Travels with My Ecologist.

On the first day of Trek Two, in a cypress/tupelo swamp of deep browns and greys, one mostly dead cypress provided a particularly atmospheric yawning stump, maw gaping about four feet above the current waterline. Naturally my companion, NC State University ecologist Katie Winsett, dropped her camera in it.

This I did not see -- but I turned towards her in time to see her arms and head disappear within, as she scrabbled inside to recover them. Seeing her southern latitudes extending from the tree while northern hemisphere wrestled with the insides of the cypress, I found it impossible not to think of Pooh bear.

Not for the first or last time, I was glad she was along. The Lawson Trek has been committed from the start to getting people who know things to come along. This turns out to be very Lawsonian.

Traditional description of Lawson's trek involves some sort of assignment from the eight Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony. In the introduction to the current version of Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina the author says thus: "Nothing is known of Lawson's sojourn in Charleston until December, 1700, when he was appointed by the Lords Proprietors to make a reconnaissance survey of the interior of Carolina." Interesting enough, but as we say in academic circles, nuh-unh. Lawson clearly took his journey, as his delightful book amply documents. Why he took his journey remains enigmatic. Lawson's family was well connected in London and could easily have had contact with people of that stature, and Lawson was quickly well connected with influential colonials like James Moore, who became governor of Carolina in 1700 and had before that made forays himself into the western backcountry. But we have no evidence that anybody paid, told, or even asked Lawson to go on his journey. We just know he went.

She was a boon to the enterprise. She pointed out resurrection ferns on one Live Oak: "They look dried up now, but when they get wet they come back to life," she said -- they can lose up to 97 percent of their water, shrivel up, and still come right back with wetter weather. Same with a moss she saw near the roots, looking wizened: "It'll wake up when the water comes up." Then she pointed out lichens and moss growing on the tree. "Sure, you see them, but look closer," she said, counting different types. She got to six before stopping, point made: there is a lot more going on if you look closely. "The interesting stuff is the small stuff," she said.

She reads the country like a tracker, too. We found our first cypress swamp when an hour or so into our first day of hiking she narrowed her eyes and said, "That drops off quickly," pointing to a line of trees evident to her but not to me. We left the forest road, descended a few feet, and yes -- there was a swamp: a low bowl, with the obligatory bald cypress knees, tupelos with spreading bells at their trunk bases, and water rendered black by the tannins from leaves, bark, and pine needles.

First came a disquisition on the nature of those wide trunk bases of the trees comfortable with their feet in the water: the spread is largely for stability. Some say the cypress knees have the same job of mostly engineering; others believe that when the water rises the knees derive oxygen from the air denied to underwater roots.

Next the dropped camera, which led to the discovery of some lovely mushrooms in the tree trunk, and most excitingly to the discovery of slime molds, in which Katie is expert. "You never see these in January," she said. "I'm excited to see them." When we started walking back towards the forest road, which naturally tracked a little ridge to stay dry, she called out changes. We stopped squishing in the ground, the palmetto vanished, the cypress and tupelo diminished, and then, roadside, we were surrounded by pines. We couldn't have climbed more than four vertical feet. "We climbed a mountain," Katie said. "An ecological one, anyways."


Days passed like this. As an ecologist Katie's training is, basically, in noticing things. My friend and fellow Lawsonian Tom Earnhardt has described Lawson as "a great noticer" -- his book is full of things that he points out, in lovely, satisfying prose, simply because he notices them. That's the value of his book -- not so much that he discovered things, but that he put down what he saw in a way that we can still understand. On Bull's Island, on the coast, for example, he described the first jellyfish he'd ever seen: "There was left by the Tide several strange Species of a mucilagmous slimy Substance, though living, and very aptly mov'd at their first Appearance; yet, being left on the dry Sand, (by the Beams of the Sun) soon exhale and vanish." The slime molds Katie studies Lawson never mentioned, but they’re bizarre creatures that are not fungi, though they used to be classified as such. Some of them exist in enormous supercells with thousands of nuclei; others exist as single-celled protists but on a chemical signal suddenly begin functioning as a unified organism. (Neither of the two we saw in the tree stump looked about to league together to take over the world, but to be honest I’m worried about that now.)

Katie's descriptions are not always as literary but are every bit as pleasant. When I asked more about those microscopic slime molds, she corrected me. "They're not microscopic so much as teensy," she said, and until you have had a scientist describe something to you as teensy you have not spent enough time with scientists. She is very interested in scale -- she says a big part of her job is training her students to see scale as more gradual than they see it. "They see three levels: big, small, and microscopic. But nature doesn't work that way." Nature is comfortable on many levels. Katie recommended to me the classic The Scale of Nature, by biologist (and slime mold expert) John Tyler Bonner, which discusses nature from the scale of galaxies to subatomic particles and has become my bedside reading.

We lay one night in the darkness, each in our own tents out of evening rain, our voices murmuring back and forth across various tent and rainfly walls. A full moon hung in a sky of scudding clouds, shadows of swaying pines scratching illuminated nylon as drizzle occasionally spattered down. Katie free-associated about cypress intraspecies variation: If an animal drags, say, an unusual seed into one bog and not another, the two differ. "Each individual bog develops a personality," she said, with particular species of microorganism in the water -- and water samples from the same bog will differ significantly in the life they contain depending on whether you take the sample from open water or from beneath leaves at the shore, a foot away, she said. "When you work with microorganisms you get a sense of how complicated things are the smaller you get. All those swamps we saw would be considered cypress/tupelo, but each one had a little different character for whatever reason.

"It's not just about deer and squirrels. It's not just a longleaf pine forest. I think it's more interesting what's going on down in the soil. On the level of the microorganisms.”

The rain stopped awhile and we heard only the wind high in the pines. The slime molds we had seen could grow in a short warm spell. “They fruit very quickly,” she said. “But I’ve never seen them in January.” 

More silence. “I like that it’s all more complex than we can really organize in our minds,” she said later.

Overnight we heard owls. The next day we learned the lake we slept near was full of hibernating alligators.