Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  Bill and I dig together as sort of a waltz, with one of us “throwing” and the other “catching”—one person chips the ground with a pick, while another positions one shovel below to catch the debris. When that shovel is full, it is swapped for another, and the original one is emptied to the side. Unlike holes that are dug for construction purposes, the fill must be carefully piled to the side in order to keep the bottom clear and provide a view all the way up to the top of the hole. Even as we avoid compressing the soil profile, there are always stray students who we notice standing on the top and looking down on us, and we shoo them away like the chipmunks at the campground. When we ask for digging volunteers, we are occasionally taken up on the offer by what inevitably turns out to be the farm kid of the group. But most students don’t really want to dig. In the old days they used to stand idly by, watching us dig for hours, which peeved us. Now they turn sideways, surreptitiously searching for cell phone signals.

  Once we can see new earth from top to bottom, we take “pins” (old railroad spikes that we painted bright orange) and insert them at the boundaries between what we think we see as layers. Bill and I argue about the direction of the sun and over whether each detail is real or just a shadow, and we work to convince each other of our opinions like lawyers in a contentious trial with no judge and a bored jury.

  Sometimes soil boundaries are distinct, as within a chocolate-vanilla layer cake, and sometimes they are as gradual as the edge-to-middle change of red within one square of a Mondrian painting. Although they form a foundation for all of the data that will follow, the number and placing of these soil “horizons” are the most subjective part of the exercise, and each scientist displays a slightly different style. Some, like me, feel we’re creating modern art out of the landscape, preferring the result to be huge and whole, with as few rules guiding the eye as possible. We are known as “lumpers” because we tend to lump the details together as we work.

  Others, including Bill, are more like the Impressionists, convinced that each brushstroke must be executed with individuality in order to achieve a coherent whole. They are known as “splitters” because they split the subtle details into separate categories as they work. The only way to do good soil science is to put a splitter and a lumper together in the soil pit and let them fight it out until they achieve something that they both know must be correct because neither of them feels satisfied. Left to her own devices, the lumper will dig for three hours, mark the horizons in ten minutes, and then go on her merry way. Left to his own devices, the splitter will dig a hole and crawl inside, never to be seen again. Thus splitters and lumpers are both productive only when forced into bickering collaboration, and though together they produce great maps, they rarely return from field trips still on speaking terms.

  Once the soil horizon demarcations have been successfully negotiated, a sample is removed from each layer, relocated to the tarp, and subjected to a battery of chemical tests to determine acidity, salt content, nutrient levels, and a growing list of field-ready chemical attributes. At the end of the day, all the information is transferred to the blackboard, graphed and drawn, and a long discussion ensues about what the visual properties and the chemical properties, taken together, imply about the fertility of the soil—“fertility” being one of the most grandiose and imprecise terms that science has ever produced.

  The ideal educational field trip lasts about a week, with one new soil written up each day, and about a hundred miles of driving afterward, toward another site. Five days and five hundred miles provide enough time and space to give students an idea as to how much soils vary across the landscape, and also to expose them to the thoughtful, ramblin’ mind-set necessary for soils work. By the end of the trip they are either in love with the work or utterly turned off, and therefore have probably decided upon a major as well.

  By dragging students through dirt for five days I can do something far more important and significant than I can do for them during an entire semester behind a desk, and so Bill and I have clocked tens of thousands of miles on these trips.

  Bill is the most patient, caring, and respectful teacher that I have ever seen in action. He will sit with a student for as long as it takes, sometimes hours if needed, in order to help him or her learn just one task. He does the very hardest work of teaching, not just relating facts from a book but standing over a machine and showing how to work it with your hands, how it might break and how to fix it when it does. Students call him at two in the morning when they can’t work something, and he wearily comes to the lab and helps them—if he’s not already there, of course. He continues tirelessly to coax the slower students toward success, long after I’ve become frustrated and written them off as not trying hard enough.

