Monthly Archives: July 2009

Carol Smith of Elle in the New York Times

July 26, 2009

I’ve never heard of Carol Smith before, but I read the New York Times for a reality check about once per week, and since today is my day off (aka it rained! Finally – the farmers here really needed it), I was cruising the NYT homepage and found this article, an interview with the Chief Brand Officer from Elle magazine group.

She pretty much took the words (about being in charge) right out of my mouth. What I would add, however, is that in thinking about my own leadership these last two weeks, I’ve concluded that it’s women, more often than men, who need to win over employers in order to get good work out of them. Men are allowed and expected to be assertive (”you did this right,” “here’s what I want you to do next time,” “this is what I need you to do better,”) whereas women get more pushback from that kind of direct, assertive talk (and very little productive work out of it). When I speak assertively or directly to my fieldcrew about what I need them to do, I get a fair amount of negative murmuring and quiet grumbling, and very little adherence to my instructions. Now this could be cultural, social, or personal, but it’s definitely there. I haven’t had this much time or opportunity to reflect on group dynamics in quite awhile, but my field crew is of late providing plenty of food for thought…

One final thought on the article – regarding never hiring people you don’t like. This is a lesson I learned very early in my career, during an early summer field research experience, and which was reaffirmed for me in one of my professional positions more recently. In both cases there was a highly desirable candidate, competed for by other potential employers, whom a boss of mine sought and obtained as an employee. Both of them immediately rubbed me the wrong way for different reasons, and seemed to have egos bigger than the positions they would be hired to fill. I tend to have a good instinct for people and personalities in this capacity, which held true in both instances, and reached out to my bosses to share my reservations, in a politically and professionally appropriate way.

In both circumstances the candidate in question was an egotistical man a little too big for his britches, and in both cases he was hired despite my quiet (and in the latter case, incredibly direct) objections, and in both cases, the candidate left the job or dropped out of the program within the first year of the opportunity he had been given. I don’t think I would have put the two together if it weren’t for the employer from the earlier case, with whom I’m still in contact, and who always recalls when we’re speaking how I cautioned her against picking up the “employee” in question, and how she went against my intuition and regretted her decision when the candidate became a nuisance to her own career.

Two cases doesn’t prove the rule, but it does provide a good reminder that anyone you’re going to spend as much time with as an employee, and especially a field crew employee, should be someone that you really, really like, someone that you can converse easily with, and someone who you enjoy talking to. More importantly in my case, perhaps, it should be someone whom you can look into the eyes of, and imagine towing their weight, and holding up under a little hard work. Because the only thing harder than holding up under your own hard work ethic day after day, is holding yourself up while also propping up everyone else.

7.3 forests to go. See you on the flipside, when I hope to be down to 3. Here we go, here we go!

-M-

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Blood and Sweat, but No Tears (Yet)

July 24, 2009

There is something to be said for the first time in your life when you reach your hand across your chest, under your armpit, and around to the back of what might generously be called your shoulder, and in the process of scratching the skin there notice that your fingertips have glided down the back of something long, thick, pulsating, and slimy. That thing that one rallies to say (after the initial, “oh, ew“) is most certainly a four letter word, or, in my case earlier this afternoon, a long string of them. The problem with leeches, though, is that if you pull them off without salting or burning them, it 1) increases the chance of infection, 2) makes them shoot blood (your blood) all over your clothing, and perhaps the worst -3) it makes them elongate into the little pseudo-worms they are, as they desperately stretch and grip onto your skin, to keep siphoning away your life force. It’s really the most grotesque, fascinating, horrifying parasite I’ve ever interacted with.

