The lab in the basement of the US Fish and Wildlife Wetland Research Center on the Louisiana State University campus is a cool refuge from the muggy heat of a Baton Rouge July afternoon. I am standing at the waist-high counter of one of the lab benches spanning the room. Circular foil trays, three inches in diameter, are spread out before me. They each hold dried samples of plants that the three of us (Rebecca, Monica, and I) collected the week previous. Rebecca is a PhD student; Monica and I are low level staff hired to assist her. We collected the samples in the Atchafalaya Basin on a hot, humid day, guiding the skiff through the flat expanse of brackish wetland. We toiled all day under the gauzy sun, up to our elbows in sulfurous mud to dig out 5-gallon buckets of marsh grasses and reeds. Today, under the fluorescent lights, I hear the hum of the air conditioner while I grind the samples in a mortar and pestle. Once each is fully pulverized, they will be treated with chemical reagents to determine the nutrient composition, thus revealing their role and value in the ecosystem. I am bored with the tedious work and impatiently thinking, “This is not how I would collect and analyze these samples”. The pestle stills in my hand, and the thought arrives in my head with a thunk of solid certainty: it is time for me to go back to school.
As I take a deep breath and resume grinding the dried leaves in the mortar, I think back on the three years that have passed since I graduated from college. After tossing my mortar board in the air in the Standford Quad, I embarked on the wandering life of the itinerant field biologist. The jobs were temporary and seasonal and took me from the jade green forests of Hawaii, to the azure of the tropical Pacific Ocean, and to the ochre prairies of North Dakota. Of all the places I inhabited and of all the questions I pursued, the seabird research cruise on the Discoverer holds my imagination most vividly - the endless expanse of ocean and sky; the deep mystery of the sea. So, I go to the university library during my lunch breaks and look up "seabird at-sea ecology" in the card catalog and the weighty paper volumes of the Science Citation Index and Biological Abstracts. These ten-pound tomes lead me to bound volumes of journals such as Progress in Oceanography and Journal of Marine Systems in the stacks. I carry them to the library's xerox machine, feeding it quarters to make copies of articles that catch my eye. They have titles like "Ecosystem Responses to Recent Oceanographic Variability in High-Latitude Northern Hemisphere Ecosystems" and "Biogeography of Seabirds Within a High-Latitude Ecosystem". These words thrill me. Could I travel to these wild places in the distant north? Could I discover the truths of the deep and it's inhabitants? Could I become an Oceanographer?
I read the articles on weekend mornings and mail letters to the authors at the university addresses listed on the title pages. I express my enthusiasm for their work and inquire whether they are accepting new students in their graduate programs. Often, I receive disappointingly thin envelopes, a single sheet reading "I thank you for your interest, but I am not accepting new students at this time". But I also receive promisingly bulky manila envelopes with cover letters reading "I thank you for your interest, I am accepting new graduate students and here are a few reprints of my recent articles. I look forward to hearing back from you".
One of these bulky envelopes is sent by George Hunt at the University of California in Irvine. I receive it on a Saturday in December. I am curled up in the navy blue arm chair in my one-bedroom apartment housed in a converted church in a quiet neighborhood of Baton Rouge. The high ceilings kept the space surprisingly cool last summer, but on this winter day it's chilly enough that I had to get down on my hands and knees this morning to turn on the small ceramic gas heater. The small white panes nestled in the ornate grill work give off a tangerine glow and a smell of burning dust. The deep green leaves of Gardenias and Philodendrons outside the square-paned floor-to-ceiling windows screen the view and noise of the street. The luxury of this, my first apartment of my own, is still sweet after nine months of living here. I look up from the pages of the novel in my lap when I hear the jangle of the mail carrier's keys down the hall outside my apartment door. I unfold my legs, stretch my arms over my head and grab my mailbox key from the dish on the kitchen counter. I amble down the dim hallway to the row of five mailboxes and pull out a bulky envelop from my box. I clumsily rip open it's sealed top as I walk hurriedly back to my apartment. I drop down cross-legged on the blue and pink patterned area rug covering the wood floorboards, and eagerly pull out the affirmative cover letter from George Hunt. He writes that yes he is accepting new students and thinks I am a strong candidate. He has also included a stack of reprints of his publications. Forgetting the novel, I begin to read. As the afternoon sun filters through the vegetation outside my windows, I find myself fully absorbed in the reading of one specific reprint - slick heavy paper, two staples on the long edge, clear crisp font and graphics. The title is "The Influence of Hydrographic Structure and Prey Abundance on Foraging of Least Auklets" and one figure in particular has captured my attention. Like notes arrayed across a staff of music, the precisely rendered bars and lines of the graphs describe rhythm and melody - a symphony of tidal currents sweeping zooplankton into a swirling mass near the sea's wind-whipped surface and the crashing cacaphonus cresendo of thousands of Robin-sized aukelets descending on the riches to feed. The symphony sings in my mind. It brings me back to those sun-bleached afternoons on the Discoverer when I wondered what was going on below the surface of the ocean around me as boobies, petrels and gulls wheeled and plunged into the tropical sea.
At work the following Monday, I write a letter to George Hunt on the typewriter at the receptionist's desk at the Center. I am interested in his research, I type and would like to apply to UC Irvine for graduate school. (Where is Irvine? I asked my New Orleans friends one weekend when I made the two-hour drive for Cajun music, swing dancing, and crawfish. “Don’t know,” they replied. “Near Santa Barbara?”). I mail my application in January, fly to Irvine in the spring to tour the campus and meet George and the other grad students, and decide to enroll (rejecting the only other offer, from Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada). I pack up again and drive west from Baton Rouge in early September, regroup in Seattle and by the end of the month I am driving the Volvo down the grapevine into the L.A. County smog on my way south to Orange County.
*
The Volvo doesn't have air conditioning, so I can't roll up the windows against the smog as I drive into the L.A. basin. My eyes water and my throat starts to burn as I descend into the inversion that has trapped the murky air.
"Oh god", I think, "What am I doing here?"
