Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  Bill was thinking of something different. He looked at me and asked, “Good Lord, did you age five years while I was outside?” and then added, “You look like a fucking sea hag.”

  “You’re fired,” I told him. “Go see the other sea hags down in HR for your paperwork.”

  “They don’t work on Saturdays. Besides, c’mon, you gotta come outside.” He motioned toward the door.

  The greenhouse that we use is one of many at the university research station, nestled up in the valley beside a little creek that flows down to the ocean. Each greenhouse is as big as a gymnasium and is composed of little more than a huge stainless-steel scaffolding covered over with sheer shade cloth. The Hawaiian Islands are themselves more or less a string of greenhouses: plant growth conditions are excellent year-round, complete with daily showers that are more like routine watering events than like storms.

  I looked where Bill was pointing, up toward the jungled mountains, and saw a bright ribbon of rainbow stretching in a full arc across the sky. Its sharp focus made it all the more brazen and beautiful, and it was bracketed by a second rainbow, wider and fuzzier, a gentle halo supporting the confident blaze of the first.

  “Hey, it’s a double rainbow,” I marveled.

  “Goddamn right it’s a double rainbow,” Bill said.

  “Well, you don’t see them often,” I said, justifying my wonder.

  “Nope,” Bill agreed. “Nobody sees the second rainbow. But it’s always there; it’s just that nobody sees it. The big rainbow probably thinks that it’s alone.”

  I looked at him hard. “You’re certainly deep today,” I remarked, and then played my part. “The two rainbows are actually one. A single ray of light moving through bad weather just gives the appearance of two separate things.”

  Bill paused, and then commented briskly, “Well, rainbows are self-centered fuckers who need to get over themselves.”

  I observed that that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

  We walked around back, got a couple of lawn chairs from the old shed, and went back inside the greenhouse. The far side of the huge space was a shambles, with stacks of dirty flowerpots in the corner, one of which had been used as a bucket to hold a big snarl of dirty measuring tape. There was a loose heap of soil in one spot, and we set up our folding chairs next to it and then sat with our bare feet in the cool, damp dirt. At the other end of the greenhouse was somebody else’s ongoing experiment. Perennial in every sense, it had been there before we came and will probably still be going when I retire.

  “How can you not like that?” I waved an arm toward the rows and rows of profuse orchids. “Just smell it.”

  “We’ve got it pretty damn good, I have to admit,” said Bill. “Never dreamed I’d end up in Hawaii,” he continued.

  I worry about Bill. I worry about his past, and his would-haves. I worry that he would have a wife and a bunch of kids if he hadn’t been hanging around me all these years. Bill keeps explaining to me that because Armenians commonly live for more than a hundred years and he’s not even fifty yet, he’s still too young to start dating. Nevertheless, I worry about his future. I worry that when he does meet someone, she won’t be good enough for him. Bill always laughs this off. “Women used to be put off that I lived in a van,” he complains; “now they only want me for my money.”

  Bill is indeed living well. His house rests high on a hill overlooking Honolulu; his homegrown mangoes are the jewel in the crown of his rich and ever-blooming garden. Bill accidentally made a small fortune when he sold the Baltimore house that he had bought as a monstrosity with rotting pipes, shoddy electrical, and a melted foundation—all of which he fixed, late at night and without help, turning it into a gorgeous piece of university-adjacent real estate.

  People still puzzle over the two of us, Bill and me. Are we siblings? Soul mates? Comrades? Novitiates? Accomplices? We eat almost every meal together, our finances are mixed, and we tell each other everything. We travel together, work together, finish each other’s sentences, and have risked our lives for each other. I’m happily married with a family and Bill was an obvious precondition to all that, a brother whom I would never give up, part of the package. But people that I meet still seem to want a label for what is between us. Just as with the potatoes, I don’t have an answer for that one. I do us because us is what I know how to do.

  I reached over and picked up a watering can, raining water over the soil covering both our feet. We wiggled our toes and worked the dirt into a nice luxurious mud, and then we leaned back and just sat for a while. Bill eventually broke the silence with “So! What should we do now? We’re good until 2016, right?”

  Bill was referring to our funding for the lab; we were indeed financially solid through the summer of 2016, with several federal government contracts in place. After that, however, the lab could still fold: research funding for environmental science decreases every year. I have tenure, but Bill certainly doesn’t—that sort of thing is only for professors. It is maddening to me that the best and hardest-working scientist I’ve ever known has no long-term job security, and that this is mostly my fault. The only thing that I can think to do if I lose funding is to threaten to quit, which would probably just leave both of us out on the street. As research scientists, we will never, ever be secure.