  Of course, twentysomethings being what they are, most students take Bill completely for granted, save a very few who understand that by the end, their thesis is often as much his as it is theirs. Nevertheless, the most efficient way to get yourself fired from my lab and out on the street is to openly disrespect Bill. You can call me any name you like, but he is your superior and you will remember it and act accordingly. For his part, Bill complains about each student with uniformly wicked contempt and then spends yet another day rescuing them from themselves.

  At about five o’clock on that day in southern Georgia—technically the same day we ate the dumplings—we filled in the hole that we had dug and packed up our gear. We stopped in Waycross to replenish the gas tank and our candy supply. While we were debating the advantages of the Hershey bar versus Starbursts, Dumpling approached us and said, “I don’t want to go see Stuckie. I’m tired of him. And I think he freaks Reba out.”

  During each field trip we set aside time for one “enrichment” activity, and Dumpling preferred not to revisit the one we’d made a habit of enjoying during our previous trips to that site. “Stuckie” is a fossilized dog that is on display within a museum called Southern Forest World and is even more unique than it sounds. According to the paleontological expertise that was brought to bear upon the specimen, it is the remains of a dog that ran up a hollow tree “probably chasing an animal” and got stuck and died. The tree petrified while the dog mummified within it, thus preserving for eternity the real-life tableau of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

  Stuckie fascinated me and I loved to imagine him as Creon breaking into Antigone’s tomb, his face contorted into a grimace of need and regret. When I recalled, however, that Reba always refused to go anywhere near the macabre thing, I realized that from her perspective, Stuckie was a sort of canine poor Yorick whose smell probably inspired unpleasant ruminations about a dog’s place in the universe. I made a mental note to apologize later while I watched her mill about near the Dumpster in one of my bright-orange Orioles T-shirts, worn to increase visibility when ambling near the highway.

  “I don’t know.” I thought, hesitating, and then said, “Bill really looks forward to Stuckie.”

  Bill was ambivalent. “My enjoyment of Stuckie is compromised by your babbling about Greek crap,” he noted, “which starts earlier and earlier during each trip, by the way.”

  “Okay, any ideas about where we should go instead?” I asked Dumpling, and Bill shot me a furious look, enraged that I would do something so foolhardy as let a student chart our course. Tradition dictated that we had to go do some goofy tourist thing before returning home.

  “How about that place we always see on the billboard? ‘Monkey Jungle’? It looks cool,” Dumpling offered.

  I threw my backpack in the van and whistled for Reba. “Monkey Jungle it is. All aboard!” I called out to the group.

  “Why not? It’s only eight hours away,” growled Bill while staring daggers at me. I smiled sweetly in return, and once he realized that I was serious, we both got in the car.

  Bill does all the driving when we go on the road; he is an excellent driver who merges onto the highway, gets behind the biggest truck he can find, and then follows it at a safe distance for as many miles as possible. I am
never allowed to drive because I don’t have the patience required by big landscapes; my mind wanders as I drive, and the asphalt road starts to seem more flexible than it really is. My job instead is to talk for hours and dream up scenarios outrageous enough to make Bill laugh, which becomes more challenging as the miles drag on.

  I used to think that Bill habitually drove fifty miles per hour because of the responsibility he felt toward our student cargo. But after learning the life history of every motorized vehicle he had ever owned, I later realized he couldn’t actually know that they were capable of mile-per-minute travel. Regardless, my attitude had become that I could go anywhere in the world, provided that I was willing to ride shotgun long enough. Once we had agreed to skip Stuckie, there was nothing for it but to get on the highway and drive south.

  Ten or so exits north of the Florida border we saw a huge black billboard displaying only two words written in neon pink: BUTT NAKED. It bothered me that I couldn’t figure it out. “What does that mean?” I mused aloud in my ignorance. “Is it a bar? Or a strip club? Or a video shop or something?”

  “I think it’s pretty clear what it means,” said Bill. “It means that if you get off the highway, there’s something butt naked at or near the exit.”

