My Last Continent (19 page)

TWENTY YEARS BEFORE SHIPWRECK

The Missouri Ozarks

D
eep in the forest, the humidity is oppressive, especially for September. It's too hot to cover up completely, and I've been slapping at mosquitoes all morning. I wear long pants to avoid poison ivy, but I'm in a short-sleeved shirt, drenched in sweat and sticky, acrid bug repellent.

Everything in these woods has a way of enveloping you. As I bend down to pick up my field notebook, I brush my bare arm against a bush that's sprouting poison ivy. I look at the batch of triple leaves, then dump half the contents of my water bottle on the spot where the plant touched my skin.

Pam hears me and looks over. It's only midmorning, but her dark-brown hair is escaping its loose ponytail, and her face is bright red, as I imagine mine must be.

“How're you holding up?” she asks.

“Great.”

Pam's twice my age, and this is my second year as her research assistant, but still she's always asking.

“Beastly out here today,” she says.

“Better than serving mystery meat at Dobbs.” Until I'd begun working for Pam, my work-study job had been food service in the cafeteria near my dorm.

I'd registered for Dr. Pam Harrison's biology class two years earlier, during my first year at the University of Missouri. Even then I knew I wanted to focus on birds; my childhood obsession with them had never waned.

I'd hoped to go to Seattle for college, to the University of Washington, where I could get involved with the Magellanic penguin program I'd heard so much about. But I was too daunted by the size of the loans the UW program would require to consider it.
Stupid,
Pam would later tell me, when she heard how I ended up at Mizzou.
How'
re you going to get anywhere if you don't take risks?

The housing lottery assigned me to Jones Hall my freshman year, and I soon learned that the all-women's dorm is a coveted place to live for sorority girls thanks to its proximity to Greek Town. My roommate, Taylor, was a petite, lively blonde from Springfield whose main goal in college was getting into the Tri-Delts. Taylor invited me to all the parties, insisted on doing my makeup—since I usually wore none—and opened up her wardrobe to me. “It's too short,” I'd say after squeezing into one of her tiny skirts. “That's the
point,
” she'd reply and hand me a tube of lip gloss.

Thanks to Taylor and her makeovers, I felt as though I'd just met a new version of myself, along with scores of other new students, and, for those first months, I relished this glimpse of who I could be, having shed the tomboy of my childhood. Yet as the months passed, I found it hard to bond with this new me, as well as with the other students. I'd be in
a crowded fraternity basement, beer flowing, music blasting, and feel a sudden need to push my way out, happier the moment I began walking home alone in the cold night air. I'd find myself wanting to sneak out of a guy's bed so we wouldn't have to try to make conversation as soon as we sobered up. The fun was fleeting, even though, week after week, I'd show up hoping it would be different.

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.

WE'RE AT A
winery in the tiny town of Rocheport—Chad and me, his friends Paul and Heather—less than half an hour from the university. The trees are on fire, bursting in shades of
red and orange, and we'd arrived this afternoon, with enough light and warmth in the air to walk through the historic little town and around the vineyard, where we'd settled in to sample the wines.

It was supposed to be an afternoon getaway, but now, having just opened a fourth bottle as the sun sets over the Missouri River in the valley below, I'm wondering when we'll get back to Columbia. And, to my own surprise, I don't really care.

Chad and I have been sleeping together for about a month, and this is the first time we've gone anywhere beyond a mile of campus. Chad is a grad student in the print journalism program, a few years older than I am. We'd met in our photography class a couple months earlier, at the beginning of the semester. I'd registered for the class because it fulfilled an art requirement; he did it to learn enough to photograph his own stories. I was instantly drawn to his unshaven, dog-eared good looks; he doesn't have the polished, preppy look and attitude so many of the undergraduate guys have. He's smart and ambitious, which I like—and, as a budding journalist, he's always picking fights with local politicians about things I care about, like logging in the Ozarks, though I sense for him it's more about getting a good story than actually changing the world. Chad writes for the local newspaper, reporting on everything from city council meetings to local art lectures, and he's been inviting me along to some of the cultural events—film screenings, dance performances, readings by visiting writers. Though I might insist to Pam that I don't have a boyfriend, I've enjoyed the chance to experience a world outside of dirt and birds and sweat.

Before Chad, my sex life had been limited to a boy from Science Club in high school and a few short-lived, drunken flings with fraternity guys. But with Chad, I discovered the liquid-body pleasures of sex, the addictive and all-consuming nature of it. Being desired was, for me, an unfamiliar sensation, an exhilarating one, and it didn't matter that we didn't have much of a relationship outside the bedroom. We'd see each other in class, and we'd go out on the occasional photo shoot together, and all of it led to the same place—the tiny room in his apartment, which he shares with two other grad students who are never around.

And Rocheport, despite being a last-minute plan, feels like a step forward for Chad and me—spending the day with another couple, in a romantic spot. After class that morning, Chad had mentioned it casually, suggesting it might be a good place to get some photos—the river, the vineyard—and it would only take a few hours. I'd looked at him in the autumn morning light, wanting to touch the hair at the back of his neck, to feel the curve of his cheekbone under my fingertip, and within an hour we were climbing into the back of Paul's car.

It wasn't long before I relaxed in a way I rarely allow myself, letting the day unfold, enjoying the unscripted moments. Chad's arm around me as we walked through town. The effects of the wine, which smoothed away my concerns about having skipped a class that afternoon. The sensations of experiencing a part of life that I've never known and that was so remote it felt almost fictional—as if we were playing the roles of ourselves years into the future, grown-ups on a weekend getaway. And as the fourth bottle is opened and poured amid
our laughter and slurring voices, I know we won't be going home tonight.

When Chad excuses himself to find the bathroom, I get up, too. Though I've only had a couple of glasses, I rarely drink and find myself wavering, grabbing his arm for support.

“I take it we're not going back tonight?” I say.

“Yeah, no way Paul can drive,” he says with a laugh. “We'll stay in town. It's on me.”

“So you planned it this way.” I squeeze his arm, pleased.

He squeezes back. “It was Paul's idea. Don't tell Heather.”

He hadn't thought of me at all. I drop his arm. “I hope he doesn't mind getting up early,” I say snappishly. “I have to be at work at six-thirty tomorrow.”

He laughs again. “Don't worry so much.” He puts his arm around me. “Let's just have some fun.”

Back at the table, Chad raises his glass toward mine, as if to make sure all is copacetic between us, and I clink my glass against his. By the time I finish the glass, my head is pleasantly spinning, and it no longer matters that this overnight wasn't Chad's idea; we're here, together, and that's enough.

We make it back to town, where the guys had gotten rooms at an inn that used to be a schoolhouse. In the four-poster bed with Chad, I let go of all lingering thoughts; it's just us and the soft cool sheets beneath our bodies, the slight creak of the bed as I take in the heat of his body and sink deeply into the warmth of my own. We've never spent a whole night together, and I soften into the curve of his arm before falling asleep.

The next morning, I wake with a headache. Chad is sprawled on the other side of the bed, his back to me, and I
doubt he'll move for hours. It's almost seven already, and my headache sharpens as I remember. Pam.