The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us

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A Note About the Author

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This book is dedicated to those lifelong planetary heroes—trees. I hope my passion for these leafy giants will inspire readers to share a sense of wonder for

our eighth continent, and maybe we can

help save it, together.

Big thanks to Eddie and James for joyfully climbing in many forests with their mom.

FOREWORD

I WILL NEVER LOOK AT A TREE in the same way again, nor will the rest of the world, thanks to the author of this book. It now seems obvious that most of what makes a tree—as well as what constitutes a forest—is above eye level, but until Meg Lowman’s irrepressible curiosity inspired her to look at trees from the top down, most humans tended to view them from the bottom up. What they missed is most of what makes treetops not only individual miracles, but collectively the source of shelter and sustenance for most forest dwellers, with dividends for the rest of life on Earth. I was thrilled when I heard about a fellow botanist who had devised ways to not only use her natural primate abilities to climb trees, but also to take tree-climbing to new heights with ingenious lifting techniques and, pushing further, to develop sky-walking pathways among the trees’ leafy crowns. In this engaging volume, she shares her view with stories that you know are true because You just can’t make this stuff up!

For a scientist and explorer, it is satisfying to make new discoveries, to go where no woman (or man) has gone before, to see what others have not, and to find meaningful pieces of the great living puzzle of life that is unique to Earth. But Meg Lowman does more, excelling in communicating her findings not only to scientists in the arcane language of numbers and graphs, but also to non-scientists with contagious enthusiasm and meaningful rationale, in language and humor befitting the audience, conveying why trees matter and how their existence and ours is inextricably connected. She also instills a sense of urgency about embracing the planet’s remaining natural forests with enhanced protection, speaking in classrooms and boardrooms, in villages far from tall buildings, in the offices of government officials, electronically and in print, with the world at large.

Throughout history, people have taken from nature whatever was needed or wanted from the world’s lands and waters. When our numbers were small and the natural world was largely intact, our impact was slight, but after one hundred thousand years of a more or less peaceful relationship with nature, the past five hundred, and especially the past fifty, have marked a turning point that does not bode well for the future of life on Earth. Human capacity to consume and alter the nature of nature has reached perilous tipping points for climate, biodiversity, and land and water use, compounded by pollution, all driving changes in planetary processes and the underpinnings of what makes Earth hospitable for life as we know it. The good news is the other tipping point—knowledge. Children in the twenty-first century (adults, too) are armed with the superpower of knowing what Earth looks like from space, of seeing and hearing about events across the globe in real time while understanding the new perspectives of geological time, of seeing Earth’s place in the universe, of vicariously traveling into the inner workings of cells, to the depths of the deepest seas, and to the tops of the highest trees. Half a century ago, it was widely believed that Earth was too big to fail. Now we know. If Earth is to remain habitable for the likes of us, we must take care of what remains of the natural systems that took 4.5 billion years to make and a bit more than 4.5 decades to break and do our best to restore damaged areas to better health. There is still time to hold on to the last safe havens where trees are intact, hosting miraculous creatures that are as vital to our existence as we are to theirs.

Bravo, Meg Lowman, aka Your Highness, for sharing your journey in this book, and for launching Mission Green, thereby inspiring others to understand and know why we must take care of the natural world as if our lives depend on it. Because they do.

—SYLVIA A. EARLE, aka Her Deepness, founder, Mission Blue

Oceanographer, botanist, National Geographic Explorer in Residence

TEN TIPS OF FIELD BIOLOGY FOR EVERY ASPIRING ARBORNAUT

Always carry a headlamp, not just in the forest but anywhere … even on a plane or traveling by car.

Keep a few tissues in your pocket for those emergency ablutions behind a tree!

Wear a vest with lots of pockets.

Never drink more than half of your water supply every time you hydrate so you always have some left, and it always helps to tell someone your itinerary in case a rescue is required.

Keep your camera handy for amazing discoveries, even if it is just on your phone.

Carry a poncho. It can serve as a ground cloth as well as rain gear.

