Sunday, July 6, 2025

Adventure is Calling and I Must Go-- Solo

“I feel sure, someway, that I shall always be a braver and stronger woman than I was before...” 

-Alice Mabel Gray, "Diana of the Dunes"



I was two hours into my first solo camping trip when I got a call from Mommaw. She never calls me-- everyone knows I hate phone calls-- so I knew someone must have snitched about my plans. Sure enough, she was calling to dissuade me from camping alone. I sat there in a Marathon gas station in Kentucky (just past her house, though I didn't tell her that) while she talked at me for twenty minutes. She said she was mailing a check to my mom who could deposit it for me so I could pay for a hotel. "Choose a good, safe hotel and only stop at well-lit nice places. Like McDonald's or Burger King." Then she hung up, assuming, I suppose, that I would do as I was told like always. I continued driving to my campsite.

I never cashed that check. It wasn't a money issue. I was camping because I wanted to, not because I had to. The fact that tent campsites cost much less than hotel rooms is just a nice bonus.

It was day one of my four-day road trip to Fargo, North Dakota, where I would live from June to August. The U$DA folks who collected the bees for my thesis had agreed to let me come there to get more field experience, since I hadn't been the one to gather the bees myself. They were even paying me and giving me free housing in the ND$U dorms. It was a good gig-- I was excited-- and since I had done a long road trip alone the previous summer, I wanted to try something new. Taking a page out of Ranger Zoe's book once again, I decided to try camping alone.

My family was less than enthused. They all tried to talk me out of it, but I was twenty-four with a reliable car and a head for planning, so nothing was going to stop me. My sister said they yapped at length about what a stupid thing I'd done at the next family gathering. Poppaw offered me several small guns, but I declined. I didn't want to deal with differing gun laws across state lines, and I wouldn't be going anywhere dangerous. If this is how I die, this is how I die-- and at least I'll be having a good time when it happens.

Night one was Indiana Dunes National Park. I did make mistakes here. 


Indiana Dunes sits on the cusp of Eastern and Central time zones. I knew what time sunset was, and I set an alarm to give me plenty of time to head to camp after chilling on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was my first time seeing the Great Lakes, and I sat in a folding chair with an audiobook and ate M&Ms as the light danced across the water. What I didn't know was that my phone had slipped into Central Time Zone. When my alarm went off, it was an hour later than it should have been, and I dashed to the campground. The sun was setting quickly as I started to unpack. It took several tries to put together the tent. It had been a long time since I had pitched one, and I kept getting the steps in the wrong order or turning something inside out.

The campground host rolled up in a gator as I was figuring out the tent fly. "Where's your park pass?" Shit. I had made the campground reservation, but I hadn't picked up a park pass on the way in. "The website said they were available on site. Can I pay you for one?" No, they were not actually available on site. I had to drive back out to the closest gas station and buy one there. I didn't want to leave my things unattended, so I put the tent back in the car and drove to the gas station.

It was completely dark by the time I got back. There was no time to make dinner, so I had more M&Ms. My teeth felt gritty. I also had to put the tent together with a headlamp on, and that headlamp attracted bugs. When I woke up in the morning, my feet and ankles were covered in mosquito bites. They looked positively diseased. And because it was a national park, the place was packed. The line for the camp bathrooms was long. It took forever to get a shower, and when I finally got into my sleeping bag, people talked nearby late into the night. I barely slept.

I told my family of none of these inconveniences, of course.

In the morning, I went to the Visitor Center and hiked some of the dunes, including the Diana of the Dunes Dare. That one tells the story of Alice Mabel Gray, an Edwardian who lived alone in a shanty on the dunes for a decade.

I wondered what her family said when she set out alone.


I stopped in Chicago for pizza at a place one of my friends recommended. I had lunch with the pigeons in a tiny nearby park downtown.


Night two was at Mirror Lake State Park in Wisconsin. There was no time zone change this time, and I arrived with enough time to have a real dinner. This was the first time I used my camp stove. I've had an irrational fear of anything that resembles a Bunsen burner since my chem lab TA days in undergrad. I once watched another TA help a student whose Bunsen burner would not turn on. The student had released the valve all the way, and when the TA turned the gas on, the flame shot up and singed a ceiling tile. If he had been leaning over it, he would have burnt his face off. Luckily there were no such fire-related incidents with my Chef Boyardee.

