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April 2009
Grace Evans takes one step, another step, step, step, lift, the ground drops away and she becomes a creature of the air. She tucks her feet into the glider harness and tips horizontal to be rewarded by the joy of weightlessness. Her bones feel hollow and light as a bird’s.
Though gravity seduces her glider earthward, she rides the wind off the hill and climbs a few hundred feet. Pockets of cooler air brush her face. On the ground, the temperature will climb near ninety. Up here, it chills her through.
The earth is a great overturned bowl rimmed by horizon. Inky cloud shadows slip over the ground. Reservoirs and car lots glitter, roads ribbon. Corn and soy corrugate fields belted by scrappy patches of trees.
She longs to lose herself in the joy of flight, but instead tips the glider to bank left. She steers towards the training field where Barbara stands buckled into her own glider. Grace flies straight at her, close enough to see alarm bloom on her face, then banks right, pulls her bodyweight back and floats earthward gentle as a leaf—tips of shoes, belly, wheels.
She hops up and wheels her rig back to Barbara, who radiates awkwardness and anxiety.
“See how easy it is? Just relax and look where you’re going. That’s really all there is to it.”
Barbara is normally the picture of confidence. They’ve been at it for over thirty minutes and she still hasn’t caught air. Grace never should’ve let herself be talked into this. She remembers only eagerness and exhilaration from learning to fly in high school. Not this stiff reluctance.
Barbara Hollinger is Grace’s lab assistant. From Penn State, she fast-tracked her PhD at Arizona State in ecosystem-level methane modeling in the Amazon Peatlands. On a fellowship at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Lab, she analyzed stable carbon isotope ratios. She joined Evans Lab last month to streamline the data analysis for Grace’s Marcellus field study.
Grace unclips from her harness to help Barbara do yet another hang check. “See? You’re secure. No problem. Just relax into it and go. Trust the equipment.”
“Will you run alongside me? That’s what the instructor did.”
Grace came here to float weightless, not to run earthbound. “Huh. Not how I learned.”
Barbara frowns, shifts her weight, fiddles a clip with a shaking hand. “Really?”
Grace laughs. “I’m just messing with you. I don’t remember; it was too long ago.” This was supposed to be a fun day out. She squeezes Barbara’s upper arm. “Okay, okay, I’ll run with you. Remember to keep this part pressed into the frame, here. If you do that, you’ll barely need to hold on at all.”
After a few attempts, Barbara does manage to lift airborne before crumpling heavily into the grass.
“Chin up, chin up,” Grace calls out. She can’t remember ever having such trouble finessing freedom and control. Barbara seems incapable of letting go. In this setting, her trademark tenacity works against her.
Grace loses count of the number of times they trudge back uphill only to drift down and land. Trudge, drift, and land, over and over. She’s never been so bored under a gliding rig. With rote practice, Barbara grinds her fear into cautious enjoyment of little hops downhill, lifted by invisible, reliable air. Grace tries to draft off her tepid delight, but it’s a relief when the light fades.
In the car on the way back, they gorge on the sweet red plastic of Twizzlers and compare experiences with men of science.
“I’ve lost count of how many of them have asked why I’m not married or when I’m having children,” Grace says. “Last month, one of the biochem professors pulled me aside after a faculty meeting to say, You should reproduce before it’s too late. Tick-tock.”
“How original,” Barbara says. “I once had an advisor speculate about my sexual orientation.”
“I had one send long emails accusing me of casting a spell on him, and can’t we ignore the age difference, his marital status, that he’s my supervisor.”
“A guy in my first lab job offered to donate his sperm.”
“Ewwww. What’d you do?”
“I threw our smallest Eppendorf vial at him and bet he couldn’t fill it.” Barbara yanks off a chunk of Twizzler with her teeth. “Another guy started a pool, which got very heated. I made twenty bucks. Then I switched labs.”
Grace laughs. “The way I see it, there are two categories of men. A******s and colleagues. A******s will roll right through and push you aside.”
“Failing that, they discredit you and steal your work.”
