Category Archives: Trees

Out of the Woods (for now)

July 18, 2009

Whew. Where to start? It has been one hell of a week, to be sure. The last 9 days have been almost completely filled by all-day stretches of forest sampling, bookended  by rushed laundering of my field clothes (which right this moment are soaking away some of the grime in a bucket in my bathroom), charging of batteries, a lengthy shower, and at least 8 hours per night of sleep. Add to that the 19 leeches, two troops of monkeys, one give-or-take six-foot-long snake, approximately six vertical falls down hillsides (or off of slick, well-traveled pathways), and 5,200 square meters of government-protected forest sampled and yeah…you could say it has been a busy week.

First, the gist. This week we planned on hammering out six of the twelve forests I sought to sample, as all six are ten hectares or less in size, and therefore considered “very small,” even for a community-managed forest. A hectare is 10,000 square meters, which sounds like a very odd amount of land for any society to delineate, until you realize it is 100 meters on a side. So when I say I sampled ‘x’ number of hectares, what I really mean is I sampled a 100 by 100 meter square, that many times over.

At the beginning of the week, however, a series of small things went wrong which maligned all my carefully made plans, and sent us to Rani Ban instead. Ran Ban is the largest forest I planned to sample, a government-managed chunk of forest near several key pieces of Nepali infrastructure (the massive dam that Pokhara depends on for electricity, in part, and the former king’s holiday retreat, just to name two), and has been “protected” by the government for quite some time. I say “protected” not to belittle the efforts of the Nepali government, but to emphasize for you the size of this forest, and the sheer scale of the operation that would be required to truly protect such a gigantic piece of forested land in a country where so many people desperately need the resources forests provide. Rani Ban (Ban means ‘forest’ in Nepali) is a 210 hectare forest, which means 2,100,000 square meters. It covers most of a medium-sized “hill,” this being the Middle Hills region, but keep in mind that I’m climbing around in the trees at somewhere between 800-1,000 meters of elevation – not quite a hill for the average east coaster of an American…

To put it in perspective, when I hit 1,000 meters of elevation on my GPS earlier this afternoon, I was only a couple hundred feet shy of the elevation of the biggest mountains in the Catskill mountains of New York, the thirty-five 35ers (or 3,500 footers), where I somewhat regularly hike. So I effectively spent the last five days in particular climbing up, over, and down the flanks of a mountain the size that you’d find in the Catskills – and then repeating the process over and over again 400 meters along the way as I began each transect, which start at the base of the hillside. It was hard, hard work.

Although we had decided to save the biggest forests for last, we shifted our focus to Rani Ban this week when a series of glitches involving weather and staffing (of my field crew) prevented us from working in first one, then another of the community forests we had already visited, and I fell back on Rani Ban (which is extremely accessible from Ban Campus, although only relative to the accessibility of the other forests) by default.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. To take an adequate sample from Rani Ban we had to do a tremendous amount of sampling (we have at least 52 10 x 10 meter plots sampled, with 4 1×1 subplots, and 1 5×5 subplot per each overall plot), which gave us the opportunity to hone our technique and approach, while taking statistical refuge in the safety of numbers. What I mean by this is that by letting our roughest plots (our first few) happen in a big forest, we probably hedge our bets that any errors in sampling would come out in the wash (the wash being basic statistical analysis of so many data points). Although we tried very hard not to make any errors from the time we began work in Rani Ban, they are almost inevitable at the beginning of any field sampling, and could include reading a diameter tape at the wrong place, creating a plot not quite 10 x 10 meters, incorrectly or inconsistently identifying plants, or estimating tree height. We carry a myriad of tools with us to avoid these kinds of errors, but – mistakes happen – all you can do is do your best, put forth a good faith effort, and in the words of a wise field ecologist “sample till your feet hurt.”

Which, in fact, is exactly what we did.

I’ll get more into the sampling process, and some of the nuance and questions I’m seeking to evaluate (as well as newly developed obstacles to some of the answers) in a blog post tomorrow, when I’ve gotten some decent sleep, but here are the lows, the highs, and the “meh: I can do betters” of this last week of fieldwork.

