Category Archives: Adventure

A Note from the Field

August 4, 2009

There is something…special about the perspective you gain in the moment when, struggling to walk along the sheer edge of a bari, or rice paddy, in a monsoonal downpour, boots soaked with water and riddled with leeches, and panic rising into your throat as you contemplate yet another day of not finishing even a fraction of what you set out to accomplish, you are able to pull back, up, and away from your little personal tragedy, like a dramatic shot from a helicopter in a docu-drama, and see the bigger picture of where you are, what you’re doing, and why.  For me, yesterday, the big picture came into focus in almost the exact same moment as when I slipped off the sheer face of the bari, mud wall cascading down and flooding the plot I sought to circumnavigate, and fell into the six inch deep pool of rainwater, mud, and more than a few tadpoles and leeches it contained. Oh, for the love of god. What the hell am I doing here?

I wondered, in that precise moment, how exactly it had come to pass that someone so ordinary and (let’s be honest) in almost all ways unremarkable as myself came to be here in Nepal, having this epic adventure almost by accident, scaling bari walls, peeling off blood-swollen slugs, rain dripping in torrents down the length of my nose, datasheets tucked securely into a waterproof folder and under an armpit, in such a way which, were it put to film, would look like something straight out of National Geographic Adventure. Who am I that I thought I could do this? And why didn’t I ask National Geographic for funding??

If not National Geographic, at least, I and my dramatic fall from the rice paddy could probably qualify for a stint on National Geographic’s “Greatest Bloopers in the field,” were they ever to create that show.

As I extracted my right boot from the muddy water with a great sucking “sploosh!” and the displacement of more than a few fledgling rice seedlings, I saw with great clarity and more than a little bit of humility that in coming to Nepal I have found, and achieved, much more than I ever bargained for, or even ever contemplated in my wildest dreams. Even if I am only half done with my forest sampling. And even, in fact, were I never to complete any of my forest sampling. The point is I made it happen – I came, I saw, and I experienced. I was right in the middle of it, so vividly and all-consumingly engaged in the culture and the science that for awhile I stopped seeing what I was and being myself, and just got the work done. And I wondered, standing in six inches of soggy rice bari, if maybe that wasn’t the point, afterall.

We were rained out, in some manner or other, for three days this week, which felt a lot like the moment in softball right before you get hit by one of those wild windmill pitches that were so popular in high school, and yet so hard to throw. You see the ball is coming towards you and attempt to react and dodge it, but know deep down inside that the ball is going to hit you hard on one of the soft parts of your body, and leave a bruise. Most of the time when this happens, as I recall, you swing anyway.

So we swung away three days in a row, making the early morning trip to field sites, eating breakfast, getting all ready to go before having our plans crushed by the uncontrollable, by the weather. The first day we did all of the sampling in a forest called Puranapani (Old Waters) with the exception of three 10×10 meter plots, before we got rained out. We attempted to wait the rain out over tea, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t continue for three days, until this morning.

The second day we attempted a different forest, promising ourselves we’d return to Puranapani to finish in the early morning on our next “day off,” which is currently being pushed farther and farther away. This one was called Alaichibari Tin Khola Pari Pakha (which means something about the former Lychee plantation by the junction of three rivers), and were trumped by one of the rivers, which had swollen to a raging mass of gray water and tumbling stones. I felt mild trepidation at the size of the river, but was determined to cross it, until I turned around to see my entire team (which as I said, shifts personalities almost daily) huddled under umbrellas, ensconced in my raingear, and looking decidedly uninterested in crossing any river in that moment. As many Nepalis, including two of my regular assistants, can’t swim at all, I could somewhat empathize, but it was with great chagrin that I received word via Bina’s translation that the community forest president, a kind of contemporary village chieftain, was refusing to give me the support of any of his community members until the river waters went down. We weren’t going anywhere, and so instead I stood on the banks of the river, looking woefully across at the itty-bitty bit of forest we had hoped to sample (something like 10.63 hectares), and watched another storm, and more rain, roll in.

So we returned to the Hemja Rangepost from which we’d started, to regroup (as you may have noticed, we do a lot of regrouping in these parts), where after a long and circuitous conversation about potential alternatives, the forest guard offered to take us to one of my less accessible forests, Majuwa, where we could stay the night before beginning work early the next morning, rain hopefully notwithstanding.