  “But I mean, is it a woman or a man or a mole rat or what? Is it even connected to something?” I mused. “Or does it imply that you have the opportunity to get yourself butt naked?”

  “It’s probably some kind of Gomer-code for something really sick,” volunteered a student who was notorious for his derision of all things south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  “Listen,” explained Bill, “if you’re the kind of guy who’s going to pull off of the highway after seeing a sign like that, you’re probably also the kind of guy who doesn’t care what’s butt naked on the other end. As soon as you see the words ‘butt’ and ‘naked’ you hit the brakes and just go with it.”

  One of the more politically conscious graduate students tried to stir the pot by asking, “Why are you assuming that it would be a guy who is going to a place like that?” Bill shook his head and continued to stare at the road, unwilling to dignify his question with a response.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t long before a better billboard caught our attention. “Explore Monkey Jungle!” it commanded us. “Where humans are caged and monkeys run wild!” We all shrieked in jubilation.

  “We must be getting close,” suggested one of the students hopefully.

  Bill shrugged. “Well, we are in Florida.” We had just passed a sign marking the border and welcoming us to the Sunshine State. The attraction we were headed toward was located near Miami, still about seven hours’ drive south of where we were.

  Monkey Jungle didn’t appear quite so inviting when we pulled into its parking lot that night at 1:00 a.m., given that its lights were off and a heavy link chain bound the handles of the front door. Bill jumped out of the van as soon as he parked, to inspect the sign on the door and also to inhale dried Nicotiana tabacum leaves, as he had taken to describing it. The students spilled out of the van like an undone bag of marbles, a few rolling off and becoming unreachable as the majority congregated in place. Bill returned to the group and suggested that we set up our tents on the grassy patch in front of the entrance and sleep until the place opened at 9:30 a.m.

  He took a drag of his cigarette. “I figure that somewhere during the course of opening shop they’ll bother to wake us up,” he said.

  Dumpling chimed in. “That way we’ll be first in line!”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” I said. “Don’t monkeys crow at dawn like roosters or something?”

  “You tell us,” said Bill as he rubbed out his cigarette. “You’re the one who’s been sleeping with a monkey.” He was referring to my latest on-again, off-again boyfriend, who was indeed no Rhodes Scholar. I stood there with a smirk on my face while Bill unloaded the coolers and then went to work setting up my tent before unpacking his own, a signal that he had meant no offense. In order to signal back that no offense had been taken, I started digging through the cooler and tried to come up with an idea for dinner.

  “Well, it looks like dinner-on-a-stick,” I announced, having found extremely little with which to cook us anything.

  “That’s awesome,” Bill said supportively, having finished with the tents in record time. “It’s my favorite,” he added without sarcasm, and then pulled out an armload of wood and got to work building a fire. It was our custom to visit the campus woodshop before each field trip and to load up the van with the scrap pieces of wood that had been otherwise destined for the pulp bin. Afterward we’d do the same with cardboard taken from the campus recycling center. On the way out of town we’d buy one Duraflame log for each day of the trip and a bunch of random food, and consider ourselves prepared for camping. We’d use these materials each night to build what I called an “Andy Warhol fire,” within which we’d use the ever-lit log to ignite a continuous stream of recyclable materials, and the emergent blaze always had a satisfyingly garish result. You could cook over such a fire provided that your sleeves weren’t flammable and that you didn’t mind if the middle of whatever you were eating was cold and raw.

  Dinner-on-a-stick meant that each person found a stick and put whatever they wanted on it and then stuck it in the fire and ate it, and that was dinner. The only rule was that if you stumbled upon something really good, you afterward had to make enough for the whole group, or at least try to make it again and divvy up the result. Dumpling was on a roll during that trip and actually managed to poach pears using a Coke can that had been torn in half and ingeniously skewered on a stick. We all agreed that his Hershey’s chocolate–drizzled creation was the absolute pinnacle of camping cuisine, except for his dumplings, of course, and everyone went off to bed happily.