Oreo cookies are a wonderful energy snack!

If you are a parent, carry a few photos of your kids—they work well to break the ice with other cultures, especially where language barriers exist.

Use all five senses, relentlessly.

Keep a journal so that you can recall amazing stories, biodiversity, and observations.

PROLOGUE

How to See the Whole Tree (and What That Means for the Forest)

IMAGINE GOING TO THE DOCTOR for a complete checkup and, in the course of an entire visit, the only body part examined was your big toe. The visit ends with a pronouncement that you are perfectly healthy, but there was no test of your vital signs, heartbeat, vision, or any other part of you—just the big toe. You may have gone in with a broken arm or a headache from high blood pressure, but the assessment of your lowest bipedal extremity alone couldn’t clue the doctor in to the real trouble. How would you feel? At the very least, you’d probably switch doctors.

For centuries, the health of trees, even those ancient giants stretching hundreds of feet high into the clouds, was assessed in just the same way. Examining woody trunks at eye level, scientists essentially inspected the big toes of their patients and then made sweeping deductions about forest health without ever gazing at the bulk of the tree, known as the canopy, growing overhead. The only time foresters had the chance to evaluate a whole tree was when it was cut down—which is kind of like assessing a person’s entire medical history from a few ashes after cremation. In tropical forests especially, the lower levels are as different from the upper reaches as night and day. The ground receives as little as 1 percent of the light shining on the crowns. So the understory is dark, windless, and often humid whereas the canopy is blasted with sun, whipped by high winds, and often crispy in its dryness between rainstorms. The gloomy forest floor is inhabited by a few shade-loving creatures, while the canopy hosts a riotous variety of life—millions of species of every imaginable color, shape, and size that pollinate flowers, eat leaves, and also eat each other.

Before the 1980s, foresters unimaginatively overlooked 95 percent of their subject; almost no one paid attention to the treetops. Then, in 1978, a young botanist with a lifelong passion for green giants and infatuated by leaves arrived in Australia on a fellowship to study tropical forests. Coming from the temperate zones, this neophyte knew almost nothing about the tropics. During her first visit to a rain forest in Australia, she stared up into the most dizzyingly tall trees she’d ever met and thought, Holy cow, I can’t see the top! That gobsmacked botanist was me.

I carried with me an enormous tree-love and planned to devote my future to demystifying their secrets. After a few misadventures, I realized that to understand the whole forest, I needed to get up into its highest levels. Initially I hoped that the simple use of binoculars would be enough to bring the treetops down to me. But after a lot of thought and some trial and error, I figured out a way to hoist myself into that magical, unexplored wonderland, full of the six-legged mayhem of the insect world and more shades of green than I imagined possible. I nicknamed this amazing new world the eighth continent. Cavers go down a rope, but I went up. Recreational mountaineers pound hardware into rock cliffs, but I gently rigged tall trees to avoid breaking any leaves or scaring off any creatures. And to affix my ropes in the upper branches, I welded my own slingshot from a metal rod. My approach turned out to be a simple, inexpensive technique, and it launched my exploration of that eighth continent, a complex hot spot of biodiversity located not hundreds or thousands of miles away like the ocean floor or outer space, but almost within reach just above our heads. I called myself an arbornaut.

During that first ascent into the canopy, I ecstatically came eyeball to eyeball with creatures I had never imagined and that were, at that very moment, still unknown to the rest of the world. I marveled at a handsome black-snouted weevil sucking leaf juices, elegant colorful pollinators flitting between vine flowers, giant bird-nest ferns that gave sanctuary to ants, and thousands upon thousands of my favorite thing: leaves. As I moved from bottom to top, I was dumbstruck by the changes I observed. Foliage in the shaded understory was blackish-green, larger, thinner, and, as it turned out, more long-lived (thanks to the windless, protected, and dark environment near the forest floor). Leaves in bright sunshine at the top were small, leathery, yellowish green, and very tough. Everywhere I looked, the crowns shared secrets not visible from ground level—shiny beetles ate young (but not old) leaf tissue, caterpillars operated in gangs feeding on entire branches from youngest to older foliage, birds plucked these unsuspecting larvae as if feasting at a salad bar, and sudden downpours of rain sent all the critters scrambling for shelter under the nearest foliage or bark crevice. In the years ahead, treetop exploration would lead to the discovery that upward of half of all terrestrial creatures live about one hundred feet or more above our heads, not at ground level as scientists had previously assumed. As I soon discovered, in the upper crowns, the majority of species were new to science. Across more than sixty thousand species of trees, nearly every one hosts unique communities.

