planet. It came afterward. Possibly carried on comets and meteors that used to bombard the primordial Earth abundantly. By the end, so much water arrived that it managed to cover the greater portion of the planet’s surface. While trying to come to terms with this information that already stretched the imagination, I also remembered that our human bodies are largely made of water as well. Thus, in a way, we humans are but extraterrestrials, —I mused incredulously.

My days passed with an underlying theme of dutifulness, which definitely bore a hint of monotony. I enjoyed pondering the physics and the geometry concerning the research project on water. Presently, however, the larger part of my project was computational, which involved writing computer codes to study the dynamics of supercooled water. As part of that process, I had to modify and extend another computer code I inherited from one of Pablo’s former students. Decoding a computer code written by somebody else to understand the functionality of its different components is generally a tedious process. That sense of drudgery made the dungeon all the more suffocating at times, and I had to escape from it often. Late at night, I would walk all the way to the other end of campus to sit beside a shallow pool in front of Robertson Hall. It was a palatial building that looked as if made of marble. At night, it was illuminated in a soft glow, with its dreamy reflection in the pool being constantly perturbed by the stream of water cascading out of a rugged bronze fountain. I would sit there watching the water, thinking about ice and supercooled water, while caressing a memory of melting snowflakes over two familiar, wistful eyes.

In due course, spring arrived. The grass was