Life and Times at SERC: Part I

What follows is Part I of a long account of my summer living and working at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland.

I spent the last sixteen summers on California’s Central Coast. Sure, I had a few brief excursions to places like Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Zurich. But for the most part my summers were spent at home with my sisters or at the beach with my friends.

Last summer I worked with the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County. Now I was getting paid to stay home and tramp around the dunes looking at plants. I had things figured out.

That same summer my younger sister Mariah also did some work in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Rather than doing fieldwork she helped out with environmental education at the Dunes Center. It was there that she made the connection that sent her to Washington, D.C., to spend two weeks exploring the workings of the Smithsonian Institution.

Mariah happened to spend a day at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) during her two-week stint on the east coast. Lying on the banks of the Rhode River, which feeds directly into the Chesapeake Bay, SERC touts itself the national leader in research on coastal ecosystems.

“You should apply for an internship there.”

I thought it was a long shot. But this was the Smithsonian Institution, an amazing opportunity to work with scientists at the top of the field and get some research experience to add to my curriculum vitae. Plus I’d never been to the east coast before, and I’d dreamed about visiting the Air and Space Museum as a warplane-obsessed kid. It’d be cool to get paid to go over there.

So I applied. And was rejected. “There were a record number of applications this year, and with reduced funding due to hard economic times we were forced to make some difficult decisions….” No surprise there.

However I was surprised when less than two weeks later I received an email from Ariana, a Postdoctoral Fellow working under Pat Megonigal in the Biogeochemistry Lab at SERC, offering me a summer position in their lab. Surprised—and ecstatic.

I eagerly accepted the offer. I finished spring quarter at UC Davis in the middle of June, and after a fortnight’s taste of California summer I boarded an airplane bound for Baltimore. Ariana picked me up, helped me get provisioned at the local grocery store, and left me in the care of a group of young strangers. My fellow summer interns.

I spent that first week adjusting to the time difference and getting to know the people in my lab. There was Tom, the post-doc who I’d be working with for the summer. Rachel, who was Ariana’s summer intern. Adam and Kate, a professor and intern pair from Villanova University who were doing work in the marsh. Jim, Ally and Nick, the techs for the lab and some of the nicest and most helpful people I’ve met. There was Ariana. There was Pat, who runs the whole show. And then there was me. New guy.

The new feeling didn’t last long, at least in my new social group. Though I lived in the Schmidt Building—overflow intern housing for the summer—I made a point to spend as much of my free time as possible in Green Village, where the majority of the roughly twenty on-campus summer interns lived.

Most of the interns were planning to spend that first weekend after my arrival in Virginia, at the home of one of the spring interns who’d just recently left. I tagged along and was glad I did—after some tubing on the Potomac and bonding time with my new friends I started to feel like a natural part of the group. The feeling carried over to the next day, when we made our way to Washington, D.C., to realize my childhood dream of visiting the Air and Space Museum. The capital made a happy impression on me that day. The Fourth of July fireworks enhanced the feeling.

The next few weeks I spent a lot of time in the lab getting acquainted with some of the instruments I’d be using in the course of my research. There was the gas chromatograph, or GC, which tells us how much methane is present in a sample of gas. There was the Leaf Area Meter, which does just what you’d think. And then there were the LI-CORs.

LI-COR is a manufacturer of scientific instruments. They have a wide range of products, but the LI-COR I got to know this summer is called the LI-COR 6400 Portable Photosynthesis System. I learned the lengthy startup procedure. Each morning, after my daily chore of counting newly emerged plants in our growth chambers, I checked to make sure each of our two LI-CORs had enough desiccant, that the fans were working, that the gaskets were air-right and that each had a fresh carbon dioxide canister.

We would use the LI-CORs to measure the photosynthetic rates of the plants we were growing. Tom had designed an experiment to study the effects of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide and soil nitrogen levels on the growth and physiology of the Common Reed, Phragmites australis (which I will refer to as Phragmites).

A few weeks into the internship an opportunity arose to drive to South Carolina for Taterfest. Many West Coast folk, myself included, may not have heard of Tater, the heavy metal-come-bluegrass band with a charismatic frontman and jaw-droppingly spectacular lead guitarist. And that’s a damn shame. Tater and friends (various other bluegrass bands also performed) put on a fine show in an intimate outdoor setting. There couldn’t have been more than 200 very enthusiastic concert goers, and most of whom had camped out in a forested corner of the farm that hosted the show.

Taterfest was a cultural experience, to say the least. To that point I was unaware that some southerners refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, and furthermore that t-shirts existed which pay homage to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The trip also opened my eyes—or tastebuds, rather—to the delicious potential of Cajun-style boiled peanuts.