Lows:
1. Being stymied by logistics. I was stunned by the amount of entreating, cajoling, organizing, and arranging it took to get to my field sites, and to get the requisite field crew there with me at an early enough time in the morning to make a serious dent in the plotwork. Between spotty buses, a field assistant oversleeping, me forgetting to photocopy the datasheets one morning (::cough:: this morning ::cough::), taking the bus in the wrong direction, the Range Post Office’s Forest Guard “volunteer” changing every.single.day, and the timing of the Nepali meal schedule (10am? WTF?), it was damn hard to get two solid chunks of time per day to hammer out some fieldwork. And oh did I learn a whole helluva lot about entreating, cajoling, and double-checking bus destinations in the progress….

2. The first two days. We started in the field a week ago this past Thursday, and the first two days I was miserable. Miserable for a couple of reasons, all of which I very intimately understand, but they were bad enough that I pulled the plug for a day last weekend, to mull things over and make changes in my process. I even wrote a blogpost after my pull the plug day, in which I talked a lot about how maybe this wasn’t the field for me after all, and how perhaps I had outgrown my desire to do fieldwork, or to sample anything. That has since changed, but I was coming down really hard on my abilities as a manager/employer, as my sampling protocols felt really out of control in the hands of my first two field assistants, and I felt extremely isolated being the only one of three people spending the whole day together in the forest but not speaking Nepali fluently.

3. Cultural differences in understandings of the following: “work,” “workday,” “hard work,” “good data,” and “work late.” This is not a knock against Nepalis – there are legitimate, important differences between the conceptualization of these terms between our two countries, and in short order I realized all the good reasons why I couldn’t just steamroll through and organize my dad as if I were working in American. I don’t have a great resolution at hand, at the moment, but I’m working on it.

Highs:

1. I feel sheepish saying this, but let’s be honest – it was the monkeys. Yesterday at around 1,000 meters of elevation I was leading the group up a sheer hillside in order to set the next plot up before they got there, and as I bushwacked upslope through the underbrush, following a bearing on my compass, I realized a troop of Rhesus monkeys was passing overhead. As I watched they actually descended from the treetops quite a bit to scope me out, and then to my utter amazement actually descended all the way to the forest floor(!), where they proceeded to walk the trails about 20 meters ahead of me for a short while. Only a few did this that I could see, but when they did it absolutely took the forward motion right out of me.

I have seen monkeys and baboons in several countries, but there was something truly tremendous about seeing them descend down to the forest floor, and my own plane of existence. It spooked me a little bit, to tell the truth, and it was breath-taking to see them walking along the path on all fours. It was reminiscent of the large, tawny-haired cat I saw around this time last year, in Costa Rica, if only for the way the muscle rippled below the fur, as it prowled along through this particular stretch of protected forest. Other troop members descended to low branches and simply hung out there for awhile, mouths agape, trying to discern exactly what it was we were up to in their forest. And I myself returned their gaze in full – eyes wide, mouth agape. Monkeys!

2. Finishing a forest! It felt so good to know we were done today, and to think of the (piles of) data I now have at my fingertips, both to enter into my laptop and to sort through (ahem: plants in bags). Halfway through the week I found out that Rani Ban has never before been inventoried, so this is the first ever description of the forest resources available to be harvest, managed, preserved or protected. I thought that was pretty cool, and am glad that the data I gathered will provide a baseline for reference by the Nepali people who manage it in the years to come. A few of the forest guards were equally jazzed to see the outcome of my data, and to read the report I draft up. My research is on forest management instead of forest ecology (although to be truthful, I’m measuring forest ecology as an indicator of the effect of different types of forest management) because I wanted to do something applied for my project, and create information and knowledge that would benefit people in the country in which I work, beyond myself. So check that one off the list!

3. Seeing the forest users in action. A few days ago we saw an old woman, bent low with the weight of the huge basket of freshly cut “dead” branches hung off her forehead and lengthwise down her back, and with her permission, I took her picture. These are not “bad people” who are using this protected forest illicitly – rather, they are members of adjacent communities whose survival is inextricably linked to the products they can pull out of the local forest system, but who in some cases they are using the forest unsustainably, taking out more than the forest can replace or give back. Helping women like the one we saw continue to rely on the forest while not irreparably damaging it is one of the central tenets of community forest management, and is also the motivation for my field project.

