All posts tagged: field research

Indiana Jones may have been a little smelly.

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Think it through. He packs a gun and a whip in the smallest suitcase I’ve ever seen. There just isn’t room for spare socks and underpants. He wears the same pants, shirt, and hat throughout every field expedition. That suitcase is too small for a couple of clean sets of clothes. If you add it all up, he must have been really amazingly smelly. So smelly that it defies belief that he could sneak up on even the sleepiest, slow-brained guard. I am speaking from a position of deep knowledge and experience here. I just packed up my gear for a field session in the far northern wilderness. Gun, whip, hat – sure they are in the bottom of the crate if you want to think so. Let’s say that the moment I learned the grant support came through I checked the loads on the revolver and tossed the whip into my packing crate, then finished off a couple of fingers of whiskey. Or, you can picture me huddled over the computer monitor late into the night …

My heart is a like a neutron star, dense and heavy.

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My heart is like a magnetar, dense and heavy and a thousand times magnetized. Four weeks from this day I will board a flight to the far away field location. I will have no phone, no lights, no motor car – ok, we do have a satellite phone for emergencies but not much else. Our sole luxury is the outhouse we are taking with us. Stacks of long underwear, socks, field pants, and equipment are growing in the front parlor. This is remote field research. My heart is heavier every hour. I look at the WideEyedSpouse and I think, I won’t see you for weeks and weeks. I pet the dogs and I worry – will you be ok while I’m gone? Wiggins the Ancient Cat creaks by, I fret, will you be alive when I come home? The weight in my chest is a coalescence of the open wide joy of learning that I was going to have a funded research program this summer. As the time for leaving grows closer, the plane tickets …

I think I’m doing adventure wrong. Or at least wearing the wrong clothes.

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A spring Orvis catalog came in the mail yesterday. Usually print catalogs are trash carefully delivered to my door – from the mail carrier’s hand to my recycling bin. This time the economically-advantaged adventure vibe sucked me in. Vests with useful pockets. Ripstop trousers. Manly jewelry that signals rugged adventuresomeness. I’m trying to decide if men buy that for themselves or receive it as gifts. Page 16 stopped me dead. Above the expedition pants and vintage military belt there’s an evocative picture of a luxury lodge at a game preserve in Namibia. I can’t take my eyes off of it. I can see a comfy bed, white pillows, chairs, reading lamps and I think I see a bathroom tucked discretely in the back. I bet there’s staff, too. I live in the wilds for weeks to months most summers. My expedition pants are ancient Carhartt’s (because I think they stopped making women’s work pants) and WideEyedSpouse’s old khakis. My belt is the same leather belt I’m wearing right now, but soaked with eucalyptus oil so …