Princeton University - Council of Science & Technology

POPE PRIZE

Essay 1
Should I Give my DNA away?"
Lara C. Atwater

Essay 2
Excerpts from novella: "Dreams of Ingrid Capac-Nolasco"
Nicholas R. Lilly

Essay 3
From Greening to Curing: Cornelia Liu Trimble, M.D.
Monica H. Wojcik

Honorable Mention
Neir Eshel

Excerpts from Novella: "Dreams of Ingrid Capac-Nolasco"

Excerpt from Alex, Day Two: Introductions, in “Dreams of Ingrid Capac-Nolasco” (pages 44-52) 9:59 AM, Kitchen Have returned from the morning nest survey out toward the river mouth and, though fearful I might electrocute myself on the water heater screwed into the shower head, have showered. I could not recognize the beach from last night. The tides seem to have eaten away at the cliff from which we watched the turtle climb; were I to judge by the distance we had walked, in the cliff’s place rose a soft slope of sand. New walls, waist-height, lifted from the water at unpredictable intervals beside planar expanses of beach, an alternating collage of minute precipices and smooth shore that wound north as the Peninsula’s coastline curved out to sea. I saw few fragments of egg at first, but beneath the sun the human flotsam returned to my sight. In no particular order, I stumbled over: two-liter plastic bottles; a broken orange Frisbee; an enormous graduated cylinder, standing to well-past my knee; Styrofoam floats; unpaired shoes—some classic flip-flips, some heeled and covered in denim, some children’s sandals all Velcro, pink, and koala bears—others only soles; strangest of all I tripped over the core of a plastic doll—legless, armless, and headless with holes drilled into the stomach and spine for goodness knows what purpose. As we walked north, Ingrid and Fidel—another of the research assistants with whom I share the dormitory, older than Ingrid and Hisham, from Colombia, and virtually speechless—counted out the half-moons and successful nestings by following the tracks of the turtles that had come ashore during the night. The turtle tracks emerging from and returning to the sea resembled paths cut by a single tractor tire, as if some eccentric agricultural unicyclist had cavorted up and down the beach, splashing in and out of the waves through the night. Some of the tracks came up only a few feet from the waves before turning back, marking out perfect crescents in the sand. Barricades seemed to have prevented other turtles from digging their nests, and their paths returned to the sea in pinched angles after falling back from sand walls and beached logs. Some turtles had pulled themselves twenty meters to the vegetation line only to abandon their nests. We came across cavities one meter deep and two wide in the sand, unfinished body pits—Ingrid told me—that the turtles had scooped into the beach when they first began to nest, swiping at the earth with the serrated lines of scales along the inside edges of their front flippers. Other turtles had ceased to nest while they dug their egg chambers, the boot-shaped wombs each brooding turtle hollows into the moist under-layers of the sand with her rear flippers and into which she lays her eggs. At the bottoms of some of these deep and narrow chambers, water from last night’s storms pooled along the soles of the boots, as if the turtles had excavated a series of miniature wells. Those turtles that had remained on the beach long enough to lay crawled over driftwood and brush, seaweed and trash, before nesting in areas that ranged from earth matted with vines to open, palm-shaded sand. Some had followed extraordinarily circuitous paths—hitting logs insurmountable and turning back along their tracks before swinging either north or south to pull themselves parallel to the waves for some dozen meters, one for a full eighth mile—only after which had they laid their brood. Instead of empty pits and chambers, here we tended to find only shallow depressions in the beach brushed over with sand, barely distinguishable from the natural roll of the dunes but for the tracks leading to and from. While Fidel—shirtless, round, glistening at the belly, head hanging beneath the sun—walked along the vegetation line and gestured to us with upraised hand if a new nest had been laid, I followed behind Ingrid as she tallied the nests and innumerable half-moons. I asked her how I might help, and she said only, “Observe,” smiling as she scraped her heel over a set of tracks to signal to surveyors two mornings from now that we had included this ascent in our count. Wooden posts