Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  What puzzles us as botanists, however, is that those forests somehow persisted through three months of total darkness each winter, to be followed by three months of continuous summer sun. Extreme light regimes are incredibly stressful to today’s plants, which generally would not live through a year of such treatment. In contrast, forty-five million years ago, the Arctic was home to thousands of miles of dense, productive deciduous forests that thrived through these wild swings in illumination. The discovery of trees that could live in the dark is akin to a discovery of humans that could live underwater. We must conclude that either the trees of the past were capable of something that today’s trees cannot do, or the trees of today no longer use these talents and instead keep them tucked away as an adaptive ace up their evolutionary sleeve.

  Bill and I, and ten other researchers who hailed from the paleontology department of the University of Pennsylvania, had been set down on Axel Heiberg in groups of four, delivered by helicopter, after riding a twin-engine aircraft, after riding plane after plane, moving north from Toronto to Yellowknife to Resolute and on up for days. Standing in the mud, watching the helicopter fly off, we looked down at our backpacks and up at each other, and realized how profoundly alone we were in our little group.

  Over the next five weeks, the paleontologists would spend day after day parked in one spot, carefully exhuming single specimens of the buried fossil trees. They worked painstakingly, basically digging a trench with ten toothbrushes. They uncovered amazing fossils: tree trunks six feet in diameter and almost perfectly intact. Because the ground was frozen, the sediment covering the fossils had to be scraped off centimeter by centimeter once the sun had thawed the top layer; it was like digging through ice cream that had frozen too hard for easy serving. The paleontologists had a few different specimens that they were unearthing, and they used small cards of plastic to do it, similar to the way that you might scrape ice off of a windshield using your driver’s license. They rotated among fossils, the perpetual sun slowly assisting them.

  The fossils were still made of wood, which is what made them precious. Most of the tree fossils you can think of have been petrified as fluids have passed through them for ages, swapping molecule for mineral until the tree has fully turned to rock. In contrast, the fossils of Axel Heiberg Island contained wood tissue that was still intact—you could even burn the fossils to heat your bathwater, which is what the rough-and-ready grizzly male geologists had done with it during the eighties when the site was first surveyed, if legends are to be believed.

  The paleontologists of our trip were a more housebroken version of the classic mountain-man geologist, but still hard-working, hard-drinking, and fascinated with the gun that the Canadian government required us to carry in case of polar bears. I had learned to keep my distance from these types of colleagues, knowing that they would never accept me as having a legitimate intellectual claim to the site, even if our funding agency did. In their eyes, I was just a grubby little girl who couldn’t lift forty pounds with a weirdo in tow, and I embraced this role, hoping it would result in their underestimating me to the point of leaving me alone. Somehow, all of our sleep cycles settled into a pattern where Bill and I worked while they slept and vice versa.

  Bill and I also took a fundamentally different approach to the site, as compared with our more established colleagues. I was obsessed not with the fantastic individual fossils but with the incredible duration and stability of the forest as a whole. This was no flash-in-the-pan freaky ecosystem; this configuration of global biology had persisted for many millions of years—millions of years during which huge amounts of carbon and water flooded into the Arctic and were transformed into leaves and woods, and then shed annually in a gush of tissue. How in the world did the system sustain itself? There is nowhere near that kind of fresh, liquid water available in the Arctic now, not to mention the lack of soil nutrients.

  Bill and I decided that instead of looking at a single snapshot of time by digging up a few individual trunks, we were going to tunnel vertically through the whole mess, looking for subtle changes through time in the chemistry of the mummified wood, leaves, and sticks. This meant digging apart and sampling layer after layer of the dead, compressed debris that had accumulated over millions of years. As we burrowed vertically through cross sections of dry, rotted leaves, we sampled centimeter by centimeter and recorded precisely where in the column we were. By the end of three summer field seasons, we’d sampled our way through a hundred vertical feet of time and were able to identify at least one strong swing in climate that the forests had been able to tolerate. From this we have argued that these ancient Arctic ecosystems are better characterized as “resilient” than “stable.”

  We chose a spot across the basin, far from the place where the paleontologists were excavating, and for weeks on end, Bill and I dug up through sediment layers that were more than ten feet thick and interbedded with gravel and silt. Each week we’d thrash around in a different twelve-foot pile of forty-million-year-old dry compost. Often we worked while hanging off of one side of a gentle, sloping, and soft cliff that was continuously giving way out from under us, sending us tumbling down the hill covered in a debris slide.

  We dug without secure footing while we tried to get a clean sample and keep track of our position relative to a base elevation. But in this environment it was difficult to the point of being silly, and we cycled back and forth between riotous laughter and rageful frustration throughout those long days of cartwheeling down the hills. One time when I dug up with the claw end of my hammer I cracked something odd and pounds of sparkling clear amber rained down on my head. “So this is what it’s like to be an earthworm,” Bill remarked once after a particularly big avalanche, and I remember pausing in appreciation of how his observations were always so spot-on.

