You can’t miss me:  Descending the hill, I tow a black trailer made to hold kids, but it’s stuffed with sampling equipment—a fancy, calibrated thermometer in a leather case called a Physitemp, a Licor pyranometer to measure direct and diffuse solar radiation, a cooler with ice to store samples, current issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal and Odonatologica, tape measure, yellow rope, lunch, and my lab notebook, all covered with garbage bags in case it rains.  I’m in a long-sleeved white dress shirt (sometimes a lightweight plaid shirt) since I burn easily.  My beige hat with green underside has an extra-long bill and a flap of fabric in the back to keep the sun off my neck and ears.  Attached to my bike trailer is a long skinny pole topped with a fluorescent green flag that flaps too loudly (have to get rid of that).

2 June 2000. Got trailer together to haul equipment.
Read many Wallace Stevens poems. Do this last, because it engulfs me
Not sure how to decide what to study—nymphs [N], adults [A]?
If N, narrow to lestids [damselflies]?
If A, narrow [environmental factors] light, temp, wind?

At the pond, I set up.  The yellow rope is stretched along one side and staked two meters offshore.  Onshore, I mark equidistance from the water’s edge by piling stones and dirt to produce 12 eight-square meter quadrats.  Every half-hour, I count the number and species of dragonflies in each quadrat to create a dragonfly summer phenology.  Between intervals, I carry a big butterfly net like a gun, jab at air, stab at vegetation as if a bayonet were attached; I’m on patrol, patrol for dragonflies, to capture and to measure their temperature.  From cars, my biology friends notice me, express solidarity with fieldwork by shouting out words of encouragement as they pass: “loser,” “the men in white coats are coming,” and my favorite, “get a real job!”  Once, four friends rolled down their windows, looked straight ahead—not at me—and without saying a single word, drove slowly past shaking their heads “no” and sped away.

Support comes in all kinds of ways.

That first summer among ponds in Fairbanks, Alaska, some of which have edges made of roads, others hidden by embankments, one close to the runway, and before knowing I would eventually study thermoregulation, I collected adults and larvae (naiads, actually, the aquatic stage of dragonflies), observed them in the field and at home in bowls and cups, watched them extend their lower jaw to capture mosquito larvae, worms, and small beetles, and read papers to determine a thesis for a Master’s degree:  perhaps a predation experiment, issues in community ecology, aquatic trait adaptations?  With very little training in the sciences except a required course or two as an undergraduate—no way I could be bothered studying anything besides Kant, Greek tragedy and comedy (in translation), or considering the placement of feet in Rodin’s Walking Man—my lab notebook balances the sheer newness of my scientific pursuit (i.e., not understanding what the hell I was doing) with my past in the humanities, so notes on ecology stand next to Sherry Ortner’s nature vs culture; carnivorous aquatic plants tangle with Delacroix.  The transition from the humanities to science was turning out to be not so much a clean break as a sliding into place, tongue-and-groove, a transmission.

“. . . and I don’t want this course to be like reading the catalog of ships in The Iliad,” stated Dr. Mark Oswood, professor of my first biology class since high school.  With that reference, my odyssey began.  His course was a good fit as it had few prerequisites and was attended by local fly fishermen, adding a practicality I had not expected, a connection between higher education and activities many of us have done since we were kids.  We took to the field to collect our own insects in lotic (streams and rivers) and lentic (lakes and ponds) habitats.  So enthralled I had found a biology professor who spoke of the ephemeral nature of mayflies against the enduring literature of the ancient Greeks that as soon as the final grades were posted I asked if he would be my advisor, only to learn he was retiring at the end of the following semester.  He suggested a new faculty member, Dr. Pat Doak, who took me on as a student, before we knew exactly what I was going to study.

The three of us met to discuss research topics of which I was open to just about any—well, actually any.  Maybe because I also had questions that day on dragonfly identification and had brought the three volume set entitled The Odonata of Canada and Alaska by Edmund M. Walker and Philip S. Corbet to the meeting, Mark suggested dragonflies as a general topic, and Pat agreed.  I wonder how different my project would have turned out if I had asked about predacious diving beetles or water skimmers instead; however, being able to say I was studying Odonata, the order of dragons and damselflies, was the first step.  Now came pinning down specifics, a juggling act because one has to consider what’s available in the lab and location of study—biking distance around the University of Alaska Fairbanks—for such mundane details can influence the formation of hypotheses.