divided the beach into segments an eighth of a mile in length. Though slathered in reflective whitewash, these posts had remained invisible to me—and to my ill-advised headlamp—in last night’s darkness. Within each eighth, Fidel also searched the grass and bush for the three fluttering orange ribbons that mark the nests for which the research assistants have counted the eggs by night—something, Ingrid has repeated, I will do before I leave. As she screamed out nest numbers and distances—“sesenta y uno, cuatro punto cuarenta y cuatro metros de la vegetación”—Fidel measured out the distances with his feet and a rolling tape-measure and reported back if the nests had fallen victim to predators—many had—or poachers—none—all the while muttering “Qué calor” toward his feet and the blistering sand. At mile one and three eighths, Fidel waved us up to the border between plants and sand, in an area where a dozen fresh tracks seemed to converge upon a single point beneath an outgrowth of palm trees. We had untangled other intertwined tracks this morning, the three of us walking in circles across the beach like carnival-goers lost in a mirror-maze, but here, for some unknown reason, turtles had laid nests upon nests. One turtle had dug deep into another’s chamber and tossed her eggs out onto the surface of the sand and into nearby bushes; another had laid before hollowing her own egg chamber, leaving behind a pyramid of tiny moons that spilled over the sand. Impressions resembling the hands of human infants bounded two by two in even lines among the eggs and craters. “Los pisotes,” Fidel pronounced, looking down at the tracks. He wrinkled his nose, sniffed the air—thick with the stench of vinegar, the concentrated rankness of overwhelming body odor—and added, “Y los chancho montés también.” Ingrid nodded. “Coatimundis,” she explained, “like your raccoons, but brown, thin-snouted and -tailed. And the smell is of wild pigs.” “Debemos enterrarlos? Todavía viven ellos?” Fidel asked, pointing to the intact eggs. Ingrid shook her head and turned from the nests, her face a swirl of braids. I lingered, staring down at the disarray of shell, yolk, sand, and footprints. Near the vegetation, scattered heaps of eggs lay split open on the sand. A single fly that had drowned in the fluid of the eggs floated in the yellow yolk as if trapped in amber, while others clung to the shell and sipped at the seeping white. Behind this albumen banquet, sitting on the blades of grass that grew among the palms, violet grasshoppers the size of purple martins rose and fell on the breeze. From their perches, they surveyed the scene and the passersby with glassy black eyes. I walked away, locked in their gaze, watching the twitch of their orange antennae. Further north, the forest thinned as the land began to taper, palm trees the last vegetation to grow above the height of brambles and bush. For the final eighth mile leading up to the zero-marker just south of the point of the Peninsula, vines coated the sand. Strings of round varnished leaves—veined in red and yellow and beaded with trumpet flowers in ivory and fuchsia—covered the earth like floral sand dollars. The vines—are these the railroad vines I have read about?—grow in straight lines, lengths of creeper stretching out along the sand from central rooting points. The branches crossed over one another, as if the beach were swathed in a sea of plant-like octopi each drawn and quartered by infinite legs. In the midst of the vines, we stopped to excavate a hatched leatherback nest. Fidel had marked the spot during a past survey, and he now sat down among the vine leaves and trumpet flowers, smiling as he pointed to his brand: two sticks arranged in a pyramid that led the eyes to a bare spot of sand between a pair of matching plastic bottle caps. Ingrid looked to Fidel and lifted an eyebrow. “Tendremos que medir,” she insisted, “for the sake of accuracy.” Fidel exhaled and heaved himself from the sand. While I paced off the recorded distance from the high tide line to the egg chamber, Ingrid and Fidel unrolled the measuring tape to triangulate the location of the nest from the points marked by the three orange flags fluttering in the scrub. They measured first from the central flag, tied in the vegetation two months ago immediately west of the egg chamber as the leatherback had laid her eggs, placed there so as to create a straight line from water to nest to bush. At the distance recorded in the logbook, Fidel swept an arc in the sand with the end of