Someone's dad offered to help me pitch my tent at this site. I politely declined, but it was nice to feel welcomed. There were lots of families there. It felt very neighborly and safe.

In the morning I hiked around and got some new birds on Merlin. It was aggressively hot and humid by lunchtime. I wished I had packed my bathing suit accessibly so I could take a dip in the lake.





Frontenac State Park in Minnesota was next. This one had some indigenous history, and I hiked to see In Yan Teopa Rock before bed. It was named by the Dakota people. Also the bluffs of Lake Peppin were beautiful. Somehow Lake Peppin is a lake on the Mississippi River-- I'm not sure how to comprehend that, but okay.

This was night two with the Bunsen burner, and I tried a backpacking recipe that had good reviews, some kind of pasta with canned crab. It wasn't great. The crab and noodles tasted ok separately, though, so I choked some of that down.


In the morning, I had chai and packed up quickly to get to a cat cafe in Twin Cities. This was my first time visiting one. The other people visiting there didn't seem to know anything about interacting with cats and couldn't read their body language. I ended up mostly sitting in a corner and giving the cats space because I felt bad for them. But I got to see pretty kitties.
                                        

I saw prairies for the first time on my way into Fargo. It was amazing how flat everything was. I also discovered that Minnesota police have some maroon-colored cop cars (no I did not get pulled over but it's nice to be able to see them coming from a distance and I've always thought red was a safe color in your rearview-- apparently not here.)


Anyway I guess here are the things I learned from my solo travel:

1) Have a digital watch if you are traveling near/across time zones
2) Double check all the paperwork before you go-- reservations, park passes, receipts, directions
3) Practice pitching your tent and using equipment before you get there
4) Keep a bathing suit handy just in case
5) Have as little exposed skin as possible at night in the summertime
6) Bring an air mattress or inflatable sleeping pad. They're not that expensive
7) Try out recipes before you camp
8) I need more time to explore new places than I think I do
9) Document better-- I didn't journal at all and I didn't take many pictures of my first solo trip.
10) I should have done this sooner

No Miss Stacy

Anne's Miss Stacy, Matilda's Miss Honey, Emily Starr's Mr. Carpenter, The Magic School Bus's Mrs. Frizzle-- when I pictured myself as a teacher, it was always with the filter of these inspirational teachers. They were my teaching ideals, but I had no idea how difficult it is to meet those high standards: to be a mentor but a kindred spirit, to be kind and witty but respected, to be full of energy but not burn myself out.


In academia, graduate students teach classes in exchange for waived tuition and a small stipend. If you're lucky like me, you also have funding from your graduate advisor to pay you for doing research. At my university, an R2 institution that does not offer a PhD in Biological Sciences, all of the biology lab sections are taught by graduate assistants earning their master's degree. We are both student and professor-- a role that I think should come with, at the very least, a parking pass that lets us park in both employee and student lots, since we have all the responsibilities of being a professor but none of the benefits.

Most of us teach 100- or 200-level labs, which are strictly overseen by lab managers. This lessens the load of deciding what to teach or needing to make lesson plans. Each lab has a set curriculum meant to standardize all the introductory lab courses to weed out the lesser students. However, these cookie cutter labs also have the effect of making you feel like you have no control over anything-- as if you are but a machine on an assembly line cranking out students as outlined in very detailed blueprints.

Journal VIII
8.16.2023
"[The lab manager] has decided for us how we will direct our labs, but I will be bending some rules: I will accept late work, I will excuse tardiness, I will find ways to let students make up labs, and I will not tell them my class is meant to be hard."

There was one special thing about teaching biology at the same university I earned my bachelor's degree in biology: I got to teach the same class I had taken as a college freshman. For all four semesters of my master's, I was lucky to teach the second semester introductory lab for science majors, Principles of Biology II. I say lucky because 

1) all the content was familiar to me, 

2) I could connect with my students because I had once literally been them, and 

3) all the bad kids didn't make it past Principles of Biology I, so I got a filtered supply of good kids.