When they encounter unexplored frontiers, scientists design new techniques and technology for safe exploration. The invention of the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or SCUBA, in the 1950s opened the extraordinary world of coral reef biodiversity to scientific research. During the 1960s, astronauts landed on the moon thanks to NASA’s development of rocket combustion for space travel. Solid rocket fuel was to astronauts what my humble homemade slingshot was to arbornauts—not a new invention, but an innovative new way to use one. Just as space travel launched a generation of astronauts, canopy access created a new career pathway for arbornauts. If you love to climb trees, take note—there is a profession for you! I was one of those first arboreal explorers, and arguably the only crazy climber to have conducted research on every continent (even Antarctica, where the tops of moss and lichen foliage are only two inches high, and require kneeling, not climbing, to access their Lilliputian canopies). Over the past forty years, I have marked thousands of leaves and tracked their life history, some lasting more than twenty years despite the constant threats of creatures (mostly insects) trying to eat, tear, tunnel through, or disfigure them. And this aerial shift in our approach to forest science has also led to advancements in knowledge of global cycles ranging from freshwater circulation to carbon storage to climate change.

It shouldn’t be a surprise (but it still is for some) that planetary health links directly to forests. Their canopies produce oxygen, filter fresh water, transfer sunlight into sugars, clean our air by absorbing carbon dioxide, and provide a home to the extraordinary genetic library of all earthbound creatures, among many other crucial functions. And unlike an electric grid or water treatment plant, no expensive taxes or fees are required to maintain this complex forest machinery that keeps our Earth healthy. Still, for it to function well, we need to insulate it from human destruction. Within my lifetime of approximately six decades, Amazon rain forest degradation has zoomed past a tipping point; restoration is unlikely. Countries like Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the Philippines have almost no primary forests left to seed future stands. And remaining forest fragments around the world ranging from California to Indonesia to Brazil are at great risk from fires, drought, roads, and clearing. We must race ever faster to understand the mysteries of the treetops before they disappear, or better yet, we must find a way to conserve those remaining green Noah’s arks. Climate change was not in my vocabulary when I studied backyard trees some fifty years ago, but now this term drives an even greater urgency to understand and conserve natural systems, especially forests.

One way to save more trees is to introduce more people to their wonders. After perfecting safe rope techniques, I designed aerial trails in the canopy called treetop walkways or skywalks, allowing groups of people to study the crowns, not just one person dangling from a rope. These walkways not only offered an important research and education tool but also served a humanitarian effort; they provided income to indigenous people from ecotourism instead of logging, which in turn inspires sustainable conservation. After ropes and walkways, I went on to design, tinker with, and utilize an extensive toolkit for canopy exploration, including cherry pickers, hot-air balloons, construction cranes, and drones. Each tool allowed unique access to different aspects of the forest and provided the means to answer diverse research questions. Exploration of whole forests, not merely the forest floor, has inspired communities around the globe—from governments in Malaysia to priests in Ethiopia—to partner with arbornauts to save their precious green heritage, which is so critical to human survival. In my experience, positive conservation outcomes arose more from mutual trust between scientists and local stakeholders than from the latest technical publications. And it never hurts to invite a few community leaders into the canopy! People seem to love climbing trees—even those who think they’ve outgrown it.