  At least once a day, we indulged ourselves in the following way: we’d plop down waist deep in the crunchy rubble and pull out some treats. Nothing tastes as good as a Snickers bar and a hot thermos of coffee in the cold middle of nowhere, and once a day we focused all of our energy toward savoring this pleasure in quiet, companionable reflection.

  One day, after we had chewed our last bites, Bill raised his arm and silently pointed at a gray speck many yards off. I puzzled for a moment and then saw that he was pointing out an Arctic hare. Coming across an animal—any animal—is a rare treat in the Arctic, because an herbivore must travel long distances to keep itself fed upon the sparse moss and lichen available, and a carnivore must, by extension, keep moving to follow wide-roaming prey.

  The hare came closer, picking among the rocks, and then began to move away from us. Bill and I stood up and followed it, keeping a good distance and leaving our gear behind. We walked for about a mile without talking, following the hare and watching it, trying to exploit the visual novelty that it offered against the bleak and monotonous landscape. It was a large hare, big as a sheltie dog and with similar fur, long ears, and a long, lean body. It didn’t seem to mind us following it at a distance of a quarter mile or so, so we hung back and followed for more than an hour. There was no real way for us to get lost; we could walk all day and still turn around and see the Day-Glo orange tents of our campsite.

  When you are supremely isolated among just a handful of people, those few people can quickly begin to seem suffocating. And they did—except for Bill, I had discovered. Before that trip, I had never really spent twenty-four-seven with anyone for weeks on end, and it seemed that with every passing day it got easier for us and not harder. Regardless of whether we were awake or asleep, we were never more than a few feet apart, though always in separate tents. Some days we chattered incessantly; some days we said only a few words, and then we lost track of what we did or didn’t say, of how much we were talking or not talking. We were just us being us.

  On the day that we followed the hare, we eventually found ourselves on a geographical high point, and I turned to see that our colleagues back at the dig were only fuzzy specks in the distance, a
s we must have been to them. In the other direction, we could see the edge of a glacier that lay like a thick white layer of frosting, still several miles away. I sat down to admire it and Bill sat down a few feet away from me. We sat in silence for another half hour, until Bill finally said, “It feels weird not to be working.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “And we’ve dug through every layer twice while sampling. It doesn’t make any sense to do it again.”

  “But we have to do something,” countered Bill. “Otherwise the Grizzly Adamses down there are going to wonder what the hell we’re doing on this trip, won’t they?”

  I laughed. “They already wonder what I’m doing here. And digging to China and back wouldn’t convince them that I’m a legitimate scientist.”

  “Really?” Bill looked at me in surprise. “I always figured it was just me who felt like a random mistake.”

  “Naw,” I assured him. “Look at those guys. I’m going to do this job for thirty more years, work as hard as any of them, accomplish just as much or more, and not one of them will ever look me straight in the eye like I belong here.”

  “Well, at least you have two whole hands,” Bill countered, wiggling his incomplete set of digits. “That’s a good start anyway.”

  I lay back and looked at the sky. “Oh, come on, nobody ever notices your hand,” I said. “Honestly, you’re more normal-looking than anyone I know; I don’t know why you don’t get that.”

  “Are you sure? Why don’t you poll some little kids about it?” Bill asked. “Like my second-grade class. And third grade. And high school, and so on.”

  I sat up with a start. “They teased you? At school? About your hand?” The idea enraged me.

  “Yup,” confirmed Bill quietly, still staring at the sky.

  I pushed the point. “So is that your deal? You’ve carried that all these years? Is that it? Living in a hole, no friends?”

  “That’s about right,” Bill confirmed.

  “You never did Cub Scouts, joined a team, all that crap?” I listed all the usual milestones that I had taken for granted.

  “Now you’re getting it,” Bill acknowledged.

  “You’ve never been on a date, have you?” I asked. It seemed to have been hanging in the air, and it just felt right to say it.

  Bill stood up and raised both arms into the endless blue-white sky that seemed, on that bright July day, to be incapable of darkness. “I never went to the prom!” he howled.

  When our laughter died down, I thought a little and then spoke. “So why not now?” I suggested. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, with no one to see you. You could dance now.”

  There was a long pause. “I don’t know how,” said Bill.

  “Yes, you do,” I insisted. “It’s not too late. C’mon, we came all this way. Jesus, this is why we’re here. I just figured it out. This is the place where you dance.”

  To my surprise, Bill didn’t joke it off this time. He took a few steps toward the glacier; he stood and stared at it for a long time with his back to me. Then he slowly began to turn in a circle and stomp, and do rough jumping skips in between stomps. It started out awkward, but he soon threw himself into it, spinning and stomping and jumping. Soon he was moving with abandon, but deliberately, not frantically.

  I sat directly in front of him, held my head up, and watched. I watched him, as a clear-eyed witness of what he was doing and of what he was, of all of it. There at the end of the world, he danced in the broad and endless daylight, and I accepted him for what he was, instead of for what he wished he could be. The potency of my acceptance made me wonder, just a little, if I could turn it inward and accept myself. I didn’t know, but I promised myself that I would figure it out on another day. Today was already taken. Today was for watching a great man dance in the snow.