I know I mentioned at the outset of my field research days that I was anticipating nights spent in the community forest villages, but there was a sort of – invisible barrier – preventing me from reaching this now overwhelmingly apparent-seeming conclusion, and from actually going to the community to take the data in the forests there. It took this Forest Guard looking me in the eye and asking me if I wanted to go (now?) to get me to actually articulate, and realize, that – yes – I do want to go now. Or at least, that I did.

What followed was stupidly expensive, exhausting, and productive. We three student-types rushed back to Pokhara to gather our things for the night, as the forest guard would only take us if we returned within two hours, in order to make the “two to three hour” hike in. Upon arriving we hurtled ourselves up the hill, until I began to drag behind a bit, and the pace slowed. We arrived at the community forest president’s home (a different cf president) in Majuwa in the early evening, and plopped ourselves down on the picnic table style bench set facing the modest shop that fronted his home, where we chatted like a bunch of casual hikers until the forest guard saw his opening, and asked if we could stay the night. It was that quick.

In Nepal, it is customary in the villages to be able to ask for a night’s lodging and food, without much eyebrow raising involved. It is difficult to get into and out of the villages, in many parts of the country, and monsoonal weather, bandhs (strikes), political unrest, landslides, and other uncontrollable events somewhat regularly necessitate a stay with people and families who are otherwise unknown. The Nepali habit of calling all older male family members “uncle” and the same of the women “aunt” means there is a much larger network of people who could generously be called one’s family, upon which a person can rely for lodging, but in the case that no one is known to you, you are not quite so out of luck as you would be in the good old U.S. of A.

So we knew we would find a place to sleep, but it is a strange thing to politely and conversationally invite yourself into someone else’s home, and to displace their teenage son from his room in the process. In the end, Bina and I took what was undoubtedly the nicer room in the two story, concrete slab constructed home, with two wooden bed platforms, upon which a mattress was constructed out of woven mats layered and then covered with the remnants of an old comforter – one so far gone and thin with wear that we in the US might be more likely to reserve it for the comfort and use of a pet than for people. The “mattress” was paired with a thick covering comforter, also made of old blankets folded into a kind of thin, cheap, and threadbare duvet cover of sorts. This kind of bed is fairly typical of Nepal, and despite the dramatic differences from what we are accustomed to in the States, it’s really quite comfortable. We had purchased a mosquito coil to burn on our way up the hill because the windows have permanent open slats at the top for ventilation, and it was thus that we spent the night. The young male student and the forest guard stayed in the little mud and brick house that was behind the building with the storefront, likely in similar accommodation but in a more traditional style of room.

Before dinner we walked down the hill to the forest’s edge with several important men of the community forest, who told us about the forest, it’s boundary, the number of strata (subdivisions made according to forest species composition, or management type), and provided other logistical information. Bina and our current student assistant were good about translating for me, and as we spoke little children seemed veritably to climb out of the bushes and down from the hills, until we were flanked by a little posse of children of all ages, twelve in number. They stood at our elbows and nosed into the circle to listen and peak at a map the cf treasurer was drawing, and a group of small girls stood at my right arm, running their fingers up and down my forearm as they admired the green glass choora I’m wearing at present, as this month in the Nepali calendar is a month in which women are especially reverent, and wear green glass bracelets for one of the female gods who cares for women, and red glass bracelets for the health, well-being, and good fortune of their husbands. I myself was gifted an armload of both red and green bracelets from a female Range Post staff member and so have been wearing them daily, but removed the red ones in a hurry after a male Nepali friend suggested that since I’m single, perhaps my red bracelets are ensuring the health, well-being, and good fortune of my ex-boyfriend! I’ll be having none of that, thank you very much.

And so the girls gigglingly perused my relatively pale white arms with their little tanned fingertips while I struggled to catch the details in Nepali, before making the trek back up the hill to kill time and wait for khana (dinner, or rice). While we were down there we had the community forest’s treasurer make a map of the forest and the different strata for us on a little piece of paper, something I’d like to explore the use of in future fieldwork. I’m interested in the relationship between what the community forestry members know or think is present, and what’s actually there, and have found so far (in a qualitative, not quantitative sense) that they are extremely accurate in their mapping, knowledgeable about their forests, and cognizant about the forest boundaries, despite their appearing to be one, big, contiguous forest to you or me. This indigenous knowledge is something we talked about a lot this last year at Yale, and it’s a compelling, fascinating element of understanding forest management, in my very recent experience.

