Lab Girl (29 page)

“Oh, I'm not worried about him,” returned Bill. “He's gone. It's not any more complicated than that. Honestly, if I admit it, it's me that I feel bad for.” He walked away from me and looked out toward the south. “There's nothing like having a parent die to make you realize how alone you are in the world,” he added.

I kneeled. A few meters away, Bill's back was bent but his body was standing. There were so many things that I wanted to say. I wanted to tell Bill that he wasn't alone and that he never would be. I wanted to make him know that he had friends in this world tied to him by something stronger than blood, ties that could never fade or dissolve. That he would never be hungry or cold or motherless while I still drew breath. That he didn't need two hands, or a street address, or clean lungs, or social grace, or a happy disposition to be precious and irreplaceable. That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.

Most of all, I wanted to wrench Death off and send it back where it came from; it had reaped enough hurt from him for now and would have to be satisfied with an IOU for the future. The unfortunate fact was that I didn't know how to say any of those things out loud, and so I only rubbed the snot streaming from my nose and thought them to myself.

When I reached down to wipe my hands on the moss, I was surprised by how comforting the soft, spongy turf felt. My knees had sunk into the top layers of the sod and the water that had squeezed out was pooling and soaking me through. I reached back down and ripped up whole handfuls of moss, rubbing it between my hands to “wash them dirty,” as we liked to say. I looked at the debris that stuck, and up close I saw what looked like tiny feathers, Kelly green on the topside, lemon-green on the underside, and with streaks of faint red along some of the edges. A pigment for every sunbeam no matter how wan, I thought as I looked up at the clouds.

The rain had amped up a notch, changing from a drizzle into a steady leak out of the sky. As I stood up, I felt the chill travel up my legs and settle into my bones; beneath my woolen long underwear I could feel water running down my legs and soaking my socks from above. I knew that I wouldn't be putting on thoroughly dry clothes again until we had left the country. When you're wet and cold and stumbling in the muck, the plants around you appear smug in their superiority, not only tolerating the miserable weather but thriving on it.

“Yeah, you love this shit,” I sneered to a clump of moss in front of me and stomped directly upon a little hillock like a petulant child, frustrated over something unrelated but unable to conceive why. The moss flexed downward unharmed, disappearing underneath a pool of clean, clear water, and then sprang back when I removed my foot, not even preserving the impression of my boot. I sighed. “You win, asshole,” I conceded, and felt depressed. I considered it, stomped on it again only to achieve the same effect, and then kicked it, and it did the same thing.

“Riverdance?” Bill had turned around and was watching me with bland interest.

“Do you have any twenty-five-milliliter vials with you?” I asked.

“Only three hundred,” he answered. “The mother lode is back in the gray duffel bag.”

“You know…because these things look just as fat and happy as the stuff at lower ground…”

I was talking about the moss, and Bill picked up on it immediately and finished my thought for me: “…even though water should be more available down low, near the streambed.”

“It's a living ShamWow,” I said while working my foot up and down, showing him the way the water pooled when the plants were condensed.

“But does it hold as much water here as it could if it were growing in the lowlands?” Bill asked while staring at the horizon, and we both knew that we had found our question for the day, and possibly for the trip.

Conventional wisdom holds that plants sit on the landscape and wait for water, wait for sun, wait for spring, wait for everything to fall into place before they take their cue to grow. If plants were indeed the passive agents that they were purported to be, water would run right through what was obviously a porous substrate and pool in the lowlands, and we'd have seen conspicuously more green down low. But what if it was the moss itself that was keeping the high ground so mushy, hanging on to water that would otherwise have run down the hill, spreading the wet for its own purposes?

What if this moss had moved into an area, deemed it not wet enough, and proceeded to change this high ground into the soggy mess it preferred, causing what was previously heterogeneous to evolve into a uniformly green expanse? What if the landscape wasn't setting the stage for plants, but the plants were setting their own stage, green begetting green begetting green? What if it couldn't be stomped down, beaten back, or dried up? What if we were slipping, sliding, and stumbling across something stronger and steadier than ourselves?

“Carbon isotopes in leaves should give us water status; we can directly compare the values in the upland with the lowland moss,” I said, summarizing my hypothesis, and started digging in my backpack for Atherton et al.'s
Mosses and Liverworts of Britain and Ireland,
an eight-hundred-page behemoth that categorizes and describes the salient characteristics of the approximately eight hundred species of British and Irish bryophytes. I opened it and began to read, hunched over so that my body blocked some of the spitting rain.

The introduction told me that I would need to magnify each leaf, which was about as big as a fingernail clipping, by at least ten and maybe twenty times in order to see the features that identify the different species. “We have magnifying lenses, right?” I asked Bill, and added, “Atherfuck also says that mosses are best identified when wet.”

“Well, we should be okay on that one,” said Bill as he wrung the water out of his fingerless gloves (“I'm so sick of wasting money on fingered gloves,” he had explained while purchasing them the year before at REI).

We settled onto our knees and began to take inventory of the species near us. After two hours, we were pretty sure that we'd found
Brachythecium
thanks to its furry, leggy appearance up close (“Upon 20× magnification the fronds resemble Oscar the Grouch's pubic hair,” Bill wrote in our field notes using his careful script). We were only partly convinced of its species (
rutabulum
was the front-runner), and so we settled upon
Brachythecium oscarpubes
for the time being.

Members of the
Sphagnaceae
family were not hard to find, given the rich red pageantry of its incipient leaves, though for the life of us we couldn't place the species. After a long digression as to whether we should include the puffballs of
Polytrichum commune
(“Because they're so pretty,” I argued scientifically), we agreed to limit ourselves to
Brachythecium
and
Sphagnum,
considering it likely that we would also find these two genera in the lowlands.