6 June 2000. Went for a run at 730PM and saw first adult Dfly [dragonfly] on overpass off Johnson Expressway.
Read Moore (1952) and Parr (1983), trying to further notes on a thesis but only have . . . general goals, not the how-tos yet.
“Lions in Sweden” by Wallace Stevens and a secondary source The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens discuss his use of consonant sound S in this poem: “No more phrases, Swenson. I was once/A hunter of those sovereigns of the soul/And sav-ing banks . . .”

Stumbling between Stevens and science was a sign I didn’t know how to judge successful biology topics, but purposefully fumbling in nature fascinated me.  At various ponds, I was captivated by the goings-on: sundews trapping insects in their chemical glands, an adult dragonfly emerging from its exoskeleton, even a rat-tailed maggot, underwater, breathing through a tube.  I had a similar reaction while a graduate student in creative writing.  One summer, I taught in the Upward Bound Math-Science Program, which brings Alaskan high school students from rural villages—some with fewer than 100 people and without road access—to “the big city,” as the students jokingly called Fairbanks (population ~ 33,000).  I was asked to bridge math-science and English, and having microscopes handy, I figured observations of pond creatures would provide content as well as being fun and informative.

From a five-gallon container of pond water, students ladled out a cup and placed a drop on the slide to observe under the microscope.  I did the same and was immediately submerged in a kaleidoscope of red, blue, and green movements that shot in and out of view with silvery bubbles among legs and antennae waving as if wheat in a field; edges of rust-colored cylinders flowered into square turrets that seemed to spin and took my breath away not only because of their beauty but also because I was reminded of a world I had forgotten.  I hadn’t considered biology much since high school except for reading popular press accounts or when teaching classes about linear perspective and the Renaissance, when art and science came together.  On the glass slide under the ‘scope, I saw worlds in a drop of water, William Blake’s grain of sand, the universe in a glass of wine à la Feynman.  Something broke through this microscopic moment; I knew I needed to see these sights through the eyes of science, too, learn how this discipline—distinct from the arts and the humanities—asks and answers its questions and the consequences of its methods.

Mesmerized or not by these sights and blind with enthusiasm, my movement towards science was infused with static.  I struggled to capture a signal, settle on a topic, so my lab notebook is filled with past signals:  Duchamp competes with dragonflies; algae and amphibians grapple in the gardens of Jamaica Kincaid.  But noise can be gorgeous, too.

Water, the color of tea, is clear enough that I can lie on the bike path, overhang the light green railroad ties that pen it in, and peer at caddisflies enclosed in castles of their own making, some shielding themselves with tiny manhole covers of flat stone while others are “rollers” of tiny cigars—portable, spiraling vegetable tunnels; the more showy are bedazzled in ruddy and muddy irregular sand-pebbles so ugly and insignificant in-themselves that beauty is due only by being part of a living home, a built environment.  Then there are the boarded-up homes of caddis living in thatched splinters of brown, black, and blond woody debris that poke out like porcupine quills or hair of punk rockers.  A water boatman, dark marquise-shaped with reddish, triangular eyes, rises to the surface, back end first, siphons air around itself and wears its breath like the helmet of deep sea divers—not the bulky copper-colored helmet in movies but a transparent balloon of shimmering, quivering silvered air.  Larvae of predaceous diving beetles hang near the surface, reptilian and scorpion all at once, with impaling horizontal saber-toothed mandibles like calipers.  And, finally (though, never really finally), walled prisons of an Attica plant, a carnivorous bladderwort incarcerating water fleas and phantom midges, the plant pops as I lift it out of the water, its suction bladders triggered.  The Sheep Creek pond is a Hieronymus Bosch garden.

My floundering among innumerable Sirens is captured in my notebook through a Wallace Stevens observation:

6/8/2000. 6:30AM. “Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was not to rec-ognize this.”
Read a good paper [by] Pete Convey: “Influences on the choice between territo-rial and satellite behaviour in male Libellula quadrimaculata Linn. (Odonata: Libellulidae).” Behaviour 109, 125 141.

Convey’s study of dragonfly territoriality in England became my signal.  Just prior to reading his paper, another paper on sticklebacks (fish) and territoriality also made an impression, and I simply substituted insect for fish, a process of transposition almost metaphoric without being metaphorical.  Perhaps I gave even more significance to the Convey paper due to key words in the title—Libellula quadrimaculata, for this species of dragonfly is found in Fairbanks.  In fact, this is Alaska’s state insect, known as the four-spot skimmer.  I jumped in wholeheartedly trying to redo territoriality in Fairbanks.