  Soon after falling asleep I was unceremoniously awoken by someone with a deep voice and an extremely bright flashlight. I stuck my head outside the tent. “Can I help you, officer?” I asked.

  Puzzled to find a reasonably clean and articulate woman instead of a desperately unwashed and incoherent man, the patrolman inquired what we were doing there. I explained our field trip in detail, accentuating my pedagogical duty to fulfill one talented student’s specific desire to visit the renowned Monkey Jungle in person before his brief youth had faded.

  As so often occurs when I find myself in such situations, the officer’s authoritarian skepticism melted into hospitality while I waxed rhapsodic over the rare and peerless Floridian soils. Within a couple of minutes he was offering everything from professional surveillance while we slept to a police escort when we chose to depart for Atlanta. I declined his assistance gratefully, assuring him that I would indeed call 9-1-1 on the pay phone down the road if I needed anything, and we parted on excellent terms.

  After he drove off, Bill stuck his head out of his tent. “That was masterful,” he said. “You amaze me.”

  I looked up at the stars and took a deep breath of the humid air. “Damn,” I said contentedly, “I love the South.”

  The incomparable welcome peculiar to the southern states continued the next morning, when the admissions desk of Monkey Jungle waved our whole group through upon receipt of the insufficient sum of fifty-seven dollars, which represented every last bit of paper money that Bill and I could produce from our pockets. After we walked out of the foyer and through the doors that led to the Jungle we were immediately overwhelmed by the screaming. It emanated from a diverse population of monkey inmates as a large number of them turned their attention toward us.

  “Good God, it’s just like walking into the lab,” said Bill, his face twisted into what I recognized as his pre-migraine countenance.

  The room we were in was actually a very large courtyard within the building complex, which had all the architectural panache of your average DMV. In a great arc over the top of the courtyard, long stretches of chicken wire were seamed together and appeared to have been repeatedly reinforced in certain
places. Homo sapiens visiting the courtyard could walk through the space within a hallway bounded by steel mesh; hence the billboard slogan.

  Monkey Jungle was indeed a doppelgänger for my lab, and the more I thought about it, the clearer the comparison became. Perhaps the ambiance had been amplified by a couple of orders of magnitude, but each of our research activities was represented by its simian equivalent within the enclosure. Three Java macaques that had been straining their brains over some problem that they could neither solve nor abandon propelled themselves toward us, supposing that we somehow represented an answer. A white-handed gibbon was draped limply across our walkway, either asleep or dead or someplace in between. Two small squirrel monkeys seemed to be trapped in their own private Samuel Beckett play, caught in a web made of equal parts dependence and loathing. In ironic proximity, two other squirrel monkeys were getting along very, very well by the looks of it.

  A single howler monkey sat high on a branch in the back, wailing out the entire Book of Job in his native tongue while periodically raising his arms in an age-old supplication for an explanation as to why the righteous must suffer. A red-handed tamarin crouched in paranoia, rubbing its hands together and scheming toward some sinister end. Two beautiful Diana monkeys meticulously groomed each other while psychologically adrift upon an ocean of boredom. An exhausted cadre of capuchins paced the perimeter, compulsively checking and rechecking the empty feeding troughs for the raisin that they were certain was right there a minute ago.

  “Every monkey is some monkey’s monkey,” I said out loud.

  I then happened to notice Bill across the courtyard standing face-to-face with a spider monkey, separated only by a rusty screen. Both of them sported the same hairdo, a three-inch-long dark-brown shiny mop that stuck up in all directions, having been groomed with little more than a few vigorous scratches during the last two weeks. This same shag covered both of their faces, and their lithe limbs hung with an athletic readiness that was only weakly camouflaged by their affected slouches. The spider monkey’s dark, limpid eyes were very wide open and his facial expression suggested that he was in a permanent state of shock.