The Arbornaut, page 5
Over those two years, I had to find a way to stick around campus all summer to continue monthly measurements of trunks when classes were not in session. I took on multiple jobs, ranging from dishwasher to payroll clerk to bartender to babysitter. The most relevant job was when my thesis advisor hired a small team of students to calculate how much wood grew in New England, as part of a study measuring potential fuel for wood-burning stoves during winter. Five of us spent one summer using a chain saw, which filled me with guilt but also provided important insights into the “big toes” of temperate trees. The project required us to cut down twenty-four individuals, weigh their trunk biomass, then estimate wood per acre of forest. Ring by ring, the chain saw ripped through an entire lifetime of each woody denizen we harvested. It was bittersweet, watching layers of xylem and phloem disintegrate into sawdust. One of our team was a forestry trainee from a nearby vocational college; he loved the chain-saw work, and zealously oiled and sharpened our toothed monster. It was helpful to learn about his perspective, which was entirely board feet and timber productivity for profit; through that lumber lens, he had a great enthusiasm for trees that I truly admired. I was probably more of a tree hugger than chopper, so the economic issues were not foremost in my mind. Years later, I was grateful for exposure to his more applied perspective on the value of timber since it remains an important element of forest management. Although we successfully created the energy model as assigned, the experience convinced me I wanted to study living forests, not forest products. It also promoted lively discussion, because wood-burning stoves, initially considered a boon for energy independence in parts of North America, soon after became a curse. Today, scientists consider black soot one of the biggest threats to climate change. When wood burns, it emits soot, and those particles not only lead to respiratory ailments for women and children who usually hover near cookstoves, but the soot also lands on winter landscapes where its dark coloration causes faster melting of glaciers and snowpack.
In between measuring trees, my last college summer was spent working as a research assistant for the college biology department, which involved sorting through a dusty and long-ignored herbarium. It was housed in the basement of the biology building and consisted of several thousand dried specimens. I loved poring over their brown, dead carcasses, a reminder of my childhood bedroom-floor laboratory. The conditions were slightly improved—I had graduated to a card table with a tiny white table lamp in a dark room. But I soon learned the environment was significantly high-risk because this space was shared with the departmental taxidermist, whose behavior was more than extremely questionable. Hired by the college decades earlier—back in the days when students studied organisms more than cells—he lurked in the basement, stuffing specimens. During the semester, biology students who wanted a daring midnight study break from the library explored the cavernous basement of the building, where hundreds of dirty stuffed animals were piled in dark rooms. None of us knew from our nocturnal explorations that a living human curated the dusty collections by day. It turned out the taxidermist was a predator himself—on me. Cataloging dried plants with his heavy breathing and wandering hands creeping up behind me was not a workable situation. After several awkward confrontations, I gathered the gumption to report him to the biology chair, who quickly “promoted” me to a desk upstairs. In addition to organizing the dried plants for the college, I had time to collect field measurements all summer, completing a full twenty-four months of trunk growth dynamics. My advisor promised to shepherd me through a first scientific publication, because he thought the data were original. I was beyond ecstatic, and duly wrote my share just after graduation. Then, I waited six months and wrote him again about our joint publication. I guess he got busy and forgot, because I never heard back. Later, at graduate school, I was envious of other students who had copublished a first paper with their undergraduate advisors and attended conferences to present a poster of the findings, neither of which I experienced.
From all those tree trunks, I learned the rudiments of field data collection, the anxieties of sampling design, and the process of formulating a hypothesis and then testing it. In the end, I looked at temperate forests quite differently—knowing their trunks are dynamic hubs of expansion and contraction, and the seasonality of leaf growth is fine-tuned with the commencement of trunk growth. A few decades later, field biologists like me would figure out that global climate change is making wood approximately 10 percent weaker because plants grow faster (and have less dense cell structure) with warmer temperatures; such changes in trunks invariably impact tree height, health, and growth. Trees are the biggest, oldest, and most iconic plants of all. Their planetary biomass exceeds 400 gigatons (GTs) of carbon, compared to only 2 GTs for wild mammals and a mere 0.06 GTs for humans. Their arboreal machinery is complex and interconnected from bottom to top, and for me, this initial foray into wood growth research ultimately piqued a curiosity about the whole forest, not just the trunks.
After college, I was determined to immediately enroll in a PhD program. My underlying reason was a secret fear of otherwise getting married and settling down like most of my high school friends. I had a wonderful college boyfriend, also a biology major, but he was heading to medical school. Why not move in together and get married? he proposed. I could eventually select a graduate program near his. I was torn. It would be a comfortable life, to have a husband with a medical practice and no need to ever work myself. But the trees had a strong pull on me; I was determined to pursue new botanical discoveries. And to accomplish that, I needed some experience outside the comfort zone of New England temperate forests. I cried. He cried. We sorrowfully parted ways, making the superficial promise we would get back together in a few years, although every couple knows this rarely happens.
