by Hope Jahren
“Don’t feel too bad,” Claude said with genuine sensitivity. “It’s mostly just bums doing it for the cookie.”
The guys at the blood bank were infamous for hitting on pharmacy runners, so I wasn’t particularly flattered when Claude developed a crush on me. “When I heard that bunch of ambulances come in I started hoping that I would see you down here,” he told me one day when I arrived with an order, prompting me to mention my fictitious art-student boyfriend, whom I had mentally rendered in detail for use on just such occasions.
“If you’ve got a boyfriend, why are you working here?” Claude asked, and it dawned on me that his understanding of the relationship between the sexes was undoubtedly deeper than mine. I made the excuse that artists are generally penniless, even when they are gorgeous and wear a sort of troubled look strikingly reminiscent of a certain photograph of Ted Williams at bat during the 1941 All-Star Game.
“Oh, so he needs you to buy pot for him,” Claude said with what might or might not have been sarcasm, and I couldn’t think of a comeback with which to defend my imaginary boyfriend, so I let it slide.
I took to working the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift and made a point of being there on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, to shoot and then deliver a cart of “drop bags” to the psychiatric ward. These were saline-based intravenous medications containing a sedative called droperidol, to be used as anesthesia during electroconvulsive therapy, known by caregivers as “ECT” and misunderstood by the public to be “shock treatments.” Twice a week, patients were readied in the early-morning hours and settled onto gurneys, and then lined up in the hallway to wait their turn for the procedure. One by one, each patient was drawn into a quiet room where a team of doctors and nurses administered electrical stimulation to one side of the head while carefully monitoring vital signs; all the while the patient was awash in the anesthesia I had brought.
Accordingly, Wednesdays and Fridays were noticeably better days in the ward, when many of the patients who had previously seemed dead in all but body could be found sitting up, dressed in their street clothes. Some could even briefly look me in the eye. In contrast, Sundays and Mondays were the worst days in the ward, when patients rocked and scratched themselves or moaned while lying in bed, cared for by nurses who seemed both supremely capable and acutely helpless.
The first time that I entered through the double-locked doors of the psych ward I was terrified, believing for no real reason that such places harbored evil souls ready to assault me at any moment. But once inside I found it to be the slowest-moving place on Earth, and I saw that these patients were unique only in that time had stopped inside their wounds, which were seemingly never to heal. The pain was so thick and palpable in the psych ward that a visitor could breathe it like the heavy humidity of summer air, and I soon realized that the challenge would not be to defend myself from patients, but to defend myself against my own increasing indifference toward them. What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane: they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding.
After a few months in the hospital lab, I became really good at shooting bags, to the extent that I could keep up with Lydia and even outstrip her at times. Eventually the Pharm.D.’s double-checking quit turning up errors in my work, and soon afterward, my confidence ripened into boredom. I challenged myself by developing time-saving rituals for everything from how I lined up my medications to the number of steps I took while walking to the Teletype. I studied the names on each label and began to recognize the sicker patients who required the same mixtures day after day. I started shooting the tiny bags that required complicated dilutions, made for infants born prematurely and bearing stickers that read only “Baby Boy Jones” or “Baby Girl Smith” where there would otherwise have been a full name.
Occasionally I was handed a “cut slip,” printed from a second, quieter Teletype, which informed the pharmacy when a patient requiring medication had died, so that the order was no longer needed. If a Pharm.D. tapped me on the shoulder and presented me with a cut slip, I stood up, walked to the sink, slashed or “cut” the bag that I was shooting and poured it out, and then grabbed a new order on the way back to my chair. One day I got a cut slip for a chemotherapy bag that I was making for a patient whose name I was in the habit of searching out from the pile daily. I stopped and looked around. Somehow I felt I had a simple sort of respects to pay, but who would want them?
Slowly I went from believing that I was doing the most important work in the world to ruminating over how pointless it was to be part of a pharmaceutical chain gang producing a mule train of medications to be hauled upstairs every hour of every day forever without end. From this darker perspective, the hospital was a place where you confined a sick person and then pumped medication through him until he died or got better, and it was not more complicated than that. I couldn’t cure anybody. I could follow a recipe and wait to see what happened.
Just as I reached the peak of my disenchantment, one of my professors offered me a long-term work-study position in his research laboratory, and all at once I was assured of the money that I needed to keep me in college until I got my degree. So I quit my hospital job and gave up on saving other people’s lives. Instead, I started working in a research laboratory in order to save my own life. To save myself from the fear of having to drop out and from then being bodily foreclosed upon by some boy back home. From the small-town wedding and the children who would follow, who would have grown to hate me as I vented my frustrated ambitions on them. Instead, I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here.