  “Hey, snap out of it.” Bill clapped his hands in front of my face. “What should we do next? We can do anything we want!” He rubbed his hands together, slapped his thighs, and stood up. Bill was right, as usual. O me of little faith. What hard-working team anywhere doing anything has any more security than we do? We will be like the lilies of the field, I decided, except that we will toil and spin and sow and reap.

  I stood up and stepped forward. “Well, what have we got?” I glanced around, taking a casual inventory of our scattered equipment. “I know,” I said, “let’s put all of our stuff in a big stockpile and stare at it for a while. Something will come to me.”

  Bill nodded at me and walked to the other side of the greenhouse. He brought over the stash of grow lights that were still good and put them down gently beside the wads of extension cords that I had dragged over from the other side. Then we worked together to move the miter saw, as well as several uncut two-by-fours and a barrel of particleboard scraps. I brought over our toolboxes and positioned them prominently, one with the lid propped open like a deep-sea treasure chest. Bill slid over a few bags of potting soil and set a bag of fertilizer next to each one.

  I was laying out the different seeds that we had, one package next to the other, when I looked up to find Bill dragging toward me a roll of chicken wire that had probably been rusting in the corner for years. I wrinkled my nose. “That’s not even ours,” I said with disgust.

  “It is now,” said Bill, and then we both knew what was coming. We began to sneak through the orchid experiment, plucking loose hoses and broken clamps, shoving them into the makeshift aprons of our T-shirts and walking them back to the pile.

  “Holy shit,” exclaimed Bill as he spied an expensive cordless power drill set down between two orchid plants. Bill and I locked eyes as he picked it up. We have at least five cordless drills already and Bill knows that we could buy any number of them just for the hell of it. We very likely have several times more grant money than whoever owns this tool. Every moral and rational fact argued that we should not have stolen the drill. Except for one: whoever owned it was not there.

  “Well, you know what they say about Hell,” I remarked while adding the drill to our pile. “The ambiance is bad, but the company is actually pretty good.” Bill sat back down and cracked open a Pepsi. I circled the pile, tucking orchid flowers into it here and there as if I were decorating a Christmas tree.

  The drill turned out to be broken: it didn’t work then and we’ve never been able to fix it. But we still have it in the lab somewhere—Bill and I have never even considered putting it back or throwing it away. I’ll never concede that any tool is useless and I’ll never admit that there is
one that I don’t need. I will never stop being ravenously hungry for science, no matter how well it feeds me.

  On that day that Bill and I sat together inside the greenhouse, we began to talk about our hopes and goals, about what plants can do and about what we might be able to make them do. Soon our brainstorming about what to do next included inevitable discussions of what we’d done before. Before long we were telling each other the stories of this book. I am amazed to realize that these stories now span about twenty years.

  During that time we’ve gotten three degrees, worked six jobs, lived in four countries and traveled through sixteen more, ended up in the hospital five times, owned eight old cars, driven at least twenty-five thousand miles, put a dog to sleep, and produced roughly sixty-five thousand carbon stable isotope measurements. This last was our ostensible goal throughout it all. Before we made said measurements, only God and the Devil himself knew what the values were, and we suspect that neither one of them much cared. Now anyone with a library card can look these values up, because we published them as seventy separate articles within forty different journals. We think of this as progress because it is our impossible job to manufacture new information out of whole cloth. Along the way, we also managed to become adults without ceasing to be children. Nothing reminds us of this as well as the stories that we told and retold on that day.

  At the end of a long silence Bill surprised me by saying with quiet seriousness, “Put it in a book. Do me that favor someday.”

  Bill knows about my writing. He knows about the pages of poetry stuffed into my car’s glove box; he knows about the many nextstory.doc files on my hard drive; he knows how I like to sift through the thesaurus for hours; he knows that nothing feels better to me than finding exactly the right word that stabs cleanly at the heart of what you are trying to say. He knows that I read most books twice or more and write long letters to their authors, and that sometimes I even get an answer. He knows how much I need to write. But he had never given me permission to write about us until that day. I nodded and inwardly vowed to do my best.

  I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.

