The place I rest

ACADEMIA I: CHICAGO, AUGUST 2013

As the conference day inches on, the back of my neck winds tighter with tension and I lean forward slightly, eyes fixed on the speaker.

I am attending my first conference as a junior in undergrad; it’s in my home city over the summer. I am too scared to ask for accommodations, so I tell my advisor I will be fine. I attend every session for three days because no one tells me that I don’t have to. I sit in the front row at every presentation, eyes darting rapidly between the speaker and the PowerPoint slides. In a quiet room close to a single speaker, I can recognize maybe 4 to 12 percent of the words with my hearing aids; another 30 to 40 percent I can perhaps lipread, and the remaining words I guess based on context. Add additional speakers, background noise, and bad lighting, and I understand nothing.

By the end of each day, I am so physically and mentally exhausted from trying to follow the conversations that I hide in a bathroom stall and cry. For three days after the conference, I cannot read or look at a screen because of eyestrain from lipreading. I am so drained by the experience that I have no questions, no thoughts, no wonder, just grey exhaustion that covers everything.

FIELD I: PLUMAS NATIONAL FOREST, CALIFORNIA, JUNE 2016

It’s 3:30 A.M. I climb into the driver’s seat and we’re off into the dark on a road that climbs up into the mountains. The crew leader and I have already checked and double-checked that we have everything: GPS, radio, batteries, and all the gear for the bee surveys we must do after the morning bird work is done. I pack an extra item: a pocket-sized WAV format recorder with omnidirectional microphones.

Around 4:30 A.M. we turn off the dirt road onto a rougher one. I maneuver the truck gingerly over foot-deep ruts and boulders as they appear before the headlights. It’s close to 5:00 A.M. when I pull over and park. The crew leader and I hurry through the dense chaparral to hit the first bird point count location. Our survey protocol dictates that we must be at the first point half an hour before sunrise.

We get there as the sky starts to lighten. We both pause to catch our breath and let the birds forget the sounds of our passage. I step over a few fallen logs and wedge my recorder into an upright snag, microphones angled up and outward to catch the birdsong in the trees. I hit “record” and then step back to where the crew leader is and take out my clipboard of datasheets. I begin the vegetation assessment, filling out the sheet on my clipboard with estimates of living tree and snag cover as I look around and check distances through my rangefinder. Out of the corner of my eye I see the crew leader noting bird species on his clipboard as he identifies individual birds calling and singing.

A minute later I am done with the vegetation survey; I pull out my smartphone and listen too, but through the oscillating lines of a spectrogram running on my phone screen, where the arc and trill of bird voices look like writing. I note the slightly buzzy trill of the orange-crowned warbler; the slower, more level trill of a Wilson’s warbler; and the bold, low, brushstroke song of a black-headed grosbeak or American robin, which I am still trying to figure out how to distinguish. I see other songs: the buzzy chicken-scratch notes of a Cassin’s finch and an uncommon treat, a canyon wren, a long sequence of clear notes that look like tilde signs. I see another I don’t recognize; I snap a screenshot for reference. A minute later, I see two brief notes that look strangely precise and inorganic, and I know time’s up: they’re the beeps of the crew leader’s stopwatch.

I hop over the logs and grab my recorder, hitting the stop button. I tuck it into my pocket as I step back and quietly list the species that I recognized. The crew leader nods and adds two songs I didn’t identify. I think back to one I didn’t recognize and translate the visual characteristics I saw, describing them with words that hearing people recognize, such as “clear,” “buzzy,” “single note”, “multiple notes,” and “rising trill.” The leader nods in recognition, assigning the song to one of the species I missed. The other song might have been too far for my phone to pick up; I may see it at the next survey point.

Through the morning we slowly work our way up the drainage; at each survey point, I repeat the same process: complete the vegetation survey, listen, then quietly confer. In this way I incorporate the new songs into my visual memory so that I can spot the species at the next survey point. The process is not perfect. My phone does not have the same sensitivity as some human ears do, and I cannot pick out the songs the crew leader hears beyond eighty meters. Much later, when I describe these failings to another biologist who sometimes does point counts, she reminds me that even most hearing people are not very good at point counting and tells me to be less self-critical.

The sun is high, and it is beginning to get warm as we finish our last survey point and begin hiking back to the truck to grab our bee survey equipment. Again, the crew leader and I confer briefly: I will hike down the ravine and visit the bee survey points along the upper drainage; he’ll drive to the bottom of the drainage and work up from there.

