Autobiographical introduction

This first post will be autobiographical.  I grew up outside of Chicago, and then later, in southern California.  Suburban life certainly didn’t afford much contact with nature or wilderness, but my parents supported my interest in science and nature through museums, fossil hunting trips in the Mojave Desert, and visits to the beach.  In high school, my interest in biology seemed to solidify and by the time I went off to college on the central California coast, I was pretty certain marine biology was the course I would take.  I’ve been a nerd of many interests, but cells, molecules, organisms, taxonomy and the like have long been near the top of the list.

I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, a beautiful campus in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, nestled on the border of the redwood forest and the dry grasslands of central California.  It was the perfect biological environment for me – good professors, a diversity of interesting courses, and field opportunities ranging from the rocky intertidal and kelp forests to coastal redwood forests.  I had lots of labs too: dissecting invertebrates like the sand crab Emerita, collecting marine algae and pressing them on paper, and getting intimate with flower structures in order to learn to classify vascular plants.  I was an undergraduate in the mid to late 1990s and was lucky enough the catch what was maybe one of the last waves of opportunity in organismal biology.  Lab and field intensive courses like marine botany, fungi, kelp forest ecology, invertebrate zoology, and ichthyology don’t seem to be very plentiful at major universities these days.  At Santa Cruz into the 1990s they still were.  By the time of my senior year, I loved to wake up at 4 or 5 AM to catch a tide on the Big Sur or San Mateo County coasts.  I’m not a morning person, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever regretted waking up early if I could be the first on the coastline to smell the salty foggy air, numb my feet in the freezing waters of the California current and look for something new between cobbles and bedrock carpeted with marine creatures.

I did my PhD in San Diego, doing research on coastal salt marshes.  It wasn’t a favorite habitat of mine initially, but I’ve learned to appreciate these amazing ecosystems since.  They are wild mixtures of terrestrial plants and insects and marine invertebrates and algae.  Coastal marshes are dynamic – changing seasonally and with each tidal cycle – and full of stressful elements like salt and sulfide that make life hard and hardy.  As a graduate student I learned a lot about how to do environmental science and how to act like a scientist, but my real passion was still for the basics like the field and the organisms and the inquiry.  I discovered John Muir during this time, an author who overflowed with those kinds of passions and who wrote beautifully.  I wish often I could be like Muir, throwing some bread in a backpack and wandering into under-explored forests for weeks at a time.

Today I’m a coastal ecologist in the Pacific Northwest working on salt marshes.  I’m lucky when I can be on a small boat winding through the shallow waters of an estuary or wading in soupy mud trying to keep expensive electronic equipment from meeting instant death by mud, water and salt.  Off work, I still spend time on the rocky shoreline or forests or mountains.  Wilderness and nature appeal to me for many reasons.  I love the intellectual stimulation, the endless questions, that come from a hike in a place where natural processes dominate.  I like the solitude and the absence of human sounds in a forest or a remote place on the coast.  And spiritually, I like having a break from societal constructs and even from the sometimes suffocating issues of human emotion, human expectations and human morality.  This blog will be a collection of connections I make with nature and wilderness – scientific, personal, philosophical, and spiritual.