Lab Girl (11 page)

I taught geology to freshmen and geochemistry to juniors, and it was far more work than I had reckoned it would be. During that first semester, I think I made more mistakes on the homework than the students did. Eventually, I embraced the persona of the amiable, forgiving professor who was eager to give everyone an A. It suited me better than trying to be a hard-ass, as I wasn't much older than most of the undergrads, and I was younger than many of the graduate students. For my part, I had never liked lecture courses anyway—everything important that I had learned had come to me from working with my hands.

Nevertheless, I dutifully fulfilled my lecturing obligations. I wrote equations on the chalkboard, assigned and graded homework, held office hours, and gave final exams, but I mostly focused on the coming New Year, when Bill and I would start building my first-ever all-my-own lab.

On the day that Bill flew in, I drove to the Atlanta airport an hour early and then stood in the baggage area mesmerized by the circling carousels. Suddenly I heard a familiar voice: “Hey, Hope, over here.” I turned and saw Bill standing two carousels over. He was burdened with four heavy suitcases of the old hard-sided kind without rollers or straps.

“Oh, hi.”

I had been at the wrong baggage claim. Confused, I looked around me. I didn't remember checking the carousel number. I also didn't remember parking the car, and yet there I was, holding a ticket to the parking structure with the location “C2” written on it in my own handwriting. This sort of thing was happening to me frequently: snippets of time were lost here and there, and even as I compensated in order to hide it, it kept getting worse. I had even gone to see a doctor about it, who had examined me for all of forty-five seconds, told me I was working too hard, and then wrote me a refillable prescription for a mild sedative.

“You look different,” said Bill.

He was right. I wasn't sleeping much and I had lost quite a bit of weight. I had always been high-strung, but this felt like something different.

“I have anxiety. It's my new thing,” I explained, opening my eyes very wide. “It affects more than twenty-five million Americans,” I said, quoting the pamphlet that the doctor had given me.

“Okay.” Bill looked around and added, “So this is Atlanta. Jesus, what are we even doing here?”

“It's our last best hope for peace!” I quoted the opening lines of
Babylon 5
in a deep science-fiction-narrator voice. I laughed at my joke, but Bill didn't.

We walked across the skyway into the parking garage and found my car. Bill stuffed his belongings into the back and then slid into the passenger seat. “I've never been this far east,” he revealed. “They do sell cigarettes in these parts, don't they?”

I handed over the unopened pack of Marlboro Lights that had been in my purse for months. “Sorry I haven't kept up with my practicing. But I am getting pretty good with these things.” I showed him my prescription bottle of lorazepam, shaking it like a rattle.

“To each his own,” muttered Bill. He lit a cigarette, rolled down the window, and threw out the spent match. I inhaled his secondhand smoke and relaxed into its familiar smell. Bill was delighted to find that winter means very little in the South, and we drove with the windows down and without our seat belts on, making our way inside the beltway and toward the rising skyline of Atlanta. I felt the deep and simple happiness that comes from not being alone.

After driving for a few more minutes, I realized that I didn't know where I was supposed to be taking Bill. That night two and a half years earlier when we had returned from the field course and he was the last to be dropped off came to mind.

I offered, “You know you're welcome to crash on my couch for a while, until you rent a place of your own.”

“No thanks. Just dump me downtown later and I'll figure it out,” he said. “Right now, I want to see the new lab.”

“Okeydokey,” I agreed. “Let's go.”

We drove to the university and I parked outside of our building, which was known as “Old Civil Engineering” even though the engineering department had long since relocated to better digs. I escorted Bill down the stairwell, into the basement, and to the room that would serve as our laboratory. I could barely contain my excitement as I turned the key and opened the door.

Once I got the door open, however, it occurred to me that I had nothing much to show him. It was a windowless room, about six hundred square feet, and when I looked at it through a visitor's eyes, I became aware of how little it resembled the glittering high-tech space that I had described to Bill during our many daydream sessions in California.

I looked around the dingy little room that had been battered and then abandoned. The drywall was pockmarked and ripped in places. Light switches spilled out of gashes in the walls and dangled freely from their hasty wiring. The wiring of a splayed power outlet was unraveled near our feet. A layer of rusty mildew covered everything, including the fluorescent light tubes that flickered above our heads. All around the perimeter, where there should have been wainscoting, there was instead a long, dry smear of something that might once have been glue. The area near the chemical hood stank like rancid formaldehyde, which was a bad sign given that the sole purpose of a working chemical hood is to prevent one from breathing, and thus smelling, chemicals.

Looking at Bill, I felt a sudden urge to apologize for the inadequacy of it all. The tour was just getting started, and I was already ashamed that this was all I had to offer to someone who had moved so far away from home at my invitation. It was nothing like the lab where we had worked in Berkeley, and it clearly never could be.

Bill removed his coat and threw it in a corner. He took a deep breath, ran both hands through the full length of his hair, and turned around slowly, counting the electrical outlets. He caught sight of the transformer and power conditioner that had been haphazardly installed in one corner of the room, complete with a bright-red emergency power cutoff. He pointed at it and said, “Oh, this is great. This will give us a stable two-hundred-twenty-volt supply. Exactly right for the mass spectrometer. Just completely perfect,” he added for emphasis.

