Issue #6

In The Field

In The Field

I.

I am asleep in the desert. I am dreaming this world and yet another. In which I am impossibly tall, resolutely female. My vision extends to the horizon. I see with an effortless, steady, dimensionless knowing. It is January and cold when the sun sets in the Mohave, so we retire to our separate tents early, campfire notwithstanding. Rhythms change. I sleep for four hours and awaken, alert and aware, present in the hyperfabric of dream space, centered in its truths and extent. The pattern repeats, I dream again. I have a staff; I am a warrior; I am indomitable. My intelligence is unbounded. I know. I belong to this place, it is my domain. I am the Earth, the Earth is me. Another morning it is especially still and quiet, dreamless and full. Snow is falling, the landscape and I are draped, shielded, embraced and we are reverently at peace. The extant whole of the Earth is apparent, emanating, and pervasive. I resonate with its thrum, I exalt with it. I, too, am more. It is a becoming like no other. Every winter in all the years since, I have ached for the desert and its dream world. My great love for the planet – its fluxing entirety and perpetuity, its temporal and timeless dances – owes to the desert and what I have dreamt there. I am formed by it more than any study or work. Because of the desert, I create. Because of the desert, I write.

 

II.

Somewhere in the Bitterroots, I have not paid attention to the sun or cardinal directions in the van on the way over. We are being shown outcrops – ribbon rock? a fault? I cannot recall. I do remember the unexpectedness of a mountain saddle high up – though not high enough for snow – and the pastoral feel of the grass and the flat. Then, a far-off rumbling crescendos into our awareness, into thunder. As one, without thought, we turn like dancers to see a herd of wild horses at the horizon flying towards us, with intent. So quickly! They are right there before us, facing us in an arc, the alpha male its keystone. They pound the earth with their hooves, snorting insistently. They are so very large, time and space collapse as their gestures fill our view. Unconsciously we have mirrored them, our group leader anchoring our curve. Jim steps out extending his hand. The stallion too, instantly, to meet him, but his head is high, his chest is out, he is assertive, challenging, dominant. Jim speaks in a sonorous, soothing voice, the way you’d speak to domesticated animals who are unsure or timid. But the stallion is having none of it. He shakes his head, violently, snorting and beating the ground again. The others join in. It is threatening – just – sublime in that remote Big Sky mountain-scape. We are not welcome. This is their place.

I say clearly but softly, to the herd as much as anyone, “They don’t want us here” acknowledging what all surmise, but not out of fear, rather to hold the moment, to forestall a break with magic, to keep time slowed. We step back, in retreat, our postures careful as we walk to the vehicles.

They watch us, somewhat more still, somewhat appeased, but holding their ground with great strength and power, and then, all at once, they are gone – to the wind, to the horizon, their place reclaimed.

 

III.

The clouds are low and long and perpetual, tufted and thick as down. It will snow soon and for a good while. This is welcome news, for even though we are breaking trail, the sleds want a good base. It is cold too, well below well-below zero, and that is good for the dogs, who are lethargic in more temperate climes. Wolves and humankind have grown up together over our short part of the long life of the Earth, and we make good partners now, having somewhat both domesticated and freed each other. All the members of my team are wild in the main – Alaskan huskies – the term used to denote that not one of them are pedigreed, but all are mixed mutts and curs, bred and chosen by nature to run. I am here in the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada to be wild with them. We have made a bargain. I will feed and shelter and protect them, and I will lead. For their part they will pull and run and pull and run and run. Out-of-harness they will frolic and I will watch. It is no disadvantage that I am a woman; on the contrary our guide tells me, in a small aside unheard by the men, that women make the best mushers. It is our empathy and intuition, our commitment to the good of the group, our innate respect, and our egalitarian understanding and appreciation of role that makes us trusted by the pack and worth following. And my six dogs do follow, they run and pull for me and run some more. It is easy. The guide, who had taken the rear position, starts to pass each team ahead of him, one by one, demonstrating and explaining his technique. We are novices, though, and not intended to follow his example. Even so, I do, when the men ahead are slow, unconvincing to their teams who are in turn aimless and purposeless, uncoordinated. My dogs are impatient, restless and itchy, so I give them permission. “On by,” I say. “On by!” I turn them to the left holding my right hand higher to keep them facing ahead heedless of the teams they pass, who thereby are unchallenged. In this way I preempt the canine equivalent of trash-talk or smirk and so avoid a dogfight. I do not look at the men I pass either, for the same reason, although unlike the dogs they are resentful. I catch up to the guide, running just behind him. He is pacing himself to stay with the group. My dogs are as one now, flying, and they don’t want to slow down. They will me to give the command, I hear them clearly. But it would be bad manners to pass the guide – I am a little afraid that I am in trouble as it is – and I don’t know where we are going either, as there is no trail to follow. So we stay behind, apace. I know I am in the clear when the guide turns and fixes me in his look. He has been paying attention to our maneuvers, to my command, and the hint of a smile flashes from his eye.