No one would have guessed that a shy kid from rural upstate New York, a veritable geek who spent her childhood collecting wildflowers along roadsides, could change our view of the planet with a few homemade gadgets. Using a simple toolkit that fits into one duffel bag, I now travel the world exploring the eighth continent, uncovering its secrets, and sharing treetop wonders with anyone who will listen. My story is a testimony: any average kid can make discoveries by exploring the world around us. This book is meant to share that thrill of aerial exploration—filled with thousands of feet of ropes, many failed volleys with a welded slingshot, lots of remote jungles, hundreds of thousands of leaves examined at their birthplace (not clipped or dead on the forest floor), multitudes of stinging ants, and gazillions of other creatures in their green penthouses. After four decades as an arbornaut, forests remain my best teachers. Once you have ascended into the canopy with me through these pages, I’m betting you, too, will feel an urgency to champion their conservation.

1

FROM WILDFLOWER TO WALLFLOWER

A Girl Naturalist in Rural America

I HAD SET THE ALARM, but in my excitement, I awoke a half hour before it rang. At 4:00 a.m., there were still just slivers of light on the horizon, so I tiptoed out to the living room of our small cabin on Seneca Lake to avoid waking my two younger brothers.

Our town of Elmira, New York, was unbearably hot in the summer, so we escaped to a nearby cabin twenty-five miles away, where the forests worked their natural cooling magic. The cottage where we spent these summers was an abandoned gristmill. Many years before, probably almost a hundred, an elm tree had taken root on that mill site; my grandfather, a stonemason and carpenter, then lovingly constructed the cottage around its trunk, so it ran right up through the living room as a prominent feature. When it rained, water dripped through the roof, down the bark to a patch of soil nestled amid the stone floor. I often searched for tiny insects inhabiting all the woody fissures. The elm canopy stretched across the entire roof, shading our cottage during summer and standing sentinel with its bare branches in winter. I loved every inch of that tree right down to the diverse fungi that grew along the trunk when it fell victim to Dutch elm disease. Its special place inside our cabin was always such a comfort, and one of my saddest childhood moments was its death. On a dangerously tall ladder, my grandfather meticulously cut away all the dead branches, leaving the beloved trunk as a statue gracing the center of the cottage. My grandparents would occasionally allow me to harvest one of the flat, tough fungal brackets decorating the dead trunk adjacent to our dining room table. I did my creative best to etch designs and paint images of plants on these living canvases, sometimes called artist fungus. Summer at our rustic cabin was my refuge, where I could explore, observe, and collect, inhaling all the nature my small body could absorb.

I carefully shook Mom awake, then we crept outside before sunrise and quietly drove five miles along a dirt road to my favorite birdwatching pond. This nature trip was a huge deal for me. Mom did not even own binoculars, and all she knew about my feathered friends was that starlings sometimes tore up her spring lettuce sprouts. But she knew birdwatching brought immeasurable joy to me at the tender age of seven and so offered to drive to a special place for the dawn chorus—an exquisite concert sung by a winged choir at sunrise. Our old Rambler bounced along a dusty road, through cherry orchards where my brother and I earned money picking fruit, near an old haunted house that made my hair stand on end, past a one-room bar where farmers bragged about their corn. Willows encircled the pond’s edge, their roots adapted to soggy soil. A discarded, leaky old rowboat was tied to a branch. I had dreamed all summer of rowing out from the bank to observe egrets or herons. Those majestic birds would garner five big stars on my modest bird list if they appeared. When we arrived, my mom worried we were trespassing on some farmer’s property even though there was no house to be seen, so she very reluctantly climbed into that dilapidated dinghy, strewn with spiderwebs and dusty underpinnings. Away we paddled. This was as close as I ever came to feeling like a princess in a silver carriage, even though it was a rough-and-tumble contraption full of leaks! We rowed and bailed constantly, to keep afloat. Out in the middle of the pond, we stopped paddling and I focused my enormous Sears binoculars. They were ridiculously bulky, felt like they weighed almost as much as I did, and probably were not even capable of focusing, but they made me feel like a professional ornithologist. Much to my amazement, as if on cue, a great blue heron flew in and landed along the shoreline. Even my mom was overcome with awe.

