He’d broken his arm playing hockey with his sons a week before. He had a winter beard and a neon-green cast on his left arm. Jeff was forty-ish, and wore sunglasses and a backward baseball cap. The biologist running the trip rolled up in in a large white van with a boat hitch and the words BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES stenciled across the side.
But as I waited to be picked up by my team in Corpus Christi, I was nervous-I imagined everyone else would be a scientist or a birder and have daunting binoculars. The good people of the Earthwatch organization assured me I was welcome on the trip and would get to participate in “real science” during my time on the gulf. In my novel there were biologists doing field research about birds and I had no idea what field research actually looked like and so the scientists in my novel draft did things like shuffle around great stacks of papers and frown.
I went to Texas to study the whooping crane because I was researching a novel. Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do. Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee.
Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett
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