a stick. Ingrid then climbed through the bushes to pull the tape taut at the two flags tied north and south of this middle marker, and Fidel repeated his cuts in the sand; they placed these last two flags, Ingrid explained, at the ends of lines that would intersect with the central segment at forty-five degree angles, at a point in the sand directly above the egg chamber. When we had finished, a hand-sized triangle formed by the intersection of Fidel’s three curves appeared at my feet, like the outline of a wave, perfectly framing the plastic bottle caps. Fidel laughed, lifting his arms into the air in a dramatic shrug, and plunged his stick down through the center of the triangle. Using this hole as our guide, we dug down by hand, hollowing out a narrow shaft in the sand. Soon the narrowness and growing depth of the hole rendered it impossible for three arms to reach the fresh earth at its base, and Fidel assumed full digging duty, tossing handfuls of the black sand into a pile at his side. When the top of the first eggshell peeked white through the sand, Fidel stopped to measure the depth from the surface of the beach down to the crest of the egg mound. Laying a piece of driftwood across the hole as a level, he slowly lowered the stick with which he had first pierced the sand down into the hole until it touched the first egg’s skin. Marking the stick against the level with his finger, he laid it alongside the tape measure to determine the depth of the egg chamber. As Ingrid recorded this measure, Fidel threw the sticks aside and reached into the backpack; from the outermost pocket he withdrew two latex gloves, one of which he pulled onto his own hand, and the other of which he passed over the hole to me. As I tugged on the glove, he waved me forward and, pointing down into the chamber, inhaled deeply. I did as instructed: held my head over the hole, breathed in, and gagged. The concentrated stench of rotten eggs, of sulfur and decay, flooded along my tongue and into my lungs—somehow, I had not anticipated the smell of rotten eggs— Fidel guffawed, the black grains of sand that clung to the sweat on his chest and stomach shaking beneath the sun. I glanced in embarrassment toward Ingrid, but she smiled, wincing, and said firmly, “Vaminos, Fidel.” He raised his arms into the air—again, an exaggerated shrug—and dropped down onto his stomach in the sand. Here, he began to lift handfuls of the sand-covered eggs up from within the hole. Brushing her braids away from her shoulders, Ingrid leaned forward, her shoulders next to mine, to direct my task: separating and tallying the contents of the chamber—the tiny yolkless eggs, like crumpled gumballs; the pricked but un-hatched eggs; the intact and un-hatched eggs, like deflated and white tennis balls, their leather dented at the sides; the tattered skins of those eggs that had hatched; and fragments, less than half of a full shell. “Try to put them in tens,” Ingrid recommended, “It will make the counting easier.” At first I sorted the eggs with alacrity, piling them into groups of ten as Ingrid had suggested on a smooth patch of sand adjacent to the chamber opening, but as Fidel’s handfuls of excavated sand and shell came more quickly, I struggled to keep up with his pace. At times it seemed as if the egg chamber had inhaled him up to his armpits, swallowing head and all down into the earth. Yet the stench would often become unbearable, and he would rise, tears on his cheeks, gasping for air. In these moments I worked furiously to sort the accumulated mess by hand while Ingrid—“No more gloves” she said—poked the eggs into their groups with the tip of the leveling stick. “Fewer pricked than successful hatches,” I remarked as the piles took shape, pleased that more hatchlings seemed to have climbed from the nest than to have perished in it. And yet—as I watched, out of each of the pricked eggs stuck the writhing tails of worms and maggots unaccustomed to the sun. Again, I gagged, though I must admit: I am impressed that something living could thrive on objects that smelled so awfully of rotting flesh. Ingrid scanned the piles with her eyes, “Yes, but fewer hatched eggs than we would find in the nest of a green. Much lower nesting success—I wish I knew why the leatherback insisted on nesting so much closer to the tides.” I looked up toward the water and then to the palms—I had not noticed: we sat squarely between vegetation and sea, far nearer to the reach of the waves than where the green turtles had laid. Fidel leaned