There is nothing better that putting on some headphones on a brisk morning and heading out for a run just as the sun is coming up, before the city is awake. Your body feels strong and light and alive and your mind brightens up, but it is even better when you can picture your baby, well fed and asleep again and curled up in your perfect husband’s arms, cozy and warm in bed. This is the best feeling there is in daily life. (Written November 12)

Surprise!!!

Picture a pretty normal day after work. I come home, turn on the computer, eat some stuff, change out of my dirty field work clothes, all that usual boring stuff. This day was a little different though because Forrest was traveling to Haiti, so even at 6 pm in Guam (3 am in our new home city of New Orleans) I was expecting to do some online chatting with him, listening for that wonderful little sound that lets me know my love has just IM-ed me. I was changing my clothes when I heard the front door creak open. My first thought was that it must be my neighbor’s girlfriend’s 4 year old, but I didn’t hear him manically yelling for me, so it couldn’t have been. Assuming it was one of the guys from the hatchery needing something I peeked around my bedroom door.

There he stood. My mind was slower to comprehend than my feet were, because I was already standing in front of him, arms around his neck, before I could understand how Forrest could possibly be in my living room! I was laughing and crying all at the same time, repeating “How can you be here!?!”

I’ll admit, even as I kissed him a part of my mind was remembering that segment on NPR about how solitary confinement makes people go loopy. I was really hoping that the time living and working alone hadn’t just loosened the bolts a bit, that I wasn’t crying and kissing some hatchery worker come to retrieve the giant box of squid from my freezer.

So Forrest was here. He lied to me about Haiti. He and Tommy had planned things behind my back and I had never suspected a thing. And for a glorious 12 days I got to spend every minute with Forrest. It was so fun that when he left I thought, nuts, now I’ll have to go back to work- even though I’d gotten as much field work done with him while he was here as I had the whole time before he came.

Just to make it an even more magical time, all the animals came out for Forrest. I’d only seen one feral pig and one monitor lizard before Forrest came, and only fleeting glimpses of them. By the time he left I’d seen 4 pigs, including one at rather close range, and 3 much larger lizards. Not only that, but we saw 2 brown tree snakes. Since they are arboreal and nocturnal Tommy thought it very unlikely that I’d ever seen one while doing field work, but while out with Forrest one day I practically stepped on a 6 foot snake! I was yipping like a startled Chihuahua and as we watched it glide away I thought, nuts, maybe I should have killed that thing. But I knew I couldn’t. They are so long and slender and graceful. (Plus I cringe just stepping on a snail.) And only a few days later we saw another, this time very young with the physique of a shoelace and sandy brown with mysterious sandy brown eyes. That time I wondered how I could even want to kill one, even with all the ecological havoc they’ve wreaked.

All week long we had adventures. We exhausted ourselves with field work during the day and went out to try new foods at night. Now he’s back in the Big Easy, starting law school today, but before he left he was trying to figure out how we could live in Guam next summer. Keep your fingers crossed.

It was such a wonderful surprise to have him here that I stayed giddy for a week after he left. I couldn’t be sad that he was gone because I was still so surprised and happy that he even came. My neighbor Frank told Forrest that he raised the bar too high, now his girlfriend is asking whether Frank would do that for her. Forrest laughed and said, just ask if she would be mean enough to leave you for 3 months. He definitely has a point, it’s been a great experience but I wouldn’t do it again. Still, I now have proof that Forrest loves me thousands of dollars worth.

I arrive at the field site. With one hand I grab a bucket containing various types of tape measures, orange flagging tape, a clipboard, a GPS, and a bottle of water. With the other hand I grab a machete. I am ready for work.

I can always tell if I am the first person on a trail in the morning by how many spider webs I snap with my face as I hike. If it’s a Monday and nobody came down during the weekend sometimes there are huge spiderwebs across the whole trail. And you know how in Indiana Jones type movies they always very dramatically and slowly swipe aside the spiderwebs as though it takes effort? I always thought, come on, it’s not hard, you can’t even feel any resistance from a spiderweb. Well, I may have been wrong. The supporting strands on the webs here are almost as thick and strong as a strand of human hair. It’s amazing. I like to very dramatically and slowly swipe them aside.