Dabbing wings with marking paint, I dreamed of following individuals day-after-day at their respective ponds, determining the time it takes to establish a territory, defend territory, recording phenology of species as affected by solar radiation and temperature—endless possibilities.  I started out simple and deliberate by decorating the right forewing with a small blue dot for the Sheep Creek pond, an orange dot for the Airport pond, and green signaled the pond off Ballaine Road.

6/15/00 3PM:  Interesting to be reading about Wallace Stevens and odonatology, learning to see in different ways, with the physical instruments telling me what it’s like, even though I’m out in it: 17.2°C and 330-340 μmols—I would and wouldn’t know this.

Different colors, lines, and shapes on hindwings created dates.  At this point, I wasn’t too worried about my numbering scheme as this pilot study was to make sure simple things worked—paint stayed put and that I wouldn’t find too many dead painted dragons on the ground.  I wondered, could I introduce one specimen from a different pond to observe a pink versus green dotted rivalry?

6/18/00  Sheep Creek Pond 8:30 AM (Father’s Day).  16.2 ℃; 560 μmols.  Leu [Leucorrhinia sp.] flying, Lq [Libellula quadrimaculata] copulating middle of pond and one basking with body and “back” to the sun.  #1 [first sample for this day] at [railroad] Tie #9 TBL (total body length, mm) 49.36, forewing:  37.80, hindwing: 37.11.  Wing quality: bit cloudy.  Pink for Sheep Creek today (forewing left) and blue line through it for 6/18 (hindwing).  Male.

Over the following weeks, clear wings became stained glass or so it seemed.  On a scrap of paper (now lost), I asked:  what about collecting dead dragonflies over the summer, cut the wings off, and color the cells, creating my own Romanesque cathedral?

On the Solstice, I had a moment that made me Saint Francis:

(6/21/2000, 11:30 PM)  The sun is going behind Ester Dome, casting a shadow.  I’m at the water’s edge and bend to take up my net, and on the way back, a medium sized dragonfly, a black                meadowhawk (Sympetrum), hovers near, lands on my shoulder, followed by another, then another, and two more . . . till some twenty-five drape me, including my arms. Once perched, they do       not stir, seem uniformly distributed. None overlap. I raise one arm and tilt it away from the sun’s direction, and in unison, they rally to maximize the remaining light. I turn slowly, and the               black cloud rises and lands on me, again, in silence. I extend each arm, move them differentially and slightly offset in time, the darters’ saltatory motion, from wrist to wrist, almost salutatory.

As my painting continued, I searched among the ponds, close-by fields, and small streams to spot rose windows—but to no avail, or as Stevens said:  “None are green/Or Purple with green rings,/or green with yellow rings . . . None of them are strange . . .”

6/24/00 730PM Ballaine Pond 27.6 ℃; 1700 μmols. Lq perching with back and body to sun.  Re-sighted first one ever, one out of 67 painted.  Unfortunately, just released about 60 seconds ago.     Bald eagle flying by.

Disillusioned by my first unsuccessful attempt at a thesis topic, my mind wandered; the eagle’s bright white head reminded me of a snowy owl in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, where I had taught Adult Basic Education and Humanities at Iḷisaġvik College several years earlier.  The whiteness of the owl extended into the expansive, snowy tundra—no trees, no horizon discernible.  I wouldn’t have noticed except for the rise and fall of a tiny ball of brilliant colors that caught my attention in the owl’s struggle to carry off a dead, male king eider whose head was the sunset in the evenness of flat light.  Its reddish bill bounced and bobbed repeatedly as it hit the hard-packed snow; orange to yellow from nostril to eye flashed; owl wings opened and closed like clouds obstructing the mint green that tapered down the eider’s “cheek,” and all these colors were positioned below its blue skullcap.  If not the sunset in miniature, then a rodeo clown being tossed.

With failures in dragonfly territoriality piling up, I emailed Dr. Convey on 07/01/00 06:38pm just in hopes of an answer (I’ve never met him).  On 3 July, he replied.  You knew from the first line this was somebody I was glad to have contacted:  “dragonflies . . . now there’s a blast from the past!” followed by detailed responses interspersed among my questions.  One problem he singled out very quickly—although I had not confided the extent of my difficulties in re-sighting the painted dragons:

. . . this probably depends on what you regard as a “site” – libellulids in general don’t tend to move too far, although there are some migratory ones, in contrast with eg aeshnids.  However, if the area you’re working in includes a large number of small ponds close together, then there will be a lot of movement between the ponds.