Yesterday in the forest we saw two different old women illegally harvesting timber and non-timber forest products (an example of the latter would be firewood, lokta, a plant used for paper, or mushrooms), and although we were in the company of the forest guard, he did not arrest them. He called out to them in an emphatic manner, told them to stop removing material from the forest, and be on their way, but he did not intervene, or even look closely to see what they’d taken. As it turns out, I learned later, he does not have the authority to arrest the women, or to fine them. The only authority vested in him, as one of the main patrolers in the forest, is that of bringing the women in to the Range Post (sort of the equivalent of a remote field office for the Forest Service), where the Range Post Officer could fine them, should he so desire.

But put yourself in his shoes for a second here – you are approximately 2,000 meters (2K!) away from your range post office, and it’s a sweltering hot, buggy day, with leeches, biting ants, and mosquitoes rampant. Your options are traveling back to the range post, dragging along an unwilling, loudly complaining and potentially physically aggressive little old lady just trying to get some firewood to cook dhal bhaat for her family, along several hundred meters of elevation, through dense forest, or else simply calling her out through the trees, but leaving her be to decide what she’ll do next. Do you haul her in?

Yeah, me neither. So is there protection to be had in this protected forest? Only the data will tell. But it’s some crazy tasty food for thought, we’ve just stumbled across here…

4. Looking at the map on my GPS unit tonight, and seeing four mostly straight little flag-riddled transects crisscrossing their way across my Nepal map. We did that!

5. Hitting my stride. After those first two shitty days and my personal day of reckoning, I kicked ass. Okay maybe not quite, but I worked hard, I moved fast(ish), I climbed high and I took the goddamned data until it was done. Day Three I woke up ready, and remembered how this works: you put your life, and everything in it, on autopilot (or perhaps I should say “an out of office reminder”) and hone in on what matters. Data.

“Mehs”

1. My field crew. It’s constantly evolving. I’ve been told that I work like “a soldier,” “a man,” and “too hard.” I can’t keep the same ‘Dai’ (older brother) from the Range Post office, from one day to the next. These are the folks who should be most familiar with the forest, its terrain, and the leg muscles it takes to get them into and across them. Instead, I am roaring through forest watchers and lower forest office staff. When I was finally given a former army officer the other day, I thought, “at last!” Someone who really knows how to work. And although the dai worked easily throughout the day, and was the first here to scale a hill slope faster than my own legs could accommodate, the next day a different ‘dai’ appeared at the agreed upon meeting place, and shared that the previous day’s dai had twisted an ankle. “When?” I wanted to know. “When he was working with me?” Although answers were not forthcoming, I later ascertained that by “twisted an ankle,” what was really meant was “his legs hurt.” “And he was very tired afterwards!” the new dai added on, as if in his friend’s defense. To my mind, he might not have been so tired if he didn’t pause hourly to light a joint. Yes, a marijuana joint. But, hey, that’s just me…

2. Being in charge of the field crew. Now that’s different. Let me just say here – to my memory, I was an exceptional, motivated, hard-working, precise and accurate fieldworker. This probably isn’t possible or even totally true, but damn if I didn’t work my butt off in those jobs. I look back to my former boss Donie’s interview process (an hour long! It was epic) for a simple field assistantship, and appreciate her thinking much more deeply now. Man, that woman is smart. It is one thing to be a field crew member, and another thing altogether to be boss, friend, guide, field crew member, and project director. Every inattentive measurement taken is a personal, deeply felt slight, every whining complaint (too tired, to hot, too hard, too hungry) injurious to my heart and my ego. Worst of all are the quiet comments in Nepali, not so insidious as they sound, but worst because I can’t understand them and all parties involved know this. And worst because you don’t need to speak Nepali to understand tone.

3. Struggling with scheduling. Getting up at 5 or 6 am (as I did several time this week) is understandable if you’ll be at work at 6 or 7, but to wake that early and not get into the forest until 10 or 11 seems unthinkable. Trying to mitigate the meal schedule by feeding my field crew myself in the morning has been a black hole for our time and energy, although perhaps contributed to some amount of crew bonding (for the crew that returns, anyway). Lunch is incredibly inconvenient, but packed, non-warm/wet lunches are almost an insult in Nepal. Were I to be working alone I would take a snack-style lunch and work straight through the day, but instead we descended several hundred meters several days this week to eat a huge daal bhaat meal, which my field assistants consumed all the more zealously because the work made them hungry. But the food makes them exceptionally sluggish, and I’ve come to hate the first daal bhaat meal of the day. It interrupts our process, puts us back at the bottom of the hill (the worst!), and totally interferes with my own personal motivation. Everyone is grumpy about starting again, having cooled off long enough to no longer be literally dripping sweat, and perhaps a little unpleasantly full.

