by Hope Jahren
Years later, while preparing to move across the world, you find the stack of cassette tapes at the bottom of your closet. You realize that you won’t be bringing them along. One by one you disembowel the tapes, pulling out reels of shiny brown floss. A curly mess is all that remains from the sprawling ecstasy of those anguished high holidays. You sit for an hour and vow to try to love what’s left of the poor sick girl who recorded her own cries night after night with only a machine to hear her. You decide that this plastic snarl, though dead, is still precious, that it is the placenta that was attached to you while you writhed in the dark waiting to be born. You stand up, carry it outside, and bury it under the magnolia tree. You come inside and pack all of the things that you will take with you, and try to forgive yourself for what you’re leaving behind.
But that particular day of health and healing is still many years distant within my story, so let’s go back to 1998 in Atlanta and I’ll keep describing how the world spins when mania is as strong and ever-present as gravity.
10
“WHERE THE HELL have you been?” Bill hollered at me when he came around the corner and saw me standing in the lab.
I blinked at him numbly. “I’ve been in a funk,” I tried to say offhandedly even as I choked on my shame. I had been lying in bed crying for thirty-six hours after crashing down from my latest throbbing mania, this one triggered by the corticosteroid injections necessary to quell an acute allergic reaction. We had been studying plants along the Mississippi River, traveling through Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana while trying to sample our way through an unbelievably lush gauntlet of poison ivy.
Plants sweat while they photosynthesize, and our textbooks teach that—like us—the hotter it gets, the more they sweat. Along the Mississippi River there are thousands of trees of the same species growing along a tidy temperature gradient: the farther south you travel, the hotter it gets. We’d developed a method to measure sweating rates by comparing the chemistry of the water in the stem with that of the water inside the leaf, which is where the sweating (or “evapotranspiration”) takes place. We were startled to find that as spring progressed into summer, sweating rates went down and not up, even though the weather was getting hotter and hotter at all of the sites. It didn’t make any sense to me, and the more I sweated over the problem, the more the trees did not.
We had done the field trip three times already, and my allergic reaction to the rampant poison ivy had gotten worse each time. Nonetheless, we kept anxiously wading through the waist-high fields of ivy in order to find the stubborn trees that we’d first fixed upon for sampling. I wouldn’t and couldn’t let the study go, and the horrible itching that I felt was nothing compared with the discomfort that I felt when each dataset looked completely different from the way we thought it should.
During our most recent trip, a rash had raged up my neck and onto my face, giving rise to a massive edema at my right temple that not only made me look like the Elephant Man but also pressed against my right ocular nerve until I lost partial vision in that eye. I knew it was really bad when Bill stopped taunting me with the nickname “Meathead” while we drove tensely back to Atlanta from Poverty Point, Louisiana (a real place), stopping only to drop me off at the Emory Hospital emergency room.
After obtaining my written consent for photographs, because “we could probably publish this,” the doctors injected me with methylprednisolone and then brought in the cameras. They positioned me on tissue paper and clicked away while I tried not to giggle at the absurdity of the idea that our hopeless plant study might result in a publication after all.
After a few more hours of waiting around, I realized that I didn’t have the cab fare to get home and started to wish that I had asked Bill for some cash when he had dropped me off. The Rat Hole was somewhere west of where I was; I reckoned it at about five miles away.
I lay in my hospital bed, nestled in paper, until I began to understand that I was absolutely gorgeous and fantastic. I went to the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and decided that I might as well get out of there because I’d hardly be the strangest character on Ponce de Leon Avenue, especially at that time of night. By the time I got to the nurses’ station, I was also pretty sure that I was the next Jesus.