On the same day that I gave my notice to the human resources office at the hospital, I sat through my break with Lydia. While she smoked, she explained to me that I should never buy a Chevrolet because they just wouldn’t run reliably for a woman driver. She had always stuck with Fords and had yet to have one completely crap out on her. During a pause, I shared with Lydia that I’d gotten a better-paying job and that I was quitting the pharmacy. True, I’d been working in the hospital for barely six months, but I had begun to see it clearly for what it was. This place was a hellhole, I had realized, just as she had been telling me since the first day I met her.
I augured grandly that someday I would have my own research lab that would be even bigger than the one I was leaving for, and I wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t care as deeply about the work as I did myself. I completed my speech in a little crescendo of self-importance from chapter ten: it was inevitable that I would be working with a better heart in my own house…than I could in anybody else’s now.
I knew that she had heard me, and so I was surprised when she just looked away and took a drag on her cigarette instead of responding. After a moment, she tapped the ash off and continued talking about cars, picking up exactly where she had left off. After we both got off work at 11:00 p.m., I waited around for a bit, but then started toward my apartment on foot.
It was a clear night and so cold that the snow squeaked underneath my feet as I walked. After I had gone a few blocks, Lydia’s car passed me while I was trudging along and I was stung with a new type of loneliness. The old unhappy loss or want of something had, I am conscious, some place in my heart came to me from chapter forty-four. I watched Lydia’s single functioning taillight disappear across the bridge, lowered my head against the wind, and continued to make my own way home.
5
NO RISK IS MORE TERRIFYING than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor—to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibili
ty of flight. The tiny rootlet has only one chance to guess what the future years, decades—even centuries—will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.
Everything is risked in that one moment when the first cells (the “hypocotyl”) advance from the seed coat. The root grows down before the shoot grows up, and so there is no possibility for green tissue to make new food for several days or even weeks. Rooting exhausts the very last reserves of the seed. The gamble is everything, and losing means death. The odds are more than a million to one against success.
But when it wins, it wins big. If a root finds what it needs, it bulks into a taproot—an anchor that can swell and split bedrock, and move gallons of water daily for years, much more efficiently than any mechanical pump yet invented by man. The taproot sends out lateral roots that intertwine with those of the plant next to it, capable of signaling danger, similar to the way that information passes between neurons via their synapses. The surface area of this root system is easily one hundred times greater than that of all the leaves put together. Tear apart everything aboveground—everything—and most plants can still grow rebelliously back from just one intact root. More than once. More than twice.
The deepest-growing roots are those of the gutsy acacia tree (genus Acacia). When the Suez Canal was first dug, the thorny roots of a scrappy little acacia tree were found extending twelve meters, forty feet, or thirty meters downward, depending on whether you are reading Thomas (2000), Skene (2006), or Raven et al. (2005), respectively. I suspect that the authors of these botany textbooks included the Suez Canal anecdote in order to teach me something about hydraulics, but the story has left me with a dank and dusky false memory instead.
In my mind it is 1860, and I see a ragged cohort of men stumble upon a living root while they are digging more than one hundred feet belowground. I see them stand gaping in the fetid air, slowly overcoming their disbelief that this root could somehow be attached to some tree that is growing far above them. In fact, both parties registered their disbelief that day: the acacia tree was also undoubtedly surprised to find its roots exposed from the rock that confined it, and produced a flood of hormones in response, first locally and then eventually diffusing through every cell of its being.
When those men moved soil and rock in order to form an unprecedented path between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, they found a daring plant that had made an unprecedented path of its own. They found an acacia tree that had moved soil and rock, through years of dry failure until its improbable success.
In my mind, in 1860, I see the men congratulate each other and gather around the root long enough to take a photograph with it. And then I picture them chopping it in half.
6
SCIENTISTS TAKE CARE of their own to the extent that they are able. When my undergraduate professors saw my sincere interest in their research laboratories, they advised me to continue on for a Ph.D. I applied for entrance to the most famous universities that I had ever heard of, giddy in the knowledge that if accepted, I’d get not only free tuition but also a stipend that would just cover rent and food for the duration of my enrollment. This is how Ph.D. training in science and engineering generally works—as long as your thesis also furthers the goals of a federally funded project, you are supported at a sort of academic subsistence level. The day after the University of Minnesota conferred upon me a bachelor’s degree cum laude, I dumped off my winter clothes in a big pile at the Salvation Army on Lake Street, took Hiawatha Avenue south to Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, and flew to San Francisco. After I got to Berkeley, I didn’t so much meet Bill. It was more like I identified him.