This feels very far away from the sparkling emerald of my native Washington, which I left two days ago after packing the Volvo with clothes, books and cassette tapes; all I need to start my new life as a graduate student at UC Irvine. I don't have any furniture, or a place to live for that matter, so I start my first quarter sleeping on the couch in the campus apartment of senior grad student, Mary Beth (MB). We met when I visited the campus in the spring and she was kind enough to offer me a place to land until I found an apartment of my own. For some reason, I opted out of campus housing, perhaps thinking it would be more fun? Cooler? to live off campus (not realizing there was no "off campus" filled with coffee shops and bookstores in Irvine, just gated communities and shopping malls). I roll into the parking lot of her apartment complex in the dark. We both rise well after the sun is up and linger over coffee, chatting on the futon couch across from a picture window that looks out onto the baked grasses of the eroded brown hills behind campus. MB walks me to the building that houses our department, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology ("Eco Evo Bio"). We take the elevator up to the seventh floor and MB introduces me to the department secretary.
"You're late for your Bio 90 lab", the plump dark-haired woman says not unkindly, glancing at the clock and grimacing empathically.
"That's today?" I reply.
As part of my financial support package, I am a teaching assistant (TA) for the freshman introductory Biology class, which includes a weekly lab that I essentially teach solo. I knew this, but I neglected to confirm when the lab first met. MB hurries me out the door and back down the elevator to the teaching labs in the wan light of the basement. I am catching my breath and trying to still my anxious heartbeat as I pull open the door. I stammer my apologies to the grad student perched on the corner of the desk at the whiteboard, keeping order until my arrival. As he leaves the room, I turn to face the twenty-five undergraduates seated in pairs at the lab benches spanning the width of the sterile windowless room. The bare fluorescent bulbs buzz above me and the over-conditioned air chills the sweat at my hairline. The moment is surreal. I am living one of those nightmares where you arrive at a meeting in your underwear or find yourself naked in a coffee shop. Twenty five faces stare blankly back at me, I catch one young woman rolling her eyes and another pair whispering behind their hands.
"Um, hi everybody, my name is Libby. I am your TA", I begin.
More blank stares.
"Well, let's see. Looks like Brian (the other grad), printed out the syllabus", I grab the stack and walk among the benches handing each student a copy.
Returning to the front of the room, I offer "Ah, shall we go over it together?".
No response.
"Okay, then, well, I guess I'll let you go", I surrender. "See you next week!" I say bright and brittle, my voice cracking.
After the students have streamed out of the lab, I slump onto a lab stool, close my eyes and put my head in my hands. After a few deep breaths, I straighten, grab my backpack and take the elevator back up to the seventh floor. I find George Hunt's office and rap shyly on the door frame.
"Knock, knock?" I say.
He turns from the cascading piles of paper on his desk, putting down the pencil with which he is marking up a document. He is large and ungainly around the middle, dressed in the uniform he will don throughout the thirty plus years I will know him - khaki trousers, a plain oxford dress shirt and sensible walking shoes. He crosses an ankle over his knee, reclines in his office chair amongst the clutter and folds his hands over his belly. His eyes, set in a heavy-featured face surrounded by a head of white hair, only just beginning to thin, and a full beard, gaze at me steadily.
"You have arrived", he says in what to my ears is a moneyed East Coast accent that accords with his sartorial style. He indicates the chair opposite the desk and I perch on the edge.
"Uh, yeah", I reply "I got in late last night".
"I trust your accomodations at Mary Beth's were to your liking", he continues.
I brighten, "Yeah for sure, I really appreciate her taking me in for now, she's great, I really..."
He cuts me off with, "Well, that's just fine", and we lapse into uncomfortable silence.
I cast my eyes nervously around the cramped room then focus on the stapled pages before George on the desk, and offer hesitatingly,
"Um, what are you reading there?"
"Ah, yes! This is a proposal to the National Science Foundation to continue my work on Least Auklets in the Aleutian Islands. I presented my results recently at an international conference in Melbourne."
He pauses like an orator holding for applause and I say "Oh neat".
He carries on, gathering steam " My results show.... "
I smile politely, but I am only partly paying attention, feeling shaken from my rough start to the morning and overwhelmed already.
MB comes to my rescue. She sticks her head in the door and takes me down the hall to meet my lab mates. There are six of us in all, two other newbies like me, and three other more senior students (including MB) and a post-doc. George has built a small empire of students in Eco Evo Bio, creating an anomalous community of seabird field ecologists in a very terrestrial and experimental department. The other professors typically oversee one or two grad students at a time, and the occasional post-doc. These other students conduct their research in sterile laboratories, tending plastic tubes of fruit flies and mapping their genetics. Or if they do head out into the field, they monitor hummingbird visitation of tubular red flowers in carefully fenced experimental in the Colorado mountains. The students and professors alike can't fathom what we are doing out on our boats in the middle of the ocean. Why we would launch ourselves into a wild and uncontrolled environment in hopes that the patterns and processes we seek to understand will reveal themselves? And the coursework emphasizes this misalignment. My class schedule the first quarter is:
· ECO EVO 203A — Genetics
· ECO EVO 205 — Special Topics in Ecology
· ECO EVO 247 — Behavioral Endocrinology
· ECO EVO 289 — Evolution
I dutifully purchase the text books at the campus book store and stack them neatly on my desk in the lab. Gazing at the titles on their spines, I think "Back in school again, I like this". But graduate school is a very different beast than college.
It's the second week since I arrived at Irvine. The seven other first year grad students and I are sitting in a windowless seminar room. Dr. Ayala (ECO EVO 289 Evolution, neatly-coiffed hair, lingering cologne) writes genetic equations on the whiteboard and then turns to us, gesturing with the blue marker. The other students respond, eagerly interrupting each other to make points and counter points. I sit silent, my head swiveling as though I were at a tennis match, tracking the others' faces as they volley ideas to and fro. My ears are hearing their voices, but I do not understand what they are saying. I feel highly ill-equipped and out of place in this room of confident and outspoken grads. They all have Master's Degrees and so have already spent two or three years taking graduate level courses, designing research projects, collecting and analyzing data and publishing papers. I have none of that. I have three years of gypsy field work. As the conversation around me ebbs and flows, my mind recedes from the stark white of the conference room out to the sterile manicured lawns surrounding the building, the chemical aroma of fertilizer and the treated gray water used to sprinkle the grass, the shaggy eucalyptus trees casting thin shade. Why did I leave the deep viridian of the Pacific Northwest for the bland strip malls and cul-de-sacs of Orange County? I don't think I can do this.