They discharged me anyway, and I walked, skipped, and then ran through the Druid Hills with ideas coming to me so fast that I couldn’t finish one thought before another one started up. I had to get back to the lab, because I had actually remembered something important: during my agricultural science courses I’d been taught about the delicate art of irrigation and the physics of water flow through porous soils. I remembered that for every one gram of tissue that a corn plant builds, it requires almost a liter of water. It sweats the water out to cool the biochemical machinery that turns atmosphere into sugar, and sugar into leaf. As the growing season progressed along the Mississippi, the deciduous trees must have stopped growing, having built all their new leaves back in the spring. The trees were sweating less, I realized, because the growing season was over and the system had achieved equilibrium.
Yes, as summer advanced, it was getting hotter and hotter all over the South, but the trees were already getting ready for winter: their growth rate was slowing, so they were sweating less too. These trees’ activities weren’t passively dictated by the temperature of our world; they were part and parcel of the goals of their world, which was focused upon making leaves. I started thinking about the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco—thousands of important scientists all in one place. I had to get there and spread the good gospel of my revelation.
I arrived breathlessly at the lab and eagerly revealed to Bill my crowning inspiration: we were going to go to the conference without any travel funds, personal or professional. I had figured it out—we’d drive! Sure, the meeting was in California and we lived in Georgia, but it was eight whole days away, which allowed plenty of time for us to get there.
My reasoning went like this: three-thousand-odd miles at sixty miles per hour came out to just fifty hours of driving, and we could break it into ten behind-the-wheel shifts lasting five hours each. That’s five days of driving with only one shift of driving on each day, if we took two students with us. Five easy days of driving. We’d fill out the paperwork to rent one of the university vans that came with its own gas card, and camp all along the way (technically illegal, but still). It would then take months for the accounts to come due, and by that time I’d have the funding somehow because one of my many proposals just had to result in a contract eventually. And after all, you can’t get funding if no one knows who you are, and so you have to appear at every conference and show them who you are, right?
I had previously submitted a vague abstract describing the Mississippi project to the meeting. Within it, I had hypothesized that the plants in my study used water more to support rapid growth than for cooling. It was an early attempt to shift focus away from the idea that the environment controls the plant and into a scenario where the plant controls the environment, a theme that I would reprise many times within many contexts over the coming years. But for that early conference, I didn’t have a clear narrative in place. I just hoped against hope that I’d have somehow worked out what to say at the conference by the time that I got there—if I ever got there.
I began to rattle on to Bill about how the road trip is the only essentially American literary vehicle, as first pioneered by Huck Finn on the Mississippi. As with many of my manic filibusters, what I lacked in coherence I more than made up for in enthusiasm. Bill rolled his eyes. “Shut your meat-hole and go home and get some sleep,” he advised. I scurried home and before long all hell broke loose as I soared up to a peak of mania and then crashed into an abyss of depression, all within the miserable privacy of my locked apartment.
Now I was back, it was days later, and Bill was looking me up and down. He brushed off the awkwardness and urged me to “snap out of it because we’re hitting the road!” He was shaking o
ur ragged Michelin Georgia state road atlas in one hand and the van keys in another. I stood amazed. While I had been mysteriously out of commission, Bill had taken my delirious suggestion as a serious order, reserved the van, and packed our gear. I smiled weakly, grateful for yet another chance to start over and do better.
The timing puzzled me, however, as it was already Wednesday and my talk was scheduled for eight o’clock on Sunday morning. We were now looking at three, not five, very long days of driving in order to get there by Saturday night. We started digging through the cardboard box where we kept our stash of the free state highway maps that we had stealthily removed from our local AAA office during multiple nervous visits staged for that very purpose. “Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and goddamn it—we don’t have Texas,” Bill bemoaned the one map out of fifty that we hadn’t thought to steal. “How in the world did we forget Texas?”
“Okay, so forget Texas! Let’s go north,” I suggested. “Have you ever been to Kansas?” Bill shook his head. “Well, you’re about to go,” I assured him as I pulled Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado out of the box.