“I prefer the ones who don’t get all possessive and stalky after you sleep with them,” Grace says.
“Too bad there’s no way up front to tell the difference between a******s and colleagues,” Barbara says. “Finding out the hard way is so tedious.”
“With our experience, we could design a better methodology, turn it into an algorithm, make a million. Better than any dating site.”
They finish the Twizzlers while brainstorming names. OkColleague, SciGuy, and LabPartner are the top contenders.
Grace’s airplane flyovers of natural gas sites in northeastern Pennsylvania last year detected significant methane fluxes at every well site. But the only way to pinpoint the sources of leaks would be to measure on the ground, at the wellheads and the fracking hoses and holding tanks. No one was doing such extensive bottom-up research. Gaining access was next to impossible. Grace had mastered the game of academic science but knew nothing about negotiating with the huge corporations drilling for natural gas.
She went for it. Managed to bluster in on the promise that she’d pinpoint their equipment leaks so they could maximize profits. Months of persistence worked. The largest, New York-based United Energy Holdings, granted her limited access to a limited number of sites in that area. The paperwork she signed was longer her CV.
She hasn’t shared much with Barbara about her arrangement with UEH. Academic scientists guard against the stink of coziness with industry.
Grace always knew she’d be a scientist. Her career template was a father who worked long hours at NASA’s Goddard campus. He rarely talked about money, but twice his projects had hearings on Capitol Hill. He told her that even though NASA was by far the coolest agency, even they had to beg for money. He cursed the “stingy, short-sighted Senators.” NASA’s budget is now less than 25% of its heyday, the 1960s Space Race. Besting your enemies is a powerful motivator.
Of the four career paths for a research scientist—academia, government labs and agencies, or private industry—autonomy is highest in academia and lowest in private industry. Salaries are the reverse. Grace values the freedom of academia, which has meant a constant slog of writing grant proposals to secure funding and publishing papers to raise her profile.
Her early success studying nitrogen and carbon flux in salt marshes led to inventing the first nutrient trading scheme. That was rewarded with a membership in the National Academy of Sciences, where she became the youngest person, and first woman, to chair a committee on regional ecosystem biofiltration. Her post-doc at Princeton Environmental Institute opened the door to a coveted fellowship at NOAA. Two universities dangled tenure track positions with 12-month salaries and start-up funding for her own lab.
One day she was in hip waders collecting soil samples when she spotted a natural gas substation carved out of the marsh and thought to look through the infrared camera. Methane plumes gushed skyward like a summons. Overnight, she became obsessed with methane. She read about leaks in old gas lines in cities and towns. She wondered how much methane was leaking from the hundreds of drilling sites popping up all over the country. Other than a few enthusiastic articles in the Wall Street Journal, she could find no studies, no papers, nothing.
There was a natural gas drilling boom with zero scientific study behind it. Grace saw a lane for herself, a nearly empty lane.
“At first, I saw methane as a brief detour, just until the world scientific community got a handle on climate change and people woke up and changed their ways,” Grace says to Barbara one day in the lab. “I believed for a hot minute it would be like the ozone hole. That was five or six years from the first studies till the Montreal Protocol phased out aerosols and refrigerants.”
“Guess refrigerants don’t have the appeal of fossil fuels,” Barbara says.
“Yeah, addiction to hairspray is only a tiny fraction of society, but all of us are addicted to gas and plastic.”
“BMWs beat beehives.”
Grace relied on her track record to convince the NSF and DOE to fund her new methane research for two years. That money got her in the back door in Baltimore as Visiting Faculty in biogeochemistry. She’s lucky. Three friends from her previous fellowships are still holed up in basements churning out grant proposals. Grace has a lab with her name on the door and four tall windows, an adjacent office, and a manageable teaching load. She’d prefer not to teach at all, but that’s life.
To stretch her budget, she designs and builds custom equipment that collects fugitive methane molecules. Together in the lab, Grace and Barbara assemble her next-gen wireless air monitors. Wearing latex gloves and jeweler’s glasses, they cannibalize old cell phones. They form neat piles of microcontroller DSPs, wireless cards, power supplies, and batteries.