And so it goes for four wondrous days, in a great circle from base camp, to yurt, to cabin, to base again, over rivers and islands, into Canada and back.

At the end of the trip we arrive at the kennel truck. It is my last encounter with the dogs. My last act – my last gift to each of them, is to load them up into the warmth. They are not large animals – forty to forty-five pounds apiece, but still I am a girl and slight and tired. They are ready though, waiting, asking, noses up, and I lift all six one at a time shoulder high into their beds. The guide watches in his still way. I embrace the hard and the soft of it as I do the wild, unafraid to handle them, for we are the same. We are bound by joy, to each other, to the Earth, to life. They sing to me, the Earth sings to me. I am their sister and her daughter. These are her stories I tell, the notes of her songs transmuted into words.


 

To Tell a Story

To Tell a Story

Most undergraduate science coursework focuses on the nuts and bolts, the facts already known, the frameworks already accepted. Really you are simply learning the litany, the catechism, and the methods. Which, for a synthetic thinker, can be rather boring. Geology is different from other sciences, though, in captivating ways. It relies on firsthand observation in the field and on direct sensory data. And geology is an historical science, rich with narrative. The overarching framework is always in flux, the story always in edit. Like any good mystery or thriller or police procedural there is an arc in development, an unfolding. Indiana University is renowned for its summer field camp in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, where students still walk out the sections, dig out the shale, and investigate rock type, formations, and mineralogies over great distances to begin to form big pictures. I mean this literally and figuratively: to begin to tell the bigger story – to relate and cohere data meaningfully – but also to experience and know the Earth and its workings at the immense physical and temporal scales it exists in. It is heaven to be out there, in the field.

I was in the foothills of the Kingston range to do field work with MIT’s sedimentology and stratigraphy group. I felt the most that I ever felt like a geologist, there, during the four field seasons I spent with them. Even though I was learning, the work was real, uncontrived, and I and the other students participated fully as thinkers and observers, discoverers and theorists. I had a talent for it, for I see process. The artifacts, remnants, and clues shone for me like jewels, and like prophecies the understandings came to me, whole, entire pictures, moving through time: the sources and paths and flow of archaic rivers; the dissolution, piece by piece, of sedimentary rock reforming  into thin smooth sheets of varnished desert pavement; the migration of an ancient lakebed over time. It was always a beautiful experience to see the story, to infer the history, in that abstract way that mathematics is beautiful, and also puzzle-solving. The tactile, material Earth at my fingertips and beneath my feet heightened the satisfaction. And my discoveries in the field conflated with self-awareness and affirmation: knowing the Earth I knew myself.

But the practice of science is, necessarily, data-providing experiments and research that do not so much discover and invent, as supplement and fill in a picture already outlined by hypotheses, framed in turn by accepted theory. Most current science thinking – including the many sub-fields of geology – is very abstract too, relying on mathematical modeling and the investigation of very small-scale phenomena mediated by instrumentation. And therefore somewhat flat to persons who live large and through their senses, like me.