  5

  ALL OF THE SEX on planet Earth is biologically designed to serve one evolutionary purpose: to mix the genes of two separate individuals and then produce a new individual sporting genes identical to neither parent. Within this new mix of genes are unprecedented possibilities, old weaknesses eliminated, and new weaknesses that might even turn out to be strengths. This is the mechanism by which the wheels of evolution turn.

  All sex involves touch: the living tissues of two separate individuals must come into contact and then attach. Contacting and attaching to another individual is a big problem for plants: they are anchored in place and their survival depends upon their immobility. Nevertheless, the vast majority of plants faithfully produce a new crop of flowers every single year, fulfilling their half of the reproductive bargain, even though the odds of these flowers eventually becoming fertilized are small.

  Most flowers are built simply: a platform of petals surrounding the “male” and “female” parts. On the outer ring of this circle is the male component: a few long stalks with wads of pollen glued loosely to the ends. In the center and at the bottom of a chute sit the ovaries. Of all the things that could travel down this open chute, a grain of pollen from the same plant species is the only thing that might activate fertilization. Self-fertilization is slightly more likely to occur, which means that the ovules will come in contact with pollen from the same flower. This can result in a seed, and then possibly a new individual, but no new genes will have been introduced. For the species to persist and evolve, real fertilization must happen periodically, and this means that pollen from one, or ten, or ten thousand feet away must successfully arrive at the ovaries.

  There is a wasp that cannot reproduce outside the flower of a fig; this same fig flower cannot be fertilized without the help of a wasp. When the female wasp lays her eggs inside the fig flower, she also deposits the pollen that coated her when she hatched within a different fig flower. These two organisms—the wasp and the fig—have enjoyed this arrangement for almost ninety million years, evolving together through the extinction of the dinosaurs and across multiple ice ages. Theirs is like any epic love story, in that part of the appeal lies in its impossibility.

  Such specificity is extremely rare in the plant world, so rare as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a feel-good example of symbiosis between ecological soul mates. Much more than 99.9 percent of pollen produced in the world goes absolutely nowhere and fertilizes nothing. As for the infinitesimal number of grains that arrive in the right place, it seems irrelevant to claim that it matters how they got there. Wind, insects, birds, rodents, or the empty corners of FedEx boxes—the vast majority of plants have absolutely no preference as to the method of pollen delivery.

  Magnolia, maple, dogwood, willow, cherry, and apple trees—they spread their pollen on every kind of fly or beetle, luring them near with sweet nectar but providing only enough for a brief taste. The value of an insect as a pollinator lies in the distance that it may travel, and thus less time spent lounging about on a petal means more time traveling in the air. Many shrubs in North America and Europe bear flowers with petals set to spring once weighted by an insect, smacking the bee full of pollen and back on his way.

  In contrast, the elm, birch, oak, poplar, walnut, pine, and spruce, as well as the grasses, all release their pollen to the wind. It goes farther than it would by insect, but never as directly to another flower. Wind-borne pollen travels for miles and then rains down indiscriminately. Enough of it hits its target, however, to keep the world perpetually blanketed by the great conifer forests of Canada, the Giant Redwood groves of the Pacific Northwest, and the expansive spruce forests that stretch through Scandinavia and Siberia.

  One grain of pollen is all that is necessary to fertilize an ovum and then develop into a seed. One seed may grow into a tree. One tree can produce one hundred thousand flowers each year. Each flower can produce one hundred thousand grains of pollen. Successful plant sex may be rare, but when it does happen it triggers a supernova of new possibilities.

  6

  WHEN I WAS THIRTY-TWO I learned that life can change in one day.

  Within certain social circles of the marrie
d, a single woman over the age of thirty inspires compassion similar to that bestowed upon a big, friendly stray dog. Although the dog’s unkempt appearance and tendency toward self-reliance betray its lack of an owner, the way it gravitates hungrily toward human contact suggests that it might once have known better days. You consider letting it eat on the porch after you confirm that it is not mangy, but then you decide not to, vaguely worried that it might start hanging around because it has nowhere else to go.

  In the right venue—at a casual outdoor picnic, perhaps—a stray dog is a curiosity and even an asset; its muddy clowning provides a rosy window into the carefree life of a simpler being. As everybody’s pet and nobody’s responsibility, it is at least friendly, if not wholesome, and is remarkably happy given its humble lot. If a single woman can be thought of as a dog at such events, then a thirtysomething single man is effectively characterized as the guy manning the hamburger grill. He’s sure to be plagued by the dog from start to finish, whether he likes animals or not.

  I met Clint at a barbeque of that sort, and he couldn’t have shooed me away even if he had tried, because he was easily the most beautiful man I had ever seen. A week later, I worked up the nerve to ask our hostess for his e-mail address, and then I wrote and invited him to dinner. After he accepted, I phoned to tell him the location, which was the trendiest restaurant I could identify near Dupont Circle. I’d certainly never been there, but it seemed like a place where people went on fancy dates, and Washington, D.C., was much cooler than Baltimore—I did know that. After giving him directions I further stipulated, “I’ll only show up if you agree that I am paying for dinner.” I had always paid my own way through life, and I wasn’t about to give that up now.