back from the hole and spat the sand from his lips. “Yo creo,” he began, breathing in clean air, “Yo creo que la baola pone sus huevos aquí porque ella es más grande—ella es demasiado gorda—too fat to, ah, to crawl all the way up.” Fidel laughed quietly at his own joke, lifting his arms in a ring round his own expansive belly to mimic the girth of the leatherback. “Tal vez,” Ingrid indulged him, “perhaps so. Hay más?” Muttering “No sé, no sé” through his laughter, Fidel bent back over the hole and plunged down into the chamber. Moments later he emerged and sat back on his feet. “Vacía,” he pronounced, wiping the tears and sand from his cheeks onto his shoulders, “No más.” After we had counted all but the fragments—“Of no use,” Ingrid said—and returned all but the intact eggs to the chamber—“to keep the pests away”—we turned to the small collection of un-hatched eggs lined up in the sand. I looked to Ingrid, unsure of what I was to do next. “We open them,” she explained, “to see when the turtles stopped developing. With the leatherbacks we can see all stages, from yolk, to when the white lines begin to form along their backs—all the way up to full embryos.” I nodded. Again, I had not anticipated this—when Ingrid suggested last night that I join in this morning’s nest survey, I had hoped we might see living turtles, not—not cadaverous embryos. Fidel rolled the first egg from the line onto the patch of sand beside the hole and pierced it with a twig. First the smell of rot and then the rotten contents itself—a stream of pink fluid—oozed from the hole. He pinched at the skin next to this puncture with his gloved hand and motioned for me to do the same; together we pulled, cleanly tearing open the egg. The decomposing contents spilled onto the sand, puddles of pink, yellow, and white fluid through which floated lumps of yolk and developing turtle. The puddles were reminiscent of curdled milk or cottage cheese colored by some combination of blood and mucous. Ingrid sat off to the side recording our findings, unfazed by both the sight and smell. As egg after egg revealed more viscous decomposition or covens of worms and maggots—how they managed to pierce the eggs with no sign of their entrance, I have no idea—I found myself grateful we found no full embryos. Scooping eggs and sand into the chamber, Fidel began to laugh. “Huevos revueltos para desayuno?” he said. Scrambled eggs for breakfast? Excerpt from Alex, Day Two: Introductions, in “Dreams of Ingrid Capac-Nolasco” (pages 68-81) July 22nd, 12:31 AM, Bunk-bed by headlamp Euphoria—I feel an inexplicable sense of euphoria— I ought to begin with our departure— On the path from Station to beach, I scraped along the sand with my feet. With no headlamp—no lights at all after leaving the glare of the kitchen fluorescents, lit again when power returned just before 8:00—I felt for roots with my toe tips, hopeful that any snakes asleep in my path would slither away from the sound of my steps. I have never before walked in a state of forced, complete blindness; it was strange—for the strides that it took us to walk from the dining area to the seaward edge of the vegetation, when all that I followed was the sound of Emma’s unhurried, confident steps, I felt as if my body had disappeared. At first, as we stepped onto the beach, my eyes distinguished only two features of the landscape: the stars and, perhaps only a reflection of the still moonless sky above, the white caps of the waves. “We’ll wait a minute,” Emma said from the blackness, as we stood together at the vegetation line, “just for things to clear up a bit.” My eyes adjusted slowly to the night—I jumped when I first saw movement at my elbow, only to realize it was Emma kicking at the sand—but around me, a world that had consisted of only darkness and starlight seemed to gradate into shades of blue and black. I first saw the contours of the sea, then of the driftwood—bark-less and sun-bleached—that shone next to the harsh black of freshly moistened sand bordering the waves, and of the softer darks of the dry earth further removed from the tides. Above us, I watched as the pale arm of the Milky Way took shape, a band of light strung between openings in the cloud cover, each pocket flooded with stars. Last night, as I clambered up the coast behind a beam of light, I was struck by the silence of the beach at that hour. No, not by the silence—by the consistency of the noise. The sounds, of insects, steps in sand, of waves, all had a certain softness to them. They droned. But