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go, so he came home and worked here for next to nothing.”
    His four years of struggling for a college degree earned him a distinguished and exciting position answering parking complaints. Quite often they were from citizens already unfairly burdened by million-dollar homes, summers in Cape Cod, and charity balls. The final outrage always came when they discovered a $25 ticket beneath the wiper of their $60,000 imported European vehicle, parked in a trash pickup zone.
    “People would call and just scream at him, and I mean screaming. Profanities, the whole thing,” said Arnold Wakelin, who wasa selectman at the time. “He’d just sit there on the phone and smile, polite as can be. He never lost his cool.”
    It always amazed Dave how much perspective could be lost in the town where people seemed to have everything. Nobody in this town realizes how good they have it, he’d tell people. And as for himself, he had it good enough at first, living at home and getting free meals and laundry service, courtesy of Mom. Boston was right next door, and he spent most of his time there, hanging out with Raffi and Kirsten at the bars and parties, driving back to Wellesley late at night after his folks were already in bed. He knew he was spinning his wheels, but couldn’t see where, or how, the change should come.
    His father eventually gave him a push. According to a close friend, the two had a minor run-in over Dave’s future—or lack thereof. He needed a plan, or at least his own place. He couldn’t just go traipsing off to Boston every other night and come slinking back in the wee hours to the Coughlin Inn. Even though he’d expected it, his dad’s criticism had stung, first because he thought he’d been making the best of it, and second because he knew his old man was right. He could do better.
    So he moved out of the house and in with a friend of his, Keith Goddard, who worked at a local gas station. They got an apartment in the nearby town of Millis, and if Dave still wasn’t sure where he was going, at least he was independent. Things slowly got better for him. He settled into his job at the town hall, where he was extremely well liked. He’d take whatever offhand projects needed work, and often put in long hours. One of his biggest inspirations had come just a few months before leaving. The town hall wasn’t exactly the most technologically savvy place, and his boss,Arnold Wakelin, asked him if there was anything they could use to streamline the annual town meeting.
    “He brought in a laptop computer and did a Power Point presentation,” says Wakelin. “It was the slickest thing. There he was running the whole thing from this little computer. He was a smart, resourceful kid.”
    They promoted him after that, and got him a raise. It wasn’t much, but he had begun to find his place. He talked about staying at the town hall for a long time, if only he could find a way to secure a position less at the mercy of a city council budget.

    A friend of Dave remembers that one day he showed up at his house with a videotape, coolly put it into the VCR, and grinned proudly as he watched himself jumping out of an airplane, tied tandem to another skydiver.
    “I was blown away,” said the friend. “He never once mentioned that he wanted to skydive. But he was like that. He didn’t talk much about doing things, he’d just do them.”
    California was the same way. When he took a week off work in May of 1999, he told his coworkers at the Town Hall he was going out west on vacation, but it was, in fact, a well-planned scouting expedition.
    He’d heard about the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management through some of his old professors and classmates. It was a brand-new school, attached to the University of California at Santa Barbara, and its two-year master’s program promised the kind of hands-on, field-oriented training that got students jobs. The fact that it was fifty yards from the beach,housed in a