*
"Remind me, who's house are we going to?", I ask MB from the passenger seat of her blue Volvo station wagon.
She turns to me and says, "The philosopher mechanic's!", then directs her eyes back to the four-lane thoroughfare that leads from campus west towards Balboa Beach.
"Ah, right", I recall.
MB had told me the meet-cute story earlier that afternoon as we tried on outfits and jewelrey for the party. The story started with her leaning under the open hood of her car in the parking lot of the campus apartments trying to figure out what was causing the skip in the engine's cadence. She then heard a sonorous and friendly voice ask her what was the problem. It was a philosophy grad student named Bill. Turns out, he actually knew a lot about cars, and was able to diagnose and fix the defect (it was the coil, "Whatever that is", I thought). Hence, the "philosopher mechanic" moniker.
"Was he flirting with you?", I asked.
"Oh, I don't know, maybe. Doesn't matter, I'm with Paul", she shrugged and smiled, glancing into the rear view mirror at the traffic behind us.
"Well, he did ask you to this Halloween Party", I teased.
MB and I tumble tipsily into the hallway, giggling as one of the housemates opens the door and welcomes us in. I am wearing a body-hugging chartreuse and white mini-dress and glow in the dark squid jig earrings that I crafted myself that afternoon (maybe a little marijuana was involved). MB is wearing her signature leggings topped with a rainbow swirl tie-dyed tunic. As MB opens the fridge to deposit the six pack we brought along, my attention is drawn to a tall, thin man with a blond ponytail, gold-wire rim glasses and a floral print shirt in gray, mauve and olive. He is talking intently to the small woman in front of him, both seemingly oblivious to the crowd around them in the kitchen; and to me, the blonde in the weird dress trying to catch his eye. No luck, so MB and I head to the living room and find her roommate, who is dating one of the other philosophy grads. I spend the rest of the evening drinking beer, smoking and chatting. Chatting with MB, the philosophy roommates, everyone but the tall thin man with the blonde ponytail. But I keep an eye on him. I see his long fingers roll Drum tabacco into thin cigarette papers, I admire his deep brown eyes sparkling in a friendly argument, I hear his warm voice rising above the chatter to make a point. But he doesn't see me. I watch him take a freshly rolled cigarette out to the balcony overlooking the empty boardwalk, the beach and breakers ghostly in the midnight dark.
"Now's my chance!" I think as I follow him.
"Gotcha!" I think as I close the sliding door against the music and chatter. Like a lioness separating an impala from the herd.
I introduce myself, we shake hands and I feel that thrilling magnetism of mutual attraction. We chat, I don't remember about what. He is sitting on the balcony railing with his back to the wall of the house, finishing his cigarette. I move closer as he stubs it out in a tin ashtray until I am standing close, at his shoulder. I look frankly into his eyes, swaying slightly from the beer and weed. He looks back surprised and a bit bleary-eyed, putting a foot down on the deck to steady himself. I gaze at him for a beat, and then another; and then I lean in and kiss him. Heat spreads in a rush from the crown of my head to my knees. I am tingling with anticipation, my body poised to lose itself in the touch of another, my mind begging to be released from the tension and worry of the past few weeks.
He drives me back to MBs the next morning so I can return her chartreuse dress and retrieve my regular clothes. Head pounding with hangover, I drive my Volvo out to the anonymous cul de sac where I am renting a room in a two-story house faced with oatmeal-colored stucco. Later that day, I am surprised when my housemmate holds out the phone and says,
"It's for you. He says his name is Bill?"
"Oh hi", I say when I take the receiver from her.
"Uh, yeah, hey there", he replies.
I wait, wondering, trying to remember the last time some guy I hooked up with at a party followed up with a phone call.
"Um, do you want to come over for dinner sometime?", he finally manages.
"Oh, ah, sure, yeah that would be great." I say to him. "I guess", I think to myself and we make a date for Friday.
Monday, after the party but before our next date, I see him across the circular walkway that defines the center of campus. His long legs stride along the pathway, as he gestures with his cigarette, arguing a point with his fellow philosophy grads. Keys hang off a heavy clip on his narrow jeans, a look that is not yet fashionable, this being 1991 and relaxed-fit is the style. His feet are shod in russet-colored work boots, also out of style in this time and place. The keys and boots are a legacy from his years as a DIY pot farmer in the Santa Cruz mountains, I will come to learn. I see him, but I don't approach. I am hesitant to commit to even exploring the possibility of starting a relationship with him. He's the opposite of the kind of man I thought I wanted; my list of requirements being athletic, outdoorsy, stylish, hip and sexually experienced. And I am wary and insecure, the result of years of casual and careless relationships. But I go on the next date, as planned, showing up at the door of the Balboa Beach house for dinner in my typical canvas shorts, boxy T and Birkenstocks. Bill will tell me months later that he was greatly relieved to see me in this casual and comfortable outfit.
"That chartreuse dress did not suit you", he professed.
"Yeah", I grimaced. Then said with a laugh, "The hairy legs and armpits probably didn't help!"
We go on another date, to a forgetable restuarant near my cul-de-sac and then we slide into the habit of hanging out on the deck of the Balboa Beach house. We spend afternoons reading Kant or "Topics in Behavioral Ecology"; and grading undergrad philosophy papers or lab reports. We make fish tacos for dinner and I spend the night under the teal green sheets of his king-sized bed. Most weekends we meet up with the other philosophy grads to play poker in campus apartments or shoot pool in dingy bars on the fringes of Irvine. One day in November we learn that one of his housemates is dropping out of the philosophy program.
"Tom and I discussed it", Bill tells me, referring to the remaining housemate. "Would you like to move into Kurt's old room?".
I look up, surprised, from the tilting stack of lab reports I am grading. But then consider , "Well, I do hate my house in cul-de-sac hell. Sure, yeah, okay", and turn my attention back to the paper in front of me.
