World travel mark of educator
By ALICIA CARMICHAEL, The Daily News, acarmichael@bgdailynews.com/783-3234
At
5 years old, David Keeling was hopping on trains in his hometown of
Cheltenham, England, and taking short trips to surrounding towns.
He never had a ticket, said his wife, DJ Urquhart. It never occurred to him that he'd need one.
“He would get all kinds of places before people discovered that he was a stowaway,” Urquhart said with a laugh.
Then, Keeling would be sent home, to the surprise of his mother, who had thought he was close at hand.
“I think she had a few shocks,” Urquhart said.
The stories are legend in the Keeling family.
They're
telling of the life of 53-year-old Keeling, who has traveled the world
and is head of the Department of Geography and Geology at Western
Kentucky University.
“You can always come home to your stuff,”
Keeling said from his office Wednesday. “But the point of going
somewhere else is that you can do something different. One of the
things we love to do for fun - my wife and I - we'll go to a country, a
little village, and stay a week and just explore, and you really get an
understanding of how people are the same.”
Keeling is not the guy who stays in the Hilton and lives the lush life on his trips, Urquhart said.
“He goes and walks into neighborhoods,” she said, and he documents the life in them with photos.
Keeling has more than 50,000 slides, which he loves to share with civic groups and others.
And “he's kept a travel log since he was 5 years old, starting with those illicit train trips,” Urquhart said.
On
Thursday, Keeling will travel with the American Geographical Society to
Libya on one of the first expedition tours there since sanctions were
put in place by the U.S. government more than two decades ago.
“We're
looking forward to seeing what's going on there now because Libya is
just beginning to open up to Americans,” said Keeling, who is now an
American citizen.
On the trip designed for educational purposes,
“the 45 passengers on this expedition tour will be exposed to a variety
of human-environment issues, including water-resource management
problems in the Sahara, climate change impacts on the Mediterranean
basin, the geopolitics of oil and Islam in North Africa and the
challenge of sustainable development for the region,” a WKU press
release said.
Keeling loves such information. It's the kind of
thing he wants his Western students to know when he leads them on
study-abroad travels.
“This winter term, we're taking students
to Tanzania in East Africa,” Keeling said. “Next summer, we'll take
students to the outback in Australia.”
Australia is a continent
Keeling knows well. He first sailed there on a migrant ship as a child.
It was during a time of upheaval for his family. His dad had trouble
finding good work in England after being a prisoner of war during World
War II.
In Australia, Keeling's dad was to work in asbestos and
iron ore mines in a county that had 4,500 people and was about the size
of Kentucky.
For Keeling, the trip was an adventure. On the
ship, he saw exotic ports of call and got to mingle with people from
around the world.
In Australia, things were even better.
“For
a kid, it was really interesting in that there were probably 35 or 40
nationalities, so I got really (well-acquainted) with people from all
over the world,” Keeling said. “All of the kids were going to the same
school and playing together, and that got me really invested in where
people were from.”
But the fun in Australia would be
short-lived. Keeling's parents were able to save enough money in two
years to pay passage back to England, to move into a nice middle-class
home there and to put their children into good schools.
In short, they became middle class.
“It's the American experience,” Keeling said. “It's what everybody wants to do if you come from an impoverished background.”
While
Keeling's family was on better footing financially, he longed to return
to Australia, and did so when he was 17, after finishing high school in
England.
He went to Australia for the adventure, he said, and ended up studying accounting at North Sydney College.
Keeling
worked his way through school with jobs that took him on travels all
over the world. One job found him importing wines for migrant workers.
Another job found him setting up special tours for people from all over.
After college, Keeling stayed in Australia for many more years, working in international business.
Then, the Australian economy took a bad turn and Keeling simply wanted a change.
In
1981, he moved to the United States. He'd been here many times on
business, he said, and got involved in telecommunications in New
Orleans.
“New Orleans was a fun city to live in,” Keeling said.
“But it was also a very cliquish city. If you weren't from a New
Orleans family or didn't know someone from a New Orleans family, it was
hard to do business” there.
That difficulty, and a love of
teaching, helped spur Keeling, who had been instructing part-time at a
community college, to head toward a career in academics.
In
1987, he went to the University of Oregon at Eugene to pursue master's
and doctorate degrees in geography. There, he also met his wife, who
shares his love of travel and teaches English at Western's Community
College.
In 1993, the Keelings moved to Bowling Green for
Keeling's teaching job at Western. Here, he said, he has loved his
work, and has even used books he's written in his classes.
He said he hopes to settle here.
But Keeling never says never about his life, which has found him traveling to 175 countries - many on numerous occasions.
Urquhart said her husband is an adventurer.
“One
of the things I most appreciate is that he's creative in terms of his
teaching, but also to the problems in his life,” she said. “If
something doesn't work, he finds out a different way to make it work in
a good way.”
Keeling said he tries to live life to the fullest,
so one day, when he's old and can't do as much, he can look back on a
life well-lived.
He doesn't even like to say he'll retire someday.
“I
wouldn't use the word retirement,” he said. “It would simply be a
transition from one adventure to another. There are lots of things
cranky old professors can do.”
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| Miranda Pederson/Daily News David Keeling is the head of the Western Kentucky University Department of Geography and Geology and has traveled extensively. |