Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for travel
You could have scared her to death… but you didn’t because she’s so brave.
When it was my turn to answer the question-of-the-hour at the circular dinner banquet table on Saturday night, I told the four pairs of Michigander eyes that I was in Lincoln so that I could avoid having to teach last Friday. This was mostly true, and though I didn’t have the compelling reasons reported by my dinner companions- “My boyfriend goes here” …. “Our friend did her undergrad at UNL- she’s over there, and she’s Asian”- I am more than content to have spent twenty hours in the car and an undisclosed number of dollars out of my own pocket to attend the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference on March 27-29.
I also wanted to go to a conference and leave the state and go somewhere new and get a free water bottle.
The conference, hosted by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, was mainly for students, and I won’t pretend that I didn’t feel overwhelmed by all the science that I didn’t understand, but I felt better knowing that many of the talks I attended were given by masters or doctorate students, just like the ones that had dinner with me. Three of them were from Michigan State University, and the fourth from the University of Michigan. The MSU kids drove, too, and thanks to the ambitious member of the group, they’d left East Lansing at 4a.m. on Friday and arrived in Lincoln around 2p.m.
My own travel plans were not so extreme, and included scheduled stops in a) Davenport, Iowa, and b) Seward, Nebraska. I was joined by my mother on Thursday afternoon, and we drove to Davenport, where we accepted the hospitality of one of my three Aunt Jans, and the company of my uncle and my cousin. First-cousin-once-removed was there, too, but in an asleep sort of fashion. One of my favorite things is seeing relatives or friends out of context, in this case, context being “Christmastime.”
We enjoyed our night in Davenport and our drive to Lincoln the next morning. The afternoon included a trip to Seward, where my travel companion and an assortment of her sisters and inlaws learned to be teachers at Concordia Teachers’ College. I took a picture of the joy.
Joyful
It had been nearly thirty years since this person was on the little campus!
On Saturday, I had to give my talk. It was a success, if you choose to buy into the idea that no one asked me questions afterwards because I explained everything so well- rather than because it was a giant mess.
Fortunately, I was able to chat with the aforementioned Michigan students and some dinosaurs, since Dear Mother was spending the day not at the conference, but at a pizza place, a quilt museum, and our hotel room, which I suppose is good enough for someone who doesn’t travel to other cities for science.
In conclusion, a man and his German speaking dog chased us around the Iowa welcome center on eastbound highway 80 during Sunday’s return trip. And we didn’t leave Nebraska without one of these.
RAR! is probably not a good stegosaurus noise
Careful of the icy patch!
I am not now and will not ever be one of those people who complains about winter and snow and threatens to move out of Michigan as soon as their “obligations” to this state are satisfied. I like winter. I like snow. I like Michigan.
However, I have no trouble saying that I do not like, and reasonably so: not having a garage*.
*Brushing three inches of snow off my car whenever I have to go somewhere and waiting ten minutes for the windshield to be a responsible degree of clear.
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
I was already worried about smelling… unpleasant before I knew that I had another day to wear the same clothes I put on in Barrow. The same clothes I’ve been wearing (and washing!) for ten weeks. I normally don’t care about this, but in the close quarters of a 757, I had only the comfort of my fellow passengers in mind. So I bought a t-shirt at the airport gift shop. Now I’m a whole new Jenny.
My fellow passengers were slightly more removed from my company on today’s flights since I was upgraded. It was nice. The rest of first class was filled with your usual busy business folk and one older Yacht-Club-esque couple. They held hands when we hit turbulence in Minnesota. They were very serious until Mr. Yacht Club had a beer and Mrs. Yacht Club finally got up the courage to use the airplane toilet. These people, the Yacht Clubs and the Business Folk, all looked at me with surprise and mild dislike when I showed up in their little first class village. I was disheveled as all heck and dragging along a muddy backpack covered with Atqasuk travel tags.
Not that any of that is news. Airports and airplanes are all the same. Under construction, busy, and filled with stock characters. In Minneapolis I encountered the typical American family and almost vomited at them with their four blond children and four monogrammed LL Bean rolling backpacks. Whatever. They were cute. I guess. The one kid was a snot, though. He wouldn’t even eat his chicken strips! I’m pretty sure he took a picture of me with his dad’s camera phone. I WAS eating a Berry Tie-dye Fruit by the Foot at the time. Clearly superior to his chicken strips. If I’ve learned anything this summer, it’s that Berry Tie-Dye and Strawberry are the best Fruit by the Foot flavors. Avoid “Color by the Foot” if you can- I know the rainbow coloring is enticing, but trust me.
