Lab Girl (13 page)

SOIL IS A FUNNY THING,
in that it isn't really anything in and of itself but is instead the product of two different worlds coming together. Soil is the naturally produced graffiti that results from tensions between the biological and geological realms.

Back in California, Bill and I decided that we would teach our soil class differently from the way it was taught to us. Instead of just filling out forms and cataloging data, we would teach where soil comes from and how it forms. We'd make students really look at it, touch it, draw it, and come up with their own improvised labels for what they saw. We developed a teaching protocol that goes like this: we simply pick a place and we dig—we dig the earth open until we can see it whole and naked from top to bottom. We expose what was unexposed, and force its secrets out into the open.

All around us we can point concretely to what's alive—a green leaf, a moving worm, a sucking root. At depth lies cold, hard rock, old as the hills to our right and left, and equally devoid of breath and movement—not alive. Everything that is physically located between the two extremes—alive and not alive—we call “soil.” At the top of the soil the influence of the living is most obvious, dark brown rubbed from the residue of dead plants, wilted and rotten, mixed into a slime that seeps and stains everything around it. The bottom of the soil is dominated by the rock's legacy; the waters of the ages have dissolved the rock little by little, churned it into a paste, and dried-wetted-dried it over endless cycles to yield a slag that is distinct from the undamaged rocks that lie below. In the middle, these two substances interact, sometimes blooming into the garish streaks of color that so struck us when we drove through southern Georgia.

Bill was born to tirelessly evangelize soil using his God-given talent for marking the subtleties of chemistry, the shading of colors and the twitches in texture that only he can see from within a hole. He can compare the dozens of soils he carries in his memory with the one before him in bafflingly excruciating detail. All reserve is shed when he talks about soil, and I have watched him deliver many dramatic monologues in Irish pubs (perfectly sober) describing how the discovery of new colors in new combinations underground is what he loves most about his work.

In the summer of 1997, we took a group of five students into the field to teach them how to characterize and map soil. The trip was a first-time experience for four of them, and a repeat trip for the undergraduate who volunteered many hours in my lab each week. Bill had warmed up to this guy, and I had also, and so we invited him to come along on each of our research and teaching excursions.

The best way to prevent people from complaining about food while camping is to force each one of them to take responsibility for one night of cooking, and our undergraduate mascot had eagerly volunteered. Desperate to impress us, he had brought cans, boxes, spices, and a bag of potatoes that he peeled and then boiled until soft, but he was only able to start cooking at about 11:00 p.m., after we finally arrived at the campground.

Boiling water on a campfire is tortuously slow, and so I was dismayed when, after removing the cooked potatoes, he set another huge pot of cold water over the heat to boil. Instead of just doling out the potatoes with a fork, which would have been haute cuisine by our standards, he instead began to mash them, adding the fine-milled flour that had appeared from his backpack. I noted with alarm that the cooking process was starting all over again and I asked him what he was doing. “I am making Hungarian potato dumplings,” he explained. “My grandmother used to make them. Trust me, you'll love them.”

We ate at about three in the morning. “Hey, you should start going by ‘Dumpling'!” I exclaimed as we finally sat down to eat, and the student's face lit up; he was delighted with the professional intimacy that a private joke implied.

“I will
not
refer to him as ‘Dumpling,' ” Bill said with a masculine scowl as he bent over his soup. He was tired and hungry and not in the mood.

The warm night air was perfectly still and we could hear a chorus of frogs that were croaking somewhere in the darkness. We all ate in silence, stuffing ourselves with the delicious dumplings that had been prepared in ridiculous abundance. While we were cleaning up, Bill was the first to comment. “Good dinner, Dumpling,” he said solemnly while gathering up the empty bowls. Whatever the student's real name was, I have since forgotten it, for it was never used by any of us again. I have also never eaten anything that tasted as good as those dumplings, in all my years since then.

We were digging in Atkinson County, which, although it does not seem notable for anything, we referred to as “Nirvana” because of its exquisite soils, unequaled within the forty-nine other states and five continents we have traveled. We found it the same way that we found so many of our teaching sites: from the car window. If you drive across the state of Georgia, from the Piedmont plain near Atlanta southeast toward the Atlantic Ocean, you will find yourself driving along a river of red dust that was rubbed from the residue of what might have been mountains in some ancient geological dream.

While driving on Highway 82 toward the Okefenokee Swamp earlier that year, we had seen what appeared to be buckets of rich apricot paint thrown across a ditch of creamy sand. In those days Bill required a cigarette frequently, and so we were in the habit of stopping often to inspect the landscape. When we had pulled over near Willacoochee, the “paint” turned out to be the rusted-iron band within a rare oxisol soil-type, and we immediately decided to include the stop in our soils course.

When we arrive at a soil site with students, we first unload the shovels, the picks, a tarp, the sieves, the chemicals, and a big blackboard with colored chalk. We dig a hole, down deeper and deeper, until we hit hard rock, careful to stand only on one side so that everyone is looking at the same thing. Once we have dug deeply enough, we dig away from the profile, opening a “pit” that is large enough for three people to stand in, and from which we can make an evaluation as to the lateral continuity of the soil's properties. This digging can take hours, and if the clay is thick or the soil is waterlogged, it is physically exhausting.

Bill and I dig together as sort of a waltz, with one of us “throwing” and the other “catching”—one person chips the ground with a pick, while another positions one shovel below to catch the debris. When that shovel is full, it is swapped for another, and the original one is emptied to the side. Unlike holes that are dug for construction purposes, the fill must be carefully piled to the side in order to keep the bottom clear and provide a view all the way up to the top of the hole. Even as we avoid compressing the soil profile, there are always stray students who we notice standing on the top and looking down on us, and we shoo them away like the chipmunks at the campground. When we ask for digging volunteers, we are occasionally taken up on the offer by what inevitably turns out to be the farm kid of the group. But most students don't really want to dig. In the old days they used to stand idly by, watching us dig for hours, which peeved us. Now they turn sideways, surreptitiously searching for cell phone signals.