4. Unteachable moments. For the life of me, I cannot make my field crew love (or plain old appreciate) why we are doing what we are doing. I tried all week long, and have now come to an understanding with the futility of it all. When my field crew complains or drags their feet (the latter of which burns fantastic amounts of time – just stupendous amounts of time), I try to help them “see” the forest better, or explain the data analysis process more clearly, but so far I have had middling success. I point out the old bari (cultivated fields – what the Westerner envisions as a rice paddy complete with terracing) underneath the foliage, or how the vines are in fact crawling up intact woody stems which have sprouted new young leaves after being lopped by some errant harvester. I emphasize the differences in foliage on slopes with different aspects (the compass direction the plots face), dwell on riparian buffer zones (a fancy way of saying the land around streams and water bodies), and ask open-ended questions about tree form and quality, size, shape, and possible sources of disfiguration, galls, and multiple trunks in a given tree. I think I’m doing a good job, but for the life of me, I cannot get them jazzed the way I felt jazzed as a bushey-eyed young student, eager to learn and retain as much as I could. I don’t really ask that they love it (truth be told, even I do not love inventory) but I do ask that they understand and appreciate it, and that they prioritize the collection of good data. In fact, I might even be about to demand that last bit.

-M-

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

This Moment in Numbers: 12

July 8, 2009

This day is at long last my ‘D’ Day, with the ‘D’ in this case being for Do. It’s time to do it, to go into the field and begin the process of answering all the questions I have spent the last nine months dreaming up. I am excited. I feel energetic and light, full of hopefulness about the speed and accuracy of my data collection (I have a good track record on the latter), and nervous. I lay in bed last night eagerly calculating and recalculating how many days it will take me to get the data, to survey all twelve of my community forests, not able to sleep despite the dark and the long day I had had. I was and continue to be totally jazzed by this moment.

I have 12 community forests to sample, with a whopping nine backup forests selected (one for every sample forest) in case one gets away. The reasons to decide against sampling a forest are diverse, but a few would be if the community didn’t want you there (it’s harvest time, and community members are busy bringing in their crops), if the forest had been dramatically damaged by a fire, flood, or landslide in the last ten years (which would affect the species diversity, a measure of how many species there are, and abundance, a measure of how many individuals from each species are present), or if the forest’s elevation, slope, or topography makes it impossible to survey (the land is very folded here, and many slopes are over a 45 degree angle!)

In addition I have randomly selected an entire backup Range Post, the management unit within which my forests are located. I am sampling three range posts (to see if there’s a difference between them), but I have the back up one selected in case I show up to Pumdi Bhumdi, Lamachaur, or Hemja and the Range Post Officer, whose help I need to get into the forests and work with the local forest watcher, is sick, absent, or just plain irritable.

Did I mention I feel ready?

I had a last talk with my bestfriend/sounding board/president of ye olde kitchen cabinet last night, a last pep talk for the field and also a double-check on my plans, methods, and thinking, from a scientist I greatly admire, and a friend who knows me well. We have worked together in two countries, now, and for all the questions I’ve checked in with him on while here in Nepal, you may as well round it up to three. Incidentally, if you don’t know the ‘kitchen cabinet’ reference, google it – it was originally a pejorative description of one of the former president’s (Andrew Jackson’s?) use of his friend’s as advisors, rather than his official cabinet, and I love the analogy. Your kitchen cabinet members are your go-to people, your last-check-before-I-take-my-swandive folks, the people whose range of experience and perspectives on the world help guide you through your own choices, even though these decisions are ones that you effectively make alone. I like the mental image of opening the cabinet doors and finding all your closest advisors there, the people you respect the most, smiling and reaching in support, willing and able to help and guide you.

Last night I told the cabinet member of note (whose name is Greg) that if by some fluke I managed to discover a new species, I would name it after him, and put an “ii” (pronounced ee-eye) after his name to show him what it would be. It’s common in science to name newly discovered species after famous, well-respected scientists, and since he’ll be one sometime in the next year or so, I’d just be ahead of the curve. I think we were both imagining plants, since that’s what I study, but I also told him, with a wink, that should it be a leech I discover instead, the naming convention will hold.

