Nemertean worm from False Bay mudflats. Shout out to Megan Schwarz.
Remember summers when you were a kid? I’m talking single digits. Morning cartoons, fruity cereal, chewable vitamins, no responsibility, no job. Nothing to do with your time but play outside or contemplate your belly button. You were so unoccupied, in fact, that your parents had to find something to do with you during the time the public education system normally took you off their hands. So they sent you to summer camp.
Any summer camp. Soccer camp, wilderness camp, band camp, karate camp, fat camp (is that real?), unicycling camp, golf camp, FROLF camp, karate-FROLF-on-a-wilderness-unicycle-for-musical-fat-kids-camp.
Look how cute I was when I was 14. Eatin' starfish.
Well, I went to science camp (and band, bible, and art camp, but that’s not what this is about).
They shipped me off to the Alaska Summer Research Academy. Ok, so I was actually a freshman in high school, but I was arguably as worldly as a nine year old, and more distant nostalgia makes a better intro.
Regardless, I attended the ASRA for two summers, focusing on aquatic (freshwater) and marine studies. They were two of the best summers of my life, wrought with education, growth, field-trips, liquid nitrogen, nerd love, pissing reindeer, “‘Cool Science”, etc. I never thought I would be back.
Diggin' in worm poop 2005.
Diggin' in worm poop 2011.
And yet, at twenty years old, deeply entrenched in debt and hardened by the harsh realities of college life (like caffeine and grocery shopping), here I am. At marine biology camp.
Pretty much.
Really I am at the Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories on San Juan Island in Washington taking classes and doing research, but it feels like summer camp. In the good ways, plus more freedom and higher tuition.
Looking at nori 2005. (Well, that's not me.)
Looking at nori 2011. (Yeah, that's me.)
We spend our 8-hour class days in lecture and lab, or traipsing around the island collecting organisms and observing diverse habitats. And the ASRA memories keep flowing back.
And here is where you say, ‘of course you went to science camp when you were a child, Mary. You’re the biology girl and always have been.’ Wrong.
In high school I wanted to be a writer, or a gender studies major. If you had asked me at science camp what I wanted to study in college, I would have told you ‘anything but science’. I’d never even taken a biology class until after I got to Puget Sound and declared a biology major. It’s funny how things end up.
At the time, I thought of science camp as little more than the alternative to discovering a wormhole my belly button, and by that I mean boredom or a summer job. Now I know it was practical training for my current academic program and desired career.
Not all cases of one’s past coincidentally improving one’s future are so concrete, but I do think it is a frequent occurrence.
The pissing reindeer.
I find it remarkable how things I thought were irrelevant, or minimally significant at best, have shaped my life. Experiences and endeavors I thought were pointless or random at the time have made me what I am today. And I suppose that is how you build a life. The stuff you do, for whatever the reason and however you think it may or may not affect you, builds an experience, a perspective, a person.
Thus, as I approach a summer where all my plans have been squashed by the omnipotent thumb of the universe, and I may end up doing something that I don’t find immediately relevant to my current life goals and plans, I’ll be open and optimistic; whatever I do will be enriching and beneficial in some way, and relevant some day.
Which my parents have really been telling me for years.
I solemnly swear to never again perm my hair. But I just can't quit the hipwaders.