Occasionally I come to a place in the forest full of butterflies. They tend to congregate by species and all of the butterflies I see in the forest are large and black: black with a big purple spot on each wing, black with yellow squares like lace at the edge of the wing, black with blue dots, brownish black. They are startling and eerie, like the ghosts of the birds that are gone now. It always seems extra quiet when you walk into a group of them.

If I take my ear buds out while I hike there are 2 sounds I usually hear. One is small scurrying animals and dead leaves. The animals are small lizards- skinks. Usually brown, but occasionally I’ll see one with a bright blue tail, and even saw one the other day that was entirely baby blue. The other sound is a scraping sound, and sometimes followed by what sounds a little like a golf ball being dropped. That is the sound of a coconut crab scraping its claws on the craggy limestone as it crawls, followed by it getting scared of me and pulling into its shell and falling off the rock, pinging against stones as it goes. I always feel a little bad about that.

The girl I replaced out here referred to hiking in Guam as working out on a stair-stepper in a sauna. That’s pretty accurate, except that there aren’t mosquitoes in saunas. I use bug spray, but since I’m sweating a couple of liters per hour it doesn’t usually do much. (Now you know I’m a scientist! Just look at that use of the metric system!)

At some point I depart the trail and start making my own. The point is to find a place where I can hike for 100 yards in a straight line and then count all the cycads in a 2 meter swath along that line, taking various measurements. This is where the machete comes in handy. I’ve gotten pretty good with it. I’ve pretty much passed the point where I’m worried that in some over zealous effort to chop through a vine I’ll hack into my shin instead. So that’s good. I’m pretty much an amazon woman with an mp3 player.

Ok Friends, Here are 2 photos. The first is the view out my lab window, right above the computer I often use. The other is the view I get if I walk out my back door and tromp through some bushes. Yeah, it's rough here.

To make matters worse (for anyone who is not me) I get paid to hike around the island counting trees. The trees are a kind of cycad. Cycads are the trees that were most common during the age of the dinosaurs (plant nerds actually refer to it as the Age of Cycads.) There weren't any flowering trees back then, just these guys and giant ferns and such. Identifying them here isn't hard. Just look for a tree that looks like a short palm tree and is dying. That's my plant.

I work for a very nice and laid back kind of guy named (Dr.) Tommy Marler. He's not actually an ecologist by training but a horticulturist. He studies tropical fruit, which means that I've already eating quite a variety of mangos, star fruit, guava, mountain "apples," atemoya (rather like it's more popular cousin, chermoya), chicle fruit, and several other small sour things and one that wasn't sour. I don't remember all the names. Also, you know how in the tropics people are always trying to convince gringos that it's cool to drink that nappy juice out of the coconut? That sort of bland/sweet/insipid junk that always has bits of coconut husk in it? Well, I have learned here, as part of my training, that the juice from coconuts is really really good if you just pick it earlier, while the fruit is still really green. Nice and Tangy. You should try it.

Here is the Guam word of the blog: off-island / on-island Fairly self explanatory. Example: Except for a few days, everyone else in the lab will be off island for the next month. (This is true. They've pretty much turned the lab over to me. This would be a great opportunity to turn evil scientist- if University of Guam could afford any equipment.)

I'm still trying to figure out this whole blog thing. I just told blogspot that my birthday could be included in my profile and it automatically included my astrological sign and what chinese year I was born in. I can't figure out how to get rid of that "Gemini" lable. It's not really the kind of thing I want people to immediately see- oh, she's listed her sign. Dumb. However, I do like being reminded that I belong to the year of the monkey.

This photo is from the last time I spent 3 months in the tropics and did some fieldwork- but that time I didn't get paid and Forrest was there (slightly longer, in fact, than I was). Also, Guatemala; Guam, eh? Don't you think that means something?

Shell&Forrest

Well, I named this blog Shell&Forrest, but, come Monday, it should probably be called Shell without Forrest. Here's why: I'm moving to Guam. Yes, without my one true love. For 3 months. I'll be doing field work there (Do I get to call myself a Biologist now? I'm getting paid for it this time). I don't actually have many details on the whole thing yet, but it looks like I'll be living in a building at a fish hatchery. Hopefully it doesn't smell too wierd. I'll let you know how it all turns out.