Locust (31 page)

The double-blind approach to evaluating the effect of a drug or an insecticide is intended to remove the biases from the outcome of the experiment. As a student, I was taught that the power of science lies in its commitment to the ideal of objectivity. The goal was to design, conduct, analyze, and interpret experiments with absolutely dispassionate, uncontaminated reason. In light of the standard “experiments” conducted in the requisite college biology, chemistry, and physics laboratories, this approach was philosophically correct—but demonstrably bad—advice. The student who managed to create matter (a common outcome of syntheses in organic chemistry—most probably the fruit of mismeasured reactants, incidental side products, and worn-out scales) was not rewarded for objective reporting. No praise was offered to the budding geneticist who refuted Mendelian
inheritance (a frequent result with fruit flies—most likely the consequence of the winged ones escaping and the wingless ones becoming mired in their gooey food, thereby skewing the proportions of these forms). However, we understood that in the course of “real” science, one had to adhere to the ideal of objectivity with uncompromising devotion.

The problem with this pedagogical approach was that once I became a professional scientist, nobody was handing me a lab manual full of preconceived experiments. I was hired as an insect ecologist at the University of Wyoming to explore the world of grasshoppers, with a particular eye to managing populations of these creatures when they became unruly. In graduate school at Louisiana State University, my research had been quasi-independent, guided by a gentle mentor and a thoughtful committee. As a new faculty member, I relished the lack of oversight—but freedom is scary stuff. I discovered that the most important and difficult phase of science is asking a good question. Our ignorance of the natural world is such a boundless resource that one must attempt to navigate through a mindscape of tangled paths, blind alleys, twisted streets, and unsigned roads. I had learned the principles of objectively designing experiments, impartially collecting data, rigorously analyzing the results, and neutrally interpreting their meaning. I knew how to answer questions via science, but standing in the midst of a few million grasshoppers milling about on the mixed-grass prairie or a few thousand scientific journals crammed onto the shelves of the university library, I realized that generating results was the easy part of science. The hard part was figuring out what to ask.

In this defining phase of inquiry, the ideal of objectivity not only fails to provide guidance; it becomes an absurd—if not utterly impossible—standard. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like for a scientist to select questions in a purely dispassionate, utterly disconnected manner. Many scientists approximate this condition in pursuing topics that are deemed important by the collective consciousness of their peers in a socially sanctioned, positive-feedback system that provides comfort and security. But this effort to become the lead sheep in the flock, a biologically problematical but conceptually apt metaphor, lacks an objective rationale. Some scientists use
the standard of “publishability” and choose the questions that are most likely to yield manuscripts, and still others select the measure of “fundability” and focus on those matters most likely to yield grants. But selecting the putatively objective criterion—peer approval, publication, or funding—is an act loaded with subjectivity. Perhaps the only possible tactic would be to construct a database of all possible scientific questions and then to randomly select one for examination. Such silliness simply reflects the absurdity of the claim that science is a purely objective venture.

I could not possibly have devoted seventeen years of my life to the study of grasshopper biology and ecology without a passion for these creatures and the lessons they offer. Even taking out time for teaching, meetings, and other duties of academia, I’ve spent a bit more than 2,000 working days—nine years of full-time labor—trying to understand grasshoppers. No sane person would devote such labor, let alone so much of one’s life, to the pursuit of questions that did not touch the heart and soul while stimulating the mind. To have invested that much of life is either a tragic waste of human potential or an expression of faith that there are mysteries and lessons worthy of this expenditure. If each passing day represents an irretrievable gift, then to squander this blessing on the heartless, soulless interrogation of nature would be to offer oneself as a martyr to the cult of objectivity.

Although my expedition to Grasshopper Glacier was founded on rational thinking and reasoned argument, my desire to explore the frozen remains of the Rocky Mountain locust was personal and subjective. I wanted to stand in the presence of such a strange and wonderful natural phenomenon. There is a grandeur of scale that draws humans into the natural world. For me, outbreaks of grasshoppers and swarms of locusts are a portal into a joyful terror that has long been an inexplicable part of my being. Like being drawn to the edge of a towering cliff or into the deep water beyond the crashing surf, I find myself pulled toward these irruptions of life.