Not that I’ve interacted with many, but still – we’re talking the paratrooper of the parasitic community – today’s leeches (which were longer than any I’ve seen before – about two inches long and skinny before they bite you – completely frickin’ disgusting and huge and swollen afterwards) were reaching out, dangling off the long leaves and plants we brushed past while laying out my research plots, like America’s ticks do, except it was as if the ticks had – I dunno – grappeling hooks. Long ones.  Long ones they could reach up and out with, right in your direction, and use to claw onto your clothes, your skin – anything they might catch hold of. My first leech today bit me by climbing past my impassable socks-over-tightly-wrapped-pant-legs getup, and up to my knee, where the zipper of my pantsleg falls. I wear field pants with zip-off legs when in the field (as in, they become shorts as needed), albeit with the pant leg intact, and zipped firmly on. But the leech in question slimed his way right through the tiny space between the end of zipper threads and the fabric, and sure enough, when I unzipped the leg, there he was, tapping me like a keg.

This is the moment of your life when you call for the salt in Nepali (”NOON! NOOOOOOON!!!! NOOOO-OOOOOO-OOOOO-OOOONNN!”) like my cousin Jackie frantically would when she was twelve and given something green or healthy that she didn’t want to eat, and in fact would not ingest without heaps of the stuff, or like you would if slugs were escaping from your garden and eating your dog. “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!!!!”

So you could say things have been busy. We’re 4 forests along, as of today, which translates into a totally mind-blowingly awesome 1/3 done with my sampling. This sounds much better than saying ” we still have eight forests to measure and I only have four weeks left in the whole country!” which could perhaps be called the reality of the situation, were I a “cup half full” kind of person. But this, I am not.

Tomorrow stands to be even better than today (which was pretty damn good, leeches excthe notable exception), as we’re headed to a forest called Puranapani, which is a wee seven hectares, or 70,000 square meters, and could potentially get wrapped up really, really quickly (as in, by tomorrow night!) Cross your fingers for me, and meditate on this number: 7. Because today my magic number was eight, and ta-dah! We’re there.

The reality of my day-to-day situation right now is actually kind of blase. I’m not doing much besides field science, and I’m doing much more work for that than is really comfortable for several days in a row/in any given day/in this country/during the monsoon/especially during a dry monsoon season. I’ve been revelling in the many moments of quiet reflection -or is it exhaustion? – that travelling to and from field sites inspires, however, and thought I’d share a few thoughts before another early, early bedtime.

And so, true to the blog’s title, here are a smattering of notes from the field.

-Field Assistants. They will never work “hard enough” for someone who works really, really, hard, and it turns out that “leading by example” (which I constantly seek to do with my little field team) is absolutely exhausting, if not impossible. Field crews will work hardest for leaders they respect and care personally about, in my experience, just like in any other job. What I realized (after being kind of bossy, unsympathetic, and too hard on just about everybody, myself included, the first week), was that I have to let them like me for who I am, and hope that they come to admire my devotion to field science, rather than loathe it. To do this well, I have to like them for who they are and how they do the work, first. For some reason that is unfair, and bogus, and very possibly entirely created by my overwhelming exhaustion, I found this hard last week. But right now we’re all growing on each other, and that’s some good stuff that just feels right (even if I do have to constantly remind them how to fix the corner plots, to measure every step, to measure precisely, where to do the dbh, not to stand in the regeneration plots…etc…)

I think this is particularly important when the field crew risks life and limb (or at least copious blood loss) to assist you, and you’re standing at the sidelines, telling them to re-measure the plot because it’s definitively-rhombozoidal, and not even remotely a square (as it should be). My esteem for my former boss Donie grows leaps and bounds by the day as I realize how hard she had to work to find decent field help, especially since she couldn’t interview potential hirees in person, from Alaska. There’s something to be said for seeing someone in person in order to decide whether their and your version of “work hard” are even slightly analagous, and it is hard, Hard, HARD to be boss, field mom, guide, instructor, data recorder, double-checker all at once. Add to that the necessity of being the person who leaves the field last and enters it first, to make sure nothing is left at day’s end, and to set the tone and tempo at its start, and you’ve got one exhausted woman on your hands.