His response was immediately and immensely helpful, signaling the end of territoriality as my topic because ponds and small lakes are clustered everywhere in Fairbanks.  While I now needed a new topic and worried about how long it would take to complete my degree, I felt wide open because this defeat had a strangely reassuring effect.  I now knew something about dragonfly territoriality in subarctic sites compared with Convey’s “Quy and Wicken Fens.”  Developing a topic was a lot like historical research and the search for primary evidence, but now my attempts themselves, including this honest failure, were the making of primary sources, more in line with creative arts.

A professor on my committee, Dr. Kent Schwaegerle, suggested I talk to Dr. Scott Armbruster, a “real field biologist,” I recall him saying, who had been on the UAF faculty but was now at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and was passing through Fairbanks.  What’s strange is I don’t have specifics in my notes for this meeting, probably thinking “what are the chances this will turn into anything?”  All I recall is Scott talking about thermometers and bees, how warm they get, and ambient temperature, which he called “operative,” for some reason.  The one phrase that had some heft to it was “thermal ecology,” which had a nice ring, as I didn’t recall those words being paired, at least for me, before that day.  A published paper and a thesis by one of his students provided details, full of new terms, definitions, and methods to learn.

To test whether the topic of thermoregulation held any sway over me, I borrowed a Physitemp thermometer from a different faculty member, Dr. Brian Barnes, who asked about my hypotheses.  Tongue-tied, because my project was not even born yet, I had no idea what to say, except to rephrase a few things I recalled from the meeting.  He said I was on a “fishing trip” but lent me this device anyway (and later became my PhD advisor after the dragonfly work, so he can’t be all that bad).  The “stab and jab” method to measure the thoracic temperature seemed plausible, but now I was stymied by rain.  With very few dragonflies flying, I divided my attention between outings to measure temperature whenever possible and learning to identify adults by wing venation.

Shapes took over my mind, and, coincidently (maybe?), I was reading a paper on a fourteen century painting that had a skull in the foreground placed in such a way that contemporary ad agents would call it subliminal, an anamorph.

7/17/00. Rain.  Finished reading “On Anamorphosis: Setting Some Things Straight” by David Topper about the anamorph in the famous painting by Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533.  Topper adds that “this notion of ‘two reciprocal things’ or ’in-between perceiving’ . . . impl[ied] that the environment yielded dual information” (Leonardo 33:2,115–124).  Squares into trapezoids, circles to ellipses, stretching, elongation.

Besides the geometry of cells in dragonfly wings and “shape constancy” in the article, the idea that science and the humanities might be “two reciprocal things” took shape.  With humanities as backdrop, however, I approached nature, somewhat jokingly, as “a pretty cool concept,” compared with my fellow students’ more empirical views.  During my first statistics class, as I began to acquire new techniques in interpretation distinct from the humanities, a quote from the same class showed the reciprocal nature of things:  “Probability isn’t a fact about the world; probability is a fact about an observer’s knowledge” (Persi Diaconis).  I readily substituted other terms for probability such as “measure” in its physical, metaphorical, and musical usage to see what might be gained or lost as well as the general term “thinking” that has the strange cost of making facts become interpretations of our knowing.  Blades of grass and Leaves of Grass, sonatas and mosquitoes, stalagmites and caryatids gently slid from just objects out there into a space of meaning making.  Here, the “. . . process of acquiring technique,” as described by Ralph Ellison in a different context is a “. . . process of modifying one’s responses, of learning to see and feel . . . of summoning up and directing the imagination; of learning to conceive of human values . . .”^[1]  Shifting from one discipline to another, gaining new techniques, has made me question whether I’ve ever really considered the consequences of my inherited values.

10 July 2000.  Rain, overcast.  Need to borrow physitemp [again].  The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens: “‘He wanted imperceptible air’; he wanted a reality which has no relation to the senses” (145). Read about wing loading in Journal Experimental Biology (1991).

During my first radio interview at the local station in Fairbanks, KUAC, I had the pleasure of explaining the method for measuring dragonfly temperature.  At the outset, I was asked not to describe things too gruesomely.

“Nothing of the sort in my work,” I assured her.

On-air, after some light banter, she asked me to describe what I’m doing at the Sheep Creek pond.

“Studying dragonfly thermoregulation,” I said boldly.  “And for this I use a fast-reacting thermometer, a Physitemp, and thrust a fine gauge needle, hair-like in thickness, which is the temperature probe, into the dragonfly thorax as soon as I capture one in the net.  If I can’t capture and “stab-and-jab” quickly (that’s the colloquial phrase for this technique, I explain) or if its wings aren’t immobilized promptly by the net, I let it go, since heat’s being built up artificially in its struggle to escape.”