I laid the maps end to end and measured with my hands; if we went up and across on I-70, the halfway point was at about Denver, and I had friends in Greeley who would surely let us stay and sleep off the first all-nighter, making us ready to roll again by noon on Friday. From there it was maybe fifteen hours to Reno, where we could camp at relatively low elevation before crossing Donner Pass and coming down into San Francisco by Saturday night, where Bill confirmed that his sister was ready to welcome us into her town house for the duration of the meeting.
Sure, it was already the first week of December, but I was from Minnesota and everything would be fine. “Salt Lake City? You’re going to love it,” I assured Bill. “It’s like an ocean of frozen mercury—it’s like nothing else.” I went on in raptures about the prairies, plains, and mountains we would cross, until I had fully regained my clear-eyed ambition.
“There’s simply no way that this is not a good idea,” I asserted, and we couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of this claim, while simultaneously being thoroughly convinced of its veracity.
As we packed up the van, I was further amazed to hear that Bill had indeed invited a bunch of students, and had even gotten a couple of takers. My graduate student Teri was certainly coming: she had recently returned to graduate school after working in the real world as a consultant for ten years, and I felt that it was urgent that she should begin networking as soon as possible. Though we suspected that Teri hadn’t been out of Georgia much, we didn’t know just how little before that trip.
Noah—our genius undergraduate who could do almost anything but never said a word while doing it—had agreed (silently, I presumed) to come. He had no driver’s license and so wouldn’t be of much help with the driving, but I relished the idea that he’d open up to us over the fifty-plus-hour drive and that we’d really get to know him. Bill, who had already spent a lot of time with Noah, was less optimistic about this and had already started referring to him as “the warm-blooded cargo.”
We double-checked the maps and the camping gear and then drove to Chevron and filled the sixteen-seater van’s obese gas tank. After that we drove to Kroger and I stuffed our large cooler with Diet Coke, ice, bread, Velveeta cheese, and baloney while Bill organized the candy trove. We agreed that the three drivers would rotate through three-hour shifts behind the wheel, allowing each driver to have six hours of rest between shifts. Thus we would stop once approximately every two hundred minutes to change drivers, buy gas, and take a bathroom break during the swap. All food was to be provided from the cooler, and whoever rode shotgun got to control the radio and was also responsible for making the driver’s sandwich to his or her specifications. Bill had procured four empty two-liter bottles, individually labeled them, and placed them behind the backseat for urinary emergencies.
Our plan actually worked surprisingly well and the first twenty-four hours of driving passed uneventfully. I was behind the wheel at about midnight and merged from I-64 onto I-70 as we crossed over the Mississippi River into Missouri. Bill kneeled on the seat beside me, gazing up, his whole upper body out the window, drinking in the gorgeous Gateway Arch of Saint Louis. As we turned north and passed right under it, the full moon lit it from above, perfectly complementing the floodlights below. When Bill finally sat back down as we turned west out of Old North Saint Louis, he said thoughtfully and without even a whiff of irony, “This is a beautiful country.”
I waited a minute or so and then answered, “Yes. It is.” Behind us, everyone else in the van was asleep. Five hours later the sun rose at our backs and slowly opened a door of light onto the endless windswept fields of Kansas. “This is a beautiful country,” Bill said again quietly to himself, and again I answered him, “Yes. It is.”
We arrived at Calvin (“Cal”) and Linda’s home in Greeley around dinnertime the next day, piling out of the van like a pack of tired hunting dogs coming home after a long chase. I had telephoned before we left Atlanta to tell them that we were coming, but had presumed upon their surrogate parentage that I’d be welcome and could bring friends. I wasn’t wrong: Cal and Linda had both been teachers for decades and loved me better than I deserved. We stretched our legs, came inside, and hungrily accepted the warm food that they offered.
“So what brings you through northern Colorado during December?” asked Cal in his offhanded way.
“We couldn’t find a map for Texas,” Bill answered, and I had no choice but to shrug my validation of his explanation.