Whereas kids today are beset with indoor technologies and fall prey to screen fatigue, I probably suffered from an overdose of plant oxygen and green blindness. From the day I could walk, I was a tireless collector of natural stuff. At the lake, I amassed piles of special shells and stones. Back in Elmira under my bed, I stashed wildflowers, twigs, bird nests, more stones, feathers, dead twigs (to study winter buds!), and even snakeskins. My parents indulged my love for nature in small but thoughtful ways, always stopping the car when I wanted to pick a roadside weed or offering encouragement for the crafts I made from sticks, leaves, bark, or other botanical remnants. I was a true nature nut. None of my local childhood friends shared this enthusiasm—and most definitely no one else in recent generations of the Lowman lineage had shared a passion for botany (although my grandfather obviously respected nature enough to retain an elm trunk amid his construction work). In rural upstate New York, we didn’t have easy access to museums, scientists as role models, or other resources to nourish a child’s love of natural sciences. All we had was outdoor play, but that simple pleasure transformed a small-town kid into a young naturalist.

Over long days outdoors, I developed patience for solo observations of the natural world that included many hours of silence. Such behavior may have reinforced my shyness. When I entered kindergarten, I became the class wallflower, miserable when confined indoors among noisy classmates. I almost never spoke in class except when called upon. The teacher told my mom something was quite wrong. I was carted off to our family doctor, who, in a gruff German accent, smiled and said, Frau Lowman, have you considered the alternative? On the last day of kindergarten, our teacher, Miss Jones, was grading workbooks. I admired her because she had humbly told us her story about why she had leg braces, living bravely with polio after some boys had pushed her into a stagnant pond during childhood, causing her to swallow filthy water. The teacher’s story haunted me and reinforced my fear of bullies. That year, I had a perfect kindergarten workbook, until the final day when my best friend, Mimi, became jealous and circled the wrong answer on the last page using her big black crayon. With heartbreak, I dutifully handed it in without a word. Miss Jones sighed and said, Oh, Meg, you almost had a perfect workbook until today’s mistake. Tears welled, and I gazed in horror as Miss Jones gave me a silver (not gold) star for the year. I did not even have the courage to tattle on my best friend. For many years afterward, Mimi and I stashed the infamous workbook in our secret tree fort, giggling about its controversial history. (She is still one of my closest friends, despite the loss of that gold star!) I later lamented not having a bona fide naturalist or professional botanist in my childhood, to guide and inspire me.

After reading their biographies at the public library, Rachel Carson and Harriet Tubman became my role models. Carson confronted the chemical companies, having figured out that songbirds were dying due to pesticides. She quietly but forcefully told her story so the public could understand the science. Tubman led slaves north along the Underground Railroad at night using moss on tree trunks as her navigational guide—truly a pioneering naturalist. I used to close my eyes in the woods, feel for the moss, and try to find my way—it was never easy, so I admired Tubman even more. My only two role models were deceased—in hindsight, I guess that trees substituted as exemplary living entities and offered many life lessons. They stand tall, benevolently providing shelter, stabilizing both soil and water, and always giving back to their community.

My three best (and only) kindergarten friends lived nearby and played outdoors in the woods with me, although sometimes reluctantly. Looking back, I owe my scientific career not just to a passion for collections, but also to a few loyal compatriots who were willing to explore the backyard. Mimi was one of ten children in her family and my alter ego, because she was brave and outspoken. Betsy came from a family of nine children, where she had access to her older sisters’ clothing; she was our fashion guru and much admired by all the boys. She was also my only friend who enjoyed birdwatching, which counted for a lot. Maxine was bold and funny, oftentimes blurting out crazy ideas. Once, she convinced us to smoke hollow sticks and we all thought our death from lung cancer was imminent. We were a devoted team, creating our little adventures before the town ever had cable television to watch National Geographic specials. A hundred feet behind my parents’ house, we imagined it was halfway to Siberia on our hullaballoo expeditions, a term we invented to secretly allude to our missions. Sometimes we took bologna sandwiches, a thermos of strawberry milk (my favorite), and a blanket to sit on. We always had some jars to collect critters, a plastic bag for plants, and a few empty shoeboxes for rescuing small creatures. Boys were not allowed. In those days, climate change was not part of the environmental vocabulary of youth, citizens, or even scientists, so the biggest threat to the local flora was gangs of teenagers running through the swamp and crushing the very blossoms I was so eager to collect. To avoid encounters with those boisterous boys, I learned to sit quietly and remain invisible in the woods, a good skill for a future field biologist.