In the summer before my first trip to Grasshopper Glacier, I remember standing at the edge of the dirt road as the dust from my truck hung over the road for a quarter mile along Whalen Canyon. There, I came to understand how a hundred grasshoppers per square
yard transforms the world. They blanketed the skeletons of the sagebrush, gripped the shreds of yucca, and lined the shady sides of the fence posts to avoid the searing heat. In the draws, where the only hint of green vegetation remained, the grasshoppers formed a virtual carpet. They ricocheted off my face and chest, clung to my legs, and boiled in every direction. At this density, the grasshoppers melded into a single, seething ecological tissue into which I was absorbed. One never fully returns from these dream-places where mental, spiritual, and physical experience are inseparable, where we glimpse the vastness of the heavens and the depths of the earth.

Whether for better or worse, whether driven by objective knowledge or subjective experience, whether seeking the tangible or the inconceivable, I was compelled to see for myself the frozen forms of the creatures that had eclipsed the sun. I was drawn to witness the immensity of life captured in the ice long ago. To touch the jumbled masses of locusts, to lift a corpse from its glacial grave, would be to make these fantastic life forms—the individuals, but even more powerfully the superorganisms that emerged as swarms—real in a way that historical accounts and woodcuts never could. Maybe such intimate contact with the creature in its final resting place would trigger a connection, an intuition, a missing link in the chain of events that had ended with the dawn of the twentieth century. Or perhaps it would simply feed my irrational fascination with immensity, my craving for the infinite.

The most famous Grasshopper Glacier lies at 11,800 feet in the Beartooth Mountains, just ten miles northeast of Yellowstone National Park. At least three other bodies of ice in the Rockies bear the name, but this is the only one that has achieved notoriety. Although the glacier was omitted from U.S. Forest Service maps before the 1940s, it was known to the miners of the region, who came across the site while seeking gold, silver, and copper. When Riley and his commission were looking for locusts, grizzled prospectors were surveying the West for riches.

The first scientific expedition to the glacier was in 1914, when it was proposed that the Rocky Mountain locust was the creature embedded in layers within the ice. Specimens were collected on four subsequent expeditions between 1919 and 1952, but none were preserved. For a while there was even a flourishing tourism industry, with jeep tours taking people to the glacier from Cooke City, Montana (sardonically nicknamed “Cooked City” when the 1988 Yellowstone fires swept to the edge of the town).

Perhaps the greatest source of speculation concerned the age of the locusts. Since the 1930s respectable publications had reported that the swarms had been entombed “since prehistoric times,” and a credible entomologist, Arthur G. Ruggles, maintained that the insects were hundreds of thousands of years old. In 1953, Ashley Gurney conducted the first and only scientific study of grasshoppers preserved in glacial ice prior to our work. He asserted that the Rocky Mountain locust comprised the layered deposits, but he noted that a few years earlier a colleague had collected live specimens of another migrant species,
Melanoplus rugglesi
. Ironically, this species had been named for Arthur Ruggles, the man whose wildly speculative estimate of the age of the locusts in the glacier was about to be refuted. Gurney used radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of specimens from the glacier. Unfortunately, the analytical methods of the time were quite imprecise, and the resulting age of the insects was reported as 45 ±650 years. This was a very difficult value to interpret and may have arisen from relatively old specimens, although far less than 100,000 years, having been contaminated with recently deposited material.

When we arrived in 1987, a weathered sign—painted on a dilapidated cabin, announcing “Jeep Tours to Grasshopper Glacier”—was Cooke City’s last remnant of the glacier’s heyday as a tourist attraction. By the time of our expedition, a wilderness border had been declared between Star Lake and Goose Lake, four miles short of the glacier. We were, however, heavily equipped with camping, climbing, and traveling gear—along with a U.S. Forest Service map that included a tentative, broken line that purportedly traced the trail from just outside Cooke City into Grasshopper Glacier. I’d long since learned that such markings on Forest Service maps represent
an odd combination of rumor, folk wisdom, and seat-of-the-pants cartography. The former jeep route had deteriorated to a meandering ghost trail.