-Also on field assistants. It occurred to me today that I might perhaps tell my fieldworkers that “I would never ask you to do anything that I wouldn’t do,” and I almost did, until I realized I’d have to follow on to it with, “but I’d do almost anything, so hey – your bad luck.” I thought this as I dangled off a 50 degree slope, pulling myself up around a tree trunk sticking out perpendicular to the hillside as if I were rock-clmbing at the Rock Gym in New Haven, legs dangling behind me as dragged my torso up another few meters of elevation fueled only by adrenaline (and perhaps a little fear). Hmm. Nevermind.

-Strong Men. I never thought I’d say this (ever!) but I miss them. I miss the type A personalities of dudes who work in forestry, I miss their capable, “oh I’ll get it” nature, their hand down to pull you up over the steep ledges, and the emotional anchor they provide to keep my lazy self working hard to keep up. I set the tone on this field crew (I am “the man”), and there’s not really anyone there to prop me up when I struggle…except me. I miss someone to lean on, and trust to catch the details. I particularly miss the many strong men in my own life, who are often emotional supports, and provide much-needed physical contact (I’m thinking hugs) when I’m struggling in my day-to-day life. I guess I need a strong man hug?

-Indelicate comparisons. My fieldworkers (and the various range post, or field-forest office staff) workers I have worked with (whom I have been running through like I have the plague, and it’s catching) have variously called me a “very hard worker,” “very strong,” and, my favorite, “someone who works like a soldier.” I almost always take it like a compliment, although I’m pretty sure in Nepal it’s as an insult. No Nepali I’ve met feels an overwhelming pull to to work particularly hard for long stints of time (like Americans do) – it’s just not in their life outlook. [Note to future field researchers working in Nepal: you will not be able to convert them, either. Trust me. You just won't.]

-Also in the arena of indelicate comparisons, my primary field assistant, Bina, has joined the bandwagon of people daily telling me I’m losing weight – not entirely shocking, considering I hike up and over 1,000 meters of elevation at least once, and usually twice per day – but took her turn in the form of “You have lost so much fat” late yesterday, as I stood at a public water pump giving myself a spongebath with my bandanna. “Well,” I thought, “I know Nepalis are small, but I don’t know that fat would be the word that I would have used to describe myself…” Insert bruised ego ::here::

Exhaustion. Is with me everyday. I wake up aching with it (at 5:45 am right now! Does anyone believe that?!) everyday, and curl up around it to sleep, hair wet and feet raised to decrease the aching every night. My thighs and leg muscles were in good shape to begin with, but I almost daily propel myself up the seemingly unending rock staircases that carve out the hillsides here by focusing on how it’s really just “exercise,” and how my legs have become, in essence, two large, condensed muscles. Everything else in my body is just kind of doing what it does, but from my hipbone to my ankles is pure strength – which is kind of cool. And exhausting.

With the exhaustion comes a lot of pain in my feet – we stand all day, and hike all day, and trip over rocks and cross streams all day, and the bottoms of my feet are killing me. I’m not really a foot person (as in, I basically just ignore that they’re there), but I’ve been trying everything – little scrubber brush, massage, body lotion – but they too are becoming rocks. And unseemingly rock-like. Definitely not lady-like…

…and neither are my legs, which are riddled with the little faux bullet holes of leech bites, which after the bite bleed profusely due to an astonishingly powerful anticoagulant they inject. It’s a little like opening a fire hydrant that taps into your blood stream, and when you salt a leech mid-engorgement (which, damn them all, I freaking love to do) they respond like aliens in a blockbuster summer movie, rearing their gnarly “heads” (tube endings) and shaking them back and forth violently, while spouting pirated human blood, until they curl up into a ball and die of dessication (can you hear my enthusiasm here?). That part is delightful, but the excessive bleeding that follows is tedious. Some of my leech bites have bled constantly for as much as four or five hours, going through multiple band-aids and gauze paths, and turning all my clothes/socks/trouser legs a brilliant blood red.