  I have accepted that I don’t know all the things that I ought to know, but I do know the things that I need to know. I don’t know how to say “I love you,” but I do know how to show it. The people who love me know the same.

  Science is work, nothing more and nothing less. And so we will keep working as another day dawns and this week turns into next week, and then this month becomes next month. I can feel the warmth of the same brilliant sun that shines above the forest and onto the green world, but in my heart I know that I am not a plant. I am more like an ant, driven to find and carry single dead needles, one after the other, all the way across the forest and then add them one by one to a pile so massive that I can only fully imagine one small corner of it.

  As a scientist I am indeed only an ant, insufficient and anonymous, but I am stronger than I look and part of something that is much bigger than I am. Together we are building something that will fill our grandchildren’s grandchildren with awe, and while building we consult daily the crude instructions provided by our grandfathers’ grandfathers. As a tiny, living part of the scientific collective, I’ve sat alone countless nights in the dark, burning my metal candle and watching a foreign world with an aching heart. Like anyone else who harbors precious secrets wrought from years of searching, I have longed for someone to tell.

  Epilogue

  PLANTS ARE NOT LIKE US. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.

  Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grown like a manic fungus, and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less than six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.

  In languages across the globe, the adjective “green” is etymologically rooted in the verb “to grow.” In free-association studies, participants linked the word “green” to concepts of nature, restfulness, peace, and positivity. Research has shown how a brief glimpse of green significantly improved the creativity that people brought to bear on simple tasks. Viewed from space, our planet appears less green with each passing year. On my bad days, our global troubles seem only to have increased over my lifetime, and I can’t escape my greatest nagging fear: When we are gone, will we leave our heirs stranded in a pile of rubble, just as sick and hungry and war-exhausted as we ever were, bereft even of the homely comfort of the color green? But on my good days, I feel like I can do something about this.

  Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name. Here’s my personal request to you: If you own any private land at all, plant one tree on it this year. If you are renting a place with a yard, plant a tree in it and see if your landlord notices. If he does, insist to him that it was always there. Throw in a bit about how exceptional he is for caring enough about the environment to have put it there. If he takes the bait, go plant another one. Baffle some chicken wire at its base and string a cheesy birdhouse around its tiny trunk to make it look permanent, then move out and hope for the best.

  There are more than one thousand successful tree species for you to choose from, and that’s just for North America. You will be tempted to choose a fruit tree because they grow quickly and make beautiful flowers, but these species will break under moderate wind, even as adults. Shyster tree planting services will pressure you to buy a Bradford pear or two because they establish and flourish in one year; you’ll be happy with the result long enough for them to cash your check. Unfortunately, these trees are also notoriously weak in the crotch and will crack in half during the first big storm. You must choose with a clear head and open eyes. You are marrying this tree: choose a partner, not an ornament.

  How about an oak? There are more than two hundred species and one is bound to be adapted to
your specific corner of the planet. In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor the holly bush. The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn’s skin. The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass. For my money, I’ll take the bur oak, the slowest-growing but the strongest of all; even its acorns are heavily armored, ready to do battle with the uninviting soil.

  Speaking of money, you may not even need any: Several state and local agencies have embarked upon tree-planting programs, distributing seedlings for free or at a reduced cost. For example, the New York Restoration Project provides trees as part of its goal to help citizens plant and care for one million new trees across New York City’s five boroughs, while the Colorado State Forest Service provides access to its nurseries to any local landowner holding one or more acres. Every state university runs one or more large operations called Extension Units, full of experts qualified to give advice and encouragement to citizen gardeners, tree owners, and nature enthusiasts of all types. Call around: these researchers are obligated to provide free consultations to interested civilians regarding your trees, your compost heap, your out-of-control poison ivy.

  Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical. Remember that you are your tree’s only friend in a hostile world. If you do own the land that it is planted on, create a savings account and put five dollars in it every month, so that when your tree gets sick between ages twenty and thirty (and it will), you can have a tree doctor over to cure it, instead of just cutting it down. Each time you blow the account on tree surgery, put your head down and start over, knowing that your tree is doing the same. The first ten years will be the most dynamic of your tree’s life; what kind of overlap will it make with your own? Take your children to the tree every six months and cut a horizontal chink into the bark to mark their height. Once your little ones have grown up and moved out and into the world, taking parts of your heart with them, you will have this tree as a living reminder of how they grew, a sympathetic being who has also been deeply marked by their long, rich passage through childhood.