So I become the third housemate. But I never sleep in the single bed in my narrow room down the hall, only using the space to study when I can't concentrate out on the deck. One afternoon in early December, I have so sequestered myself. I am sitting alone at the cheap melamine desk pushed against the bare white wall, hunched over my Evolutionary Genetics text book. I have homework due tomorrow morning, but I have made no progress over the past hour, the text and figures are blurring on the page. I am tired from being up late the night before grading lab reports and I am worrying about my paper due tomorrow for Behavioral Ecology. I also need to sit down with George and discuss the National Science Foundation proposal I am planning to submit in January. I groan inwardly imagining how he will skewer my first draft of the proposal. I am staring blankly at the wall, when Bill appears in the doorway,
"I am going to make us some dinner. Chili and rice, okay?"
"Sure, honey, that sounds delicious", my stomach rumbling it's approval.
"How's it going in here?", he asks with a warm smile.
"Ok?", I say with tears in my voice.
He steps into the room and squeezes my shoulder, then gives me a kiss. "Dinner will be ready in a few".
I am so overwhelmed with my course work and teaching duties that I don't notice how our lives are becoming entwined. And maybe that's a good thing. I don't have the bandwidth to worry about committing. I don't have time to be afraid of getting hurt. But it isn't just that I am too distracted to sabatoge our relationship. It's also Bill. He is steady and affectionate, his warm presence melting the icy block of my uncertainty and insecurity. Time passes, and one day I realize that we are actually a couple. We are standing side by side in the kitchen at a philosophy house party, each sipping a beer. A new acquaintance asks,
"How long have you two been married?"
"Married!?", we both exclaim.
"We met at Halloween", I clarify. And Bill and I shrug at each other.
By December we are together most of our days and all of our nights. We even spend Christmas break together, choosing each others company over family gatherings around the tree. My mom and her friend Liz invite us to vacation with them in Baja California. Liz has an arrangement with a local Mexican family to park two somewhat derelict Airstream trailers in the dunes above the beach. We read by kerosene lamps and hauled in our own water. We secured the plastic jugs in the bed of Bill's Toyota pick up truck before we left Irvine, tied down in front of his large metal toolbox, another legacy from his Santa Cruz days. He can wield a circular saw as easily as a logical argument, and repairs the make-shift deck off our trailer as a favor to our host.
Most afternoons during those langorous Baja days, Bill and I climb down the dunes to walk along the flat expanse of hard steel-gray sand. The setting sun shines through the tops of the breakers and the air is calm but chill enough to require jeans and sweaters. We stride down the beach, hands in pockets and discuss whether moral judgments are evolutionary adaptations, that can still possess a form of objectivity grounded in the adaptive history of a species (his thesis). Or how processes operating at a small scale, such as local temperature, prey availability, water structure, can create larger-scale patterns in the distribution and abundance of marine organisms (my thesis). I marvel at his lightening fast intelligence and iconoclastic ideas. He is impressed with my grit and fortitude at sea. We ask probing questions and offer extensive explanations, we explore new paths and retreat from deadends, we claim victory and admit defeat. Together we develop our hypotheses and ideas. With his keen interest and intelligence he nurtures my fragile intellectual ego and I grow stronger. But it's not all science and philosophy.
"It's the alchemy between lyric, rhythm and melody", I enthuse. I am explaining why a certain passage in Tom Waits' "The Heart of Saturday Night" so captivates me. It was an album on heavy rotation in the tape deck of the Toyota as we drove down from Irvine.
"True, he is a master songwriter", Bill agrees. "Although there is that unfortunate lyric - 'It's the crack of the pool balls, neon buzzin', telephone ringing it's your second cousin'", he reminds me.
"Oh right", I laugh and loop my arm around his waist. "He was really stretching on that one! 'Your second cousin'?"
I am sitting at the dining table doing homework one afternoon after we have returned to Irvine from Christmas break in Baja. All those arduous yet engaging conversations on the beach with Bill, like intellectual windsprints, have left my mind feeling stronger and my thinking more agile. I look up from a page in my notebook covered with genetic calculations for my evolutionary physiology class. I put down my pencil and cast my eyes out the beach house windows to the distant haze over the ocean. With a sudden yet calm certainty like a sun first appearing above a still horizon, I know I can do it. The dark clouds of my insecurity and confusion clear and I step over the threshold into a new life. I give the ocean view a few more seconds of attention and then I focus my eyes back down on the paper in front of me and hunker down for six years of hard work.
*
"Stand up straight! Stick out your chest!" advises George from the head of the table, apropos of I don't know what. A group of us grads will be attending a science conference in the coming weeks, so perhaps it's his idea of a good networking approach?
Mary Beth and I will scream with laughter about it later, but for now I stifle an eyeroll and simply reply, "OK, George".
MB and I are seated at George and Peggy's dining room table in their tasteful Laguna Beach bungalow with the other grad students who haven't gone home for Thanksgiving. The "waifs and strays", as George cleverly quips. MB and I snicker like adolescents and George levels his unflinching gaze at us. A surprising contrast to the dancing eyes of Peggy, the quiet and petite woman he is married to, as she passes the candied yams. Childless, he and Peggy have hosted us grads for dinner several times over the past two years. Peggy is an excellent cook and George pours from their extensive wine collection, so like ungrateful teenagers, we always show up to eat and drink heartily.
The "stick out your chest" variety of comments from George don't really sink into my consciousness. What does get me are comments like, "So what? Who cares?"
I first hear this comment some days after that Thanksgiving dinner. I am sitting in a straight-backed metal chair in George's office, facing him across his cluttered desk. The fluorescent bulb overhead hums and sheds cold light on the dot-matrix computer printout before us. It is the first chapter of my dissertation; the pages are stapled in the corner and festooned with George's pencilled comments. It's been two years since I embarked on the arduous journey that is a PhD program and I am feeling proud and accomplished to have written up what will eventually be my first scientific journal article. Or rather, I was feeling proud and accomplished.
"So what? Who cares?" George says with a teasing grin.
"What do you mean?", I reply, slumping in my chair and resisting the urge to pout.