The wounds finally stop bleeding when the blood around them dries enough to prevent any more from escaping (i.e. not from coagulation), but they form what looks like an ugly mosquito bite that has been thoroughly scratched, and then pus everytime you succumb to scratching. Add about 20 clustered on the front of my legs (and as of today, two on my upper back, one on the back of my waistline, one inside my right knee…etc…) and you get the picture. Nasty.

Distractions. In my head, when I’m escaping from the leeches mentally, if not physically, I go to the beach in the US, where it is hot but not humid, and where there is water you can submerse yourself in. Although there’s lots of gorgeous water running across this part of Nepal (it’s part of what makes the trekking so aesthetically pleasing), the vast majority has run across farmland or through communities in its path to the country’s rivers and lakes, and is completely unsuitable for bathing or swimming. So I spend a lot of time staring in dismay at gorgeous, sparkling bodies of water, wanting to swim in it and holding back, almost salivating with the desire to jump in and be totally, wonderfully, wet. Hence the beach fantasies. And the lake fantasies. And the MODS fantasies. And the in-America-we-don’t-throw-our-garbage-in-the-water-and-I-can’t-tell-you-how-brilliant-it-was-that-someone-came-up-with-that-idea fantasies. Not a bad place to go, when you need to get away. And lordy I can’t wait to hit the beach in CT when I get back – somedays I map the trip from the airport to the beach in my head!

Food. I am on the craving trip of a lifetime. I want ice cream and chocolate, preferably together or one after another, ad nauseum. In fact I want ice cream in lieu of almost every meal (okay, every meal). I want FAT. I must be burning more than I’m picking up (despite the inescapable Asian rice belly I’m rocking these days), because I crave JUNK. Junk from all different countries, places, and cultures. Copious amounts of junk food. I notably don’t crave salty food – Nepali eateries offer a food they call “chow mein” which we in the US would call “Fried Ramen with vegetable shavings,” but I can’t bring myself to eat it. It even smells like it is bad for me. Chocolate and ice cream on the other hand – well let’s just say I wish it were more in vogue to be both a glutton and a food hoarder in Nepal.

I’ve started supplementing my diet with copious amounts of fruit, and on my last day off (the day of the solar eclipse, which became a national holiday here), I ate no fewer than three pomegranates, two mangoes, and a banana, all in less than about eight hours of wakefulness. These sugars seem to do the trick they way I need them to, but the effect is less long-lasting than, say, the little KitKat bars I discovered at the shop outside of the Ban Campus gates last week. On my day off, I should admit, I also ate something like three of those suckers, and then mourned the fact I couldn’t go buy more and properly pig out for, oh, the next three days.

For now, I’m going to leave it at that. There’s much more I wanted to say and many more creative ways to say it, but I am beat and late for bed (it’s after 10 pm! Yowza! My life is so exciting). I’ve got field clothes to put on my little clothesline, my water is filtered, and I might even have enough data sheets to make it through the morrow. Oh the excitement – I can hardly wait.

Tomorrow 8 turns into 7!

Namaste,

-M-

Posted in: Adventure, Creatures, Forestry, Forests, Research, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist – No Comments

Love Song for Nancy Drew

July 19, 2009

This week’s Fashion & Style section of the New York Times included a well-titled tribute to the Nancy Drew mystery book series, “Nancy Drew’s Granddaughters,” and included several choice quotes from many famous and ambitious female political and social figures who read the series as a child. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens with the Times, the short article had the feel of an overedited, in-just-before-the-deadline one-off, and not of the quality tribute that the indomitable Carolyn Keene deserves.

