The bear really did it for me. Or was it the rattlesnake? Or maybe the daily menagerie of lizards, toads and garter snakes my 5-year-old held up happily for our inspection. I thought, “this is what field research while parenting should look like!”
My partner Rosemary, our two children (5 and 2) and myself were camping in the Klamath Mountains of Northern California for 6 weeks while I gathered data on the effect of wildfires on forest life. The Klamaths are easily the most remote area on the Pacific coast of the United States, typically ignored even by tourists, though the Pacific Crest Trail begrudgingly does a westerly detour through the high country. A few communities along the rushing Salmon River, relicts of the gold rush, were never connected to the grid. Bigfoot is everywhere. Tribal cultures, including the Karuk, Hoopa and Yurok, nurture a vibrant connection to ancestral lands marked everywhere by millennia of traditional care, from tanoak and sugar pine orchards to ancient village sites and spiritual trails.
The Klamaths are also exceedingly steep, poison oak is ubiquitous, mosquitoes are locally overwhelming and temperatures in summer soar to the three digits. So would our offspring take to living in this rugged place for half the summer, or would they be miserable? Would we all be miserable in this paradise? The last time we camped, we’d only gone a couple of days before hearing the tireless refrain of “I want to go home!”
This summer’s research was going to be critical to my PhD project. Though I have years of field experience, I had never organized a field season from scratch. I was also going to bring along two interns, whose needs I would have to attend to in addition to my family’s. Wanting to avoid last minute scrambles, I started organizing months in advance, including making packing lists, storing research and camping gear in plastic tubs for the day it would be needed, and really dialing in my protocol to avoid hang-ups. I designed my schedule to have a reasonable daily load so I could spend time with my family and also so I could be flexible if changes needed to be made in the field.
When we arrived at our destination, we had the entire campground to ourselves. We quickly investigated river access, which would turn out to be a key ingredient in spending a happy summer in the wilderness. Rosemary would go to the river with the kids every morning while I was off doing surveys. When I returned around lunch time, I would join them and sometimes take our oldest on a trip down the river in our inflatable paddle boat (though for all my organizational frenzy I hadn’t actually brought paddles!). Or we would build dams on small tributaries. We waded in search of water life, catching tadpoles, small fish, and, once, a lamprey. We collected dead butterflies and dragonflies and poked at scat piles. We would end our adventures looking for wood for the campfire, which was mostly unnecessary but very entertaining.
The kids were never bored and never complained about camping. They seemed to flourish and settled right in to our new rhythm. They became very relaxed playing and swimming in the river (with life jackets). Our youngest stopped needing diapers. They became experts at identifying poison oak, and no one got it, which was a miracle. Being in nature was relaxing and nurturing, for them and for us.
I love UC Davis as a school, but Davis is flat, surrounded by industrial agriculture, and generally a very unnatural place. Our time in the Klamaths was a perfect antidote for this. We visited an elk lick and walked on the deeply worn trails they made on their daily rounds; the scent of the herd was heavy and we could hear the cows calling in the distance. We cautiously investigated a rattlesnake, which seemed more intent on making a ruckus than actually striking. And then of course, there was the bear.
My oldest had asked to visit the elk lick at dusk, but we found it deserted. We continued to a meadow beyond, and as we squinted into the failing light, a dark shaped detached itself from the background. It was a black bear, and a good-sized one too. We watched it amble about, eating from abandoned pear trees. Though mosquitoes were settling all over us, I whispered that if we didn’t move, we’d be able to keep watching the bear. Still it didn’t notice us, and started walking on the trail that headed our way. I usually see bears running away when I’m driving. Never had I been in such a situation! When it got to about 20 meters from us, I decided to clear my throat, at which point it stood up on its hind legs, clearly confused (I was realizing what terrible eyesight they have!), and finally decided to go another way. For my son’s first bear encounter, this was the encounter of a lifetime!
So, it was a pretty ideal field-season-while-parenting, with science done and magical experiences all around. I almost wish there were some crises here and there to add nuance. Of course, I was incredibly fortunate that my partner was willing and able to come along so I didn’t have to be away from my loved ones for all this time. Not many people are this lucky. My protocol was also perfect since I started bird counts before dawn and wrapped up by noon, leaving the rest of the day to hang out with the family. If my protocol had been more demanding or required night-time surveys for example, this would have been difficult to reconcile with kids’ rhythms. It would have been challenging too if we’d had to move every day or every few days; the kids took some time to get used to a new place and would have been stressed by frequent moves (not to mention the logistics of packing and unpacking everything).
On the other hand, I think that part of the success was in fact not in spite of parenting but because of it. Of course, having kids inevitably means I can’t spend as much time on my work as non-parents. But I have learned to be better organized to make up for this, which is common for parents in academia (see for example my friend Jamiella Brooks’ essay on how to finish your dissertation while parenting: https://ideasonfire.net/dissertating-while-parenting/). I had backups for all my equipment, checklists, and built-in flexibility in my schedule. And I had excellent interns who were very understanding about my family needs. By the end of the field season, we were all already looking forward to doing this again next year!
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