Yikes, I am so behind on this blog that I’m finishing this December 2017 post in June 2018… trying to catch up but especially prompted on this one because Lab Girl is the UMass Common Read this summer and I may get to see Hope Jahren speak in September. Plus Five Colleges (my workplace) is encouraging us to read and discuss all four common reads for the participating campuses. I love the Pioneer Valley!
This was the December Nature and Environment book group selection, and an interesting contrast to H is for Hawk. Both of them were placed at the end of the year because they were still popular and the library asked us to wait for the demand to die down. They are also both what I loosely classify as “cross-disciplinary” titles for the purposes of the group (a type we alternate with classics of nature writing and oh-my-god-we’re-all-going-to-die current issues).
Overall I enjoyed it a lot, but became more and more impatient with Jahren’s over-the-topness/nuttiness, especially around an epically-disastrous van trip, until she revealed her bipolar diagnosis. Then everything made a lot more sense; I would have had more sympathy had she introduced it earlier. The book still reeks of superhero syndrome, which is how I think of memoirs (most often of teaching) by people in very difficult roles who succeed against all odds in a way that is completely not sustainable or replicable.
In the early memoir section I loved the David Copperfield thread. Her stories of working in a hospital lab prepping IV bags as a teen are fascinating:
If this is for the ER or the ICU, we have about ten minutes to make it happen. Fortunately for the patient, there is a sleep-starved teenager apprenticed to a chain-smoking barmaid in the basement who is ready for action.
(Lydia, the chain-smoking tech who takes Hope under her wing, reminds me very much of a senior kennel aide I worked with at Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in the 80’s.)
[I was forced] to manage the timing and extent to which I could wander through my own thoughts, and I developed a fine control over my ability to reemerge. I could work with my brain in my hands for hours, move it into my head for twenty minutes, and then shunt it back into my fingers in the same way that I could slosh water back and forth in a half-full bucket.
Interspersed between the memoir chapters are shorter bits about the germination, growth, life, and death of plants. These are great (especially in contrast with The Hidden Life of Trees, which we read later). Jahren’s metaphors are both brilliant and illuminating.
Folded within the embryo are the cotyledons: two tiny ready-made leaflets, inflatable for temporary use. They are as small and insufficient as the spare tire that is not intended to take you any farther than the nearest gas station. Once expanded with sap, these barely green cotyledons start up photosynthesis like an old car on a bitter winter morning. Crudely designed, they limp the whole plant along until it can undertake the construction of a true leaf, a real leaf.
The evolution of leaf into spine: “One new idea allowed the plant to see a new world and draw sweetness out of a whole new sky.” Trees are “always doing something.” “Soil is the naturally produced graffiti that results from tensions between the biological and geological realms.”
By suspending each leaf separately, the tree has stacked its surface area into a sort of ladder for light to fall down. Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches. Look again and you’ll notice that leaves low in the canopy are of a darker green; they contain more of the pigment that helps each leaf absorb sunshine, allowing them to harvest the weaker rays that penetrate shade. When building foliage, a tree must budget for each leaf individually and allocate for each position relative to the other leaves.
A cactus doesn’t live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet. Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert. The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods: nobody living there can afford to move.
The later memoir sections are full of touching, hilarious, and horrifying moments. Discovering opal in the hackberry seed: “it still stands out as one of the loneliest moments of my life. On some deep level, the realization that I could do good science was accompanied by the knowledge that I had formally and terminally missed my chance to become like any of the women that I had ever known.”
Jahren’s relationship with her lab manager Bill is mesmerizingly weird and wonderful; Bill is the one other person in the book who’s larger than life in the same way she is. The climax of a strange story about Bill’s hair:
“What is your problem, anyway?” Bill said in exasperation. “You’re acting like a guy shaving off his hair and then hoarding it in a dead tree on the wrong side of town isn’t a totally normal thing. My God, you are hung up.”
segues into a brilliant parody of The Giving Tree (I’m firmly on the “hate” side of that one, as I am on Love You Forever) called The Getting Tree, “about an arboreal parent figure that slowly cannibalized its offspring because of its progressive and oblivious greed.”
I am sick to death of this wound that will not close; of how my babyish heart mistakes any simple kindness from a woman for a breadcrumb trail leading to the soft love of a mother or the fond approval of a grandmother. I am tired of carrying this dull orphan-pain, for though it has lost its power to surprise, every season it still reaps its harvest of hurt.
And my very favorite quote—not a new idea but nicely expressed: “Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”