Field biology isn’t all sunshine and profound experiences that fundamentally rearrange the fibers of your being. Some days are objectively, irredeemably, shitty. Over the years the competition for the title “Worst Day of Field Work ever” has been tight. Honorable mentions include:
- The day when I had to coordinate a meeting between an increasingly impatient construction crew and an increasingly angry conservation group. Neither side was happy with the plan I put together for monitoring a red-tailed hawk nest. Both expressed their frustration by yelling at me until the state regulations for raptor conservation spontaneously changed. The only sensible thing to do was to announce, “I think I’m having a medical episode,” and faint, which I did.
- The day a surprise thunderstorm came over a mountain ridge while I was a two-hours’ hike away from the nearest trailhead. My rain jacket chose that moment to lose its waterproofing, my GPS lost satellite connection, and I completely lost both my sense of direction and my dignity. After a good cry and a lot of bushwhacking, I made it back to my car as drenched and pathetic as a drowned rat.
- The day I accidentally backed a Jeep off the side of a road and into a ravine at four in the morning. The slope was too loose and too steep to drive up again, and I had to jump out while the jeep rolled further down towards the bottom. My stomach still makes an uncomfortable backflip every time I reverse downhill in a car.
- The mysterious rash that appeared on my leg after a day counting prairie dogs. Convinced it was bubonic plague, I coughed up for a $200 doctor visit that was not covered by my insurance. Turns out it was an allergic reaction, presumably to the bubonic plague.
After the events of this past summer, I am thrilled to announce that there is finally a clear victor!
It was the end of a ten-day hitch and I was looking forward to some time off to go for long runs and bag some summits. Things started out as usual. A morning surveying birds, a long drive, and a run. By the evening though, my head was throbbing and my eyes hurt every time I looked at a bright light. I started my standard migraine protocol: a handful of Excedrin, a bottle of water with electrolytes, dinner, and going to bed early.
In retrospect, I should have taken the next day off. It was a physically demanding survey of fallen beetle-killed lodgepole pine and rock outcrops. The parts that weren’t jackstraw were hip-high swathes of ferns and grass, so dense I couldn’t even see my own feet. Hint: This is an example of foreshadowing. Tough terrain on a good day, and this was not a good day. While the pain was gone, the migraine left nausea and brain fog in its wake. I was clumsy and uncoordinated and even took a big tumble over a fallen log. A few points later, I reached into my pocket for my phone to take a picture and found pine needles and crumbs instead.
I spent the next 2 hours retracing my steps with the GPS without success. If my phone was in the tall grass, I wouldn’t see it even if I stepped on it, and it was impossible to know exactly which logs I climbed over and which ones I crawled under. Eventually I had to admit defeat. I trudged my way to the car, a second migraine threatening to erupt from stress.
Back at the car, my day got even worse. The Jeep had a flat tire. First I had to unload everything from the back of the Jeep to access the spare, and then change the tire. Normally that’s not a big deal, but when your head pounds every time you bend over or stand up it is incredibly difficult.
There’s a part of Twilight: New Moon where our protagonist Bella Swan is so heartbroken over her vampire boyfriend’s disappearance (it’s either that or seasonal depression) that she spends four months sulking. The time passes in four pages, each with only one word: October. November. December. January. That’s what those next couple of days felt like. Not enough energy to read, or run, or film myself foraging for pop-tarts as my audition tape for Alone. Not enough energy to do anything but feel sorry for myself. The fog lifted enough to get back into the field at the end of the weekend, but even so the rest of the field season I was plagued by headaches. To be fair, this is still better than what I was worried about after the prairie dog incident, which is to be plagued by bubonic plague.
As it turns out, having migraines this frequently is not good and I got a referral to a neurologist and an MRI to check for other problems. According to the radiologist, my brain is “Unremarkable.” I am deeply insulted.
There is a bright spot, however. Three weeks after the first incident I was close to the survey where I lost my phone and went to look for it. It took over three hours of retracing my steps with the GPS and bumping into one bear, but I found my phone! Despite being exposed to monsoon rains, all it needed was to be charged. This was the proudest achievement of the summer, and possibly, my life.
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