The girls and I wanted a secret place where we could escape adults, boys, and all other distractions. We constructed a rough-hewn fort in the lower branches of a few birches and maples. Logs from my dad’s woodpile and a nearby thicket of young saplings provided our initial building materials. It was by no means an architectural wonder, just a few footholds nailed into place, plus some branches and blankets hauled into a wonderful sugar maple crotch about four feet off the ground (although it seemed more like a great expanse when we were six years old). We ate lunch up there, drew pictures, and told stories in our special hideout. Despite its rickety design, we wiled away many hours caring for baby birds that had fallen from their nests, trying to repair butterflies with broken wings, or simply amassing the flowers I later pressed and stashed under my bed. One afternoon, we rescued earthworms cut in half by our dads’ lawnmowers, trying to Band-Aid them back together, but the poor creatures did not survive our simplistic surgery. We role-played as explorers, nurses, heroines, scientists, and castaways. The birches, with their peeling white bark, inspired our imaginations to transform us into members of the local Cayuga tribe, who had used birchbark for canoes and other practical purposes. From that fort I learned the rudiments of forest succession, becoming aware of the tallest trees, strongest branches, shadiest canopies, and propensity of each species to house wildlife. Along with sumac and cottonwoods, birches were a relatively short-lived species in upstate New York, called early successional because they were the first to grow in a forest clearing, but their weak wood ultimately caused them to topple during high winds or snowstorms. Birches were then replaced by later successional (or climax) trees such as maple, beech, or hemlock. My parents had built our house on a cleared lot, so the backyard grew anew into forest; over the course of my childhood, several birches and cottonwoods that formed our playground later became overshadowed by maples in true forest succession. I watched cottonwood and birch transition into maple and beech, whose dense canopies in turn shaded out many of the wildflowers on the forest floor.

Throughout childhood, learning about the natural world—and especially all things floral—was my obsession. I became a local expert on phenology, the seasonality of nature’s events, before anyone in Elmira, New York, had even heard the word. I knew exactly when and where in the forest to find jack-in-the-pulpits, followed weeks later by yellow trout lilies and amazing varieties of violets ranging in color from pink to purple to blue to white. Spring ephemerals are those early seasonal wildflowers that bloom before the trees leaf out, while sunlight still reaches the forest floor. This clever strategy allows them to grow and reproduce before the shady conditions from the canopy above prevent adequate light for flowering. Late spring and summer flora abound in sunny fields and open meadows, but not under heavily shaded maple or beech canopy. By the age of ten, I knew the calendar of phenological events for many wildflowers in upstate New York. I kept careful diaries to track all kinds of seasonality, from plants blooming to canopies greening to birds migrating to mosquitos biting to fireflies twinkling.

My wildflower collections grew enormous. I hoarded old telephone books under my bed, deploying them as plant presses, and checked out stacks of field guides from the public library to serve as identification aids. I am not even sure what inspired me to press my collections of flowers, having never seen an herbarium until college, nor did I ever meet a real botanist who would have taught me the technical nuances of how to collect plants. Somehow, I determined that a pressed wildflower looked slightly better than a withered, dried-up carcass of stems after seeing many of my handfuls of wildflowers wilt pathetically on the kitchen table. Despite her patience toward my nature pursuits, Mom was unhappy about the mice attracted to all the pressed bits of roadside residue under the bed. She put out mousetraps with cheese, but thankfully those furry critters were well fed from the dried collections, so the traps never snapped in the middle of the night. I spent hours of most days squatting on the bedroom floor, which became my laboratory, poring over some crummy Golden Guides from the library, trying to identify specimens. When I opened the telephone-book pages after a month or so of pressing, there laid dozens of brown flat corpses. After all the effort of pressing and then waiting for the specimens to dry, it was disheartening to discover that most plants lose their color when dead. The challenges of coloration, plus a lack of any technical botany books, created extreme hurdles to identify many of the specimens.