Linda found a bed for each of us within their huge barn of a house and we all slept like rocks for ten hours; Bill and I were the first to emerge the next morning. Cal invited us to walk over to the neighborhood coffee shop and we accepted enthusiastically. As we drank our coffee, I told Cal about my plan to drive up to Laramie, over to Salt Lake City, then on to Reno and up over the Sierra Nevada, and finally down into Sacramento and across to the Bay Area, all in the next day and a half. Cal had grown up on a cattle ranch during the 1940s and was a steady man of few words. He listened and nodded his understanding, and then advised me in a measured tone, “There’s a big storm coming in. You might want to take I-70 through Grand Junction in order to avoid the Divide.”
“No, I don’t, because that’s longer,” I said, and then boasted, “I’ve already calculated it.”
“Well, not much longer, if it is at all,” Cal replied, though good-naturedly.
Determined to win what I saw as an argument, I insisted, “No, I’ll show you when we get home.” We unfurled the maps of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah and used a string to compare the two routes. With victorious satisfaction I was able to show that the string was ever so slightly shorter when it was laid up over Cheyenne. Cal just shook his head and asked us if we had chains in the van. I explained for the tenth time that no, we didn’t need any of that stuff because I had grown up in Minnesota. Cal shook his head again, went outside onto the porch, and stared at the northwestern sky for a while.
Of all the regrets of my life, winning that game with the string features prominently among them. My route was indeed shorter—all of sixty miles shorter than Cal’s. A single hour of driving: that’s what I thought I was avoiding by hurtling us headlong into the worst winter storm of the 1990s.
As we reloaded the van, Cal and Linda’s eight-year-old daughter, Olivia, decorated the inside with the crayon-colored flags that she had copied from the world atlas. While we hugged goodbye, I thought briefly about how I was always leaving the few people in the world who loved me, and then I shook it off and got behind the wheel.
My job was to drive to Rawlins, Wyoming, after which Teri would take over and get us to Evanston, just near where we would cross into Utah. As I drove, I heard Bill and Teri bickering about “the deli”—Bill’s name for our cooler of food, which was by now a couple of inches of cold water with baloney floating in it and a few chunks of residual ice pr
opping up some soggy cheese. It stank so horribly that Teri was pushing for a new rule: its lid could be opened only when two or more people wanted something inside, and even then only with the windows open. I sympathized with Teri, knowing full well that the stench was hardly going to improve in the next two days, but I felt obligated to side with Bill, as he was the only one of us who was still actually eating from the cooler. Because of the fight, everyone—maybe even Noah too—was in a sour mood when we stopped at a gas station on the west side of Rawlins so that Teri could take over the driving.
While I was waiting for everyone to finish in the bathroom, I stood and stared at the horizon, noting that the sky looked awfully dark for 1:00 p.m. I could also feel the temperature plummeting as the wind picked up. Teri came out of the gas station and climbed into the driver’s seat, and I asked her to tap on the horn to signal to the others that we were ready to roll.
Bill and Noah jumped into the backseats, and Teri started the engine. I was tired and bored though the day was still young, and the map that I was holding made the road ahead look flat and uninteresting. I took off my boots and put my bare feet up against the heaters on the dashboard. I thought about putting my seat belt on but then decided against it: This was the flattest place on Earth; what could possibly happen?
As we merged onto I-80, Teri pressed forcefully on the accelerator and the van sped forward as if she were joining the commuter rat race on the Atlanta beltway. I shifted in my seat uneasily but said nothing for a mile or so. The very moment that we crossed the Great Divide, the weather changed drastically and I saw flurries starting to come down.
I looked at the wet road and realized that in the next few minutes it would become slick with ice. I looked at Teri and realized that her plan was just to keep ramming on the gas pedal and maintain eighty miles per hour. I spoke in the calm and steady voice that I use to instruct students while they are immersed in a dangerous and complicated laboratory procedure. “Okay, so it’s going to get really icy here and you’re going to want to slow way dowwww…”