Despite those benefits, it was so much harder than I thought it would be. Public speaking anxiety has always plagued me-- will always plague me-- and the concept of public speaking regularly each week filled me with dread.

first day teaching 8/23/2023

Journal VIII
6.6.2024
"I don't love teaching. I didn't sleep at all the night before the first few classes I taught. It got a little easier and I slept better out of necessity, but it never became "easy" like everyone swore to me it would. Teaching men is the worst-- I think if all my students were female, I would be able to relax a little & enjoy cosplaying Miss Stacy."

It took a long, long time to get better. By the end of semester two, I was starting to feel a bit of confidence. The anxiety still gnawed at me, though, so I developed a method where I set my office hours to the same day(s) I taught. I did all my grading and prep for the next week's classes on those days. That way, I was only "teacher" 1-3 days a week, and the rest of the time, I pretended I wasn't one. I responded to student emails as fast as I could before moving them to my "teaching" folder, not for the students' benefit, but for my own: the faster those emails were taken care of, the sooner I could get back to pretending I wasn't teaching. I also no longer let myself rehearse a lecture over and over-- I would practice my spiel an hour before class started, and then time was up because students were entering the room and it had to be. It worked. Teaching no longer consumed my whole week. It was doable.

However, I could never shake the feeling just before each class when I wondered where the professor was, since class was about to start-- and then I remembered that I was the professor.

Journal VIII
11.9.2024
"I have so many fucking papers to grade, plus a paper of my own to write."

I think that entry sums up the graduate teaching assistant experience in a nutshell. And this one complements:

Journal VIII
11.12.2024
"I started grading at 11:30am yesterday and didn't finish until 3am this morning."

I don't know how public school teachers do this five days a week all. day. long. Kudos them. I think I would die. But also I'm sure it's more rewarding when you get to decide what and how you want to teach.

I did bend the rules, as I planned day one. I did make exceptions that make class more accessible: allowing late assignments, not counting tardiness against students, finding ways to let chronically ill students make up assignments. I'm not a tough cookie, like the White Witch of my high school biology days. If you came to class and answered all the assignment questions, you got at least a high B. I think the students liked me, if my formal class reviews are a valid indicator.




By semester three, I was working in the things I thought were most important for early biology majors to know: the importance of accessible science communication, career options that don't involve the medical field, study tips, how to prepare for long upper level labs. Many of the pre-med diseased students (which I could and may write an entire post on) didn't give a shit about my verbal asides into the details of the plant, animal, and ecology labs, but most other students seemed to appreciate that I cared about what I was teaching.

Journal VIII
11.19.2024
"I looked forward to teaching today's lab on ecology, but one technical glitch threw me off & I didn't recover well. My OneDrive folder wasn't synching with the computer so I couldn't pull up the PowerPoint or quiz I'd prepared online on time. I started 10 minutes late and was all flustered and rushed and I fear I muttered unintelligibly about invasive species and the benefits of hunting. The second class was better."

Journal VIII
4.3.2025
"I finally made the joke I've wanted to make all six times teaching this class in the past. I'm graduating in a month, so no one can say anything to me. It's the animal evolution lab, discussing the difference between protostome & deuterostome development. 'Humans are deuterostomes, meaning the first opening that forms in this developing clump of cells is the anus. So yes, at one point, we were all nothing but a butthole-- and unfortunately, some people never really develop past that.' I got the laughs I expected."

last day teaching 5/1/2025

I am no Miss Stacy, but I think my students did learn things from me and, if they were listening, they got good advice on how to be a successful student at Marshall.

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Knee-Deep

"I'm sure I could never have lived there if I hadn't had an imagination." -- Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables




My awe of living and working in a coastal National Park lasted about two weeks. My romanticization of this new life was the only thing that would keep me going.

This post has been in the works a long time because every time I sit down to write, I get so pissed off that I have to log out and go calm down.