Before I continue, I do want to mention that in the second grade I was heartbroken to find out from our elementary school librarian, Mrs. Lawless, that my heroine Ms. Keene did not, in fact, exist. The Nancy Drew mystery series, which according to the Times piece debuted in the 1930s, was written not by one single author, but by a long series of authors and editors who wrote under the name of Carolyn Keene, a pseudonym. I had inquired with Mrs. Lawless after heading determinedly into the library with pencil and paper in hand, intent on telling the authoress how much I liked her books and how much they meant to me, and that I was waiting for her to publish the next one.

I was young enough at the time that copyright and publication dates meant less than nothing to me, and that pencil and paper would be the instruments assisting in the writing of my communique. Suffice it to say, I was more than a little bit devastated that there in fact was no Carolyn Keene to read and receive my letter. For if Carolyn Keene didn’t exist (and surely, she must!) then to whom could I write?

I was a very, very nerdy child, and I most definitely looked the part. I actually remember the feeling I got while learning to read in Kindergarten, struggling through the “Sam I Am” book series even as I considered them to be more than a little bit unenlightening, although I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was perpetually curious to find out what exactly would happen to Sam on the next page. I remember the daffodil yellow cover of the books, which were really merely pamphlets, and how the little photocopied pages felt in my hands as I triumphed over first one then another page, working my way through the books until I successfully met the release that was the back cover.

In first grade I have a clear memory of sitting in the corner at one of the child-sized low, round tables in Mrs. Whitlock’s classroom, and being embarrassed and annoyed by the lunch-lady (who I ran into at the airport just a few years back, and who still remembered me as the prolific reader in the corner) coming over to praise me for always reading, something I hadn’t necessarily realized I was doing until she pointed it out. The other kids from my class and their day-to-day activities didn’t hold my interest the way the books did, however, a phenomenon that would prove true through at least the first half of high school. I was much more interested in what I was discovering about the world through reading, and in all the great stories that existed to be discovered.

As I grew older I read more and more aggressively, learning to read through the roar of our television, on long car rides, and in class. In particular I read in math class, which I found horribly and unutterably boring, and would hold the book open in my lap behind the little curved plastic desks, pushing it forward almost onto my knees and pressing them up against the desk to pin it there whenever an alert teacher deigned to meander my way during lessons. I was rarely caught or chastised probably, in hindsight, not because I was so crafty with hiding my books (somehow I doubt I got around Mr. Blanchard, my fourth grade teacher, of all people), but because it was so infrequent and likely very amusing to come across a kid who so loved to read that she snuck books between the pages of her math text and sought to craftily hide her reading during other lessons. I attribute both my exceptionally high verbal scores and my exceptionally low math scores to this years-long behavior, and smile now to think of what my teachers must have thought about the little nerd child.

At home I read in the shower,  soaking many a library loaner by pressing the book up against the shower wall with one elbow and quasi-shampooing my hair with my other hand, or by leaving the book on the old radiator with white-chipped-paint just outside the shower doors, anchoring the pages down with the shampoo bottle, and leaving the shower door open.  When I couldn’t find books to read that were yet to be digested, I read shampoo bottles, ingredient lists, classified ads, music lyrics, and (perhaps best of all) my dad’s copies of the ‘Reader’s Digest.” In later years I read books far beyond my years, age, and knowledge of the world, and as a child I read through lunches and classes right up through Middle School, when someone picked up on how bored I was in school and skipped me a year in English and Social Studies, and when the social scene first began to develop and I realized to my surprise that I was intrigued by the possibility of playing a part.

There are several good stories to be told about the nerd child and her great books, and were I to paint you a picture of me during my childhood, you’d find a slender but tall little girl with long, thick brown hair pulled back into a hairband from a great big forehead, wearing some awful printed mock turtle-neck top from Land’s End with teddy bears or images of presents patterned across the material, and  thick aqua-blue plastic glasses two sizes too large for her face. She would be huddled off to the side of a large group of students, the latter of whom were flush in the moment of coming of age, while she herself was engrossed in her canary yellow covered hardcopy book, chin in hand, deep in thought. And between the canary yellow covers in the midst of a great adventure and perhaps more importantly terrific feat of mental reckoning you would find nerdy little me, a plump young girl named Bess, a tomboy named George, and our good friend, Nancy Drew.

