At most colleges and universities, as at Brockport, tenured faculty are eligible for a sabbatical every seven years. It’s a wonderful privilege, with few analogs for most working Americans. For me, a sabbatical offers the time to put aside my normal duties—which run mostly to administration, teaching, service, and supervision of other people’s research—and immerse myself in the natural world, research, and writing. Hopefully, my sabbaticals have enhanced my “professional development” and benefited the college, through fresh approaches to teaching, enhanced scientific skills, and new research ideas. However, I have been considering another benefit of my sabbaticals: empathy. Why empathy? Because sabbaticals remind me of how challenging it can be to embark upon a new research project. It’s a daunting, visceral feeling that I confronted during my Masters and PhD programs, but the winnowing effects of memory have dimmed my recollections of the challenges those times presented. And so, too often, the empathy that I should feel when helping a student develop a research project has been replaced by an academic advisor’s version of the Nike aphorism, “Just do it.” I need to be reminded that it is not that easy. Take for example my first sabbatical, which I spent studying Australasian pipits in the Australian Alps. When I reached my isolated alpine research site, the ground was snow-covered, the weather “changeable.” Everything was unfamiliar. There were poisonous snakes (a non-issue in the North American alpine) and huge, venomous funnel-web spiders wandering over the snow. Although I’d studied North American pipits, for a while the behavior of Australasian pipits remained mysterious. They were difficult to catch and band, and I had no search image for their nests. And I mostly worked alone—no one to help understand the pipits, no one to commiserate with when the flies and heat got bad, or I stepped on a nest of biting ants, again. Sometimes I wondered why in the hell I was where I was, pursuing those devious birds. But eventually, I learned. I found enough pipit nests, came to treasure my research site—the soft light at the end of a long day, the clatter of the small creek near my tent, the lovely blooms of alpine flowers. With time, the pleasures of fieldwork, of living close to the land, of coming to understand a species, perhaps a system, made my earlier angst much less compelling. I confronted different issues on my second sabbatical, but the feelings of “What am I doing here?” and “How will I ever figure this out?” returned in full force. Instead of pursuing a hard-core scientific research project, I was interested in writing a book of creative nonfiction about rare and endangered species of the Death Valley region. I had ideas, but no clear path. I had few contacts in the region, and for a while I floundered. Again, I worked alone, far from friends and loved ones. On my first night in the field, I sat in a suffocating car, eating a dinner of cheese and crackers as fifty-mile-per-hour winds pummeled me and the vehicle, gritting my teeth and wondering, “Why?” But during the night the winds calmed. And when I stepped into the beautiful wash of a full moon and strolled down to the spring where Owens pupfish hung suspended in the crystalline waters—a species that twice had come within the thinnest breath of extinction—I understood that “things” would be okay. it would take time to find the right direction, but I would get there. Generous people would share their knowledge and friendship, and I would understand what I wanted to say, and how to say it. But most importantly my experiences helped me develop a deep affinity for the beleaguered species that I was studying—and the book that I envisioned would come. And now there are Inyo Mountains salamanders, one of only two desert salamanders in the world. They are restricted to twenty or so rugged and isolated canyons in (go figure) the Inyo Mountains, in the rain shadow of the High Sierra. The species has been petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and my objectives are to assess its population status, evaluate current and potential threats, and develop a better understanding of its ecology. And although I know something about the salamanders, I have confronted the same types of discomfort that I faced during my earlier sabbaticals: doubt, uncertainty, and the daunting feeling that I lack sufficient energy to do this. It has not been particularly easy, partly because of the Inyo Mountains themselves, which rise 7,000 to 9,000 feet above the Owens and Saline valleys: no maintained trails, rugged topography, many drainages choked with tangled shrubs and blocked by steep cliffs. The salamanders have chosen a great place in which to hide themselves away, and I am often left contemplating the title of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men. And as on my other sabbaticals, I often work alone. On my first day of fieldwork, I trudged for two hours up a dry desert wash, found only a thin trickle of water guarded by thickets of flesh-ripping wild rose, got hung up on cliffs way too high above the ground, and saw no salamanders. Damn. From my previous experience I knew that the canyon was a poor site, but my walk back down the wash was still a discouraging one. At my second site I managed to find one salamander, but could not survey the entire drainage because I was unwilling to climb a sixty-foot-high cliff, alone. I carry a personal locator beacon, but that cliff seemed way too steep and high, and too far from home. . . And then there’s the critical issue of developing “a feeling for the organism,” which is how Evelyn Fox Keller described the Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock’s affinity for maize and its genetics. This involves more than developing a simple search image; instead it’s a matter of “thinking like a salamander”—which when considering the evolutionary gulf that separates humans and salamanders, is no easy thing. But I am learning (slowly), and adapting. The approaches seem a bit less steep and long, the cliffs not quite as high, the country not so lonely. In some canyons I have found lots of salamanders. I am not yet thinking like a salamander, but their ways seem a bit less opaque. Sometimes I am lucky enough to have companions, and then the work is easier. And best of all, there are those times when I flip a rock and find a creature coiled in moist soil, a refugee from a wetter time, enigmatic in its history and presence—Here, in the high desert!—and I am taken (again) by the beauty of the world, and its great wonder.
And so, when my sabbatical research is done, I hope that I will return to Brockport with a full cache of data, a better sense of the Inyo Mountains salamander, and a renewed understanding of what it is like to begin—again, or for the first time.
4 Comments
Nathan Kleist
10/23/2017 07:15:03 am
Wonderful entry Chris! Good luck out there and may the mountains bring you many salamanders.
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Chris
10/23/2017 05:09:50 pm
Unfortunately, I do not think that those salamanders will come to me....
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Rob Mrowka
10/23/2017 04:32:10 pm
Well done!
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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