"You have all these graphs and figures. This complex statistical analysis. But there's no story here", he says gesturing at the stapled pages abandoned on his desktop.
"Well, but I thought...", I say weakly.
George leans forwards and interrupts, sincere and serious now, "What is the one figure, the one result that the reader will remember when they have forgotten the rest of the article? And what story does it tell them? And why should they care?"
I can't hold back the pout any longer and am on the verge of tears, so I grab my backpack, say a quick goodbye and hurry out of his office. I run down the stairs, unlock my bike and pedal angrily for thirty minutes to the Costa Mesa bungalow I share with Bill and Sally (our year-old German Shepherd).
Bill is pacing the back yard with a hand-rolled cigarette clasped casually between his fingers, deep in thought about his own dissertation. We moved from the Balboa Beach house last year, to this one-bedroom mother-in-law cottage on a quiet street in Costa Mesa, a humble neighborhood halfway between the beach and Irvine. Front lawns in Costa Mesa are generally well tended, small patches of green among the sun-washed stucco with the odd house fronted by a patch of brittle dry brown. Cars parked along the sidewalks are modest models, Hondas and Toyotas, typically washed and maintained, but with the occasional dented door or rusted bumper. Our neighbors are white and Hispanic; elderly, middle aged and twenty-somethings and I don't feel unkempt and awkward like I do in the sterile avenues of Irvine. I have established a small garden in the corner of our backyard where I grow flowers, tomatoes and basil. The basil plants become small shrubs in the dry heat of the Orange County summer; by fall our harvest of fragrant peppery leaves covers the round table in the dining nook. We fill the freezer with home made pesto; pasta drenched in the oily, garlicky sauce becomes a winter staple.
I storm out into the backyard and relay George's "So what? Who cares?" comments to Bill. I want him to share my indignation.
Instead, he puts out his cigarette, places his warm hands gently on my shoulders, trains his intelligent caramel eyes on my face and suggests kindly, "Maybe you should go for a run?"
I stamp my feet and huff off to the bedroom to change into shorts and shoes, returning 30 minutes later sweating and relaxed.
As I drink a glass of water in the kitchen, I say with a sheepish grin, "You were right, honey, I feel better".
Bill smiles and puts his arm around my shoulders.
I am also thinking, "And George was right, too. What is the story I am trying to tell? And who would care, anyway?".
*
That first chapter of my dissertation was based on fall surveys off the west coast of Vancouver Island on a Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans research vessel Ricker. Always on the lookout for opportunities for his brood, George had forged a contact with a Canadian fish research biologist and finagled a spot for me on his survey of juvenile salmon. I spent as many daylight hours as I could positioned at the windows of the Ricker's wheelhouse, counting shearwaters and murres as they flocked on the water or streamed in flight across the bow until fatigue shuttered my eyes. Murres, my tuxedoed companions from the Farallons, which nest on remote coasts from California to Alaska. And shearwaters, relatives to the petrels I marveled at on my tropical Pacific Discoverer adventure. My vantage point at the wide windows on the highest deck of the ship not only afforded unobstructed views of the sea and the birds around me, but also of the sunrise sky spangled in vermillion and gold, and of the ghostly plumes of Humpback whales stopping to feed on their way south for the winter. While I was counting birds from the wheelhouse, massive paired beam trawls, trailing port and starboard behind the ship were skimming the surface for fish such as salmon and herring. Each year, returning to Irvine after three weeks at sea off Vancouver Island (and after a much-needed visit to Washington), I would organize, sift and sort the data; arranging it into charts, tables and maps; trying out simple statistics to compare averages or learning complex models to examine direct and indirect connections between birds, fish and oceanography. I endured countless meetings with George over drafts covered with his penciled comments; and like a music student hunched over the piano keyboard with her firm and patient teacher standing at her shoulder, was told, "that's not quite right, go back and do it again", for revision after revision.
Innumerable months later, I am standing in front of my campus mail cubby, excitment bubbling up from my toes as I tear open a manila envelope and see the turqouise cover of the journal Fisheries Oceanography. I flip quickly though the glossy pages to find the title of my own work : "The distribution of sea birds relative to their fish prey off Vancouver Island: opposing results at large and small spatial scales"[1]. I hold in my hands the first chapter of my dissertation, my first scientific article. Its concise text and efficient graphs belie the meandering months of soldering on through messy piles of data; the course corrections after mistakes, missteps and dead ends; and the tearful episodes of insecurity. Its thirteen pages of maps, graphs and text tell the story of how what we perceive depends on the scale of our observations. When I zoomed out on the data, when I took the virtual 10,000-foot view, the numbers of birds and fish correlated: lots of birds, lots of fish. But when I zoomed in, virtually hovering just a few miles above the sea, I saw a negative correlation: lots of birds, very little fish. Could the birds be eating holes in the field of fish arrayed beneath them? Or more likely - were the voracious squawking flocks of birds driving the fish away? George's "who cares?" ever present in my mind, I had concluded the article with: "If this avoidance behavior is common in pelagic fish, then sea birds may affect fish populations by driving fish away from plankton-rich surface waters and thus negatively affecting the feeding and growth rates of their fish prey". In other words, the key interaction between predator and prey, seabird and fish, might not be eating away, but scaring away; with the fish fleeing from their own feeding grounds to avoid being snatched up in a seabird's bill.
*
Those were some of the hardest years of my life, but they were also rich with love and friendship. For as many arduous meetings I had with George, I had deep and supportive and delightfully wandering conversations with Bill as we walked Sally on the beach in Baja every Christmas break. I had poker nights with Bill and the other philosophy grads. Dave was the ringleader and host (soft mustache, colorfully patterned sweaters). We sat around a card table eracted in his tiny campus apartment, drank cheap beer and played elaborately invented card games with byzantine rules called "Cominsky Park" or "Night Baseball". One memorable evening in December, Dave, who like all of us had little spare cash for buying gifts, performed a song he wrote for each of us as a Christmas present. He was an intelligent and comedic song writer. The song he wrote for me and Bill was titled "The Slaw Man and the Liberator". "Slaw" for the cap on Bill's head that had "Coleman" stitched on the brow (free with the purchase of our camp stove) - "Coleman" became "Coleslaw Man" became "Slaw Man". And Libby the Liberator. The song was crafted in the gritty texture of a Tom Waits ballad. A memorable line: "He's a tall master debater and she's a bird shit contemplator. [refrain] The Slaw Man and Liberator". At poker night a few months previous I had told the gathering about ducking away from gulls on the Farallons as they swooped on me, sometimes feeling a spray of guano on my head. And some number of evenings later, I overhead Eric (blond mullet, motorcycle jacket) respond to Dave's question about me: "I am not sure, I think she studies seabird shit?".