The year was 1976, when tree-hugging environmental majors fervently believed forests would grow forever, outliving humans and providing stability to the planet if we only offered them protection via fencing or some technical government policy. The phrase “climate change” was not yet in our vocabulary and it never dawned on us that anything except clear-cutting, burning for agriculture, or the odd insect attack would threaten trees in a global fashion. Only two decades later, forests would face the ultimate threat of an increasingly inhospitable planet due to extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and insect outbreaks exacerbated by a warming climate. To nourish my tree-love, I applied to two forestry graduate schools, one of which offered me a full scholarship. My selection was made entirely through a financial lens since I was still juggling an undergraduate college loan. It seemed a miracle to receive a Duke fellowship. From a small-town girl’s global view, I also thought moving to the piedmont landscapes of North Carolina was akin to seeing another continent, offering a new set of tall green subjects to study. Unfortunately, Duke University’s forestry school in 1976 was not much different from my undergraduate geology experience. Only two women were accepted in a class of over thirty students. I eagerly signed up for some botany courses because the ratio in that department was more favorable, approximately 1:3. One my favorite classes was arctic ecology with an iconic botanist named Dwight Billings. Despite his enthusiasm for plants, he intimidated me, as did other classmates from places like Washington, DC, Santa Barbara, and Chicago. Could I hold my own with all these students from large universities who had coauthored publications with their advisors and navigated scientific conferences like pros as part of their undergraduate experience? They sprinted to the library every Friday night to be the first to read the newly arrived journals. Even worse, Dr. Billings required us to present two in-class lectures. I threw up in the ladies’ room before giving both oral presentations that semester, overcome with shyness and totally tongue-tied. Meanwhile, in forestry classes we analyzed board feet of timber in loblolly pine plantations. To make our calculations, I learned a computer language called Fortran on an enormous IBM computer whose metal footprint occupied an entire classroom. Each student created a deck of punch cards to calculate different assignments. We carted enormous boxes of cards to and from class. Feeling out of my depth, and not really motivated by the concept of calculating board feet, I sought solace outdoors—in the Duke Gardens, or simply looking for piedmont wildflowers along the roadsides.
Running was still my favorite way to clear the cobwebs from my brain. I started running during college because it was a great excuse for tree-spotting. There were no girls’ sports teams in high school so I did not come from an athletic background, but I guess running became another solo occupation, kind of like pressing wildflowers or measuring trunk growth. Duke had a jogging course that meandered through the woods close to the science building. I was a regular, and preferred morning runs when the birds were singing and fewer human footsteps were pounding the dirt. On a brilliantly sunny Saturday, I felt exuberant in the crisp air, running alone in the woods. It was a surprise to see a tall, athletic runner coming toward me at such an early hour, and we passed on the narrow trail. I thought little of it until I suddenly heard heavy breathing behind me. The runner had turned around and was gaining on me. Some inner sensibility came into play. I started looking for escape routes, just as his enormous hands grabbed my breasts. It would do no good to scream—no one was around—but I was a nature nerd and knew my way through the underbrush. With a burst of adrenaline, I dashed left into a tunnel of sumac, dogwood, and grapevine. I was not fast, but I was small, and dense vegetation was the best chance for escape. The assailant was gangly and over six feet tall, so the vines tripped him and the understory branches slapped his face and gripped his athletic limbs—Mother Nature’s snare. I surprised the attacker with my zigzag escape and managed to outrun him through the dense foliage, sprinting all the way to my office. With heart pounding, I just sat at the desk and shivered for a full three hours before gaining the courage to dial campus security. They yelled at me, asking why I took so long to call. They explained a rapist had been reported on campus over the past three months. I asked them why any signage had not been posted. There was silence on the line.
It took this frightening experience to galvanize me into the radical decision that a male-dominated forestry school was not for me. I had amassed enough savings from working part-time at the Environmental Protection Agency in Research Triangle Park to sponsor my own sabbatical. Sometimes choices are not made strategically or with sophisticated long-term planning; this decision, triggered by a sexual assault, ultimately led me to seek a change all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. The University of Aberdeen, Scotland, offered a twelve-month master’s in ecology, a program that had caught my eye in the Williams College career office more than a year before when I was looking for graduate school options. At the time, the tuition of $5,000 was beyond my financial means, and international students were not eligible for Aberdeen’s financial aid; a year later, I had saved just enough from my part-time job at the EPA. An unexpected departure from Duke prompted no questions or exit interviews about gender challenges, assailants, role models, or lack of mentoring, which are common conversations in today’s campus landscape. My resignation at the EPA, however, prompted them to tempt me with a full-time job. I had worked in the air pollution regulation division, a lone female among several hundred male engineers. The job involved reading big stapled regulatory reports, to compare the details of allowable air pollution between state boundaries and predict what conflicts might arise when, for example, one state had lax regulations but an adjacent state was more strict. In those days, such comparisons were made by hand, not using a sophisticated computer model as is the case now. Their offer put me at a crossroads—should I settle into a padded chair, gazing at air pollution regulations for an entire career? I could imagine a solid government retirement package at the end of four decades, but I was already bored stiff in a comfy office for hours on end. I couldn’t envision a career path that didn’t involve fresh air and forests. I relinquished the paycheck and enrolled in the master’s in ecology program at the University of Aberdeen.