tonight, in the darkness, the beach sounds took on texture. In the beginning, just as last night, the only noise seemed to come from the waves breaking on the sand. Yet as we walked further south—I followed a few steps behind Emma, as requested, so that she might signal if a turtle appeared in our path—as we walked, the sea itself would drop silent in the eeriest moments, as the whole swell for some distance before and behind us pulled away from the coast. The gentle whir of the insects that last night had pervaded the vegetation was tonight punctuated by the clattering, arrhythmic calls of katydids and cicadas and the high pip of frogs seeking mates. I wonder, now, if the glare of my headlamp deadened my senses, a sort of holistic mute— The first turtle we worked tonight surprised me with her smell. Emma signaled by upraised hand for me to wait at the waterline as she followed the turtle’s ascending track out of the waves and into the shadows thrown by a silhouetted line of palms—shadows somehow cast in even darker tones of black than the rest of the beach, an expanse itself lit only by starlight sifted through patches of cloud. Emma used no headlamp, no flashlight as she traced the turtle’s invisible path, and for a moment—perhaps minutes, for I seemed to lose all track of time tonight—as she disappeared into the darkness, I felt as if I stood entirely alone on the beach, the lone human presence for miles, surrounded by a field of unseen turtles— And yet, blind as she was, Emma emerged from the darkness already tugging the backpack from her shoulders. “She’s just begun to cover,” Emma said, pulling logbook, pencil, two-meter measuring tape, headlamp and flashlight, tagging pliers and tags from the main compartment. She placed the tape, book and pencil, and flashlight in my hand and smiled, pocketing the rest. “Perfect timing. You ready to work?” I grinned, nodding, and together we marched off toward the vegetation line. The scent of the turtle floated up from her body pit as we knelt in the sand behind her—away from the range of her gaze—a smell of fish, of seaweed and of pure salt. I know it will sound foolish when I read this after I have returned home, bur there was something—something pleasantly elemental about her odor— Emma crawled round the turtle’s tail to just behind her right front flipper; for now, it lay motionless in the sand beside her shell as her rear flippers worked in tandem, methodically tamping down the sand above her egg chamber like the dexterous hands of a human baker kneading bread. “Remember the procedure?” Emma whispered from the dark. “I check for tags first—” “Ready,” I replied, poised to write, holding the logbook inches from my eyes. Emma laughed. “Go ahead and use the torch to write by—we don’t expect miracles of night vision, especially on cloudy nights like this—just be sure to shine it down into the book and away from her face.” I nodded and flicked on the light. Beneath my eyes, the matrices of the logbook glowed red. “No tags on right fin,” Emma called from the darkness. “Old tag holes or old tag notches?” I stared down at the empty data cells. “Nothing.” Emma stood and walked round the turtle’s rear. “Same on the left,” she said, kneeling beside the turtle’s left flipper, “No tags, no holes, no notches—seems we have a new girl.” Emma crawled across the sand and sat beside me. “Remember,” she said, pulling the pliers, headlamp, and line of tags from her pocket, “repeat the numbers back to me, just to be sure.” She removed two tags from the cardboard strip—a makeshift carrying device that consists of a length of cardboard folded at a right angle against the bend of a row of open tags, each fastened in place beneath a line of duct-tape—and held them in the glow of the flashlight. “Right first, with the smaller number,” she said, pointing to the first of the tags, “Left fin follows with the next number in sequence.” I frowned, confused by this repetition. I remembered every word Ingrid had told me. Emma pocketed the second of the two tags and inserted the first into the mouth of the pliers, lining up the tiny arrow of metal on one arm of the tag with the prongs on which the arrow would catch and lock in place when it pierced through the turtle’s skin. I looked at the pliers as she held them in the light—toothed, the disquieting color of rust, the metal of the tag glinting in their open jaws—and I felt relieved that I am not allowed to do the tagging— Emma pulled the headlamp over her hair with her free hand and crawled