Travel to the Mud

Nature Writing: Why a Girl Who Hid Books at the Neighbor’s for the Times Her Mother Made Her “Go Outside and Play” Should Take Oceanography and Marine Biology in College.
Diablo Valley College offers courses in Oceanography and Biology that meet the requirements for those seeking an AA, transferring to a four-year college, or for proponents of life-long learning. The Oceanography professor has been teaching the subject for years and has groupies, most of them men in their forties to seventies, to help in the lab portion of the course. Over the hill of his life, the professor married a woman who is a retired marine biologist, formerly the only female and English-speaker on a Russian research ship. She joined him at DVC after a stint at USGS Science Center for Coastal and Marine Geology located in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Her biology class emphasizes the marine segment of biology. In addition to the course work, the Oceonography class requires field trips: one to the Martinez Marina during class time, one to the Marine Mammal Center north of Santa Cruz, another on the same Suisun Bay boat the elementary students in the area learn marine science, and a trip with a checklist to the aquarium at Golden Gate Park. Optional activities include the Coyote Point area by the San Mateo Bridge, the Bay Model in Sausalito, a whale-watching cruise from Moss Beach, and an optional weekend on the Sonoma County Coast. The marine biology class goes on the Suisun Bay cruise, and offers the optional Sonoma Coast trip, plus a trip to watch the elephant seals fornicate while you earn extra credit. The professors also hold a class at a marine center in the Caribbean for summer students. These classes impart information valuable to students in all majors because they not only broaden knowledge of environmental issues, they round out the education of those who do not concentrate on the sciences.
Students whose summer Olympic sport would be page-turning, whose idea of dirty is newspaper ink on their fingers, and whose idea of a hike is climbing the stacks at a many-storied library, may balk at the requirements of the classes, scoff at the optional trips, and search for alternative classes to fit the category. Fortunately, sometimes Oceanography is the only class that fits your schedule so you stumble onto it. Taking the class is a benefit to any citizen of the world. In addition to teaching important issues that affect our global environment, the classes are interesting in the variety of information studied, and the trips are fun, even though indoor people may expect otherwise. Professor Bill’s groupies from many walks of life go on the field trips, as well. One of them is a commercial airline pilot who takes his trailer on the Sonoma County outing. He has a plug on the side of the trailer dedicated to an electric blender for the best-doggone frozen strawberry daiquiris, or so he boasts.
Some of the outdoors-type people on the Sonoma trip camp in a cow field next to the pilot’s trailer. Others, uncomfortable with the smell of cow patties and the danger of stepping in one in the middle of the night, rent motel rooms. This weekend officially begins on a Saturday morning as dawn breaks in a tide pool. Fortunately, the groupies prepare you by suggesting that you bring a change of shoes to wear in the tide pool and a full rain suit for afternoon activities. The tide-pool awes visitors with its plethora of barnacles, anemones, snails, seastars and sea slugs. The air is fresh, the ocean salt blows in your face, and the excitement of new discoveries invigorates you. You have a checklist with pictures to aid you in cataloging your exciting finds. The professors have a license to borrow a few specimens that you will study under microscopes the groupies set up on tables at the campground. In the late morning, you go clamming. This means you walk for a mile through deep mud, carrying buckets and long contraptions made out of PVC. If you are a slow walker because mud-walking is not your forte and you happen to be there when the professors find a still-wet skull of a seal, you get to carry the bloody head for the day. The trudge through the mud rewards you with hard work to find dinner. You trade the business suit you wore to the office on Friday for a plastic suit on Saturday as you lay SPLAT! face-down in the mud, and force your manicured hand—all the way to the shoulder—down a deep hole to pull out clams—TA DA! Some students use the long homemade PVC invention to suck those critters to the surface. When you have collected enough clams for dinner, it is back through the ankle-deep mud to the campground. Some students shuck and wash clams while other slice and dice them to add to the broth and vegetables the professors compiled at home. While the stew simmers, you gather around the tables, looking through the microscopes identifying and cataloging the characteristics of the specimens you collected that day before returning them to their habitat. The sounds from the tables as the students uncover new knowledge on the slides are like the Fourth of July: “Oh! Wow! Look at that!”
Although some students do not opt to spend the weekends with the specimens in the mud, whale watching, studying the effect of rock music on migratory marine mammals, observing the seals’ attempts at procreation, or watching jelly fish move to classical music and artificial light, they benefit from the classes in other ways. Perhaps you wish to explain opposing forces in a business situation; you can compare the situation to plate tectonics because now you understand them. Suppose you, an indoor person, attend an important meeting to promote your corporation in the state. You go to the meeting, armed with statistics and reasons for the state senator to support your corporation; however, everyone is standing around trading personal fish stories. You did your corporate homework. You know the senator is on the committee that deals with the waterways; but, what does an indoor person like you know about fishing? It is not enough to share that your brother lives on, arguably, the best trout river in the world. If you took the Oceanography class, you could share what you found in the benthic samples you pulled from the Martinez Marina the night before or the threat of Asian copepods to the Delta. Or—suppose you are sitting in one of the giant leather chairs in Congressman George Miller’s office in the Rayburn Building, lobbying him to support your corporation’s expansion in Asia. You do not want to waste his time with small talk, but an informed constituent could mention the work he did with Representative Tauscher on the beneficial reuse of dredged material for habit restoration. Or—suppose you are a graduate student who has an assignment to write a creative non-fiction piece on nature. Enough said on taking marine classes even if you are a card-carrying indoor person?