Once we can see new earth from top to bottom, we take “pins” (old railroad spikes that we painted bright orange) and insert them at the boundaries between what we think we see as layers. Bill and I argue about the direction of the sun and over whether each detail is real or just a shadow, and we work to convince each other of our opinions like lawyers in a contentious trial with no judge and a bored jury.

Sometimes soil boundaries are distinct, as within a chocolate-vanilla layer cake, and sometimes they are as gradual as the edge-to-middle change of red within one square of a Mondrian painting. Although they form a foundation for all of the data that will follow, the number and placing of these soil “horizons” are the most subjective part of the exercise, and each scientist displays a slightly different style. Some, like me, feel we're creating modern art out of the landscape, preferring the result to be huge and whole, with as few rules guiding the eye as possible. We are known as “lumpers” because we tend to lump the details together as we work.

Others, including Bill, are more like the Impressionists, convinced that each brushstroke must be executed with individuality in order to achieve a coherent whole. They are known as “splitters” because they split the subtle details into separate categories as they work. The only way to do good soil science is to put a splitter and a lumper together in the soil pit and let them fight it out until they achieve something that they both know must be correct because neither of them feels satisfied. Left to her own devices, the lumper will dig for three hours, mark the horizons in ten minutes, and then go on her merry way. Left to his own devices, the splitter will dig a hole and crawl inside, never to be seen again. Thus splitters and lumpers are both productive only when forced into bickering collaboration, and though together they produce great maps, they rarely return from field trips still on speaking terms.

Once the soil horizon demarcations have been successfully negotiated, a sample is removed from each layer, relocated to the tarp, and subjected to a battery of chemical tests to determine acidity, salt content, nutrient levels, and a growing list of field-ready chemical attributes. At the end of the day, all the information is transferred to the blackboard, graphed and drawn, and a long discussion ensues about what the visual properties and the chemical properties, taken together, imply about the fertility of the soil—“fertility” being one of the most grandiose and imprecise terms that science has ever produced.

The ideal educational field trip lasts about a week, with one new soil written up each day, and about a hundred miles of driving afterward, toward another site. Five days and five hundred miles provide enough time and space to give students an idea as to how much soils vary across the landscape, and also to expose them to the thoughtful, ramblin' mind-set necessary for soils work. By the end of the trip they are either in love with the work or utterly turned off, and therefore have probably decided upon a major as well.

By dragging students through dirt for five days I can do something far more important and significant than I can do for them during an entire semester behind a desk, and so Bill and I have clocked tens of thousands of miles on these trips.

Bill is the most patient, caring, and respectful teacher that I have ever seen in action. He will sit with a student for as long as it takes, sometimes hours if needed, in order to help him or her learn just one task. He does the very hardest work of teaching, not just relating facts from a book but standing over a machine and showing how to work it with your hands, how it might break and how to fix it when it does. Students call him at two in the morning when they can't work something, and he wearily comes to the lab and helps them—if he's not already there, of course. He continues tirelessly to coax the slower students toward success, long after I've become frustrated and written them off as not trying hard enough.

Of course, twentysomethings being what they are, most students take Bill completely for granted, save a very few who understand that by the end, their thesis is often as much his as it is theirs. Nevertheless, the most efficient way to get yourself fired from my lab and out on the street is to openly disrespect Bill. You can call me any name you like, but he is your superior and you will remember it and act accordingly. For his part, Bill complains about each student with uniformly wicked contempt and then spends yet another day rescuing them from themselves.

At about five o'clock on that day in southern Georgia—technically the same day we ate the dumplings—we filled in the hole that we had dug and packed up our gear. We stopped in Waycross to replenish the gas tank and our candy supply. While we were debating the advantages of the Hershey bar versus Starbursts, Dumpling approached us and said, “I don't want to go see Stuckie. I'm tired of him. And I think he freaks Reba out.”

During each field trip we set aside time for one “enrichment” activity, and Dumpling preferred not to revisit the one we'd made a habit of enjoying during our previous trips to that site. “Stuckie” is a fossilized dog that is on display within a museum called Southern Forest World and is even more unique than it sounds. According to the paleontological expertise that was brought to bear upon the specimen, it is the remains of a dog that ran up a hollow tree “probably chasing an animal” and got stuck and died. The tree petrified while the dog mummified within it, thus preserving for eternity the real-life tableau of a
Tom and Jerry
cartoon.

Stuckie fascinated me and I loved to imagine him as Creon breaking into Antigone's tomb, his face contorted into a grimace of need and regret. When I recalled, however, that Reba always refused to go anywhere near the macabre thing, I realized that from her perspective, Stuckie was a sort of canine poor Yorick whose smell probably inspired unpleasant ruminations about a dog's place in the universe. I made a mental note to apologize later while I watched her mill about near the Dumpster in one of my bright-orange Orioles T-shirts, worn to increase visibility when ambling near the highway.

“I don't know.” I thought, hesitating, and then said, “Bill really looks forward to Stuckie.”

Bill was ambivalent. “My enjoyment of Stuckie is compromised by your babbling about Greek crap,” he noted, “which starts earlier and earlier during each trip, by the way.”

“Okay, any ideas about where we should go instead?” I asked Dumpling, and Bill shot me a furious look, enraged that I would do something so foolhardy as let a student chart our course. Tradition dictated that we had to go do some goofy tourist thing before returning home.

“How about that place we always see on the billboard? ‘Monkey Jungle'? It looks cool,” Dumpling offered.