I headed up the hill to the University of Utah to see Molly Chang, a professor in the geology department. I’d gotten to know her during the winter semester, when I took some classes there in preparation for starting a Master’s program—or, at least, that had been my plan at the time. When I began to get tight with Jack, I started to wonder if some nice university closer to where he was more typically stationed might be even nicer. Call me fickle, but that’s how my mind works: life first, and career … in there somewhere.
I found Molly sitting at her desk in her office, leaning back so far in her swivel chair that her hiking-boot-clad feet dangled above the floor. Her desk and surrounding bookshelves were populated by the usual array of rock samples and obscure images that seem to bloom wherever a geologist is planted. She looked up from a clutter of books and papers and gave me an expectant look.
Molly is a sedimentologist, which means she studies how fragments of rock, animal shells, twigs, and what have you get transported and deposited as things like riverbeds, beaches, and so forth. If left deposited for a while, the fragments get cemented into sedimentary rock. I went to Molly because she is an expert on desert sediments, and so far “African” was the only word I could put with “Florida dust.” Leaning against her doorjamb, I said, “Dust storms
from North Africa would come off the Sahara desert. Is that right?”
“Usually. Back before Homo sapiens,” Molly said. “Mineral dust deflates off the Sahara, sure, and always has. But the topsoil blew off the Sahara a while ago.”
“Say what?” That’s the thing about talking to a geologist. You never know what time frame you’re going to land in. We are the historical science, and our minds jump straight to the time scale and epoch that seems most significant.
“Well, the Sahara wasn’t always a desert, you knew that,” she said.
“In fact I did not. What epoch are we discussing?”
“Post-Pleistocene. In human terms, the Stone Age.”
We were discussing a time considered recent to a geologist, but to a historian of human events, the dim, distant past. “I savvy the warming of the western U.S., the climate change from wet and cool to hot and dry, but I’ve never chased it overseas.”
“Ten or twelve thousand years ago, the Sahara was green, a savannah. It had some nice forests, even. The climate was cooler and wetter. Paleolithic man chipped pictures of giraffes into the rock outcroppings that surrounded the water holes where the animals came to feed. The women dug up wild onions and raised a couple kids and maybe an orphaned fawn or two. Life was easy. Then as the ice age retreated, the Sahara warmed and grew increasingly arid. Life got tougher. Game and grass grew scarce, so the men took over the care of the domesticated animals and started herding them to far pastures, stripping the vegetative cover there as well. The topsoil started to get up and go.”
“How long ago?”
“Call that seven, eight thousand years ago. But the advance of the desert is still happening, expanding south into the semi-arid zone called the Sahel. The loss of topsoil has accelerated over the past thirty years, through the current drought cycle, which has been going on unusually long.
Lake Chad is all but dried up, between lack of rain and people pulling water out of the watershed to stay alive. And then there’s the fact that there are even more people there than there used to be, what with all the improvement in medical care and so forth, for both the people and their animals. More people and animals leads to more overgrazing, gathering of every twig of wood for cook fires, and the cycle intensifies.”
“Are you taking a shot at me because I’m an old ranch girl?”
“No. You come from a so-called advanced culture. You brought your fuels in by tank truck, right? And I imagine your family culled the herd rather than let it overgraze your land.”
“That’s right. We had dry years, but Wyoming is probably a lot less arid than North Africa anyway. Even the driest part of Wyoming is considered only semidesert.”
“Exactly. But in North Africa, we’re talking full-on desert. And the people are nomadic. They move the herds with the grass, and they don’t own any pickup truck to run into town for fuel. Instead, they push the herd until it strips the vegetation, as I said. That sooner or later degrades the biological capacity of the land. For instance, where you used to have grass and trees creating a baffle that kept the air quiet next to the ground—a microclimatic effect—you now have wind right at ground level, and sediment is plucked up into the air with each little breeze.”
“You mean like our ‘dust bowl’ years here in the United States during the 1930s, when farmers left the ground naked to the wind after harvest.”
“Right. The next dust devil sucks up all the fine sediments and off it goes.”
I said, “Doesn’t a certain amount of it happen anyway?”
“Right, and there are biological systems downwind that depend on the nutrients that come packaged in the dust. But when we disrupt the vegetation, the system accelerates.” Molly cocked her head to one side. “So what’s going on? Are you getting interested in this stuff?”
This was where I intended to set up my target and do a little archery. So I said, “Sure. I was thinking that with your specialty in desert sedimentology, you might be interested in my doing a report on this African dust thing.”
“You mean for your Master’s thesis?”
Whoops!
“No, I was thinking of more like a term paper. Or a special studies project.”
Molly narrowed her eyes. “Are you planning a trip to Africa?”
“No, Florida. That’s where the research is being done, you see, and—”
“Florida? What’s the sudden interest in Florida?”
If I’d been prone to blushing, I would have been beet red about then. “I have a chance to go there is all, and—”
“Does this involve that big, good-looking FBI guy you’ve been hanging around with?”
“Okay, well, yes, Jack’s in Florida for a little while. But I was thinking I could sort of kill two birds with one stone: See him, visit the USGS there, and come back with research for a paper. Get course credit.” The idea suddenly sounded stupid, really stupid.
Molly rocked her head back and laughed heartily.
“Cherchez le homme.”
“This isn’t a joke, Molly.”
Molly held up a hand. “Far be it from me to judge a woman who adjusts her career to her private life. I passed up a chance for the astronaut corps because I wanted to be there each evening to read my kids to sleep.”
