A euphoric sense of pride
It seems too simple, too neatly optimistic, that the world can work in such harmony. But it’s true.
This is a guest essay by Maddie Woda. Pinch of Dirt is a free newsletter, but it’s thanks to paid subscribers that I was able to commission a handful of writers to share their unique and inspiring nature and outdoor adventure stories this year.
Braving plant structures
Fungi always struck me as parasitic. Then I learned about mycorrhizae, or fungal roots.
Mycorrhizae are the mutually beneficial relationships between a plant and fungi in the soil. Perhaps your mind dredges up a word from a long ago biology class: symbiosis. Mycorrhizal fungi are more efficient than root hairs in sucking up water and minerals for their host tree; the host’s leaves photosynthesize, produce dextrose, and shuttle some of that leftover sugar back into the ground. The fungi, which can’t produce its own dextrose, reaps the benefit of the overflow.
It seems too simple, too neatly optimistic, that the world can work in such harmony. But it’s true.
I learned about mycorrhizae from Jamie Boyer, the enthusiastic professor of Plant Structures, an introductory botany class offered by the New York Botanical Garden. A dozen of us attend our weekly class at 6pm. Most of my classmates are older than me—avid gardeners who take copious notes. It’s not always fun stories about quaking aspens, a deciduous tree that can clone itself thousands of times over; there are also notecards of definitions to memorize and tests to pass. I recognize some of the terms, like mitosis, prokaryotes.
But axillary buds, rhizomes, the difference between a stem and a prickle? These are new to me.
I tuned out much of this information in high school, and I’m only choosing to learn it now because of Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter. In 1938, aided by not much more than a heavy plant press, these two women surveyed the botany of the Grand Canyon. Melissa Sevigny recounts their adventure down the thrashing snaketail of the Colorado River in her book Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon.
Clover and Jotter were fastidious note takers, and even in this spare art form you can sense how electrifying their endeavor was: “Echinocereus coccineus, [Clover] wrote in her journal, and then crossed it out and tried several other names, before adding a question mark and the notation ‘possibly new.’”
The thrill Clover must have felt, identifying a new species of hedgehog cactus—that was worth traveling hundreds of miles to a completely alien place, surviving hazardous conditions, and tuning out unrelenting sexism. These were women who could name every plant they touched, who could recite the exact biological mechanisms that made it thrive, and it changed their lives.
Growing up, I was not taught exact biological mechanisms, human or otherwise. I attended an Evangelical school with a strict, literalist viewpoint. Creationism was the only science available to us, the Bible our only textbook. The Earth was about 6,000 years old. Questions about evolution were never entertained—especially not those asked by girls—and the mysteries of the universe stayed God’s.
I enrolled in ninth grade biology at a new school, a secular school, but by that point, it felt too late. The other kids had already heard of Punnett squares and Charles Darwin and claimed the Earth was 4.5 billion years old. I tried not to look too shocked and kept my questions to myself. I dissected my worm and peered at the cross section of monocot stems with very little conviction. To the best of my ability, I avoided science classes in high school and college. I didn’t think I had what it takes to learn about geology or physics or computers—so I didn’t.
But reading is low stakes—if you don’t understand Richard Dawkins’s argument about altruism, you can return The Selfish Gene to the library with no one the wiser. I picked up Brave the Wild River after one too many days feeling hemmed in by tall buildings, hoping to nourish my desire for adventure in the great outdoors, which was starting to atrophy. The fact that this adventure book was about two botanists was almost accidental.
The risk was low, but it was real: that I wouldn’t understand the vocabulary or the logic of botany, that the words would fly over my head. At worst, I’d recognize my own incompetence. Instead, I was inspired to put myself out there and learn something new.
Clover and Jotter embarked on a rafting trip through some of the most dangerous whitewater in the world, in an area mostly left alone by white travelers due to its perilousness, at a time when only 13 percent of science doctoral candidates were women. Reading about Clover and Jotter’s momentous achievement nudged me to step further into the unknown.
Now, every Tuesday, I enter the classroom with the will to learn and the belief that understanding is within my reach. After class, I look at the vegetables I’m making for dinner and feel an almost euphoric sense of pride that I understand how my radish receives minerals and water from its tap root, and how vacuole organelles give kale its structure.
My newfound knowledge and disappointment are intertwined. With every new fact, I see the paths untaken—glaciologist, volcanologist, chemist—a life of field work and curiosity. Did I miss the life I was meant to have because of my Christian schooling or my own fear of failing at something new? It’s hard not to wonder as I learn plant terms usually taught to teenagers. And I’ll never know—maybe I would have been a fantastic evolutionary biologist. But Elzada and Lois, two thoroughly practical women, don’t seem like the kind of people to dwell on what-ifs, so I try not to either.
Maddie Woda edits novels for Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, and articles for Summit Journal, America’s original climbing magazine. Originally from Ohio, she is a graduate of Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
I loved Brave the Wild River and wow were those two women brave and passionate and smart.