Goodbye Friend - Carl Dahkle 1943-2010

In the Dolly Sods - 1980s

Carl Dahkle was almost the first person I met when I moved to Washington.  I arrived late in the afternoon at the Lamont St. NW address where I was going to stay, got out of my fully packed car and rang the bell. Carl appeared at the door in a t-shirt and shorts listened to my introduction and said, "well we'd better get those things out of the car."  He marshalled up a few other folks that I didn't know and my car was emptied.

At the time I didn't know that you couldn't leave a car full of stuff on Lamot Street lest it be broken into. It didn't take long for me to know that and a dozen other things about living in Mt. Pleasant, sometimes thought of as "Mt. Un-Pleasant." 

Like many other residents at GNU House Carl was in transition. He was from Richmond Virginia and didn't have a regular job. At the time he was living at GNU House and paying his rent working for the landlord by being a handiman and working at his little computer company "GNUtronics." 
Like most other GNU House residents Carl eventually moved on.  While we may have cut ties with the GNU House, and certainly with the landlord, we didn't cut ties with each other and thus Carl became one of our "GNU House" friends who we would keep up with at least a couple of times a year - often at parties.

Many of my GNU House friends moved to Maryland but Carl and his girlfriend/life partner Clare  stayed in Washington living in Columbia Heights and eventually buying their own row house in Mt. Pleasant.  Carl, worked for a couple of different high-powered shops including Mitre, Celera Genomics and Grumman-Northrop eventally settling into the database side of mapping the human genome. A friend of his I met at the hospital tells me that nowdays college kids graduate with degrees in Bioinformatics, but that when they hired Carl you just went for somebody bright and figured they'd pick it all up eventually.

There is plenty of water in the Sods but it's very tannic and has got to be purified.

Once he got to working and could indulge his interests he was avid about photography and camping.  It was the camping side that brought he and Dan together in the 1980s for a trip to Dolly Sods, an area in West Virginia with unique geography and good hiking.  I went there myself on a fall break in college and have to say that it was wet and cold. Dan and Carl got a much better experience going in the summer.

He was a big burly fellow. The beard always seemed right for him.  If you were going to go camping with someone he was the person to go with because even if things got tough his deep loud void would be there seeing the bright side of things.

Like when they lost the tent poles and had to tie the tent up on a tree.

We heard from Clare in late October that Carl was having radiation for a tumor that they thought was in his brain.  He'd had a cough in the spring, not thought much about it but eventually gone in to the doctor.  After Labor Day they knew something major was wrong and started the radiation. He had a creaky heart and in the end that gave out. We visited him briefly in the ICU and were pleased to hear he'd gotten sprung from there, but was too weak to go home.  Thankfully for someone whose life was spent living large his confinment in a failing body was brief.

Happy Anniversary!

Friend - we'll miss you!