After such a long and crazily energy intensive (but unproductive) day, we chowed down hard on dinner, and it was delicious. The food in the communities is generally produced by the family serving it, or by their neighbors, and you can taste the difference. I reveled in the delicious food, eaten in a smoky, mud-walled kitchen room in the back building while we were seated on the floor on little woven straw mats, Indian-style. The Nepali students eat their food extremely quickly, like it’s about to up and disappear in front of them, which is consistent with people throughout Nepal, from what I’ve seen. I attempted to the same once or twice, but found that all it made me want to do was burp, so have reverted to the slower, relish-the-moment style of American food consumption. Which means, of course, that when everyone else is finished slurping the last bits of Daal (lentils) out of their little metal bowl, I’m still sloppily scooping up wet bits of Daal Bhaat in my fingertips, achar and tarkaari mixed in for flavor.

On this night we went back to the room after dinner to chat a bit, and then retired early, anticipating an early morning of work to wrap the plot up promptly. I had brought the smaller of my two backpacking sleeping bags, which looked incredibly incongruous and synthetic in the very organic, rustic setting, but provided a soft, soothing, sense of home and comfort to me as I finished brushing the creepy crawlies off my bed. I love sleeping in a sleeping bag (and would do so all the time if that wouldn’t be such a weird thing for my friends to see!), so was glad to settle into the bag in the surprisingly chilly evening air, pulling the head part of the mummy bag up behind me and the sides close around my shoulders. I fell asleep in an instant, and awoke in the morning to the most delightful mountain chill (and copious amounts of fog) I’ve experienced in all of my time in Nepal. It was fantastic, and I dragged lethargically as I pulled myself from my sleep, reminding myself that it was my project we were there to do, after all.

What followed was a fairly productive, fairly enjoyable day in the forest, made more so by the community forest treasurer’s apparent interest in my research/me, and his funny, intrigued questions and thoughtful use of the English language in articulating them. The day passed almost effortlessly, in fact, and before I knew it we had wrapped up Majuwa community forest, had finished plucking a few lingering slimy leeches from our shins and toes, and were relishing one last delicious daal bhaat meal before tearing down the mountain, out to catch a bus and cruise back to Ban Campus, and home.

I wrote this post on July 30th after a long day in the field, but haven’t had a moment to do the editing since, which is why it’s only being posted now. I’m in Lakeside (again! I know, I know) for the day to do more data entry, in anticipation of our last, week-long blitz on the community forests of Nepal. By my count we are eight field days shy of done, and – please god – let those be some fiercely sun-shiney days. Eight days from now is one day after my personal deadline, and a little over a week from my departure flight, giving me some time to relax, explore the area some more, and maybe even have some fun(!)

I am awed by the pace of this experience, though, and by how much I’ve learned and how little I did, in terms of the original scale of my project (and the latter is not necessarily a bad thing). I knew it would need to be cut down in size and all-inclusiveness from the get-go, but find at the moment a certain wistfulness coming over me, a chagrin at all the good questions thus far left unanswered, and a hesitation to leave without doing so many of the academic, social, and recreation activities I aspired to, in my naïve early days in the country. At the same time I am pretty damn proud of my progress, how much I’ve learned, and even more so, how much I’ve seen. I don’t have any conclusive results, yet (in a personal sense), but I have a lot of new perspective, and anticipate taking some much-needed me time before heading back to the States, and determining my next direction and set of personal priorities.

I have two forests to go in terms of those that I absolutely must finish sampling, and four total. One is a tiny one-day affair, and the first two are sizeable. We’ll get them done, though, because where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I have nothing if not will power. In fact, some days I think I have nothing but willpower.

8 forests down, 4 to go, and 15 days (at absolute most) to get it all done in. 16 days to American food and my family and friends, 17 days to the beach, and 24 to Yale. I feel so content, so good, so ready. Let’s get this shizzle over with, eh?

Namaste,
-M-

Also posted in Creatures, Culture, Forestry, Forests, Research, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist, Travel, Uncategorized, Yale and FES – 1 Comment

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-

Also posted in Creatures, Forestry, Forests, Research, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist – 0 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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