Crisis After Crisis During Pandemic Field Day Experiments

Catalina Mejia

Catalina Mejia

Wielding the wooden handle tightly in my grasp, I brought the rubber mallet down as hard as I could on the top of the PVC pipe. “Please, please let there not be a rock below it,” I whispered desperately to myself.

I was alone in the middle of the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, nearing the end of the most important day of fieldwork for my PhD research. The mallet came down on the pipe and bounced off: there was a rock blocking the way. I fell back feeling alone and demoralized. It had been a day of setback after setback, in the middle of a summer when the world faced crisis after crisis. “I can’t take any more,” I sighed to myself. “The world can’t take any more.”

My interest in climate change started when I was a young teen and first learned about how human actions had plunged the natural world into ongoing, drastic changes. My never-ending curiosity about these changes and how we could combat them led to a passion for studying ecology, which led me to pursue a PhD. This is how, somehow, I found myself alone in the middle of a forest during a pandemic.

This was the only Saturday I could collect all the soil cores I needed for my research, and once again, there was a rock preventing me from hammering my PVC pipe into the ground to collect my soil sample. The focus of this work was to understand how climate change will affect stores of nutrients in forest soils, particularly nitrogen. I most wondered and worried about the potential for losses of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which might accumulate in the atmosphere and make our climate crisis worse.

The Hubbard Brook was the perfect location to address my interests because I could collect soils from the natural climate gradient created by the stark elevation differences in the steep terrain. The mean annual air temperature of my research plot at the lowest elevation in the forest was two degrees Celsius warmer than my plot at the highest elevation.

While two degrees seems like a small difference, it is the overall change scientists expect for this region after 50 years of climate warming.

On that all-important Saturday, I started my soil collecting at the highest elevation plot. And similar to how I had felt at the beginning of 2020, I began the day hopeful and ready to get to work. Then, the setbacks started, first with car trouble. The terminals on my car’s battery were apparently too old and loose to be able to hold on during all of the jostling on the backcountry, forest roads. Every time I needed to start my car to drive closer to the next plot, my car would refuse. I would pop the hood, jiggle things around, and after what felt like the hundredth time, the car would start. With the possibility of me getting stuck in the middle of the woods growing ever larger, I would hug and stroke the hood of my car, begging it to hold on until the end of the day.

Once I moved from the plots at higher to lower elevations, the soil coring also became more difficult. My methods involved hammering a PVC pipe into the ground to collect a 10 centimeter core of soil. The summer had been a surprisingly dry one, and in the warmer, lower elevation plots, the dryness in the soil was magnified. The drier a soil was, the less it would give in to the edges of my PVC corer and the more every root and rock that I hit would bounce the pipe back. Every plot found me more and more desperately rooting around on the ground till I found a spot that would be forgiving.

I started to repeat a mantra to myself, “please let this work, please let me finish,” again and again. Without even being aware of it, my mantra morphed into an anxious loop, the climate crisis, the pandemic, the stress of a solo day of fieldwork all mixing together in my thoughts: “What will happen to me? What will happen to the world?”

All day I had been thinking about the greenhouse gases I was trying to measure in my cores and the difference made by 2 degrees Celsius. The air was only slightly warmer and the soil was slightly drier at my warmer, low-elevation plots, but the tolls of these small differences had become painfully noticeable. When my rubber mallet bounced off the PVC pipe again, any motivation that I still had in me fizzled out, and I sat frozen.

Suddenly, I felt a buzzing at my leg. I slowly pulled out my phone and saw something flashing across my screen. It was a message from the site leader at Hubbard Brook asking how I was getting along, and if I would be done soon since the day was getting late. I felt the smallest flicker of warmth reignite in my body. I responded saying that I would be done soon.

“I am almost done,” I repeated to myself. Soon after came a call from a friend checking in on my day. I told her of my troubles and she responded with kindness and support. “You’ll be done soon. You’ll finish,” she promised me. The warmth grew, and something inside me seemed to shift. I sat back up, scooted over to a new spot, picked up my rubber mallet and tried again.

Though I was still by myself in the middle of the woods, in the middle of New Hampshire, I no longer felt quite as alone.

I did finish collecting my soil cores that day, and preliminary results show that those small temperature differences might be important for losses of nitrogen gases, but I am not sure that I could have made it through that one day without those last-minute check-ins from other people. The mental burden of conducting fieldwork alone due to COVID-19 restrictions had been more than I expected. Though two degrees Celsius or two people checking in may not seem like a lot, those small changes can actually mean something.

In 2020 we were all hit by more setbacks and crises than any of us were expecting, and unfortunately, more may be coming our way. Small acts of checking in and giving support can mean a lot. Whether to a friend, a colleague, or another graduate student, make the small efforts to reach out and ask for support if you are in need of it. We can make sure that none of us feel alone in our struggles, and help, however slightly, to lighten each other’s loads.