At age 4, my parents put me in a kayak. Every summer thereafter as a child, my mother, father and I would roam the Adirondacks by water. By 5 or 6, I was comfortable hauling over beaver dams and ducking under snags and bridges. Every July and August, we spent almost every day of my father’s vacation time camping at Lake Durant, where days merged together, and time seemed to stop. I would spend countless hours exploring the damp boreal forest or circling the lake’s tiny islands with my kayak.
I must have made dozens of maps of Lake Durant as a child. I sketched the point where we camped and recorded the footpaths leaving our site. I mapped every submerged rock in the lake that you could scrape your boat on and the tiny streams that entered the lake. Chronically curious, I became obsessed with mapping and exploring every landform I could see and understanding how everything was connected. By age 11, I received maps of the entire Adirondacks. For hours, I would spread out across our small living room floor and pore over them, fighting to keep our pets from tearing them. I quickly memorized most of the landforms, paths and water bodies dotting the six million acres of the park. To anyone foolish enough to ask, I could explain in painful detail how to reach any landmark.
By the time I entered high school, my parents had given me my own touring kayak, and I had taken up orienteering and light mountaineering. The three of us grew as outdoorsmen together — I learned and they re-learned the sense of backwoods exploration. Nobody thinks of New York as a frontier, but to me and my ever-growing imagination, each step or paddle stroke took me deeper into an immense but inviting wilderness, both in place and in spirit.
In 10th grade, a science research program at my high school connected me with George Robinson of the State University of New York at Albany. I have no idea what inspired him to mentor a student so young, but he showed me a few papers on beech bark disease and agreed to work with me if I could come up with a project. I began reading through volumes about the combination of an invasive insect and a native fungus that has left most beech trees in the Northeast looking like they have been shot at hundreds of times. I realized that I had overlooked its symptoms on all the beech of my younger years and discovered a new obsession, a new curiosity. I already knew where everything was, but now I wanted to know how it all worked. After three years, George and I had put together a rudimentary theory on interactions between beech bark disease and the forest ecosystem, and I started traveling across the country to present it at several competitions.
Then came Dartmouth. Besides the woods and waters of home, Dartmouth was the first place that ever felt unlimited. Here we have endless corridors of knowledge down which to walk and the right people to point you in the proper direction if you decide to ask.
Freshman winter I met biology professor David Peart. He put an immense amount of energy and patience into shaping me to think like an ecologist. He destroyed my naïve assumptions about how the world works and taught me how to perceive the subtly important details of science through the noise. With some help from our lab statistician, I taught myself how to program in R and started poring over data sets the same way I pored over maps as a child. I spent hours staring out the window of our lab toward Balch Hill, trying to understand the patterns in front of my eyes. Through lots of work and little sleep, David and I worked to put together some of the mathematics behind tree structure on Mount Moosilauke.
I must have taken a hundred small walks during my freshman year through Pine Park, over the Velvet Rocks and up Balch Hill, with no regard for the time of day. My head would swirl with ideas, trying to understand the patterns within the forests I saw. Ecology became my new wilderness, a separate world to slink off into and explore for hours, unbothered.
Lauren Culler, a Ph.D. student in the ecology and evolutionary biology program, took me back to where I started: the water. When I first met Lauren, I was skeptical of how someone could spend such a long time studying aquatic insects without becoming incredibly bored or crazy. I was quickly proven wrong when Lauren showed me damselflies, whose larvae breathe through gills on their tails and hide in plain sight on the stalks of underwater weeds. I learned through experience that you can coax them to perch on your arms if you hold them under water for long enough. Lauren also taught me about dytiscid beetles, which have large pincers and hunt unsuspecting tadpoles and fish, and water scorpions, which I cannot describe with words. I have since returned to the lakes of the Adirondacks and found these creatures hiding in the familiar places of my childhood, unnoticed by me for over a decade.
After handling thousands of damselflies, I moved on to work with biology professor Kathy Cottingham. She has probably been the most patient with my tangled research interests, and we have bounced through a handful of different projects. Kathy taught me to branch out. She has shown me that the answer to a given problem will often require looking in the cobweb-covered places of our knowledge, in disciplines rarely visited by ecologists.
I skipped out on sophomore summer to research with ecology and evolutionary biology Ph.D. student Jess Trout-Haney in Greenland. It was a difficult decision to make, forgoing a term I had looked forward to for two years so I could travel to a strange and uncomfortable place. I don’t speak either of the two common languages in Greenland — Greenlandic and Danish. There are no trees, the lakes are cold and mosquitoes abound. However, on the tundra I felt like a child at Lake Durant again. I was exploring, mapping, hopping on rocks, falling in lakes — returning to my roots. I returned with more ideas swarming around my head than mosquitoes, and it has taken almost a year just to organize the big ones for next year’s field season. I’ve never been happier.
My Dartmouth experience has been defined by curiosity. I have been lucky enough to encounter people who sympathize with my obsession for exploration and even encourage it. I would encourage my peers, an intellectually diverse and amazingly talented group of individuals, to find what makes them curious and grab hold. You will find amazing complexity in this world in areas you would never expect, like damselflies hiding in plain sight.