Most creative work, on the other hand, involves synthetic thinking and outright invention, and usually also problem-solving, even if it starts with analysis and investigation. Creative work also requires an attention to many co-equal variables and factors, which must be reconciled and accounted for in any product. (It has this in common with all historical sciences, like geology, archaeology, and anthropology). Design and art offer opportunities for this kind of work; both happen in concrete, sensory space, too. I found an outlet in landscape and urban design, especially at the competition level, for this kind of open-ended yet rigorous invention. Competitions are idea forums first and foremost. Landscape design is an especially rich experience, because the problems come with a multitude of constraints – cultural, environmental, architectural, social – and it is, like geology, a spatial and temporal discipline.

Even within design, my love of narrative persisted. I found garden design to be boring and trivial. I enjoyed community design so much more, where peoples’ values and stories were central to the process. The designs of public space – monument or park, building or roadway, I realized, were simply inscriptions – the Earth a great tabula rasa, in which human values and stories are encoded. All of my best work is of this kind.

I did not stay a geologist, or a designer. I found it hard to keep storytelling in the forefront in everyday practice of either profession. I had escaped to the desert with the sedimentologists and stratigraphers to satisfy the writer, the artist, the sensory creature I am. As much as I miss geology I know that it introduced me to story-telling and to myself, and that design encouraged me further. In the end, my love of stories led me from reading the Earth, to inscribing it with human narratives. And to writing down everything else, too.

Desert Landscapes

Desert Landscapes

Desert Landscape paper paintings were first exhibited at City Wide Open Studios – Erector Square, New Haven CT, October 13-14, 2007

Mixed papers on canvas. 11″ x 14″

Artist Statement.

Desert Landscape I

 

Desert Landscape III

 

Desert Landscape IV

 

Desert Landscape V
Because

Because

I was rigorously trained as a scientist years ago, and I am a divergent thinker. So I like to ponder, wonder, and hypothesize about all nature of things, but I am exacting in my process.

People – including reporters, writers, doctors (and even scientists themselves!) – are often confused about the principles of scientific thought and practice, and so they have difficulty understanding, interpreting, and critiquing scientific results, and explaining them to others.

Here are some basics.

The main work of science is prediction. Scientists, through hypothesis and experiment, try to establish the ‘rules of operation’ for any system, so that future events can be predicted. This traditional scientific method works well for systems that are linear1 and have only one aspect that varies, which in the real world are few. But complicated problems can often be broken down into smaller ones that lend themselves to this type of investigation. Medical drug trials are a common example. Climate modeling is not.

Scientists start with hypotheses. Good hypotheses derive from known, previously established scientific relationships, and from new observations. Scientists may observe associations between phenomena and question, “Are these events, occurrences related?”

For example, many lung cancer patients were found to be tobacco cigarette smokers, and it was a strong association. Strong associations are called correlations. The work of science is to establish if correlated events/occurrences have a causal relationship, i.e., if one thing causes another. After many initial experiments (and many experiments that replicated the initial results) it was established to the satisfaction of scientists, if not the tobacco industry, that cigarette smoking does indeed cause (some forms of) lung cancer.

Bad science thinking comes from confusion about associations, correlations, and causal relations. And we are confused for a good reason – human beings are made to see patterns. Recognizing patterns is essential for survival, and it is a habit of mind all creatures share, predator or prey. The problem is, we often make or see patterns that are not real or meaningful. The word for this very human condition is apophenia.

Here are a few suspect associations:

– The alignment of stars, planets, and moons at birth WITH personality and fate
– Consumption of cholesterol WITH heart disease
– Any one strong storm (winter, tornado or hurricane) WITH climate change

The scientific method is a process to sort through patterns and overcome apophenia. Scientists examine associations to find those that are strongly related. Then they hypothesize about the causes of these correlations, and test their hypotheses with experiment. Successful hypotheses become theories, the tools used to predict the future. Apophenia leads us to skip over the middle steps that science rigorously takes, and draw incorrect connections. We jump to conclusions.