*
The second chapter of my dissertation took me north of Vancouver Island to the waters surrounding the Pribilof Islands, one of the largest colonies of seabirds in the Bering Sea - over two million birds make it their home each summer. The two rocky crags of islands are populated by Northern Fur Seals, a small village of humans and several seabird species including my old pals, the Murres. George, ever the master at making connections, got me a berth on a NOAA Research Vessel, the Miller Freeman, for a survey of juvenile pollock, a key prey for Murres and their compatriots (and the most lucrative commercially harvested fish in the US). And again, I would count seabirds as the ship quantified the number of fish around the Islands. Hour after hour, I stood alone on the open deck at the height of the ship, ruggedized laptop lashed to the rail and binoculars around my neck, peering out of the hood of my parka across the steel gray sea frothed with wind-blown waves. One day an atmospheric low moved in from the north over the islands and the wind kicked up to over 40 knots. I remained out on deck, unable to see, what's more count, the Murres tossed about on the heaving seas or staggering in flight through the stormy spray. I gripped the rail of the deck and road the storm like a roller-coaster. I whooped as the bow plunged down the face of a stories-high wave into the trough. A green wall of water broke over the ship, drenching me with stinging salty water and clearing my mind of thought. Free, so free.
And again, after every survey I would arrange and re-arrange the myriad strands of data until patterns emerged. I tortoised through the data analysis and writing with only a little less struggle compared to my first publication. Yes, I experienced the dead ends and self doubts, but also, increasingly, glimmers of sweet clarity. One late afteroon, deep into my analysis, I am sitting at my desk in the nook between the bedroom and the open back door of the Costa Mesa cottage. I tilt my head side to side to stretch my neck and turn to admire my garden in the hazy evening light. The PC whirrs as the tape backup completes the transfer of the day’s results. I am pleasantly tired and satisfied. I have learned an advanced statistical technique, spectral analysis. It has been challenging to learn how to use the method and understand the results and the successes have allowed me some moments of confidence and capability. A nascent excitement for the next phase of my career begins to glow in my chest. Even as my mind turns to what Bill and I will make for dinner that night, I feel a quiet warm thrill. A thrill about how my life is now expanding, about the possibilities. It's that fall-season-school-is-starting-what-will-I-learn-next-feeling. I shut off the PC and stand, calling to Bill at his desk in the living room,
"Hey honey, want a beer?".
The result of my solitary toil at the little desk by the back door of the Costa Mesa cottage was "Scale-Dependent Spatial Variance Patterns and Correlations of Seabirds and Prey in the Southeastern Bering Sea as Revealed by Spectral Analysis", published in the journal Ecography[2]. This article continued the theme of the first: how what we understand about nature depends on our perspective, on where we are standing when we cast our attention on our subjects. What the spectral analysis allowed me to do was name that point when the picture changed, when it flipped from synchrony to asynchrony. That point was the scale or the size of the fish schools. The birds found the biggest schools but didn't seem to care where within the schools they foraged, they didn't seek out the very highest densities of fish within the larger school. And who cares? you (and the voice of George Hunt that lives on in my mind) may ask. So, I wrote: "This result suggests a new hypothesis to explain poor small-scale correlations between consumers and resources: resource distribution is relatively uniform at small scales resulting in only a slight increase in foraging return for consumers showing an aggregative response at these scales." I was suggesting that seabirds don't need to be perfect to be succesful. They might pause in their swallowing of shiny little fish and "think", "Sure there may be an even greater density of fish over there, but there's not that much more fish. I am getting my fill here. Why bother?"
*
The third chapter I forged on my own. Well, after George connected me with the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Labs on San Juan Island, Washington. But the decisions about which streams of data to collect and where were all mine. I had been reading books and articles about Optimal Foraging Theory. Optimal Foraging Theory asks how animals get the most food for the least effort. Where do they look? What do they eat? When do they move on? The case studies I was reading about were fascinating to me because it appeared as though the animals were omniscient. They were behaving as if they knew where the best food was, how much effort it would take to get it and how much energy they would gain. But of course, they couldn't actually know all that. The authors I was reading were asking whether simple actions, shaped by natural selection, could produce behaviors that appear impossibly well-informed. So I decided to test one idea that particularly intrigued me because of the apparant elegance of the animal's solution. The theory was called "Area-Restricted Search". It hypothesized that a predator would optimize the time spent in a patch of prey by slowing down or turning more frequently when it encountered something good to eat. It was the first time I had designed a field study of my own. I felt my maturity as a scientist growing as I researched the theory and formulated the specific hypothesis I would test. I felt a connection with the traditions, the history, and the collective endeavor that is the pursuit of knowledge. I felt like a real scientist.
Each day in my last summer of grad school, I woke before sunrise, packed a thermos of coffee and a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and launched a ten-foot fiberglass skiff into Griffin Bay on the east side of San Juan Island. As I motored out to the middle of the bay, the rising sun cast Mount Baker in rose and tangerine, and the easy breeze lapped wavelets against the bow, the quiet interrupted only by the buzzy squawks between Murre fathers and chicks. My familiar companions in the field ever since the Farallons ten summers ago. I glanced down at my left hand and was caught by surprise again by the gold band on my ring finger. Bill and I had married just one month ago, gathering friends and family at the campus arboretum for a garden ceremony officiated by a lawyer colleague of my dad’s. Neither of us had marriage as a life goal. We were already committed to each other in our hearts and got married for practical purposes. Bill was getting ready to graduate (he was a year ahead of me) and we thought it might be easier for me to find a position as a teacher or researcher at the university he went to if we were married. So, there was no getting-down-on-one-knee. In fact, we argue to this day about who asked who to get married - we both think the other did. We were seated in our lawn chairs, their aluminum legs half-buried in the dunes above the Baja beach where we spent each Christmas break. Tequila and grapefruit juice were in our plastic cups, Sally was laying at our side. All three of us were watching the sky turn colors as the sun sunk through low clouds over the Pacific towards the horizon. I brought up the notion of us getting married as a way to ease our transition to university life.
