Dirty, as Defined by a Soil Scientist (8/16)



Dirt

 .

This week has been an interesting one. I already touched on all of the departures, but the swamp has been getting a number of visiting scientists from a couple different government agencies.



The first to arrive was another hydrologist from the US Geological Survey. A couple of weeks ago, while Fred and I were out doing those well-runs, we stopped by and checked some of the wells this hydrologist had installed. He wasn't anything like I expected, though I'm not sure why I was expecting anything in particular. Apparently, the culture of the USGS is a completely different brand from that of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Their slogan is "Science for a changing tomorrow," and I like it.

Maybe I was expecting someone in a lab coat? I'm not sure, someone else in the office had mentioned that the USGS hydrologist had particularly technical way of explaining things, so I had my ears fine tuned for all sorts of jargon. I got a little (fractionalization of water?) but I suppose that I'm so used to slugging through primary research articles that I can get by.

Science-speak is like being half fluent in another language. Context clues are everything.



NRCS Soil Scientist, USGS hydrologist and his battered arms.



To continue- the project this guy is working on currently is really, really interesting. He's going around collecting water samples for isotope analysis. In case your chemistry is a little rusty, a periodic element, like oxygen, can have a varied number of neutrons. The most common form of oxygen has 16, but it can have more or fewer, and this is useful because a greater amount of one isotope over another can provide some clues as to where the water came from- because not all water is created equal.



However, during previous analysis, the mass spectrometer (Organic chemistry has been more useful than I care to admit) ran into some funky data due to the amount of organic material in the water. Since the water at Dismal is basically organic soup, he's collecting from different sites all over the refuge, and I've been tagging along.

I felt so very official, collecting water samples. Even though it basically just required filling a little glass bottle with ditchwater and jotting down a few specifics about the water itself (acidity, temperature... same science, different day.)

While we were out we stopped to service his wells and survey in some reference points. Ahh, how far I've come.

And then he got to poking around on his computer and I stood around, being utterly useless. I was playing with a dragonfly (I haven't had the chance to look this up to confirm yet- maybe it was a damselfly?) that had been hovering in the vicinity.

Perched on a branch, I watched as it's little head jerked back and forth, looking for lunch. As I waited for it to make a meal of one of the mosquitoes (revenge at last) I was pulling the thorns from an old greenbrier vine and chucking them into the clearing. When one passed in front of the dragonfly, it shot forward, connected, and returned to its branch.

Fascinated, I began throwing small pieces of plant matter in front of the insect, which would consistently zoom forward  and smack whatever I had tossed out of the air. I like to pretend we were playing catch. Eventually, it grew tired of my antics and caught a fly out of the air. I watched it eat before I joined its picnic with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Later on, we met up with Fred and the soil scientist from the NRCS in the blocks at the southern end of the refuge. She's the one that had visited at the very beginning of the summer. She witnessed my first encounters with blackberries during that first, intense experience. She also brought another scientist, who seemed a little unhappy with being out on the coastal plain.

I felt much more confident this time around, I had been around the block a couple of times (ha.) and I was eager to show her how much better I had gotten at this sort of thing.

Typical of the rest of my life, things did not turn out the way I had expected. The other three fully grown, fully educated scientists bounded through that block like it was going out of style. I felt like I was booking it- leaping over logs, jogging through the saplings but it wasn't enough.

Alright, it was more of a fast trot, but still.

The blackberries were pretty obnoxious, I've been pulling them from my hands and knees all afternoon, and I have a shiny skin of Neosporin covering my forearms. Though I discovered the cause for my lack of speed- I care too much about my skin.

Every time I got snagged pretty good, I would pause to unhook the thorns or try to sidestep past them. These guys? Forget it, the USGS hydrologist was covered in blood by the time we made it to his well.
I couldn't believe it, his forearms looked like Halloween. I was slightly horrified, and then annoyed at the loss of my ability to complain.

Though the walk wasn't bad, I occupied my mind by thinking up science-inspired curses for the blackberries, such as I hope a point mutation halts your chlorophyll production and you die a slow, miserable, anaerobic death. Or I wish you a terrible meiotic nondisjunction that leaves your progeny sterile.


On the way back, it seemed like the rest of them were twice as fast as they were when we went out. I was also carrying and awkwardly-shaped well pump that was significantly heavier than I expected. I wielded that thing like a shield, with both hands, and I know my shoulders will be sore tomorrow.

When I finally popped out of the foliage, an earthen intern born of blood and the field, they were all sitting casually around the trucks, chit chatting. They eyeballed me as I emerged, and I was a little embarrassed that it took me so long to get through the relatively unimposing walk. The soil people grinned at each other- it was one of those looks that reminded me of the looks parents exchange. You know the ones, entire conversations that they think you don't have an inkling about? One of those.

Well- so what if I'm a slowpoke? So what if I'm young? I've never been one to colour inside the lines.

Soil 1 then looked me up and down and said, with the slightest hint of Virginia twang, "You are just too clean."

11 weeks down, 1 to go. Tomorrow, when the last intern vacates the premises, I'll be hightailing it to D.C, this time to visit one of my friends from school. I am just a little too excited to show off my bear (blackberry) battle scars, the tanlines that prove I have been working like a decent human, and the true scope of the bug bites that plague me.