up to the turtle’s right flipper. Without turning on the light, she felt for the patch of skin where she would insert the tag—near the shell, away from the large scales of the fin, where the turtle would not feel the rub of the metal as she swam in the sea. Emma held the pliers in place around this spot, their teeth planted above and below the soft flesh of the turtle’s flipper. I dared not breathe. With two hands, Emma pressed down on the handles of the pliers—a crunch, the sound of grit, of sand scraping against metal and flesh. In my mind I saw fluid, cartilage torn, pierced by a metal shaft— But the turtle did not move. “Perfect,” came Emma’s voice from the shadows. She switched on her light. “1-0-5-3-5-5.” I exhaled. “105355,” I repeated, scribbling the numbers in the logbook. “105355,” Emma called back, still leaning over the tag; it now shone beneath the beam of her headlamp, planted in the turtle’s flipper, perpendicular to the inside arc of its flesh. Emma pulled the second tag from her pocket and lined up the arrow and prongs within the teeth of the pliers. Tagging implement ready, she turned off her lamp, crawled round to the left flipper, and repeated the process: locate, position, pierce. Again, the turtle did not move. “Good lord,” Emma whispered, a note of astonishment in her voice, “what a placid lady we have.” She switched on her headlamp. “1-0-5-3-5-6.” “105356,” I repeated, recording the number. “105356,” echoed Emma. She crawled back across the sand. “Measuring tape, please,” she requested, extending her hand. I produced it from my pocket. “Thank you—I thought I might do the curved carapace, if you don’t mind, just to demonstrate with this turtle. You, however,” she continued, unfurling the measuring tape, “with your gibbon arms, can attempt the straight. I never get the measurements in three tries, and it always infuriates me—blasted calipers,” she nodded at the apparatus beside me, shoved arm-tips down into the sand to avoid trapping grit along the slides, “I might as well attempt to wield a jousting stick.” She laughed and turned to smooth the sand from the turtle’s shell. “I know you learned all of this yesterday afternoon—I can see it in your eyes, I’m trying your patience—but Ingrid insists that we go over everything again in situ. A bit of a bother for all concerned, but it does give me an opportunity to display my battle-tested but nonexistent teaching skills. So,” she turned back, “to start, be sure the turtle is clean; we want to get as accurate a measure of the curved length of her shell as possible. Place the zero marker of the tape at the middle of the indentation between her shoulders, just here, at the line where skin fuses with shell.” Emma reached up toward the head of the turtle and positioned the tape. “You’ll be able to feel it on the next girl, no worries. Lay the tape flat against the curve of her back—be sure it’s positioned down the middle of her shell—and, at the peak of the little crescent above her tail, mark your spot.” Emma pressed down with her thumbnail at the high-mark of the curve cut from the edge of the shell above the turtle’s tail. Releasing the far end of the tape as she reached up to turn on her lamp, Emma opened her mouth to read off the numbers— Behind her, the turtle reached forward with both of her front flippers and slashed at the beach in the same motion and with the same speed of a swimmer stroking the butterfly. Clods of moist earth and two symmetrical fans of black sand flew towards us in the beam of Emma’s light, coating my lap and the pages of the logbook, and filling Emma’s open mouth. She gagged, coughed, spat onto the sand. “Are you alright?” I asked. I brushed at the logbook, cleaning the sand from its pages. Emma laughed. “At last, camouflaging,” she spat, “Now that—that is far more typical.” She lifted the tape to her lamp. “1-0-8-point-9,” she read, the stride of her work uninterrupted by a mouthful of sand. I hesitated, amazed. “108.9,” I repeated and bent my head to record the measurement. Emma reached forward with the tape, swiping the fresh layer of sand from the turtle’s back as she laid the white strip of plastic across her shell. “Impressive accuracy,” she whispered to the turtle, pulling the measuring tape taut, “You had me worried just now with your stoicism.” She sat back, spat, and read off the numbers, “1-0-8-point-7.” “108.7,” I echoed. Again, Emma leaned forward to drape the tape measure across the turtle’s back, and again, the turtle swatted at the beach, sending sprays