TLDR:
  • pay discrepancy
  • fucking QUICKSAND
  • using personal vehicles for field work-- we spent 2-4 hours on the road each day
  • long, inconsistent hours-- we had to work around the tides, which meant very late nights, very early mornings, working weekends and holidays, and absolutely no routine
  • absent supervisor with unclear expectations
  • type B manager who could not keep her own ducks in a row, much less other people's
  • not being told we were to present our research until 10 days before the presentation
I'm not trying to ruin anyone's life, so I'm not mentioning real names or places. I'm just being honest about my internship from hell on my personal blog.

My first red flag should have been that the job didn't pay as much as it advertised. When applying to positions, I kept an Excel spreadsheet of all the information about each posting, including the pay. This one advertised that it paid $600/week with free housing. It was a step up from the job I had at the time, which paid $500/week with free housing. However, as I filled out my hiring paperwork, I saw that it listed my salary as $480/week (before taxes.) I went back and checked my Excel sheet-- $600, as I thought. Maybe I had written it down wrong? I was so sure. I went back to check the job posting-- it was gone. There was no way to check. I didn't want to make things awkward with my new boss by asking for more money (I should have.) I had already turned down all the other positions I'd applied to, and unless I wanted to move back into my parents' house, I didn't have a choice but to continue my onboarding paperwork.

My Ameri Corp$ counterpart and I later learned all the other techs, who did (easier) more general work and had a 6 month term instead of a 3 month, were making $720/week plus free housing. 🙃

Week 1 was a dream. I'd requested to start a week earlier than the others because of when I had to be back in WV for grad school. Since the other techs weren't there yet, there wasn't much for me to do. I tagged along on other projects, met other employees, and started writing a page for the website about my research project. It was all slow and peaceful. I decided to start vlogging on TikTok for my small audience of family to see what I was up to.







Week 2 was all orientation for the other new techs. I already knew most of the stuff from immersion the week before. We got CPR and Wilderness First Aid certifications and visited our field sites for the first time. Most of the others were fresh out of undergrad and didn't know much about field work. For once, as they asked me for advice, I felt strong and capable and like I knew my shit.

There were 15 of us early career girls: two science communication interns, two year-long fellows, four six-month ecology techs, two three-month Ameri Corp$ (me & J), a 3-month undergrad intern, and four summit restoration techs. None were men-- we had several conversations about the leaky pipeline theory. There were two permanent scientists, H and Bird Man. Bird Man worked exclusively with birds and one of the fellows. All the other projects fell under H, who was finishing her PhD. To help H's work load, there was a manager for all the early career peeps, S.

I received a lot of Google calendar invites that week, and was told more details for everything were coming. One called "Presentations" (no description) was scheduled the last week of my term. I accepted it and thought nothing of it, assuming we would get more details later.



The physical copies of my first published poems arrived that week. It was a good time.


Week 3: My field partner, J, and I were to spend the summer surveying marine worms around the park. We were to learn how to do this with the help of a local worm harvester whose family has been doing this for generations. Frank was a wonderful, 70-something gentleman who called us "dears" in his Maritime accent, but he had no earthly clue how a cell phone worked. I tried fruitlessly those first two weeks to get a hold of him. He must have assumed my West Virginia number was a spam caller, because he never answered my calls or texts, and I'd bet money my introductory emails are still sitting unopened in his inbox with hundreds of thousands of others. He only responded to our supervisor's messages.

So H sent him an email saying her techs would set up a time to go out worming with him sometime that week. She gave him our numbers and emails. He responded with enthusiasm.

"Hey Frank! We're planning to go to the Thompson Island good site on Wednesday. Could you meet us there at low tide?" No response to that, in email, call, or text. H emailed him herself, and Frank agreed to go out with us. But it was set to storm on Wednesday, and Frank didn't respond to any of our attempts to confirm he still wanted to go out. "Maybe he'll just meet us there?"

Frank was not there when we pulled up. We decided to try calling him from J's phone, since her D.C. number was closer to Maine's area code than my West Virginia one. For the first time, he picked up for us. "Hello?"

"We're out at Thompson Island, Frank-- are you still planning to meet us?"