I packed warm clothes and hugged my poor parents, who felt like I was heading to the moon. Flying from Elmira to Scotland was a big emotional transition as well as a physical one. From the air, upstate New York was a complex mosaic of farm and forest, the only truly checkered parts of my past: those squares of farmland that turned white in the winter, interspersed with the dark squares of wooded terrain. This black-and-white pattern was especially visible because snow settled in the fields, not among the trees where the heat from living canopies melted the white stuff. In a figurative sense, the winter cross-hatching coloration of rural farms and forests was illustrative of the dichotomy between the tanking of my region’s economy and the unspoiled natural beauty that remained. I had seen the aftermath of a big flood during my senior year in high school, and five years later almost every factory or corporate headquarters in our region had migrated to locations farther south. Increasingly, you had to look beyond a creeping malaise of car bodies piled up in backyards to appreciate rural New York State’s backdrop of gorgeous woodlands.
When my plane landed in Aberdeen, the sky was cold and gray, which I soon learned was the norm. A year in Scotland can be summarized by 364 gray-sky days, confirmed by my one thousand–plus photographs of sunless landscapes. Despite all the gray vistas, I had a truly life-changing experience as a graduate student overseas. The University of Aberdeen was situated along the shores of the North Sea, within sight of petroleum rigs offshore, which led to oil blobs peppering the beach. The presence of American oil companies in Aberdeen was both a blessing and a curse. Upon hearing my accent, most shopkeepers assumed I was a wealthy oil wife, but they quickly revised their thinking after seeing my dusty khakis, oilskin coat, and the dented thermos hanging out of my tired rucksack. To afford tuition on a modest budget, I lived low on the food chain and needed to find very inexpensive accommodation. Two classmates and I discovered an old farmhouse about fifteen miles north of town, available for free if we helped the owners with their barley harvest.
I had an upstairs bedroom where a jackdaw nested in the chimney and cold winds whipped down the shaft during big blows off the North Sea. I could see icy gray swells from the window, just beyond the barley fields, which danced wildly in those never-ending northerlies. My best purchase in Scotland was an electric blanket, which cost a whopping five pounds. I wrote my entire thesis in that electrified cocoon, which literally saved my life in a cold farmhouse with no heat or hot water. I budgeted approximately five pounds per week for living, which barely paid for fish, cabbage, tea, and a few packs of biscuits (the Scottish term for cookies). My housemates were also on a stringent budget, so we teamed up to share groceries. One large Scottish cabbage served all of us for about a week, and I became an expert at using just the correct amount of salt in a boiling pot to bring out the flavor. Almost weekly, I ventured to the fishing docks to buy fresh catch, which was very inexpensive when purchased directly from the boats. My two housemates, Alan and Peggy, owned a dilapidated Morris station wagon, so old that moss grew in its metal siding, and they were savvy about finding roadkill for a main course. If a dead rabbit was cold, they surmised it died a slow death from myxomatosis, a disease ravaging the hare populations in the Highlands. If the rabbit was warm, they figured it had been in good health but hit by a car, meaning safe for human consumption. Alan wielded his sharp machete and behaved like a mad symphony conductor as he flailed it around our kitchen, butchering the carcass for stew. We added a few onions, boiled the meat for hours, and concocted a hearty meal. My children are embarrassed their mom ate roadkill as a budgetary strategy during her student days, and admittedly it was probably a bit risky. I would never advise them to do such a thing.
After classes commenced, I saw a tiny posting on the departmental bulletin board requesting a weekend guard for an endangered little tern colony at a seaside rookery (aka breeding colony) about five miles up the coast. The assignment was to prevent walkers and dogs from interfering with tern nesting. I was hired, bought an old bicycle, and spent each Saturday holed up in a sand dune from dawn until dusk with a thermos of coffee. The days were long and cold, with that North Sea wind whipping off the frigid water, but I loved watching the terns and hearing their raucous calls as they protected their eggs. The pay was five pounds for every Saturday during nesting season, which covered modest groceries and still left enough for me to purchase an occasional bus ticket for a hiking trip to the Highlands. Scotland boasted a weather pattern that could drive nearly anyone to drink. And so it did; I witnessed the locals in our nearby fishing village migrate to the pub around 4:00 p.m. as I shivered while riding home from the tern rookery.