Nancy Drew was for me both hero and heroine – she was effeminate (she wore pearls) and also tough, full of sass and not about to take ‘no’ for an answer. She snuck out of the house without fear of the dark or the scary things it could contain, and her friendships were not merely those of young girls learning about the world and themselves, but of alliances, from which she acquired the strengths and abilities she could not find in herself. She was a superhero in a skirt, and even though I occasionally found her perfection and Home Ec-yness (which I might even then have referred to as Home Ickyness) a little too saccharine sweet for my taste, I was always along for the ride, usually tagging along on George’s coattails, as her toughness and resilience were a bit more closely aligned with where I sought to locate myself in the world.  The girls of the Nancy Drew series made me feel strong, and capable, and safe, and the works of Carolyn Keene made me feel normal, and smart, and powerful within my own tiny corner of the world at a time when my growing understanding of myself and how big the world can be most needed that reassurance.

The Times article asked many famous women “who their Nancy Drew was,” and I would say that mine was daring and brave, and took risks with her physical well-being only when she knew that her intellectual abilities and powers of reasoning could get her out of any sticky situation she might find herself in. Indeed, the latter helped her wriggle free from many a prickly situation, and I in my real life (when I actually put down the book long enough to observe it in progress) began to similarly use my own creativity and resourcefulness to get myself out of the sticky situations of the day-to-day life of a grade schooler (of which I don’ t really think there were all that many). From the Drew books I developed the ability to see the world more clearly, when I was attentive enough to it to discern the patterns and causality in grown-up life, and would even today attribute much of my observational aptitude to the good role models that Nancy Drew and her sidekicks provided.

I remember too how exhilarating it was to go to the local library and run my fingers cross-wise along the spines of the 40+ Nancy Drew books that they held from the series, overjoyed with the secret coup-de-grace of a whole bookshelf’s worth of material that, it appeared, only I was clever enough to check out and read. And I remember as well how it felt the day I returned the last books to the library (for I used to check out dozens at a time, taking them home in a large plastic shopping bag imprinted with the acronym of the local librarians’ union), and realized that I had out-read the series – I had finished off Nancy Drew, and in fact had read so many of the works multiple times that there was no longer any more previously overlooked nuances to detect.

It was with a heavy heart then that I moved down a shelf, to the aquamarine blue bindings of the Hardy boys series, which I devoured just as quickly, although with a little less exhilaration than that of Nancy Drew (because ugh! They were boys!), and an even heavier heart that shortly thereafter I returned the last of that series as well. I even now recall the awe and pride of standing in front of the entire mystery section of the children’s room of the library, and seeing that I had read every title across a half dozen floor-to-ceiling shelves, and the sadness that accompanied the understanding that I had moved beyond my old friends, and would have to let them go if I wanted to keep reading.

Nancy Drew was my co-conspirator, my inspiration, someone who challenged and befriended me during the angst of the first  decade of my life, in a time before laptops and iPhones and constant internet connectivity and the endless barrage of the television. She met me in the quiet places in my house, held my attention, and pushed me to try harder, go farther, and think more creatively at a very formative and vulnerable age. And when I finally left that children’s room book section for the ‘Young Adult’ shelves (whose location was trepidatiously close to the Adult books consumed by my mother, a voracious reader herself), I remember the chagrin and nostalgia of leaving a roomful of well-known and closely loved friends behind, and the indebtedness I felt to Nancy Drew, who I knew would protect all the other books and characters in my absence. Losing the Drew series was a lot like losing an old friend at that relatively tender young age, but she and her co-conspirators opened the door for me to a whole host of other works, and life experiences lived between the pages of great and sometimes not so great works of literature, and for that I will always be tremendously grateful.

-M-

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