of sand into the air that ricocheted off Emma’s chest. “1-0-8-point-6,” she read, as the sand fell from her shirt to the turtle’s shell. “108.6.” Emma crawled back to where I sat. “You ready for the straight?” she asked, methodically recoiling the tape measure so that the zero mark lay on top. “Grab the calipers and give me the logbook.” Emma stuffed the measuring tape back into its plastic bag inside the backpack and held out her hand. I did not move. She let her hand fall. “Something the matter? The SCLMAX is not really that difficult—I’m afraid I talk a great deal more than I ought to sometimes, and half of what I say is likely hyperbolic gibberish to anyone patient enough to listen. You ought not to take it to heart.” I laughed. “No—I’m not afraid to use the calipers. It’s just—” I peered past Emma’s shoulder, where the turtle threw another fountain of sand into the air, the powder colliding with Emma’s back and sliding down to the beach. Emma tilted her head, eyes expectant and quizzical. “It’s just that I have never touched one before.” Again I laughed. “I can not imagine what it feels like.” Emma stared at me, her eyes unblinking beneath the red globe of her headlamp. “Well,” she said, understanding in her voice, “that is something to which I can relate; but there is no time like the present to remedy your ignorance.” With one motion, she pulled the logbook from my hands and the calipers from the sand. “Zone: B for border,” she muttered, scribbling in the logbook, “And I believe we are at somewhere around the three-and-a-half mile mark, but we should check just to be sure.” Emma closed the book around the pencil and looked up. “Right—go to it,” she commanded, laying the calipers across my lap. I pushed myself to my knees and crawled toward the turtle’s tail. Emma turned off her lamp and followed close behind. “To continue the tutorial,” she whispered, “remember to check the scutes above her tail—go ahead, the last two plates at the bottom of her shell. Find whichever is the longest—” I reached out and felt for the pointed ends of the two scales of shell that formed the crescent above the turtle’s tail. Their edges were worn smooth—hard, like stone, and flecked with grit. “The left,” I said. “Excellent, then you’re already in position. Now—well, first, trade you for the torch.” Emma pulled the lamp from her head. “Just turn it on now and be careful not to shine it in her eyes. It’s more convenient when measuring the straight,” she said, offering me the headlamp. I handed over the flashlight and tugged the lamp down over my hair—wet, now, with sweat, with moisture from the air and sea. I turned toward Emma. “Where should I sit?” “Plant yourself by her left side, with the fixed end of the calipers towards her head—that’s right. Though you’ll have to get closer, right up beside her fin—” I inched forward until my knees rested against the turtle’s carapace, and just as I came alongside her, she arched her flippers into the air. Her left fin came down upon the sand with an audible thud and slammed into my thigh. I braced myself against her shell. “That hurt—” Emma laughed quietly in the dark. “Does it surprise you that she’s so strong?” I could feel the weight of the turtle’s flipper pressing against me through the fabric of my pants—its solidness, its force far removed from the image I had held in my mind of graceful creatures of the sea, of submarine butterflies. “Yes.” Again, Emma laughed. “You ought to try fighting ocean currents and dragging three-hundred pounds of bone, eggs, and keratinized skin ashore to give birth to several hundred children every few years, and see if you don’t develop a bit of muscle. And this girl is downright docile—it always comforts me when the turtles fight back. Seems like a bit of feistiness would serve them well in this world.” The turtle’s flipper collided again with my leg and I toppled sideways. Emma resumed her teaching. “Ready for the straight? Find the peak of her left shoulder—remember, the shoulder corresponding to the longer tail scute.” As I felt along the curved edge of shell that projected out above the turtle’s left flipper, I brushed against her skin. I froze, my fingers resting against the flesh above her neck. Soft, cool, like the papery skin of a grandmother’s cheek— Emma’s voice called me back to my task. “Did you find the apex?” “Yes,” I replied, lifting my fingers from the turtle’s skin. I placed the point of the calipers’ fixed arm against the tip of the turtle’s left shoulder and slid the second arm