It was what it was: the first labspace to which we were the sole possessors of the key. It may have been a tiny hellhole, but it was
ours.
I marveled that Bill could see that gutted room not in comparison with what we had always planned it would be, but for what it was, and for what hard work might make it into. Despite the large difference between past dreams and present reality, he was ready to love our new life. I made up my mind that I would try to love it too.

IT'S RARE,
but a single tree can be in two places at once. Two such trees can exist up to one mile apart and yet still be the same organism. These trees are more similar than identical twins. In fact, they are identical without qualification right down to each single gene. If you cut both trees down and count the rings you will see that one of them is much younger than the other. When you sequence their DNA, however, you will find no differences. This is because they used to be parts of the same tree.

It is easy to become besotted with a willow. The Rapunzel of the plant world, this tree appears as a graceful princess bowed down by her lush tresses, waiting on the riverbank for someone just like you to come along and keep her company. Don't be fooled into thinking that your fairy-tale willow is special, however. Chances are that she is not. If you walk upstream, it is likely that you will find another willow tree. It is also likely that this tree will be precisely the same willow as your dear willow, standing in a different pose, with a different height and girth, and having perhaps seduced dozens of other princes over the years.

A willow tree is far more like Cinderella than it is like Rapunzel in that her lot in life involves working harder than her sisters. There's a famous study in which scientists compared the growth rates of a group of trees for a year. The hickory and buckeye were fast out of the gate, but then stopped growing after just a few weeks. The poplar made a good show and grew for four full months. But it was the willow that quietly outpaced all the others, continuing to grow for a full six months through the shortening days of autumn and right up to winter's iron gates. The willow trees in the study grew an average of four feet by the end—almost double the growth of their nearest competitor.

Light equals life for a plant. As a tree grows, its lower branches become obsolete, too shaded by the newer ones above to be of any further use. A willow tree loads these used branches with reserves, fattens and strengthens them and then dehydrates their base such that they snap off cleanly and fall into the river. Carried away on the water, one out of millions of these sticks will wash up onto a bank and replant itself, and before long that very same tree is now growing elsewhere. What was once a twig will be forced to function as a trunk, stranded under conditions it had never considered. Every willow tree features more than ten thousand such snap-off points; it sheds 10 percent of its branches in this way every single year. Over the decades one—maybe two—of these will successfully take root downriver and grow into a genetically identical doppelgänger.

The oldest surviving family of plants on Earth is the
Equisetum—
the horsetail. The fifteen or so species that persist today have known 395 million years of Earth's history. They saw the first trees scale the heavens; they saw the dinosaurs come and go; they saw the first flowers bloom and then swiftly overtake the Earth. There is a sterile hybrid horsetail known as
ferrissii
that cannot reproduce but can only spread like a willow via parts breaking off and establishing elsewhere. Although ancient and impotent,
ferrissii
can be found growing from California to Georgia. Did it cross the country like a newly minted Ph.D. moving to a sprawling technical university and find magnolia trees and sweet tea and black humid nights loaded with fireflies and uncertainty? No.
Equisetum ferrissii
crossed the country like the living thing that it is, and found itself elsewhere, and then did the best that it could.

THE AMERICAN SOUTH
is a plant's idea of Eden. Summers are hot, but who cares, because the rain is generous and the sunshine predictable. Winters are more cool than cold, and freezing is rare. The heavy humidity that chokes us is like nectar to a plant; it allows it to relax and open its pores, and to drink in the atmosphere, confident that evaporation will not interfere. Plants grow all over the South like nowhere else—poplar, magnolia, oak, hickory, walnut, chestnut, beech, hemlock, maple, sycamore, sweet gum, dogwood, sassafras, elm, linden, and tupelo stand over a blanket of trillium, mayapple, laurel, wild grapes, and woefully plentiful poison ivy. In this deciduous world the mild winters are a leafless, lazy time that serves to heighten the drama of the spring explosion of growth. In February, the South begins to burst forth in a profusion of leaves, every single one of which will grow bigger, greener, and thicker through the long, busy summer. In the fall, copious fruit ripens and seeds are scattered, until finally all the leaves are shed in preparation for winter.

If you rake fallen leaves into a pile and then examine them, you will see that each one shows a consummately clean break at the same place near the base of the stem. The fall of leaves is highly choreographed: First the green pigments are pulled back behind the narrow row of cells marking the border between stem and branch. Then, on the mysteriously appointed day, this row of cells is dehydrated and becomes weak and brittle. The weight of the leaf is now sufficient to bend and snap it from the branch. It takes a tree only a week to discard its entire year's work, cast off like a dress barely worn but too unfashionable for further use. Can you imagine throwing away all of your possessions once a year because you are secure in your expectation that you will be able to replace them in a matter of weeks? These brave trees lay all of their earthly treasures on the soil, where moth and rust doth immediately corrupt. They know better than all the saints and martyrs put together exactly how to store next year's treasure in Heaven, where the heart shall be also.

Plants are not the only exploding growth in the American South. Between the years 1990 and 2000, the amount of total income tax collected annually by the state of Georgia more than doubled as Coca-Cola, AT&T, Delta Air Lines, CNN, UPS, and thousands of other recognizable companies relocated themselves to the Atlanta area. Some of this new revenue was channeled into the universities in order to meet the educational needs of a larger and more corporate population. Academic buildings popped up like mushrooms, the number of faculty skyrocketed, and student enrollment continued to climb. In Atlanta during the 1990s, every kind of growth seemed possible.