Let’s look more closely at the claims of astrology. Historically, associations have been made between personality and the complement of stars, planets, and moons present in the sky at birth. Scientists discount these associations as non-real patterns, because they have not found/cannot find causal relationships. Specifically, there are no ways that heavenly bodies exert a physical effect that determines genotype (our biological blueprint) or affects fetal development.

For many observers though, the correlation holds up, even as the causal relation fails. People born in March are headstrong, those in January are inventive etc. How can we think about this scientifically? Sometimes, one condition that correlates with another, though not its cause, stands in for something that may be.

To apply this reasoning to astrology, you might observe that the regular appearances of heavenly bodies also correlate with the seasons, which in turn, correlate with the calendar. A scientific question to ask is, “Might there be a seasonal effect on genotype or development that is expressed in personality?”

One biological pathway to pose for this is hormonal. There are many independent, established scientific observations and conclusions that are suggestive and consistent. Here are three: Human hormone levels are known to fluctuate, for many external reasons; humans are known to be strongly affected by environmental conditions like night and day; brain development in utero is known to be strongly affected by a mother’s testosterone levels.2

Good questions to ask and investigate come out of this deeper look into associations:
Do seasonal variations affect pregnant women’s hormone levels? How?
Do pregnant women’s hormonal variations affect fetal development? How?
If found, do any variations in fetal development affect/determine personality, psychology or intellect?

There are many, many investigative steps to take in order to establish every one of these connections, before giving astrology any due. But if they all hold, rigorously, constellations might be a stand-in for seasons,3 and as such might be a shorthand indication of seasonally determined biological traits …

Science is not fail-proof. But it is a good practice to refine our pattern-making into useful understandings. Scientific thinking has a place outside the profession too. We can all learn to be critical and cautious about the patterns we see.
Don’t jump to conclusions!


 

Issue #6 – In The Field

Issue #6 – In The Field

This week: the recollections, thoughts, and journey of a former geologist.

CONTENTS:
In The Field
To Tell a Story
Desert Landscapes
Because

NEWS & NOTES:
Recommended reading:
Stephen J. Gould wrote beautifully about the geological subfield of paleontology in “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History” . It is a history of the Cambrian Era written as a detective story, with a fascinating, nerdy side trip into the methods of genius.

“PrairyErth” by William Least-Heat Moon, for another exacting and rich song of the Earth.

Last, but not least, a geological thriller: “The Really Big One”, by Kathryn Schulz in the July 20, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

Credits:
cover art: Desert Landscape II by Deborah Zervas. 2007, mixed papers on canvas.
drawings: Deborah Zervas, charcoal on paper.
photographs: courtesy of Bruce Wujcik.

In The Field

In The Field

I.

I am asleep in the desert. I am dreaming this world and yet another. In which I am impossibly tall, resolutely female. My vision extends to the horizon. I see with an effortless, steady, dimensionless knowing. It is January and cold when the sun sets in the Mohave, so we retire to our separate tents early, campfire notwithstanding. Rhythms change. I sleep for four hours and awaken,

Continue → Read More

To Tell a Story

To Tell a Story

Most undergraduate science coursework focuses on the nuts and bolts, the facts already known, the frameworks already accepted. Really you are simply learning the litany, the catechism, and the methods. Which, for a synthetic thinker, can be rather boring. Geology is different from other sciences, though, in captivating ways. It relies on firsthand observation in the field and on direct sensory data. And geology is an historical science, rich with narrative. The overarching framework is always in flux,

Continue → Read More

Because

Because

I was rigorously trained as a scientist years ago, and I am a divergent thinker. So I like to ponder, wonder, and hypothesize about all nature of things, but I am exacting in my process.

People – including reporters, writers, doctors (and even scientists themselves!) – are often confused about the principles of scientific thought and practice, and so they have difficulty understanding, interpreting, and critiquing scientific results, and explaining them to others.

Continue → Read More

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