My best reference for learning botanical jargon was a set of nature encyclopedias purchased at the grocery checkout display, which Mom kindly let me buy—one volume at a time, each for one dollar—when I helped her with shopping. I cherished all sixteen volumes, and they provided rudimentary definitions, including diagrams of pistils, stamens, and plant sex in a slightly more sophisticated fashion than the simple Golden Guides. I found it unsettling that the word pistil, referring to a plant’s male parts, sounded so like a deadly weapon, pistol, but they were so radically different. There was so much to learn! I was just a small-town nature girl who loved the outdoors yet was not savvy about most technicalities of scientific vocabulary.

When our fifth-grade teacher casually announced the next New York State Science Fair would be held in the nearby town of Cortland, I was hesitant but also determined to enter my collection. Maybe the science fair would introduce me to other kids studying nature? I drew a poster illustrating the general parts of a wildflower: petals, sepals, pistils, and the rest. It was simplistic, but I felt as close to my hero Rachel Carson as ever, having cataloged several hundred types of local botany over the past five years as a scientific collection, all carefully pressed and labeled in ridiculously small five-by-seven-inch photo albums. I selected four books of pressed specimens, which was about half of my homemade herbarium. Not really knowing that plants in a professional herbarium were glued on large eleven-by-seventeen-inch sheets of paper, I had purchased from the local drugstore commercial photo albums intended for baby pictures; instead they became laden with dried (and mostly brown) wildflowers and small index cards listing the name, date of collection, location, and habitat. I tried to pick the best ones, either those with a few vestiges of color or ones with really cool names (such as snakeroot, live-forever, or Indian pipe), and avoided showing the less attractive ones, such as a cattail that had virtually exploded with white seeds all over the page.

Dad, despite knowing absolutely nothing about botany beyond mowing a lawn and raking leaves, offered fatherly enthusiasm and awoke at 5:00 a.m. on the day of the science fair to drive me two hours to Cortland. I did not sleep a wink the night before, shivering in fear that someone might ask me questions about the project. Not only was my shyness magnified at the notion of such a public event, but I had never met a professional scientist. Carefully loading the albums of pressed plants plus the crayon posters into our secondhand 1953 Ford Crestline Sunliner, Dad and I set out on what felt like a great expedition. It was 1964, and he always bought gas when it was on sale, so it must have been a week of higher prices at the pump because he had neglected to fill the tank. Dad obviously did not want to worry me, so as we came over the crest of the hill into town, he said, Hang on. The car glided downhill on empty, careening through red lights and quiet streets in those wee hours of the morning. We were first in line when the gas station opened.

The science fair was held in a huge gymnasium at the state college, and I was assigned a small table for display. Wedged in among what seemed like 499 unruly boys, I did not see any girls but hoped a few were scattered in the crowd. I yearned to find a kindred spirit. I was astonished at the multitude of tables demonstrating a chemistry activity to replicate a volcano: pour vinegar on baking soda in the middle of a papier-mâché pyramid and, voilà, an eruption! There may have been only fifty volcanoes in the auditorium of five hundred students, but they attracted raucous cheering and bawdy attention that only emboldened their creators and was simply not part of my DNA. Had I not felt so self-conscious, it might have struck me as funny—a wildflower collection displayed by a consummate wallflower amid the chaos of vinegar volcanoes. But I was overly nervous as the only botanist (and one of few females) in the auditorium, as the judges later informed me. Nor did I see any other natural history projects throughout the entire science fair. The judges passed by in a herd, without commentary except to glance through a few pages of dried flowers and offer polite comments about the challenges of pressing plants without harming them. (I wanted to blurt out, "Of