"No, dear, chance o' storming today." Frank pronounces dear "dee-uh" in his gravelly, thick Boston accent. He was loud enough without speakerphone. "I didn't hear from you, so I didn't plan on going out." J and I side-eyed each other.

"We're sorry about that, we've been trying to reach you. Would you be able to call us later today when we get back to $ch00dic so we can set up another time?"

"I can't. I don't have your number, dear." More side-eye. He was talking to us with her number right now. "Well you girls be safe. If you hear thunder, get the hell out. You're sitting ducks out there with that big metal worm hoe."

H had sworn to us that there was no quicksand at the sites we went to alone before meeting Frank. When we finally had a sit-down meeting with the four of us, he corrected her. There were, in fact, "honey pots" in every mudflat, and we could have found one with a foot in the wrong place. Wonderful. I love undisclosed danger.


Weeks 4-6: The reality of my situation set in. If not for the friendship of my new roommates and coworkers, I don't know that I would have made it to August.

There is no set schedule when you work in the mudflats. These barren expanses are underwater except for a small window at low tide, which happens twice a day roughly 12 hours apart. The tides are on a 12.5 hour cycle, so low tide might be at 3am and 3pm one Monday, then 4am and 4pm the next, and so on. The following Monday, low tides will be at 10am and 10pm. It's not safe to be out on the flats in the dark, so really only one low tide a day was an option. This meant we alternated each week either having very early mornings or very late nights, and each day, we started an hour later than before. I could not have a routine.

It also took a shit ton of prep and cleanup work to go out in the field. Every day, we had to put down a tarp in the vehicle and load our equipment, then drive two hours to our main site on MDI. Mudflat mud is incredibly destructive: it wears down everything it touches and taints everything with a permanent murky smell. Frank taught us to rinse everything in salt water as best we could before leaving a site, just like the wormers, so our equipment would last longer. On the way back, we would have to stop at the only place that sells propane to have a certified Propane Pumper refill the propane-fueled field van. After our two hour drive back to headquarters, we had to rinse off the salt water with fresh water so that wouldn't wear things down and hang it all out to dry until the next day.

Nothing air dries on the eternally foggy $ch00dic peninsula. It's like living on the Twilight set. Water got into our hip waders the first week, and we had damp feet for the next three months.

The car situation itself was a nightmare. $ch00dic had 15 interns that summer, most working in pairs in places that required driving, but only two field vehicles. (They would acquire one more halfway through the season, but Team Mud wasn't allowed to use it because it was the only $ch00dic vehicle that didn't smell like mud yet.) And those two cars? A propane-fueled 16-passenger van and a 2002 Nissan with no automatic locks, no AC, manual crank windows, no aux input, and this fun little feature where when you turned the headlights on, the dash lights went out. This created an interesting dilemma when driving in the dark or the rain: you could either see where you were going or know how fast you were going on the giant speed trap that is the only road to the main park Island. We usually took the van, as we were an NPS-funded project as opposed to a $ch00dic-funded project, unless it was an EarthWatch week and the van was needed to transport teams of volunteers.

On the way back from doing a photoshoot in the mudflats with us in July, the communication intern would learn the hard way that the Nissan's registration was expired. It had been expired for over a month when she got pulled over-- the responsibility of S.

S is a self-described Type B person, which is not a trait that the sole contact point for 14 early career professionals should have. She is the most disorganized person I have ever met and seems to think it is a fun quirk, not a devastating flaw. I like her as a person-- she's good at crafts and into nature, she goes on adventures in her Subaru Outback on the regular, and has several cats-- but as far as managing people goes, I would prefer to be overseen by a rabid chimpanzee.

S forgot to tell her employees things regularly: that the only available field vehicle was in the shop and we would need to take our personal cars, that the work schedule had changed, that a flight of volunteers was now coming at a different time, that we weren't allowed to let the volunteers stop and have ice cream they paid for with their own money, that we needed to tell the kitchen to prep packed lunches for 12 volunteers unexpectedly. But the one I haven't forgiven her for yet was forgetting to tell me that I would be giving a presentation on my project.