Bill sighed, gazing dully at the breaking waves, "I don't know. Planning a wedding seems like such a hassle."
I turned to speak to his profile and said hotly, "Well, would you at least think about it?"
After a couple beats, Bill replied "Want another drink?"
"Sure. Thanks." I said, turning my face away and handing him my glass.
The next morning, back in the beach chairs but now curled around steaming mugs of coffee, Bill interrupted my reverie with, "So, should we get married?".
I cried, "Oh, honey!" and threw my arms around him.
Even though we were motivated by logistics, the wedding did cast a light on our love, and we were pleasantly surprised at how much we liked being married.
"Hello, wife!", Bill would say with a grin as he brought me a beer and joined me on the overstuffed sofa in our Costa Mesa cottage, un-pausing the VCR in the machine.
"Hello, husband!", I would reply, taking the cold bottle from his hand.
Back on Griffin Bay under a brightening early morning sky, I idled the skiff into position. I lowered the transducer - basically a high-tech fish-finder - to just below the surface of the water (I had subsituted fish for seabirds for this study). When I flipped open the portable laptop and booted up the transducer's software I was presented with a gray screen, a heavy back line on the bottom showing the Bay’s floor 15 feet below me. I tooled around the Bay following a pattern not unlike mowing a lawn, until I saw the black smudges and smears of herring schools on the screen. Sweet! I thought to myself as I started the program I wrote (proud me!) to log the GPS position of the school. I then puttered as slowly as I could, following the school as it did whatever herring like to do in the morning. Which, I already knew, was feed (they are crepuscular, meaning most active at sunrise and sunset). I followed them for 30 minutes or until I lost "sight" of them, then shut down the transducer, carefully stood up to reel down the plankton net. The net was a windsock of gauzy mesh fine enough to catch a sesame seed of a zooplankton, (a.k.a. copepods after the Greek kṓpē = "oar" and pod = "foot"; so "oar-foot"). After the herring disappeared for the day, I motored back to the dock in the stiffening late-morning breeze and returned to the Friday Harbor Labs perched on the shore across from the ferry terminal. I spilled the contents of the net under a dissecting microscope to identify and count the shrimpy copepods, Acartia, Oithona and Calanus. I graphed those data along with the transducer-GPS derived data on herring school travel rate to test my prediction that herring would slow down in areas where I caught lots of copepods. I felt the satisfaction of creation: designing a study based on a theory, then carrying it out in the field, pouring over the data and assembling the results. Too bad said results were equivocal and, in the opinion of some, the chapter was unacceptable. It nearly sunk my PhD degree altogether.
*
I drop my bags on MBs living room floor and collapse on the futon couch, exhausted yet jittery from too many Diet Cokes. I have just powered through a marathon three-day drive from Ohio to Irvine. Bill and I had moved to Bowling Green Ohio last fall for his new position in the Philosophy Department and I had been churning out pages of my dissertation from the attic office in our rental house near campus. But I had hit a snag. And the emails and phone calls with my committee members over the past months of the muddy Bowling Green spring were getting me nowhere. I couldn't convince them that my third chapter, the narrative of herring and copepod in Griffin Bay, was worthy. The June date of my dissertation defense, when I would give an oral presentation of my results and demonstrate my knowledge by countering challenges from my committee, was rapidly approaching.
Hanging up the phone in Ohio after another fruitless conversation, only two weeks before my defense, I panicked. "What if they don't even let me make my case? What if they cancel the whole event?" I sobbed to Bill and he folded me into a hug.
So, instead of flying out to Irvine with Bill a few days before the defense as planned, I threw some clothes into a duffle, stuffed a backpack with drafts of my thesis, tossed my bags into our teal green Honda Civic and headed back west. Driving away from Bill and Sally on I-75 towards Indianapolis, I told myself that if I could just sit down one-on-one with my committee members and talk it over, I could convince them to at least give me a shot at it. My memory of that road trip is a blur of endless interstate asphalt, dingy highway motels and muddy diner coffee, enlivened only by the terror of skidding on the slippery pavement beside a looming semi-truck during a Colorado snowstorm. Three days after I left Ohio, MB welcomed me at the door of her campus apartment in Irvine and I slumped into her hug. As I did at the start of my PhD odyssey six years ago, I would be sleeping on her couch for the next week while I prepared for and, with luck, conducted my dissertation defense.
Seven sleepless nights after that heroic road trip, with bloodshot eyes and an uneasy gut, I open the door to the conference room on the seventh floor of the Eco Evo Bio building. My committee sits around the table in the fluorescent glare of the windowless room. On one side of the white melamine rectangle I see Diane Campbell and Brad Hawkins. Diane spends summers in Colorado, recording hummingbird feeding at tubular Scarlet Gilia flowers, in carefully fenced plots to control unwanted interfernece in her field experiments. She is neat and petite, with straight sand colored-hair tucked behind her ears. Brad doesn't go out in the field. He codes computer models to demonstrate how large-scale ecological patterns emerge from the interaction of climate, evolutionary history and species interactions. He is quietly chatting with Diane, peering at her through smudged tortoise-shell glasses, clad in jeans and a wrinkled mud-colored button-up. They are not marine scientists, there are none in Eco Evo Bio outside George's clutch of grad students and postdocs. But they are ecologists and the best fit I could manage in this department of fruit fly geneticists and evolutionary physiologists. Opposite Brad and Diane sit Paul Smith and George, my anchors. Paul is a fishery scientist from the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, an hour's drive south of Irvine. I designed an independent reading course with him the year before, plumbing the depths of fish population biology and resource management. George, thinking ahead to my future, had encouraged this broadening from seabirds to fish (how many seabird ecologist jobs could be out there, after all?). So while I was writing up my dissertation, I also applied for funding from the National Research Council to do a post-doctoral project on sardines under Paul's guidance. Paul is even larger than George and also gray, but with a goatee instead of a beard. A wise and kindly walrus. All four turn their heads towards me as I enter and the quiet conversation dwindles. They are a silent tribunal waiting for me to defend my dissertation. To justify the months of being tossed about on the sea; the uncountable hours staring at the computer screen, columns of numbers blurring before my tired eyes; the Sisyphisian cycle of writing, review and revision that culminated in the 159 pages presented for their approval. My dissertation, the sole focus of six years of my life, laid before them like a fragile gift: theirs to pick up with gentle admiring hands or smash with clenched fists. With shaking knees and sweaty palms, I load the slide carousel into the projector, dim the lights and begin.