And now it’s time to rally and leave, as I have one last battle to do with a laggard employee of the forest office here before I can take to the field, and I’m showing up as he starts his day, in hopes of counteracting the laziness, but here are the numbers.

18: randomly selected potential sampling sites, with 18 photocopies of forest operational plans, all in Nepali.

15: minutes before I leave campus for the day.

12: forests to sample by August 10.

7: the number of days per week I don’t want to work, but just might have to.

6: forests at or under 10 hectares in size (whoopeee! Thank you, random sampling!)

6: working days in a week.

4: Pieces of fancy schmancy American raingear.

3: Range Posts and Range Post Officers to work with.

3: pm, the time the monsoon starts.

2: Backpacks packed with gear.

1: 90 hectare, or 900,000 sq meter forest to sample (a percentage of).

1: field assistant, with the promise of others if needed.

1: last cup of delicious Costa Rican coffee before I go.

1: Last deep breath.

Namaste,

-M-

Also posted in Adventure, Forestry, Forests, Friendship, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist – 1 Comment

For Love of Trees

June 16, 2009

These have of late been some very long days of working at my computer, hunched over the little tables in the common space of the guesthouse, doing work on and off the internet to make sure my research plan will be both feasible and fruitful. Tonight after a long, long, long day in the very 70’s style lounge chair that has effectively constituted a “desk chair” for my work here I found I was in serious need of a break, and feeling a little low in spirit due to the slow rate of progress in my research. As I paused for a moment to lean back over the spongy plastic of the seat to crack and stretch my back, I noticed with pleasure that the wind had picked up and was beginning to blow through the open windows, at long last cooling the damp tendrils of hair which have clung to the back of my neck almost since I landed in Nepal. It was going to rain.

I have had an intense love of precipitation in all its splendid forms for as long as I can remember, and have never seen a storm I did not like. I am a particular fan of rain and snow, especially when accompanied by lightning, thunder, or hail, and have always struggled to understand the people who groan as it commences. To me, weather is magical, and to wish it away…bad juju, at the very least. The weather is one of so few remaining sources of change that we humans have not yet brought to heel – I hope we never, ever come to control the climate. To my mind, having so few things against which man is powerless induces a kind of cockiness into our species, which makes us fallible. Instead we need and should crave these regular doses of nature’s power to put us back in our place which, to my mind, should not always be at the top. Rainy wedding days be damned – Fred Astaire and Ginger Roberts had it right – we need to learn to stop trying to always be perfectly in control, and spend more time out dancing in the rain.

And so, eager to see, smell, taste, and maybe even dance in the rain myself, I closed my computer and walked outside and along the forest’s perimeter as the wind picked up, watching how the air blew through the treetops, testing the strength of nascent leaf stems and revealed the white underbellies of leaves while my hair danced with eager anticipation over my head, delightfully out of my control. This wind, the fierce, indefatigable column of air that was moving around me, made me feel as if the world sighed with relief at the promise of a good quenching rainfall, when the sky darkened, and then waited with baited breath as the gift it sought was withheld. There would be no rain.

Instead of dancing in the rain, then, I turned in towards the forest, which flanks my guesthouse windows and the hillside behind the forestry school, and stared into it, hard. At the time I was completely unaware of the intensity of my concentration, but stood looking slowly over the ground and plant-life the forest contains, eyes roaming up, and over, and through the various layers of strata, thinking about the plants and trees and secrets it held.

I was recalling a conversation I had with my friend Jesse from school, shortly before we all parted ways for the summer. We had somewhat tangentially been talking about careers in the field and how they related (or don’t) to careers in the office, as well as the difficulty of choosing effectively between the two paths. Either I or Jesse (I no longer remember which of us it was) commented that the more you learn about the field you love, the more training and education you obtain in your area of specialization, the farther you remove yourself from the source of your passion, and the reason you selected that field to begin with. To develop professional know-how, attend well-known universities, and work effectively for organizations and offices with strong brand associations is to send yourself farther and farther into the offices and the policy and the management and paperwork, and turn decidedly away from the hiking boots, campfires, field culture, and community of field scientists that made you choose this life’s work when you began it. It is a decision I am loathe to make, but one which confronts us all. To be promoted, in professional conservation work, is to go increasingly far from the things and places which are most dear.

