My Last Continent: A Novel(60)

In my second semester, I took my first class with Pam, and my focus shifted—sharply, as if snapped back into its natural place—from parties to science. A tiny, dark-haired woman in her mid-forties, Pam was energetic, blunt, no-nonsense, and her passion for ornithology was palpable and contagious. She could answer any question without hesitation, many answers based on her own research, and I wondered what it would be like to have that sort of knowledge, to know as much about a species or an environment as you did about yourself.

Pam taught several courses in biological sciences and ran the avian ecology lab. That semester, I read everything I could about birds and registered for her avian ecology course in the fall. One day, she took me aside after class. She said she needed a field research assistant, and while she usually hired graduate students, she sensed that I might be interested. The job entailed searching for and monitoring nests, resighting banded birds, and recording field notes.

“I’ve never done anything like that before,” I said.

“Are you in decent shape? There’s a lot of hiking involved.”

An active runner back then, I logged about fifty miles a week. I nodded.

“How’s your hearing?”

“Fine.”

“Are you color-blind?”

“No.”

“Any problem being out in bad weather?”

I shook my head.

“Poison ivy, bats, snakes—problem?”

“No.”

“Then you’re hired,” she said. “We leave from the Tucker Hall parking lot tomorrow morning, seven sharp,” she said. “Don’t be late.”

I didn’t have any idea what I was doing that first morning, but gradually I learned. I learned how to catch a bird in a net, how to weigh and measure and band it. I learned how to listen and how to wait, how to spend hours under a canopy of trees in volatile midwestern weather, how to spot well-hidden nests.

And now, a year later, I’m working with Pam on a long-term study evaluating the response of various species to deforestation and restoration in the Ozarks. We look at breeding patterns, predation, and the birds’ rate of return in clear-cut forests.

As we walk among the oaks and junipers, I can see the delineation between old and new growth from the last clear-cut. Ahead of me, Pam stops short, and I crouch down next to her. She’s peeking under a low bush, at an empty nest. As usual, she says nothing, waiting for me to see what she sees. And a moment later, I do—shell fragments, so small they’re barely perceptible to the naked eye. Unless you’re Pam, or have been trained by Pam.

“What do you think?” she says.

I sit back on my heels and look around. I don’t see tracks among the fallen leaves, but snakes are the main predators of songbirds around here.

As Pam pages through her field notebook, I know we’ll be adding another component to her half decade of research—and this is what I’ve grown to love: the way each day brings a new discovery, the way species’ lives are layered so intricately, the way we begin to ask the questions that will eventually puzzle out all these mysteries. Working with Pam had become, for me, far more intoxicating than the beer bongs and Jell-O shots of Greek Town.

“I’ll do some research on snake predation in this region,” I say to Pam.

She shuts her notebook and looks at me. “You’re always talking about working with penguins,” she says. “Where are you thinking about graduate school?”

I have stacks of brochures and applications in my apartment, but, on the other hand, I don’t want to leave. I feel as though I need to finish what I’ve started here with Pam—the problem is that it could take years, even decades.

“I’ve still got time,” I say.

“You need to plan ahead.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll stay here. Keep working on this.”

She takes a drink from her water bottle and shakes her head. “Bad idea. You want seabirds, you need to go east or west, north or south. To the sea. In two years you’ll be done here.”

“You don’t want me to stay?”

“You don’t want to stay,” she says. “You want penguins, not songbirds. What is it, a boyfriend?”

I’ve been sleeping with a guy named Chad I’d met in a photography elective, but I’m not calling him a boyfriend. Not yet.

“No,” I assure Pam. “Nothing like that.”

“Great,” she says. “Then nothing’s stopping you.”

“What if I like working with you?”

“Get out of your comfort zone. That’s the first rule of making it as a researcher.”

“And the second?”

“You choose science,” she says, “or you choose family. Women don’t have the luxury of doing both.”

Though she is my mentor, I don’t know a lot about Pam’s personal life. I know she is single and lives in a small house not far from campus; she bikes to work in almost any type of weather and, like me, usually works weekends and holidays. She doesn’t have pets because she travels to Central America to track the migration of the songbirds, and I once heard her refer to her graduate students as “my kids.”

We get back to work, and later, when Pam returns to the car, I stay behind for a few minutes on the pretense of taking some more notes. I like the quiet out here, and when I’m all alone and very still, I can sense the ghosts of the Civil War battles; I glimpse deer passing delicately among the low branches, or a turtle sunning on a rock near the river. On campus I often feel lonely, left out. Here in the woods, there’s no such thing as loneliness, only quiet, and something like peace.