We were all worked up about S and her management style, so to de-stress, the roomies and I went to Art in the Park in a nearby town on Saturday of Week 6:




Week 7:

H was busy. We went an entire month without hearing from her (which is crazy for a 3-month internship.) There were all kinds of questions we needed to ask her about study designs, but we couldn't reach her. She was too busy with her PhD and the many projects she had going on in the park. She made me appreciate how wonderful Pam and Dawn had been.

I've learned what kind of mentor I don't want to be like.

Frank seemed disappointed by her lack of involvement, too. I think he had doubts that our project would amount to anything given our little experience and mudflat knowledge-- and rightly so. We went out on the flats with him twice. It was just me and J and the smell of mud for over two months.

We worked through July 4th because of the moon phase. We were on the wrong side of the island to even see fireworks from where we were surveying.


Week 8:




Week 9:


Part of my quest to visit every part of Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge was a long drive inland. I got to my destination through Google Maps with no trouble, but when I put in the address to go home, it was as if the route I'd taken no longer existed. It only showed a new route twisting and turning in the opposite direction from the way I had come in. I shrugged and trundled down the gravel road in my little Kia Rondo.

It could have ended very badly. The road went for miles without passing a single building, getting rougher and narrower. I passed men in army uniforms practicing driving those massive military trucks. The only other people I saw were the occasional grizzled men driving lifted trucks, who looked at me quizzically in my overalls and pigtails in a fishbowl car in the middle of nowhere while my speakers blasted "King" by Florence & the Machine on repeat. I got dangerously low on gas and was starting to panic. Just as I thought my car couldn't possibly clear the rocks jutting up out of the road, I exited through a thin clearing in the pines and was back on a paved road near farms. I made it unscathed, and brought home wildflowers for our kitchen table.

Week 10:




Week 11: I detoured to Canada. The original plan had been to go to Prince Edward Island and have the Anne of Green Gables weekend of my dreams just before heading home. This plan was shattered by S telling me that Google Calendar invite I had received months before was for my own talk on my mudflat project TEN DAYS before said talk was supposed to take place. J was also to give her own separate talk-- even though we had done everything together-- and so were the science communication interns. We were all flabbergasted. There was no way I could go through my data and put together my talk in time unless I worked on it over my PEI weekend, so I gave up the trip. I was furious.

Instead, I took a day trip to the closest Canadian island.


I gave my practice presentation that Wednesday. H attended and had a lot to say-- bold words from someone I had barely seen all summer.

"First of all, I just want to say I felt very rushed listening to you speak. I need you to take a breath and just slow down." I always talk at that rate. I'm just a fast talker. If she had spent any time with me that summer, she would know that-- but she hadn't been around. She proceeded to pick apart our study design and the way we had defined things, the very things we had questions about early on but couldn't reach her to ask about. 

The only things she seemed to like was the quick video I had put together to show our methods. 

We gave our presentations on Friday. My methods video would not play.

I was livid with S-- she was so disorganized. Why hadn't we had our practice presentations in this room so we could practice with the same equipment? I know it was open then. I could have troubleshot then, and now I had risked my phone in the mudflats and wasted time going through clips for nothing.



Week 12:



H did acknowledge that her mudflat crew tended towards burnout each season, so she offered us a second project to work on: eelgrass monitoring. It was a blessed relief to hike to tide pool sites and step in the ocean to count aquatic plants. I was delighted by the hermit crabs at the sites.


I enjoyed learning from an old timer like Frank and leading citizen scientist volunteers. I made great friends from all over the country. I was inspired by Zoe and learned to adventure by myself.  I learned I can deal with anything for three months. I don't know that I gained good references-- I was incredibly blunt in my exit surveys. Overall, Maine was an adventure, and it was (kind of if you ignore the hellish work conditions) fun to dabble in marine biology, but I knew I belonged in the forests and creeks of Appalachia. 


On my last day, I got a coffee from the Downeaster and took it out to a cove my roommate told me was a good place to see seals. The roomies helped me pack up my car, and I was back to the hills where I belonged. 



"Do you want a cookie?" For making it through my internship from hell?? Absolutely.