My long look into the forest also made me think of what we students referred to as “TNC Day,” this semester, when staffers and the president of the Nature Conservancy descended upon our brand new eco-friendly school building, Kroon Hall, and did presentations on their work, their approach, and what it is like to work for TNC. I attended several parts of the larger event, including a lunchtime panel discussion attended by both the organization’s bigwigs and some of the state-level staff. In commenting on the presentation being given, for a warm up laugh, one of the presenters pointed to a compelling image of a happily bubbling, back-lit brook in a forest, and said, “I’m sure this speaks to everyone here, but it’s not exactly what our day’s work entails. When we made this powerpoint yesterday, we were talking about how long its been since any of us have seen anything like this.” And as I watched, the other panel members chuckled wryly, and nodded in agreement.

It’s funny how stuff like that sticks with you. Instead of feeling amusement at a sentiment I can certainly relate to, I felt a mild degree of horror, and a strong impulse to run the other way, away from everything (environmental nonprofit management and conservation in particular) I have been so single-mindedly moving towards. I already know well how, once in a cubicle, surrounded by piles of paper, working on one of many small projects and trying to maximize your efforts and hours to achieve one tiny conservation goal for one small place, group, or organization, it is so easy to forget why you got yourself into conservation to begin with. How quickly one loses track of why the condition of the natural environment matters, and why it matters to you.

So perhaps it wasn’t so strange that as I stood there looking at the forest, I thought to myself, almost as a reassurance, “this is why I actually came here. Because I love the trees.” And it was a good and timely reminder, for sitting for days upon days while hunched over a computer, overheating in the sweltering weather while your hiking boots become stationary obstacles for your bedroom’s rodent community, is not in the least inspiring. But forests – forests I can get behind. Forests are so deep, and beautiful, and mysterious, with innumerable processes happening at any one time, most of them invisible to our human eyes until we train them to search them out. I have been moved by forests since I was a child, and have sought to study forest ecology since the very first day I realized how much of a source of inspiration they are, for me.

I remember how during college I stood out on the sandy point of an outcropping in the Galapagos Islands, in the midst of unbelievable natural beauty, warm weather, cool breeze, and brilliant, brilliant blue ocean, and felt the absence of…something…so keenly.  I couldn’t name it, at first, but for its absence I  disliked the Galapagos, and couldn’t emotionally engage with them the way my friends did. It wasn’t until a few days later, when we drove up into the highlands of one of the occupied islands to see Lonesome George, the last land tortoise of his species, and passed through the low elevation forests of that island, that I could put my finger on what it was that had been missing. I was missing the trees.

And I am not a fan of just any old tree. I am a fan of the interestingly symmetrical ones, the outlandishly large and proud ones, the kind I can climb, and those that sport epiphytes (plants that grow on trees) and little floral and faunal communities all their own in the crooks of their branches. I love the trees that flower in stunning and unexpected ways, those that I can’t quite reach my arms around, and those that bend and wave in the wind. I love the trees of the Sierra Nevada, which, when down, were as “tall” as I am in their diameter alone, and the trees of Costa Rica, with the crazy latticework of the ficus, which is called matapalo (which means to kill wood) or “strangler fig” for the way it capitalizes on other trees’ growth to get up into the canopy. I love the dark spruce of Alaska’s boreal forest for the way they hide and shelter the life there, and I love the little shrubby, long-thorned bushes of southeastern South Africa, called “spekbom” by the locals, out of which any moment an entire herd of elephants might emerge, without notice. I love both plants and trees.

I have had a favorite tree in every place I’ve lived, in every house and every place of employment or study, for as long as I can remember. At Yale it is a huge, colossal pine, proud and tall and beautiful, which sneaks in along the perimeter of one of the science buildings, whose own scale masks the pine’s height and distracts the eye from its stature, right adjacent to where those familiar with Yale’s campus will be accustomed to finding the cupcake truck. It is also the large deciduous tree that flanks the Marsh Hall parking lot, predating the parking lot’s construction by far, and which you can see straight down into from the aerial perch that is that building’s cupola. I love in particular that the building and tree compliment one another so well – Marsh on its many floors gives you visual access to every element of that which the tree holds in its boughs.

