Sand Box

I took this picture while working in the sand dunes in 2004, if you look close you can see the next team of people on a dune in the distance.

I closed my eyes, even though I was wearing goggles, and could feel the warm wind and sand slapping me in my face at around 50 mph. The feelings of danger, excitement and freedom swelled inside of me, and I couldn't believe I was getting paid to do this!

It was a frosty day outside of Seattle when I got the news of my first botany job. I was in a bad mood, and couldn't drive my car because of the ice covering the roads and several inches of snow piled on top of it from weeks of being parked made my car not want to start. I put on my cowboy boots and bundled up, I was walking to the store to buy ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies. I bake when I'm sad or upset, and the memories of my grandmas, and the smells of cookies or bread makes me happy. My cowboy boots turned into ice skates, something that never happened in Texas. My butt hurt from all the falls, and I was indeed very grumpy as I slid home on the boots. I walked in the door of our wood stove warmed house, slush dripping off my boots, and threw the butter on the cabinet. My dad chuckled at my anger.

"You don't like the ice much huh?"
"Hell no!"
"Well how about a job starting next week in Southern California in some sand dunes?"
"They called! I got the job!"
"That's right, now are you going to make me some cookies?"

Finding endangered plants in the middle of hot sand dunes is no easy task, but I loved everyday of it. Clouds don't appear much in SoCal, the blue sky just gets streaked with some white stringy ones. So the sky above the sand dunes was almost always blue, contrasting the vast beige sand. These sand dunes are the biggest in the country, stretching as far as your eye can see when you are in them. I would leave my cockroach infested apartment around 2am, waving good bye to the drunk neighbors still leaning on the wall with beer in their hands to start my transects in the dunes right at the cool sunrise. The government hired professional drivers to take us out in sections of sand that might not have seen a person in years. It was a challenge getting so many of us out to the middle of nowhere by sunrise, and we only had one dune buggy. They ended up putting sand tires on two old Subarus to cart six of us at the same time.

The sand particles were bigger on the west side of the dunes, and fine as powder on the east side, because the wind carries smaller particles farther. This caused us to get stuck in the sand a lot, even with the professionals, on the east side. One such day, we got the dune buggy stuck in the fine sand. After hours of my team and boss (who was driving) digging around the tires, we gave up and waited for someone to pull us out. There were twelve other teams out in the dunes though, so the drivers were busy picking all of them up for hours and couldn't help us. Sand doesn't hold heat, so we were freezing after it got dark, still waiting to be rescued. We could see his jeep lights for miles as they came over several dune mountains along the way. He finally reached us, his naked lady flag flapping in the wind, and pulled us out in a couple of minutes with a tow strap. It was too late for me to drive back to the city, so I stayed in the tent city that the temporary botanists lived in out in the dunes. I was so tired, I didn't use one of the primitive showers to wash the sand off. It seemed to be everywhere, stuck in my hair and every crevice of my body. A friend let me have a sleeping bag, and I crashed even though they stayed up talking and watching movies on laptops. The next morning I woke up and noticed a huge pile of sand in her sleeping bag that fell off of me in the middle of the night.

Every day, for months, I walked those sand dunes. I figure that I've walked them from north to south at least twice. We had to stay in strait lines for the accuracy of science, sometimes being forced to walk deep down into the hot sand bowls and strait back out the steepest part counting the endangered plants along the way. The bowls would have kangaroo rats and sunflowers that smelled like vanilla, but in the afternoon they felt like a furnace when we were already in the hot desert. The best moments were waiting to be picked up at the end of our transects, after a hard days work. The three of us would lounge around on the sand in the shade, and I would close my eyes and feel the breeze against my face.

Lady Long Legs