Now, why she asked the next question was puzzling, but there was no time for pause:

“Doesn’t that kill them?”

“No,” I responded confidently and without delay, but I began sweating in the booth, realizing that I didn’t have evidence to say this, and began worrying about potentially misleading the public.  Am I jeopardizing my funding?  Is this a lie?  Need to fix this now; amend my statement quickly.  In a calm, no nonsense tone within milliseconds—I’m pretty sure—I triumphantly clarified:

[Kill?]  “No, not right away.”

This, of course, was supposed to convey the idea that if dragonflies died as a result of my action, I wouldn’t know because they flew away as soon as I released them.   All good.  I hadn’t noticed the other interpretation until I heard my voice broadcast a few days later over the radio.

I won’t dignify what friends yelled from cars after that.

That summer and fall, snatching specimens out of the air with a quick flick of the wrist, hog-tied at the end of the net to prevent movement, collecting data more-and-more efficiently, I recorded dragonfly temperatures for as long as they flew.  By 29 November, months after I saw my last one, my advisor, Pat, and I began judging whether the data I collected was adding up well enough to continue next summer.  She introduced statistics to determine thermoregulation and drew a figure that was not really new to me but applied statistical coursework to my own data for the first time, a bridge between dragonfly and datum, nature and number, making abstract reality.  I wish I had kept this sheet of paper and hung it up as a painting.

Draw stable lines of a right angle, labeling the vertical, thorax, the horizontal, ambient.  At its apex (bottom left), dash a line out at 45 degrees.  Any point landing on the diagonal is common between the outside temperature and the heat of flight muscles inside, an isothermal line.  We first plot data from the smallest “perchers,” so called because of their general habit of alighting horizontally for long periods and making forays in search of females, to defend a temporary territory, being lie-and-wait predators, in contrast to “fliers” that momentarily rest vertically but are on the prowl constantly, flying their patrols hour-after-hour.  Dots for meadowhawks, black or cherry-faced, repose above the dashes, and we pare the points down even more into a best fit line whose slope draws parallel to the isothermal.  They are cold-blooded conformers.  Asterisks delineate boreal whitefaces whose black bodies are punctuated by deep irregular reds or tired golden-yellows along thorax and abdomen.  These little stars rise above the dashes, too, contracting into a line less parallel but still conforming.  Giving a hint of thermoregulation, squares for the largest percher, the stocky black-gold four-spot skimmer, cross the isothermal and compare very well to the open circles of the smallest flier, an emerald, with a metallic-ash powdering over its verdant thoracic stripes and iridescent eyes that burn a green flash in the middle of the day.  The remaining fliers, diamonds for these darners—with blots of blue, blue-yellow, yellow-green marking each abdominal segment, and on their stout thoracic plates, colored bars, some thick, some kinked, some sulphur green paling off into yellow ultramarine—lay horizontally, signifying that, while flying at low and high temperatures, they thermoregulate, aligning more closely to what humans look like.

These elegant, predacious acrobats zip by pigmenting my afterimages; these tangibles shaped by geometric symbols regress into straight lines, color-coded by genera, finally taking on the value of numerals.  And in adding our own line, the seemingly exclusive categories of cold and warm blooded become a continuum, as heat transfers in this figure allowing us to add apples and oranges, to see the rise and run of steps in Medieval drawings of the Great Chain of Being metamorphose into vincula, yoking at once in a single word, flesh and math, tissue attaching tendon to toe and that simple line of division.  I still don’t know whether there are intrinsic values, but we are the creators of evidence.  Sitting by ponds with scrap paper in-hand roughly sketching each capture, among dragonfly exuviae hanging from grass like pendants and paintings, tadpoles with legs and tails, the gall of funny friends and plants, the atmosphere against a thorax, my temperature index is an abstraction blooded.²

^[1] Ellison, Ralph.  “The Seer and the Seen,” in Shadow and Act.  First Vintage International, 1995, p 162.

²Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, It Must Be Abstract (vi).

……………………………………….

Todd Sformo is a biologist working for the North Slope Borough-Department of Wildlife Management in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska.  Sformo works on a variety of Arctic organisms such as fish, bowhead whales, and a freshwater mold to support the department’s goal of maintaining subsistence activities for the communities of the North Slope.  He has a PhD in biology, an MS in biology, an MFA in creative writing, an MA in art history, and a BA in philosophy.  Besides publishing scientific papers, he has prose poems published in Hippocampus (June 2015), Cirque (Summer 2018), and The Ekphrastic Review (2021), and an essay in Catamaran (June 2020).

Art, Culture, Education, Identity, Science