In DC it was the towering old elm that was next to the back porch, whose leaves would be lit up as a greenish yellow by the outdated streetlights that ran along the alley behind 14th Street, and whose pollen doused my back porch and rendered my housemates squeaky voiced and sulky with allergies. Spunky squirrels inhabited that tree’s ancient branches, occasionally making a sudden, spontaneous appearance on part of our porch, scaring themselves as much as they startled us. In my hometown in New Jersey it was the Japanese Cherry Blossom tree on my front lawn, and the two big Red Oaks which towered over our house out back, protecting it; in the Catskills region of New York, where my grandmother’s cottage was, it was the towering, wisened old pines, obscuring all light from the front of the house, rendering the front lawn dead to all but its own shed needles, with nary a shoot of green in sight. In between there were the trees of my college campus, so many of them towering and gorgeous that it is hard to pick just one as a favorite. But if I had to choose I’d pick one of the amazing, beautiful trees out and along the road to Houghton House, our art building, many of which were of a scale not to be witnessed anywhere else on campus, or in the region.

My love for trees makes me a crappy backpacker. I am just as happy walking into the forest, sitting down, and making myself comfortable, as I am with trekking through it all day. I found that I was tremendously gratified recently when, on our last group outing, Gil and Katrina and I all admitted to one another somewhat embarrassingly that, for us, it’s becoming less and less about racking up the miles and checking off the trails, and more and more about just being in the woods. After we spied a couple with a well-established campsite in the backcountry in New York, with tarp firmly attached to the tree and freshwater fetched from a nearby bubbling stream, I decided in the future my backpacking trips should consist of a one day on, one day off schedule – one day to hike the usual 10-12 miles, one day to explore every bit of the forest around me. One day to hike 10-12 miles, one day to play in the woods…

When as a young adult I first became conscious of the fact that I was almost de facto entering into a professional field that focused on something so plain sounding as vegetation, I felt as if I was in a way settling for second place, passing up all the world’s fantastic fauna: lions and tigers and bears, baboons and whales and frogs, manatees and bats and pandas and voles, to spend entire summers of research focusing on grasses, legumes, and forbs, as I did in Minnesota, the effects of burning and cutting National Forest trees, as I did in California, or on a whole hell of a lot of different types of vegetation on the tundra of Alaska, where there are no trees. “Who gets excited about vegetation?” I wondered after someone asked me what I’d actually been doing for work in Alaska at a party one night, and I lost them after the first five words. Right around “vegetation.”

But here I am studying vegetation, excited about plants, and forests, and trees, and look where it has taken me. To Minnesota, to California, to Alaska, and to Costa Rica, Nepal, and indirectly, to South Africa. Most of my international travel has been fully paid for through work or research, and I am so privileged, at the moment, to be living in Nepal to study trees, and they way they grow as a result of the decisions we make to manage them. What great luck, I think now, to have fallen for vegetation.

And so I stood there in the face of the forest, admiring how it crawled up the huge slope and curved down and around its spine, to cover the backside of the hill in thick sweeps of green, like a royal mantle, a cloak. I tilted my head back slightly as the wind once again blew in the promise of a storm, and looked into the canopy as bits of vegetation and birds were blown from tenuous perches and out to meet the rest of the world. I stretched my arms out from my sides just a little, enough for them to be caught by the wind and pressed back and away from my sides, and I grinned.

And as I stood there, hanging in the wind and drinking in the scent of the forest, like a line out of a fairy-tale up walked a toothy little girl of about ten, hair in two black pigtails up and above her head, red ribbon bows neatly tied around each bundle of hair. In my memory she is wearing a blue dress tied at the waist, as Dorothy or Alice or Goldilocks or any number of other inquisitive little girls have worn, but in reality I believe it was a school uniform in the form of a dark blue jumper and light blue shirt.

She smiled dreamily up at me without hesitation, unconcerned by this peculiar bideshi leaning into the wind, and asked in good English, “what’s your name?” And I looked away from the forest long enough to smile back at her and say in Nepali, “Mero naam Meri ho.” My name is Meri. She looked into the forest in the direction I’d been staring, nodded in assent, and continued on her way down the little path. When I looked her way again she was walking slowly forwards, looking backwards over her shoulder now and then to see if I was still there, and grinning. And I for my part stood there and hoped for her that she might be one to find out for herself what there is to love in the forest around her home, and find it within herself to study and protect it. Maybe even just for the plain old, everyday love of trees.

-M-

Also posted in Forestry, Forests, Research, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist, Uncategorized – 1 Comment