Fortunately, my team had a sense of adventure. Dick Nunamaker, a research scientist with the USDA laboratory on campus, lived in a tiny log cabin on the windswept plains outside Laramie, so he was well adapted to adversity. Larry DeBrey, my research associate, had been a construction worker, a logger, and a firefighter, so the expedition was well within his comfort zone. Tim Christianson, my doctoral student, had been working on a demanding field project studying insect communities in a sagebrush shrubland at 9,000 feet, so he was conditioned for the trek.

Within the first five miles, we had lost the trail twice and changed a flat tire. The road was so bad that the other three fellows decided to walk in front of the four-wheel-drive truck that was hauling our gear. Their logic was that they could hike faster than I could drive, so they could scout ahead for passable routes. And walking involved far less physical abuse than banging around in the cab or bed of the truck—not unlike the logic used by pioneers who chose to walk alongside the prairie schooners. At times, my crew took to rolling small boulders from the badly eroded track in an attempt to preserve the oil pan and avoid using our last spare tire. In the course of seven hours, we traversed the fourteen miles to Star Lake. This serene site was surrounded by craggy outcrops and a few courageous pines—a perfect location for a camp. Angry gray clouds soon rolled over the distant peaks, and a fierce wind buffeted our tents all night.

The next morning dawned crystal clear, with a heavy dusting of snow on the higher peaks—not an unusual condition for August in the high country. With light packs, we headed out from camp and around Goose Lake, which stretches from the wilderness border to the pass that would take us up to Grasshopper Glacier. The thin patches of stunted trees above camp quickly gave way to patches of alpine meadows and by the time we reached the pass, the only signs of life were palettes of orange, green, and gray lichen splattered on granite boulders, some scattered tufts of grass sprouting from the windblown soil between the rocks, and a few mountain goats across
the way. As we reached the top of the pass and crested the ridgeline, the glacier came into view. The great crescent of ice rested in a classic cirque, an immense bowl of rock at the head of a boulder-strewn valley. The saddle was flanked by Sawtooth Mountain’s Iceberg Peak and Mount Wilse’s Glacier Peak. Winds funneled up the granitic gorge and across the ice—a perfect trap for any airborne insects attempting to cross the Beartooth range.

Our thrill at having successfully reached the glacier was quickly dispelled, as we realized that the frosty spectacle was courtesy of the previous night’s storm. Two inches of fresh snow covered the ice—and buried any chance of seeing grasshoppers at or near the surface. A couple hours of scraping and searching convinced us of the futility of attempting to locate specimens under these conditions. We were seeking needles in an immense, frigid haystack. But mountain weather is notoriously fickle, and what the clouds bring the sun soon takes away. Although it was evident that the day would yield nothing more than a couple of reddish tibia collected from a patch of exposed ice beneath a boulder, we also realized that the snow was rapidly melting.

Over the next three days, the glacier was stripped of its snowy mantle, and the pitted gray ice was revealed. The warm days sent torrents of water down the face of the glacier, making the work wet and treacherous. The constant hazard was falling, as the resulting slide could quickly deposit a careless climber over the low shelf at the toe of the glacier. The short drop would end with a plunge into the sapphire blue meltwater lake that fed West Rosebud Creek far down the valley. With ice axes and crampons, such a spectacular descent was unlikely, but slips and stumbles were not uncommon. Such mishaps yielded painful reminders of the virtues of keeping one’s gloves on, even as the temperatures climbed into the high forties. The surface of a glacier does not resemble a frozen lake but is strikingly similar to a cheese grater, being formed of thousands of tiny, sharp-edged pits that efficiently rasp the skin from unprotected hands.

A much greater, but highly sporadic, threat arose from the boulders that would break free of their icy moorings and plummet down the face of the glacier. All afternoon we heard the rumbles and crashes of
rocks that the sun had worked loose. A large section of the glacier was entirely covered in a shifting jumble of boulders, and others were eager to join their brethren. During lunch on our second day, I found a sunny spot alongside a stable boulder, which provided an effective barrier to the wind. From a couple hundred yards away, I heard a faint cry and saw Larry waving. I figured that he was coming to join me, so I waved back and shouted an invitation to lunch.