I did enjoy watching the people during my solo adventure. The other non-stock characters on the loooong flight from Anchorage to Minneapolis were an old Martin Crane type and a Very Important On-the-Phone-Every-Second-Until-They-Say-I-Can’t-Be Gentlemen. He was a little shady. I would cast Tom Cruise in this role for Jenny Rides an Airplane: The Movie. These two fellows had a very important business deal to conduct, but unless they were talking in code, it sounded like Tom Cruise Guy was trying to lure Martin Crane Fellow into a cabin. With fish. I think the deal was about fish.
I was fortunate to have a pleasant seat partner for the long flight. She was pleasant in that we did not exchange words throughout the entire journey. I think she was disappointed that I wasn’t a young handsome single doctor. Based on her choice of reading material, the careful and becoming travel outfit she’d planned, and her mousy demeanor, I invented a life for her that involved patient saving for long cross-country flights where she can meet eligible young men and fall in love over packs of roasted nuts. She’s careful to wear something that shows off her figure but not her skin, partially because she is ever-so modest, but also because she is petite and easily catches a chill on planes. She’s also careful to leave at home the romance novels and especially-oh, the horror, if a worldly man caught her reading something so old-fashioned- her well-loved Jane Austen books. Since she can’t quite bring herself to read Cosmo without blushing, she settles for People magazine. It conveys youth, a sense of fun, an interest in pop culture, and is less stuffy than Time or Newsweek, but is by no means provocative or embarrassing. Her lonely flights take her to Alaska at least once a month, since she is playing the numbers game and everyone knows that Alaska is a virtual treasure trove of MEN.
On the next plane I sat next to a nice older man in a pink polo shirt who ordered a screwdriver and loves West Michigan! He helped me get my bag from the overhead compartment when Cranky Flight Attendant stashed it far away.
At the end of the day I was in Grand Rapids with my parents and my sister. They were okay with seeing me, I think. They thought that my feet should smell better and that I should stop telling them to reduce their carbon footprint, but they can deal.
What shall we do while we’re waiting?
Of COURSE I got up in time to eat two pastries and have a glass of cranberry juice in the lobby of the Puffin Inn. Of course I made it onto the shuttle that I’d signed up for last night, and of course I got to the airport in plenty of time to sit and wait before the 8:45 boarding time. It was plentier of time than I’d originally thought. Last night they told me that I could skip check-in because they had my boarding passes all ready, but I was still expecting a line at security. Silly Jenny, of course there are no lines at security for valued customers who have been bumped up to first class!
Having a bed last night was lovely, though I suspect I will still be able to sleep on the plane. I hope that the rest of my team- none of whom were interested in volunteering to stay with me- was able to sleep well enough. I’ve already spoken to Jobby, and they even delivered my luggage to the new apartment!
Oops. They’re boarding first class. Peace out.
Bad guy got run over by a caribou!
Merely saying that Jeremy and I were in the field for more than 27 of the 42 hours between Friday at 6 and Sunday at noon does not quite capture the enormity of what Team Efficiency accomplished this weekend. Add on travel time and prep time and one will quickly deduce that we didn’t really sleep more than five hours a night.
Exactly what we accomplished is as follows: wet site total season (marked individuals), dry site total season (marked individuals), wet site total season (largest reproductive), dry site total season (largest reproductive), leaf collection (three leaves times two species times twelve plots times two sites), other leaf collection (fifteen leaves times two species times six plots times two sites), specific leaf area index leaf collection (ten leaves for each species we study in Atqasuk), removal of soil probes, soil sampling for two different researchers, thaw depth on all 96 plots, OTC removal and disassembly, remarking the boardwalk, taking pictures of each plot, transplant growth measures, seed collection (one species from every plot), cleaning out and taking down the tent, staking and stringing the biomass plots, cleaning up the lab, packing away the equipment… oh yeah, and we started the marathon weekend with collecting phenology data, just like we always do.
I’ve spent nearly the whole ten weeks and never even explained that last bit! For each of the plots I have at the wet site (24 control and 24 with OTCs (open-topped chambers) I have a spreadsheet printed out with spaces to fill in the general status of the vegetation in the plot. As events happen in the plots I write down the date. We record information for each species both for the plot in general and also for three marked individuals of each species in the plots. For example, I observed that in experimental plot eight, Eriophorum angustifolium individual four had green leaf on J169, inflorescence on J169, open flower on J170, withered flower on J175, seed set on J188, and seed dispersal on J201. I did not observe leaf senescence for this individual, though there were Eangs in the total plot that were in this state on J228. Making these kinds of observations is easier when you only saw the plots every ten days or so (like we did), but it is clearly more accurate to check more often (like Rob and Jean did).