The next two hours are a dizzying montage of images and emotions, like a film when the director wants to accelerate time and arrive at the climatic scene. Flashing across the movie screen of my memory are maps, color-coded slices of ocean temperature, and data points scattered on a two-dimensional frame. Now a shot of me standing confident of posture and clear of voice. This image is quickly replaced by a slouching and stuttering me, face in a puzzled frown, asking "Could you repeat the question?". A panned out shot of the whole conference room, momentarily ringing with laughter at a joke I inadvertently made at my own expense. Then fade into another of the room fallen quiet and the committee members staring pointedly.
The montage wraps up with me clenching my brow as Brad says emphatically, “You need another field season. These data aren’t conclusive”. He turns to Diane for confirmation and she nods firmly.
"Oh god," I think as ice spikes up my spine to the base of my skull. "I was afraid of this." Apparently the hours spent going over my results in Brad's cramped office down the hall were to no avail.
"The first two chapters are prefectly adequate", he concedes, "but this third chapter, this herring and copepod study", he gestures dissmissively towards the graph on the screen "it's just weak".
I sag and say, hesitatingly, “But I have funding for a post-doc”. I tilt my head towards Paul and he smiles encouragingly. A whine seeps into my tone, “I'm supposed to start right away. I can't really go out in the field again”.
Brad counters with a sigh and a one-shouldered shrug “Well, I don’t know what the standards are in your field, but in mine this chapter would not pass muster”.
George, who has been lounging comfortably in the passenger seat and letting me steer, sits up and takes the wheel. He begins with, “In our field, data are more difficult and expensive to collect than in terrestrial or lab studies studies where you can easily design experiments with replication and controls.” He is a large and slowly circling shark, smiling with cold eyes and a mouth of very sharp teeth.
He continues to command our opponents' attention with his subtly aggressive ease, “We conduct our research in difficult conditions at sea and can only work with the natural variability from year to year. It’s very costly to mount a research cruise and any data are highly valuable.”
Now warming up to his primary grievance, Massachusetts accent bleeding through the West Coast veneer, gaze challenging, “In addition, seabird oceanography is a new field, we may not be as rigorous (this in air quotes) as experimental biology but our work is illuminating pattern and process in the ocean that can not be observed Any. Other. Way” he concludes, casually threatening as he crosses his arms across his bulk.
Paul sits sagely and nods his friendly walrus head.
I leave the conference room and pace the hall while the committee deliberates on whether to accept my dissertation and grant me the PhD. Clammy perspiration dampens the armpits of my blouse, my throat is hot sand and my eyes burn. I roll a low stool from the lab next door and sit down heavily. I rest my head against the blank white wall, stare up at the perforations in the sterile acoustic tile on the ceiling and try not to cry. I can only imagine how George badgered the committee into coming around to his point of view. Or maybe they were convinced by the logic of his argument and Paul's steady conviction. However things progressed, Brad and Diane apparently troop onboard, because when they call me back into the conference room 30 minutes later, George and Paul greet me with smiles, and I learn that my dissertation has passed and I am now Dr. Logerwell. My shoulders relax away from ears, I close my eyes and take the first full breath of the morning. Bill, my dad and stepmom all hug me outside in the hall.
Dad grins broadly and asks, "When can you start writing prescriptions?".
I laugh and reply "I am not the kind of doctor, Dad".
Bill wraps an arm around my shoulder and I lean into his familiar warmth, suddenly and utterly exhausted.
*
Looking back from the ease and comfort of late middle-age, I ask my younger self as she forges into her future like a mountain climber determinately placing one heavy boot above the other: Why did you work so hard to get that PhD? Did you think about the kind of life it would commit you to? Did you realize how the colorful and chaotic years of other people's twenties would be sacrificed to your discipline, study and research? That your committment to husband and career meant that you would not be able to fulfill your dream of a tiny apartment in a West Coast city near the small coffeeshops, lively bars and intimate music venues of the queer neighborhood, a cat curled on the sofa and herbs growing in pots on the fire escape? And you must have found plumbing the depths of the ocean for its secrets very compelling to commit to a life of at-sea research given that working on boats was your least favorite kind of field work by far. How did you tolerate the seasickness, the lack of privacy, the cramped quarters? No way to stretch your legs in a long run or bike ride? Sinking into Bill's embrace after your dissertation defense, did you imagine that in the course of your multiple salty decades you would sail all the seas of Alaska: the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea and the Arctic? Could you have conceived of 50-knot winds blowing unfettered across the Bering Sea? Northern lights rippling emerald into the black Arctic night? Ice floes spanning the horizon, walrus and polar bears picking their way carefully over the ridged and furrowed surfaces? Raising a pint of beer in a toast as Dad cheered "Congratulations, Dr. Science!", could you have imagined the adventurous, challenging and gratifying life in oceanography ahead of you?
[1] Logerwell, E.A., N.B. Hargreaves, 1996. The distribution of seabirds relative to their fish prey off Vancouver Island: opposing results at large and small spatial scales. Fisheries Oceanography 5: 163-175
[2] Logerwell, E.A., R.P. Hewitt and D.A. Demer, 1998. Scale-dependent spatial variance patterns and correlations of seabirds and prey in the southeastern Bering Sea as revealed by spectral analysis. Ecography 21: 212-223