“Someday these monitors could be as simple and affordable as smoke alarms,” Barbara says.
“That’s the idea,” Grace says. “There’s no reliable way to detect methane emissions in real time. I’m measuring on the production side, but there are leaks in processing and transmission too. Tons more research is needed. Sensors could be installed at multiple locations along the chain like smart alarms to alert operators of abnormal flux.”
“Plus, what about regulations to limit methane emissions? And require monitoring.”
“Right. Methane should be part of a global greenhouse gas regulatory framework, along with carbon dioxide. We need high-precision monitors to verify emissions, so countries can start cap and trade systems. Scientifically validated, direct measurement is the only way to prevent fraud.”
“When that happens, you’ll make a million,” Barbara says. “And when you’re up on that Nobel dais, I can say I knew you when.”
Grace’s fantasies tend more toward survival than a certain stage in Sweden. So far, she’s survived homelessness, harassment by her PhD supervisor, assault by a department chair, nine moves, one career change, countless failed grant proposals, her father’s sudden death. Her mother’s reappearance.
When they work, Grace’s instruments send a steady stream of data, but she hadn’t considered the logistics of repair when they break down—which they do, often. She can’t exactly jump in the car for a three-hour drive whenever something blinks out.
Barbara feeds samples into a methane isotope analyzer to graph the emissions. She’s already helped narrow the research down to the worst offenders. Something’s up with at least three of United Energy’s newest wells. It can’t all be down to Grace’s glitchy instruments. They need weeks more data before they can draw any conclusions.
With all the promises she made to their PR guy, the last thing he wants to hear is that their seven-million-dollar wells leak methane from Day 1. There is no known fix.
Grace cracks open another cellphone. “This project has rekindled my love for invention. I used to make all kinds of things like this when I was a kid.”
“Bet you were one of those goth girls in shop class,” Barbara says.
“Not at all. I was a total nerd tinkering in my dad’s garage at home.”
“How fun. Inventing with Dad. I always wanted to go on my dad’s hunting trips, but he only took my brothers.”
Grace and her father sometimes spent whole weekends together, inventing, building, testing, eating little. When he scored cool surplus equipment from his project at NASA, they retreated to his garage workshop. As a kid, she assumed every dad’s garage was a version of Doc’s workshop in “Back to the Future,” strewn with prototypes, models, and test materials. They didn’t talk much, but her few memories of laughing with him were always in that garage.
“Look at this one.” Grace waves a bejeweled hot pink Hello Kitty cell phone case with a rainbow tassel. “What self-respecting female would carry a phone like this?”
“How do you know it’s a girl’s phone?” Barbara asks, laughing.
Grace finally finished assembling her dossier to apply for the department’s first tenure-track position to come up in five years. She knows it’ll be highly contested but refuses to be intimidated.
In the lab, Barbara asks, “Ever have that feeling like, what have I achieved, really?”
“Imposter syndrome? Nope, never.”
“Come on. First time you’re up in front of a class of grad students and they’re all slouchy folded-arms glaring like, Prove it, b***h.”
Grace laughs. “Never. I tell myself, You know more than they do.”
Barbara downs the last of her coffee. When she interviewed, Grace hadn’t noticed low self-esteem. Maybe she’s better on paper than out gliding. Or competing in the arena.
“Assembling that application was a grueling time suck but also surreal,” Grace says. “I kept scrolling through my CV like it was someone else’s. I was like, damn, this girl is accomplished.”
“I bet. How many papers have you published?”
“Forty-six, I think. Or forty-eight, something like that.”
“Geez. When do you sleep?”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“On your CV, did you include Young Scientist awards, like, I’ve got Regeneron, Breakthrough Junior, Ben Franklin, NSF Talent Search—"
Grace had put Barbara’s application in the trash because of that, but she went through with the interview as a favor to Pete Hollinger, Barbara’s dad.
“No, who cares what I did in high school?” Grace pushes a strand of hair off her face. “Maybe I peaked too early.”