Most people think of my bird listening as a one-hit wonder. They marvel, but they think in absolutes: if I get an identification wrong, I get a pitying look, and if I get it right, I am exceptional. There’s no room to make mistakes, to learn. It’s rare for other birders to engage with what I am doing. But the crew leader does; he doesn’t spend time marveling at what I am doing, the strangeness. He installs the same spectrogram app on his phone, and we argue and compare notes. And every time it’s my turn to get up before dawn to help with point counts, I learn more songs.

The truck rumbles off and I am alone in a cloud of dust. I belt my backpack and hitch the cooler strap on my shoulder so that it’s a little more comfortable. There are hours to go before I am done, bees to catch and plants to identify, but I am alert as if I have had a full night of sleep. Songs of the unseen world still dance in my mind and somewhere in the branches overhead as I begin to hike down the ravine-using my bee net handle like a hiking pole on the steep slope—-toward the stream below.

ACADEMIA II: ESTES PARK, COLORADO, SEPTEMBER 2014

For my last conference as an undergraduate, a little angrier and wiser, I ask my mentor for accommodations, the same ones I get for school-CART captioning. Although it’s illegal for conferences to not provide these accommodations in the United States, the mentor is told they’re too expensive; when she relays this news, I smile and say I’ll manage because I don’t want to let her down.

I give my presentation and then attend the only session that is closely related to my undergraduate research. During a networking event, my advisor waves me over and introduces me to an older researcher, who asks me what my plans are after graduating. I reply honestly that I want to get fieldwork experience because I don’t have any. He laughs and tells me that fieldwork is not a career. I smile and don’t say anything. How do I explain to him that I don’t see a career here? He starts talking to someone else, and I drift through the room, watching but with no way to understand and enter the noisy conversations.

I skip the rest of the conference to explore the surrounding mountains. I hike from lake to lake, each one a little higher than the last, until finally I am above the tree line; a cold breeze ripples the glassy water as it reflects the walls of a cirque and a grey sky. A dipper-round and slate-feathered-hops from rock to rock, hunting for invertebrates where the snowmelt flows into the lake. I sit a while with the water, the dipper, and the mountain before I walk on.

Tomorrow I will fly home, and this time my eyes do not hurt and my shoulders do not ache. There are still no answers as to whether I have a career here, but the grey exhaustion is not there and I feel alive with questions and ideas. And that is enough for now.

FIELD II: ELDORADO NATIONAL FOREST, CALIFORNIA, JULY 2018

A blessing of bee research is that bumblebees generally do not give a damn it you are bumbling about making noises as long as you are not in their immediate vicinity.

Field biologists working in bear country learn one cardinal rule: make noise. It warns the bears of your presence and gives them time to move away. Prey animals are not noisy; they move quietly to escape detection. Bears and other strong or dangerous animals do the opposite; they make noise. So the way you move through the world conveys what you are. Be quiet and move cautiously, and you are prey. Be loud, and you are an animal that does not need to hide to survive.

Growing up in a hearing world, sound was never mine. I had to think about the noises I made, constantly being aware of this unseen thing. For a long time, my voice was trained to have just the right amount of volume, tone, and enunciation. To sound deaf— even if others understood me — was something to hide. Speaking entailed constant awareness: be smaller, be quieter, be palatable to other people; do not frighten them with your strangeness.

So I love being in bear country. I become myself without thinking, noisy and free. When I move, the world talks back; logs creak, twigs snap, leaves crackle. The whitethorn rustles and scrapes as I push through it. Some of the long thorns reach my skin despite heavy cotton and canvas, but I ignore them. I move through the world like a bear.

My hearing coworkers have a harder time. Because they hear, they walk quietly without thinking, and all of them have a moment during the summer when a bear comes a little too close, seems a little too interested, and they have to wave and shout as they nervously wait for the bear to leave.

And all summer I crash across the mountainsides; the bears leave me alone and the bees don’t give a damn.

ACADEMIA III: TORONTO, ONTARIO, OCTOBER 2019

A week before my second conference of grad school, the hosting university realizes that I am a student visiting from another institution, and it immediately retracts its previous offer of providing interpreters. Like previous organizers, the conference organizer does not have dedicated accessibility funding, so the conference cannot afford to pay for CART captioners or ASL interpreters.

