Free Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Page A

belowground. I see them stand gaping in the fetid air, slowly overcoming their disbelief that this root could somehow be attached to some tree that is growing far above them. In fact, both parties registered their disbelief that day: the acacia tree was also undoubtedly surprised to find its roots exposed from the rock that confined it, and produced a flood of hormones in response, first locally and then eventually diffusing through every cell of its being.
    When those men moved soil and rock in order to form an unprecedented path between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, they found a daring plant that had made an unprecedented path of its own. They found an acacia tree that had moved soil and rock, through years of dry failure until its improbable success.
    In my mind, in 1860, I see the men congratulate each other and gather around the root long enough to take a photograph with it. And then I picture them chopping it in half.

6
    SCIENTISTS TAKE CARE of their own to the extent that they are able. When my undergraduate professors saw my sincere interest in their research laboratories, they advised me to continue on for a Ph.D. I applied for entrance to the most famous universities that I had ever heard of, giddy in the knowledge that if accepted, I’d get not only free tuition but also a stipend that would just cover rent and food for the duration of my enrollment. This is how Ph.D. training in science and engineering generally works—as long as your thesis also furthers the goals of a federally funded project, you are supported at a sort of academic subsistence level. The day after the University of Minnesota conferred upon me a bachelor’s degree cum laude, I dumped off my winter clothes in a big pile at the Salvation Army on Lake Street, took Hiawatha Avenue south to Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, and flew to San Francisco. After I got to Berkeley, I didn’t so much meet Bill. It was more like I identified him.
    During the summer of 1994, it became my responsibility to serve as the graduate student assistant instructor on what felt like an interminable field trip through the Central Valley of California. The average person cannot imagine himself staring at dirt for longer than the twenty seconds needed to pick up whatever object he just dropped, but this class was not for the average person. Each day for six entire weeks involved digging five to seven holes and stooping over them for hours, then camping out, and then doing it all over again at a different place. Every feature of every hole was subject to a complex taxonomy, and students were to become proficient in recording each tiny crack made by each plant root using the official rubric developed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
    While examining a ditch of interest, the student employed the six-hundred-page
Keys to
Soil Taxonomy
—a handy guide resembling a small phone book but much less interesting to read. Somewhere in Wichita (possibly), a committee of government agronomists has been perpetually enjoined to transcribe and reinterpret the
Keys
down through the ages as if it were an Aramaic text. The preface to the 1997 version of the
Keys
contains a moving passage describing the breakthroughs of the International Committee on Low Activity Clays that necessitated this new edition, emphasizing that it was written only for emergency use, given that the ongoing work of the International Committee on Aquic Moisture Regimes would likely make yet another overhaul unavoidable before 1999. But back in 1994 we were consigned to the 1983 version of the
Keys
and labored in childlike ignorance, little suspecting the bombshells soon to be dropped by the International Committee on Irrigation and Drainage.
    We taught while crowded into a ditch with the ten-odd students who had worked with us to dig it out. The curriculum was designed to usher them into the secret world of the state agronomist, the civil servant, the park-service forester, and