Barbara laughs. “I doubt it. Hell, when I apply for tenure track somewhere, I’ll include everything. Make it twenty pages long, they eat that s**t up.”
“Yeah, don’t forget babysitting. Summer camp counselor. McDonald’s. The search committee weighs CVs and shortlists the heaviest ones.” Grace smiles. “What you really want is first woman this and youngest that. I’ve got my eye on the Perkins Prize and the Detwiler Medal. They don’t seem to know that women do science too.”
“You need gray hair for those,” Barbara says. “By then, you’ll have tenure somewhere.”
“Oh, I will. Those will be to prove a point.”
“Did you include your TED talk?”
“No. It’s not peer-reviewed.”
“What b******t. That’s why scientists are losing the climate ‘debate’—as if there even is one. We stay holed up in our labs, talking to ourselves in conferences and journals.”
“Ivory tower is such a dumb cliché. I always think of Rapunzel.”
“Let down your hair, Grace.”
“Always. The dean encouraged me to apply. He actually said, to my face, We need more women around here. Like I’m supposed to be impressed at how enlightened he is.”
“It’s because we’re so decorative. And we bring Lemon Drizzle Bundt cakes.”
“How’s the reconciliation with your mom going?” Barbara asks early one morning.
“It’s not.”
When she arrived in Baltimore last summer, Grace assured her mother that this move was purely career driven. Their possible reunion had not been a factor.
“What about your Sunday dinners?”
Grace groans. “They’re awful. She acts like we can just pick up where we left off twenty years ago. It’s pure fantasy, complete with white tablecloths and platefuls of Italian food.”
Her mother’s life in Curtis Bay, an old industrial neighborhood south of downtown, is like a ’70s TV show set in the ’50s. She lives in a two-story brick rowhouse with a white-columned front porch. Pruned shrubs and flowers border a tiny green lawn that she cuts in fifteen minutes with a push mower. Francesca drinks coffee on a creaky porch swing with floral-print cushions and reads the Baltimore Sun before walking two blocks uphill to teach middle school science. She co-manages the community garden and brings home whatever is in season. She attends Mass at St. Athanasius six blocks from her house and volunteers at the local food pantry.
“C’mon, everyone loves Italian food,” Barbara says.
“I never had it growing up. My dad refused to make even spaghetti. I didn’t understand until later that it was because of her being Italian.”
“Not pizza?” Barbara asks in mock horror.
Grace laughs. “Hell no. Pizza’s American, even he knew that.”
“I do hope you take this chance to get to know her. Ask all those questions you’ve got bottled up.”
“You watch too many sappy movies. I have no questions, bottled or otherwise.”
“Well, there’s a reason you ended up here.”
Grace sweeps her arms wide. “Yeah, you’re looking at it.”
“No such thing as coincidence,” Barbara says.
“Geez, if I’d known you were this New Agey, I might not have hired you. Tell me you won’t bring your crystals and Tarot cards in here.”
“Mock all you want. It’s a rare opportunity. A woman needs her mother.”
“Maybe two decades ago, but it’s too late now,” Grace says. “I’ve been fine without her.”
“At least you had your dad.”
Grace had been overseas on an exchange program when he died of a heart attack at work. His cousin handled everything, including the cremation per his wishes. For all Grace knew, the astronauts scattered him in space. After a lifetime of longing. He never talked about it, but his boyhood scrapbook was in a box of his stuff. His one and only ambition in life was to be an astronaut. He never came close.
“I kept waiting to be sad when he died, but mostly I just felt relief to be free of all the expectation and judgment he heaped on me.”
“I thought you two were close.”
“On his terms, we were.” What Grace remembers of the years with him is nights alone with books, him working late, her mother absent. Grace remembers her early decision to be smart. His indifference. Working her way through the boys in tenth grade, not caring about reputation. Her father called her moody, sent her to her room. If she forgot to clear up after dinner, he winged dishes into the sink like frisbees. Now she flies like those dishes and she hasn’t broken yet.
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