Bill was writing everything down in detail. “How many of each?” he asked, mentally calculating how the contents of each vial would be conflated into three separate analyses on the mass spectrometer for carbon isotope composition. He answered his own question as he quickly recounted the number of vials that we had with us: “I guess no more than a hundred and fifty.”

“Let's just sample until it gets dark, and see what we get done,” I said while carefully noting our exact location on the topographic map and verifying it against our GPS. We negotiated a labeling code that incorporated the date, site, species, number, and the collector responsible, and then took out our tweezers and got to work. “Everything we've ever done and read tells us that the individual variability is high, so the more of these we can get home, the closer we'll get to measuring the site average,” I mused.

“If there is such a thing as a site average isotope value.” Bill hit upon the ultimate sticking point of our study.

By the time we'd collected twenty
Sphagnum,
we'd found our groove: first I proposed a tissue for collection, then Bill confirmed that it belonged to a distinct and identifiable individual, then I photographed the plant against a scale card while Bill wrote down anything notable, then I picked and placed the sample in a tube and capped it, and then Bill labeled it and set it down in order. At the end of this process, we retraced each step for accuracy and I reread the code on the label while Bill verified it against its entry within the field notes.

I believed that photographing each individual sample was over the top, but I let Bill have his way and gave thanks to the digital age that was saving us thousands of dollars compared with what we'd spent over the years in developing roll after roll of film cataloging identical-looking leaves.

We crouched in the wet mulch so close together that the tops of our heads touched now and again. “I want you to know that I feel a lot better now,” Bill said as he worked. After taking a deep breath he added, “Which is surprising considering the large number of open sores covering my scalp.”

We worked until our shadows grew long and the dusk began to fall. We gathered up the vials that we had filled and bundled them into ziplock bags, carefully labeling them in batches. We drove back to the farm and peeled off the outer layers of our soggy clothes, and then we sat by the fire, steaming in our long underwear until late into the night.

We repeated this collecting routine at seven more sites, four located upland and four in the lowlands. When we packed up to leave the country we had more than one thousand hand-labeled vials, each containing a single leaf that had been identified, described, photographed, and cataloged.

“If it's moss youse after we'll get straight to making more and so bring you back,” Billy told us as he sent us out at four in the morning with a big hug, and we got into the car and drove off toward our morning flight.

Bill drove and I dozed fitfully against the window, nagged by guilt for failing to entertain him during the long, dark drive. Upon arriving in the car rental parking lot at the airport, we retrieved the broken side-view mirror from the trunk, taped the keys onto it, and heaved the whole thing into the after-hours key return. We got a bus to the terminal, checked our bags, printed our boarding passes, and headed through security.

The moss samples were in our backpacks. We had learned long ago never to check samples unless it was absolutely unavoidable: however remote the possibility that an airline might lose our baggage, it was too much to risk where samples were concerned. When we placed our bags onto the x-ray conveyor belt, the glass vials tinkled. We walked shoeless and docile to the other side of the checkpoint, only to find a security agent waiting for us.

“Now, then, you'll be having a permit for these?” She had opened our backpacks and was handling our samples as if they were wads of garbage that she had pulled out of a trash compactor.

Oh shit. Permits,
I thought. We didn't have one, and I wasn't entirely sure that we needed one just to get them to Norway. I should have looked it up before the trip, instead of worrying about Bill. I wracked my brain for a believable lie, or a funny story, or anything that might get her to hand the samples back to us.

Bill was always direct and honest when answering the questions posed by people in uniform, and it never failed to impress me. “No permits needed, because they're not endangered plants. We're scientists; they're just for our collection,” he explained calmly.

The agent had opened one of our ziplock bags and was roughly sifting through the vials with her hand. A couple of them bounced out of the bag and fell onto the ground. She pulled a single vial out of the bag, held it up to the light, and shook it; she unscrewed the top of the vial and turned it upside down. It was like watching someone shake a baby. I stretched out my arms, mutely hoping that I could appeal to her in terms of basic female sympathy and she'd pass them back so that I could cradle them, settle them back into place, and shush them to sleep.

“Nope,” she chirped. “Biological samples don't leave the country without a permit.” She scooped up the entire lot and chucked it into the refuse barrel with one motion. I looked at the pile of discarded items that had been abandoned at the last moment. There were bottles of drinking water and hairspray, Swiss Army knives and matches, an open container of applesauce, and a big pile of tiny glass bottles, each of them covered in meticulous handwriting and containing a speck of precious green. Sixty hours of our lives were also buried in that pile, and possibly also the answer to an important scientific question, I thought. Bill pulled out his camera, leaned into the barrel, took a photo, and walked away.

We trudged over to Bill's gate, walking on the backs of our shoes. In an hour he would be returning to the United States, and my flight wouldn't leave for Norway until later in the day. We sat down to wait, and Bill began sifting through his address book and scribbling down 1-800 numbers. He checked his watch and said, “I get to Newark at nine a.m. East Coast time. I'll call the USDA when I touch down and see what we need to get a permit to bring plants out of Ireland.”

I sat stewing in defeat.
The samples we've lost over not having permits,
I thought.
The time we've saved by not applying for them,
I countered.
When will I learn?
I asked myself.

Bill interrupted my internal dialogue by looking at me meaningfully and saying, “It'll never be really lost, you know; we wrote everything down. We'll start over. When you think about it, we got a lot done on this trip.” I nodded, and before long his zone was called to board, and for the second time that day something was pulled away from me that I didn't want to let go of.

I watched Bill's plane push back and taxi off, and I thought how the more important something was in my life, the more likely it was to go unsaid. Then I pulled out my vegetation map of southwestern Ireland, lined it up with the topographic map, and systematically planned out where we could find more moss.