The Adventurer's Son(11)
Matt, an Iditarod musher as well as an engineer, offered me his “dog shack” as a place to stay in exchange for looking after his kennel. Each morning after feeding his barking white sled dogs, I rode my mountain bike to the thaw fields, where a crew of misfit laborers melted the permafrost to mine for gold. Alaska Gold operated two gold dredges, enormous 1940s-era boats that floated in the ponds they dug. At their bow, a conveyer belt of one-ton buckets slurped up the tundra and passed the diggings to giant sluice boxes that rinsed nuggets and gold dust from pay dirt. I worked ahead of Dredge #6. My job was connecting water hoses to two-inch steel pipes sunk eighty feet down into the permafrost, then jacking and twisting the pipes with heavy tools to break them free of the ice that gripped them.
I sent nearly all my earnings home, happy to make sixteen bucks an hour. But living in the dog shack so far from Peggy and baby Cody was lonely. That spring, my high school class would hold their ten-year reunion. The invitation reminded me that my science career had been sidetracked. A decade had passed, yet I worked side by side with kids who had just graduated from high school. It was time to grow up and get that Ph.D.
After a full season in Nome’s thaw fields, my visits to graduate schools on bustling campuses like Princeton and Stanford offered a contrast in cultures, and not just with Alaska’s frontier. Pretentious Princeton put me off, yet the Stanford vibe was exciting. The Bay Area’s nearby mountain bike trails, redwood forests, and rocky coastlines appealed to me—almost as much as Stanford’s outdoorsy students and eclectic faculty.
Stanford professor Jonathan Roughgarden was a tall, lanky man who wore his mop of brown hair carefully combed to the side. Brilliant, with an owlish look befitting his Harvard education, Roughgarden beamed in excitement as he used his hands to give comprehensible shape to abstract ideas. The National Science Foundation had funded his proposal to develop mathematical models of food webs based on fieldwork with Caribbean lizards. It was a project that needed a student like me, one with athletic abilities who was also competent in the quantitative arts. From my perspective, Roughgarden and the project’s fieldwork would complete my training as a modern ecologist.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a Ph.D. from Stanford either.
Chapter 6
Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn
Cody and Jazz, Culebra, 1991.
Courtesy of the author
The Ph.D. program started in the fall of 1988. Peggy, who was pregnant with our second child and finishing her own degree in elementary education, stayed in Alaska with eighteen-month-old Cody. Midwinter, I flew home and drove our Subaru to California. Peggy and Cody followed soon after, flying down with frozen moose and caribou meat, part of our strategy for surviving on a grad student stipend in Silicon Valley.
A couple of weeks later we threw a barbecue potluck with my new California friends. Early on at the party and stimulated by the day’s preparty cleaning, Peggy went into labor. We handed off the hosting duties to a pair of Alaskan friends and headed to the Mountain View hospital. Just after midnight on January 22, 1989, Peggy gave birth easily to our daughter. We christened her Jasper Linda Dial, her middle name honoring my mother and her first name the muscular beauty of the Canadian Rockies.
Jazzy was a sweet, beautiful baby. Her features were tiny, her smile darling on minuscule tender lips, and her sparkling personality matched both her name and arrival into the world at a party. As expected, Peggy made an attentive, loving mother of two, although a mother at times overwhelmed.
Ph.D. programs are essentially poorly paid apprenticeships with a boss expecting constant, unpaid overtime. This left me unable to pull my full weight as a parent. Alone all day in the condo complex where we lived with no other young mothers nearby, Peggy felt isolated caring for a toddler and an infant. She took a low-paying job teaching movement classes to preschoolers at a women’s health club where she could bring our kids with her to work. She wasn’t about to let someone else raise them.
“Roman, it doesn’t make sense for me to work at the club. The kids are always getting sick there. And if I take another job, all the money I make will just go to child care. I’d rather stay home and raise them myself.” Her kids paramount, Peggy gave up the companionship of coworkers to keep Cody and Jazz healthy. We agreed that emotional wealth was worth more than money, so she focused on her role as housewife and mother, an arrangement that made everyone happy.
ARTICULATING A VIABLE Ph.D. project consumed my first year at Stanford; completing it took three more. Roughgarden’s NSF proposal had described the Caribbean’s common anole lizards as ideal organisms to study complex food webs in tropical rainforests. The small, colorful, and active creatures are abundant in the canopy, far above the jungle floor. At the time, scientists viewed the canopy as an inaccessible, unexplored landscape just overhead but far out of reach.
Most canopy studies cataloged life as seen through binoculars from a tower or the crotch of a single tree. Our research involved manipulative experiments in multiple trees sixty to one hundred feet above the ground. The protocol called for removal and exclusion of anoles from individual trees for nearly a year. Because anoles spend their lives in the canopy but hatch from eggs in the forest floor’s soil, we would keep the lizards out of the crowns following their removal with plastic collars around the tree trunks. Next, we would compare both the counts of bugs and the amount of leaves eaten by bugs in trees without lizards to the same counts in trees with natural populations of lizards. In this way, Roughgarden and I could measure the myriad impacts of an abundant predator on its environment. That was the idea of the experiment: to bump an ecosystem and quantify its response. To make it happen would require ropework, courage, and plenty of sweat and muscle. It sounded like my kind of challenge.