While everybody and their brother was seeing polar bear after polar bear in Barrow this weekend, Jeremy and I had to be content with the company of the reincarnation of Rob’s ground squirrel and a few pesky caribou, one of which nearly ran us over and seriously interfered with the science*. It was… charming?
We never would have succeeded in our race-against-time to hop a plane that didn’t know we were coming without the help of Wondrous Bob. Of course, without Wondrous Bob to add several things to our to-do list, we might also have been a bit less stressed.
It was a pleasant kind of stress, and we were pretty happy with ourselves and our accomplishments, like the hoity-toity researchers that we are. We were also happy that the airplane, which we made with twenty minutes to spare, did not reject us.
*Tripped on a string and broke a stick.
Sky blue. Like the sky. With jet fighters and lightning.
In other news, Jeremy and his grandiose schemes continue to disappoint. This time he PROMISED that Atqasuk would be magical, warm and fun… I believe the word he used was “phantasmical”… and it rained all day yesterday. It rained on our luggage, it rained on the truck, it rained on our food boxes, it rained on the airplane, and it rained on the other truck. The trucks entered the rainstorm covered in dust, and my new Earnest Science skills lead me to believe that this is how they ended up covered in mud. The new box of Otter Pops got a little muddy. (We got a hot tip from a rogue Loon Person that The Kids had managed to steal the stockpile we’d flown into town last time, so we had to restock.)
It rained so thoroughly that the internet connection was down. We had to entertain ourselves in other ways. My favorite way was coloring (good thing I had 100 crayons on my person), but my second favorite was beating the rest of the team at a rousing game of Texas Hold ‘Em.
Now we’re off to kick some Biomass butt. Vroooooom! (That’s the sound of the ATV carrying us away… though all four of us AND the point frame are going to be on the same ATV, so vr-oo….ooo…OOOmmm…mmm…… might be a more appropriate onomatopoeic representation.)
So I ask you- when sour cream goes bad, does it become sweet?
So, I took a break from my obsessive post making yesterday, in part because I was forcefully and suddenly recruited to find all the walnuts in a gallon size bag of trail mix. This was not a problem. I like to be helpful. It was the oddest request that I have had in a while, but I enjoy spontaneity. My efforts yielded, using a stretch of the imagination, 17 “walnuts”. About one-third of a cup, coarsely chopped. These were added to a salad that we (eleven) were served for dinner, by the housemate I described in detail about 48 hours ago. My hands smelled like dried kiwi after I completed my task, but this was mostly my imagination, since dried kiwi hardly has a distinctive scent and no one else smelled my hands or is able to confirm my story.
I don’t mean to be flippant about any of the following topics: old people, talkative people, or people named Bob. I forget that my idea of “all in good fun” is not universal. (Our eighth grade teacher had to direct my closest friend and me to be nice to the new girl because she absolutely would not understand our sense of humor.) In any case, I mean no offense to our weekend companion, who was a gracious makeshift host and a generous volunteer cook.
The most characteristic element of Barrow’s weather, at least for the summer months, is the fog. It is clearly visible, ominous and somewhat malicious, on the horizon as you fly in from Atqasuk. We saw it today, flying in from Atqasuk, at about 12:30 pm. This is lovely, and we had beautiful clear skies for the whole flight, but we were meant to be in Barrow by 9:30, so we had another “hurry up and wait” sort of day with the packing, calling, and driving to and from the airport that are all involved in returning us successfully to Barrow.
Therefore, no one can ever be in too much of a hurry to get anywhere. Some are angry or at least slightly annoyed at having unreliable transportation, but I have heard at least one person hope that the fog rolls in thickly on his day of departure. I guess it depends on what you’re traveling and whether you are prone to anxiety.
I am just prone to tired, as a result of staying up late and getting up early. Before eight is early, I don’t care what you say.
Such is the headache of waterfront living!
(I am feeling peculiarly unsettled today. Perhaps close readers will have noticed this from my shockingly disjointed paragraphs. The syntax is off, too, and I am unhappy with my self-important vocabulary choices. I really didn’t sell it this time, and I’ll be a disdainful sort of bemused at myself in the morning. C’est la vie.)