Unlike most conference organizers, this one doesn’t offer profuse apologies and tepid assurances; she keeps communicating. In the week before the conference, she cobbles together a team of undergrad and grad students hired as notetakers to type out everything for every seminar and group session; she and the other organizer also install an experimental transcription app on their phones to use as a mic for the presenters.

But it’s hard; it’s impossible to keep up, and they get tired; their hands get cramps from typing. At one point I see that the organizer, a leading scientist in our field, is typing up the notes herself to give one of the notetakers a break. Her action means a lot; my advisors and hearing mentors always treated accommodations as something they could not be bothered with beyond sending a couple of emails or turning on captions. When these failed, they shrugged and gave up, leaving me to struggle on my own.

The setup works, more or less. The software doesn’t work most of the time, but occasionally it works long enough that the notetakers can take a break. The notetakers can take a break. The notetakers try to type up everything verbatim; they are students from the organizers lab and familiar with the content, so what they type seems accurate.

Although this process is far from seamless, it’s the first time I’ve been to a conference where I saw colleagues pulling out all the stops to accommodate me, rather than the other way around. It leaves me hopeful.

Yet I’m frustrated by the complacent attitude of some of the attendees; they offer only sympathy and make no attempt, however small, to change the status quo. Others stare at me as if I am a strange animal and ignore requests to use the transcription app when they speak. It doesn’t escape my notice that the two organizers, the notetakers doing all the work, and the people who do use the transcription are mostly women, BIPOC, queer, or some combination of the three; all are people who hunger for change.

FIELD III: ELDORADO NATIONAL FOREST, CALIFORNIA, MAY 2018

It’s the end of a solitary month recording birds in the desert, soon I will be in a fieldhouse crowded with five other biologists for a week of training in survey protocols before we can start surveying in earnest. It will be good but stressful this first week before things calm down, with lots of conversations and voices I must try to follow.

I watch the moon set over Mono Lake’s tufas at dawn; I enjoy the changing landscape of light across the mountains as I drive north. I try to savor the last of my solitude.

At dusk, I am nearly at the fieldhouse, but I stop just over the mountain pass, parking just off a forest service road. Spring comes in stops and starts here; snow starts falling and I hurry to set up my tent as the ground rapidly turns white. Soon my tent, and the surrounding Douglas firs and red firs are covered. Sound is really just vibration, and when – pause, I can hear with my body the snow’s soft silence.

I zip my tent door shut, tuck my glasses and my hearing aids into my hiking boots in one corner, and burrow into the sleeping bag. As I grow warmer, I watch the stretching and shrinking shadows of the trees against the tent walls. In the silence, each cycle of stretching and shrinking tree shadows announces car headlights passing in the night.

I am looking forward to tomorrow.

A slow osmosis seems to happen when I live and work in a small group of six people or fewer, particularly in remote places. This is one of the best things about remote fieldwork. In a matter of weeks, my coworkers gradually adjust to my deaf tempo; sometimes grudgingly, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes intentionally, they become aware of communicating with someone whose perception of the environment is different from theirs.

Why does this happen? Kindness? Of course, but fieldwork is dangerous and difficult, and communication is vital. In a group so small, no person can be seen as unnecessary, expendable; our mutual interdependence cannot be denied. And so they adopt ways of communicating.

They look at me when they speak. They understand that I am not following all the words all the time and cue me in to whatever is being discussed, repeating when I ask them to without condescension, anxiety, or rancor— as if it’s a natural thing, which it is. They remember to hold a light above their faces in the dark, to not stand with the sun at their back. They repeat jokes and never say “never mind.” They wait until my eyes are on them before they continue talking. They figure out gestures to communicate over distances or follow my directions about communicating on a walkie-talkie (hint: it’s twenty questions—beep once for yes, twice for no, and three times if you need me to come over, stat!).

Our field crew will develop inside jokes, moments of shared amazement, and many bruises. And I am there in the middle of it—laughing, wondering, complaining because that slow osmosis makes it a place where I belong.

I feel joy at what I gained in scientific fieldwork, but also anger at how much work there is left in science, academia, and society at large. Fieldwork is my place in the world where I can rest; I’m allowed by the people around me to be both a deaf person and a scientist without denying either. Here the tension at the back of my neck loosens, and I don’t have to always think ahead, trying to gauge and accommodate the distance between my world and theirs.