I hadn’t taken her for the adventuresome type, but then, Molly kept a lot of herself where no one saw it. All I could think to say was, “Wow.”
“Right. So what you’re really saying is that you want an introduction to the people at the USGS in St. Petersburg, right?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Fine. I could put you in touch with Miles Guffey, the guy who sort of started all that African dust business. It’s a breaking-news kind of project, very high profile in the
media, but they’re doing some interesting science.”
“Great!”
“Now, hold your horses. If you want to nose around in all that, fine, but I’m not going to risk a perfectly good professional connection on less than a thesis project.”
I realized a little too late that I was losing control of the conversation. “Well, I know a thesis is required for the Master’s degree in geology here, but I thought that came later, like after I formally enroll in the program.”
“Show some spine,” Molly chided. “Quit waffling. I pulled some strings to get you into the classes you’ve already taken, so you owe me. As your advisor, whether you’ve asked me to be that or not, I advise you to look a little more dedicated, like you live and breathe only to study geology. I know that’s bullshit, but hey, it’s how the game is played.”
“Hmm.”
Molly’s dark eyes clouded with annoyance. “Come on, Hansen, get it together. What are you, thirty-five? You’re not a kid anymore; you don’t need to be spoon-fed. You’re a seasoned professional. Get that lovesick look out of your eyes and start pretending that nothing else matters to you, just like the rest of us idiots.”
I tried to smile. “Okay. Right. Let me at it. Ride ’em cowgirl.”
“Yeah. Ride
Em
. That’s my job. But seriously, you want to prepare yourself for more of your forensic work, right? Well then, a dust thesis might be just the thing. Documenting source terrain, analyzing sediments and geochemistry and so forth. I’ll bet that’s just what the FBI guys are looking for.”
“I could treat it like a crime scene,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. But oddly, as soon as I spoke the words, my brain began to tilt its machinery in that direction, and little connections began to bloom … .
Molly’s eyes narrowed down to slits as she broke into fresh laughter. She turned her swivel chair to face one of her bookshelves. “Let’s see … . I have it somewhere here … .
Ah.” She pulled a book off a shelf. “The United Nations report on desertification.”
“What’s ‘desertification’?”
“I believe it is defined as ‘the reduction of the biological capacity of arid lands,’ as in, if you strip off the topsoil things don’t grow as well. Just what we’ve been talking about. Note the publication date.”
I opened the book. “1982. Is there anything more recent ?”
“Ah, good, your mind is functioning. There was a big push back in the 1970s, when the drought started, but when they ran out of money,
pfft
. There’s still a lot being done, but not much is seeing print. Try the UN Web site.”
My stomach sank. This was beginning to sound like work. “Maybe I should start with the recent work the guys at the USGS are doing.”
“Okay. Hit the Internet, and the library. But the USGS doesn’t have any money either, so I’m not sure what you’re going to find past the news stories, which are hardly a scientific source.”
“Wait just a moment here! You think I should take on a thesis project that won’t get funded?”
Molly leaned back in her chair again and studied me for several moments. Her smooth Asiatic face had gone as hard as porcelain, her eyes to flint. “I would in fact
prefer
you work on something that has no funding.”
“Why? What am I supposed to live on? What—?”
“You’re an independent type. I should think you’d want to work on an unfunded project precisely so you can maintain your independence.”
I took a breath and gave myself time to think. “You mean, so I don’t have to dance with the boys what brung me.”
“Em, these days most science is bought and paid for by the wrong interests.”
“You mean the corporations?”
“Sure. The corporations fund what they fund and don’t what they don’t, and that’s how we’re supposed to decide
what we should study? That in itself is an important part of your education. When you’re on one of your detective cases, do you study only the evidence that someone tells you to look at? And do you only come to conclusions that someone with money thinks you should arrive at?”
“What about government grants? The National Science Foundation, or the—”
“The corporations bought Congress years ago. Even the NSF is not without its political overtones and its cronyism. Oh, we should try to get you some money, Em, but we should try first for the kind that comes with no strings attached, and no presumed results. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, you go read around in that book and decide if you’re really interested in that stuff. If you are, I’ll make you some introductions. And here, take this book, too.” She pulled a volume out from between a stack of test papers waiting to be graded and a box of thin sections waiting for petrographic analysis. With a wry flourish, she dusted off the book.
I took the book from her. It was entitled
The Secret Life of Dust
by Hannah Holmes. “Looks like a novel,” I said.
“No, but it reads like one. Science writing for the lay public.” She chuckled. “It takes the dryness out of the dust. And one more thing: Watch out for Miles Guffey.”
“Oh, now you tell me.”
“No, don’t get me wrong, he’s highly regarded. He’s one of the big thinkers, puts together the big picture like few people can. But people like him ride the edges of things, and you’ll find that part of what he does is connect with all kinds of strange people and see which ones have something he can use. He uses his high profile like a knife, to cut through red tape. The downside is that there are all sorts of hangers-on that kind of catch on the smart man’s fur like so many burrs just traveling along for the ride. I hear he’s got a microbiologist working for him now who’s real bright, but he came out of a lab where people are messing with some bad microbes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean anthrax. Biological warfare. Here, you ought to read this, too.” She added a book entitled
Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War
by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad to my weighty stack. “I don’t trust these guys who make a bad germ worse and call it security. If Guffey tries to connect you with that crap in any way, you tell him you’ll find your own way home.”