During the summer of 1994, it became my responsibility to serve as the graduate student assistant instructor on what felt like an interminable field trip through the Central Valley of California. The average person cannot imagine himself staring at dirt for longer than the twenty seconds needed to pick up whatever object he just dropped, but this class was not for the average person. Each day for six entire weeks involved digging five to seven holes and stooping over them for hours, then camping out, and then doing it all over again at a different place. Every feature of every hole was subject to a complex taxonomy, and students were to become proficient in recording each tiny crack made by each plant root using the official rubric developed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
While examining a ditch of interest, the student employed the six-hundred-page Keys to Soil Taxonomy—a handy guide resembling a small phone book but much less interesting to read. Somewhere in Wichita (possibly), a committee of government agronomists has been perpetually enjoined to transcribe and reinterpret the Keys down through the ages as if it were an Aramaic text. The preface to the 1997 version of the Keys contains a moving passage describing the breakthroughs of the International Committee on Low Activity Clays that necessitated this new edition, emphasizing that it was written only for emergency use, given that the ongoing work of the International Committee on Aquic Moisture Regimes would likely make yet another overhaul unavoidable before 1999. But back in 1994 we were consigned to the 1983 version of the Keys and labored in childlike ignorance, little suspecting the bombshells soon to be dropped by the International Committee on Irrigation and Drainage.
We taught while crowded into a ditch with the ten-odd students who had worked with us to dig it out. The curriculum was designed to usher them into the secret world of the state agronomist, the civil servant, the park-service forester, and other practical land-management jobs. The grand finale of such soil-documentation exercises is the determination of “best use practice,” for which one deems most suitable the construction of a “residential structure,” a “commercial structure,” or “infrastructure,” after which one is goaded to “specify.” By the fourth week, a septic tank seems far too posh an ornament for whatever hole your head is in, and so you resort to paving the mental landscape into one unending parking lot, which is how I suppose some portions of the United States got to be the way they are.
It took me about a week to notice that one of our undergraduate students—the one who looked like a young Johnny Cash and was perennially clad in jeans and a leather jacket even in 105-degree heat—always somehow ended up several meters away from the edge of the group, digging his own private hole. The main professor of the course was also my thesis advisor, and as his assistant, my role was largely behind-the-scenes. I floated from hole to hole, checking on the students’ progress and answering any questions. I looked at the course roster and determined by process of elimination that the loner’s name was Bill. I went over and interrupted his solitary work. “How are you doing? Do you have any questions or anything?”
Without looking up, Bill refused my help, saying, “Nah. I’m good.” I stood there for a minute and then walked away and checked on another group, evaluated their progress, and answered some questions.
About thirty minutes later, I noticed that Bill was now digging a second hole, his first one having been carefully refilled and smoothed over at its top. I picked up his clipboard and saw that his soil evaluation had been completed meticulously and that he had also included his second-best answers in a separate column down the right side of the page. At the very top of his report, suitability for “infrastructure” was checked, and a specification of “juvenile detention center” had been added in careful handwriting.
I stood next to his hole. “Looking for gold?” I joked, trying to strike up a conversation.
“No. I just like to dig,” he explained without stopping. “I used to live in a hole.”
His matter-of-fact relation of this personal detail made me understand that he had meant it literally. “I also don’t like for people to see the back of my head,” he added.
Not taking the hint, I stood there and watched him dig for a while, and began to notice the uncommonly large amount of earth that he was moving with each shovelful and
the implied strength that must have accompanied his wiry frame. I also noticed that he was digging with something that looked like an old harpoon flattened at one end—a sword beaten into a real plowshare. “Where did you get that shovel?” I asked, figuring it was from the pile of junk I had hauled out of the department’s equipment locker, which had been located in the basement next to an old coal hull.
“It’s mine,” he said. “Don’t judge it until you’ve dug a mile in its shoes.”
“You mean you brought your own shovel from home?” I laughed in friendly surprise and delight.
“Hell yes,” he affirmed. “I wasn’t going to leave this thing unattended for six weeks.”
“I like your thinking,” I replied, seeing that I was clearly not needed. “Just let me know if you get stuck or have any questions.” I started to leave, but hesitated when Bill looked up at last.
He sighed. “Actually, I do have a question. Why aren’t those morons over there done already? This is like the hundredth hole we’ve looked at. How long does it take someone to learn to spot a fucking earthworm?”
I shook my head in corroboration and shrugged. “I guess their eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.”