Why Field Biology? Part One

I write this listening to the soft sound of waves against the gravel beach of Lake Nerka, and, in the background, a loon calling a long howling call, like a lonesome coyote. Today I watched a pair of loons diving on Hidden Lake. One minute, they were on the surface, paddling silently along; the next minute they had seamlessly disappeared beneath the glassy calm, hardly leaving a ripple. Phantoms.

About nine days ago, I moved from Aleknagik up to a more remote camp on the second lake in the Wood River System, Lake Nerka. This lake, I am happy to report to all the fish geeks out there, is the namesake for one of its most famous and numerous inhabitants, the sockeye salmon, otherwise known as Red Salmon--Onchorhynchus nerka. The camp is the definition of "remote"-- it is an hour and a half by boat from the nearest village, and sits at the base of Church Mountain, one peak among a foreboding wall of mountains that zoom a couple thousand feet up from the lake, transitioning quickly from spruce forest to alder and blueberry scrub to granite scree-fields, spires, and patches of leftover snow. Though there are no glaciers here now, it wasn't so long ago (on a geologic timescale) that glaciers filled each one of the U-shaped valleys that now form the various arms, fjords, and river valleys draining into the lake. A glacier scoured out Lake Nerka itself, along with all the other lakes in the system. It's times like these when I wish I had a pocket-sized geologist I could bring along with me to interpret some of the strange geological patterns I see here, so different than the predictably constant columnar basalt of the Cascades and the Columbia Gorge. Like a total lack of good shale skipping rocks everywhere except for ONE BEACH in one cove in one place on the lake. Or the lens of clay on Hidden Creek. The fact that half the spires of these mountains are granite, and half aren't. The fact that none of the rocks in the streams are very round, as if they hadn't been tumbled for long. This place is a foreign hodgepodge of geologic histories, it seems, but I'd love to be able to read the landscape better to figure out what earthquakes, floods, tectonic collisions, and slow erosions took place here over time.

My advisor Daniel Schindler, his wife Laura, and their eight-year-old daughter Luna live up here every summer; my other camp-mates include a college-age intern, a teenage nanny for Luna, and two other graduate students who've been coming up here for the last several years. Peter and Kale are both extremely smart, good cooks, and fairly handy with an Evinrude motor, a broken water heater or generator, or a homemade solar powered fish-tag reader. Although I've only been here for a little less than two weeks, I've been folded quickly into the family-like atmosphere of the camp, where everyone pulls his or her own weight. There's a small greenhouse, where lettuce, chard and peas grow frantically under the midnight sun; an almost-finished sauna; a bunkhouse, a cookhouse, and several sheds/outbuildings; a small lab where we can process samples; and the "new cabin," where Daniel and his family live. The beach is home to a small herd of 18-foot aluminum boats, our mode of lake transportation. My graduate studies here have so far included learning how to drive these boats in weather conditions ranging from flat calm to 3-foot wind-waves, the use of various power tools, how to survive a bear attack, how to build an outdoor clay pizza oven, generator operation and repair, and so much more that you'd never learn how to do in a classroom, or in a lab.

And then there is the fieldwork itself. Let's talk about why I want to be a field biologist in the first place, and what that even means. Why am I here?

Part of the reason I am drawn to field biology is that fieldwork can be a meditative experience, a state in which you are fully aware and present, focused on nothing but whatever it is you’re trying to observe, count, measure, or find. I’m a person whose mind just won’t shut up, whose panicky, anxious inner dialogue can rarely be hushed without a good hard seven mile run or an all-night study marathon to tire me out. But rather than continue to attempt to exhaust myself constantly in order to achieve temporary peace of mind, I’ve recently been trying another, more energizing route, which is simple and long-lasting but difficult to achieve: mindfulness. I’ve found that recreational activities that require an intense amount of focus, like kayaking, help me quiet my mind. Thus any task or activity that, by its nature, requires mindfulness to achieve any small measure of success, attracts me. As I practice the awareness of body, boat and environment that’s needed to pilot a small plastic watercraft down rapids, all other worries and anxieties fall away. Bank accounts? Househunting? Chores? Future plans? It all fades as I focus on present conditions: the paddle, the eddyline, my posture, what the next bend might hold. I end up feeling refreshed. And I’ve found the same to be true of working in “The Field.”

You cannot go out into the Alaskan bush on autopilot. Just like kayaking, where a moment of non-awareness can result in a capsized craft and a cold swim, if you trundle through the bush on foot or zip across the lake in a boat without mindfulness you might not come back with the data, or you might not come back at all. Besides a sharp awareness of potential dangers—was that rustle a bear?—you must be mindful of the weather, where you’re stepping in the creek, your body (are you hungry or cold?), your field partner, and so many other things besides the fish, or birds, or rocks you’ve come to study. You have to listen and you have to look, or you’ll miss the patterns you’ve come to gather up so that, from thousands and thousands of numbers, you can weave a tapestry that tells a story about a landscape. In listening and in looking, in this pattern-gathering, your mind gets engaged and slows down and stops chewing itself ragged. It just is. You just are. I just am. As I walked up Hidden Creek yesterday, stepping slowly over rocks as I followed behind my field partner snorkeling in the stream, the slow pace didn’t make me anxious or tense. My mind slowed down and switched into a mode of extreme lucidity. I noticed everything: moose and otter tracks in the mud, blooming nagoon berries, the buzzy call of an Arctic warbler. I had a few insights. Sometimes my mind was completely blank. Occasionally, I wrote down a number or two that Peter shouted to me from his face-down snorkeling position. And they call it “fieldwork.” Ha.

Let’s be honest, though. This blissful, meditative state doesn’t occur automatically the moment you step out into “The Field.” In fact, a good portion of your days spent in The Field are going to be spent in brutally hot/cold/muggy/buggy/wet/smoky/windy conditions. You’re going to walk up that stream angry, or crying, or in such a hurry you trip and fill up your waders with cold water. You’re bound to get sweaty, covered in bug bites and poison oak, sunburned or chilled, dampened, hungry, and thirsty. You’ll want to punch your field partner’s lights out at some point, that is, if they don’t punch yours out first. You will break expensive equipment, you will get lost, you will forget your lunch, you will do the protocol wrong and have to repeat it countless times. In a lightning storm in the middle of nowhere on a dirt logging road, your two-way radio will fail to work when your truck has a flat tire and you don’t have a spare. When you spend too many hours underwater in a cold river in a wetsuit, you’ll get hypothermic. Sleeping every night in a tent or an uninsulated shack, you’ll get lonely. After eating too much beef jerky for two months, your digestive system may rebel in ways you wish it wouldn’t.

But all this is just practice, and it’s also worth the rewards. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be back out in The Field after years of being pummeled by the elements, cheap-ass equipment, low pay and incompetent field partners. In kayaking we say “Everyone is between swims.” In Buddhism, the path is the goal, and hardships provide an opportunity to practice the skill of mindfulness. In fieldwork, you might get awful blisters and it might pour for six days, but as you walk up the stream, the sun might come out, and your mind just might stop beating up on itself.