down along the metered shaft. Emma gasped. “Good god—you’ll make me envious this next week with that arm-span.” She lifted her own arms from her sides to examine their breadth. I flushed in the dark; holding to the base of the calipers’ sliding arm—as Ingrid described—I pressed in toward the turtle’s shell until the metal touched the tip of her left tail scute. Emma observed my technique. “You seem to have paid attention yesterday afternoon.” I smiled and lifted the shaft of the calipers to my light. “1-0-4-point-2,” I read. “104.2,” Emma replied. I slid the metal arms free of the turtle’s carapace and repositioned their tips. “1-0-4-point-0.” “104.0,” echoed Emma. “And the third?” Once more, I pressed the arms of the calipers in round the turtle’s shell. As I sat back on my feet to read the measurement, she lifted her flippers from the beach. Sand—black, wet—flew into my mouth and eyes, and for the second time of the night, I was blinded. I coughed, spat into my lap, blinked, rubbed the grit from my eyes against already sand-covered sleeves. Through the hacking and intermittent winces floated Emma’s voice—inquiries regarding my well-being, offers of water to rinse the sand from my eyes, repeated utterances of “shit.” I shook my head, determined to appear undaunted, and, as my eyes began to tear, my vision cleared. I leaned forward and read, biting down on the grains of sand still stuck between my teeth. “1-0-4-point-3.” “104.3,” Emma repeated as I crawled toward her. She stared down at the numbers in the logbook. “You’re a natural—in all seriousness, I have never before seen caliper measurements this precise on the first go-round. Not a talent to be taken lightly here.” She glanced up from the book and began to laugh. “Oh dear—and a face full of sand to show for it. If you were not before, I must offer my congratulations: you are now officially a sea turtle researcher.” I grinned, shaking the sand from my scalp— Goodness—I just looked at my watch—it’s well past two o’clock. I fear I may fall asleep before I can finish recording the night. It will have to suffice: a summary of what followed— More than once we saw the red lights of guided tour groups in the distance, but—it pleased Emma—we never crossed their paths. We did encounter an isolated pair of tourists: two grown men, strayed from their group. They lay in the sand, photographing a turtle as she covered her eggs. Emma enlisted my assistance as “the token intimidating male presence”—“Be tall, look serious,” she directed. When she explained to them the dangers of what they were doing, the men replied in English, “We are not tourists, we are from Spain,” and wandered off toward town, the scent of vodka in their wake. At mile five, we stumbled upon a large, white, dead pig, likely washed out from a farm along the canal and carried ashore by the waves. Its stench alerted us to its presence from half a mile away, and when we approached, the winged silhouettes of vultures took to the air. We worked five more turtles tonight before we stepped from the vegetation onto the Station lawn—a more than respectable number, Emma says—and I quickly learned to turn my head tail-ward if the turtle had begun to camouflage her nest. As we returned to the Station, more shooting stars filled the sky than I believe I have ever seen in my life, and spots of bioluminescent algae, like electric blue quarters sprinkled on the beach, shimmered in the wet sand we kicked up behind us as we walked along the waterline. The glare of the town lights dimmed neither the algae nor the stars as we passed by the town in the dark. Hisham and Ingrid met us in the kitchen to take the equipment away for their shift. They laughed when they saw my face. “I hadn’t noticed what a long neck you have, man,” Hisham said, “An extraordinary five-o’clock shadow.” Ingrid asked if the evening had gone well, and my smile seemed to please her. After she and Hisham left, I looked at myself in the mirror above the bathroom sink. An even layer of black sand coated my throat, glued with sweat to my skin. I noticed lumps at the base of my eyelids as I looked, and, grabbing my lashes between my fingers, I pulled the skin away from the white of my eyes: masses of sand had gathered inside the lids, along the lower line of the eyeballs. I have removed as much as I can with toilet paper—a shower will have to do the rest. I don’t know—as painful and exhausting, and as strange as the night has been, I can not help but feel warmth— I am here. Excerpt from Alex, Day Six: Bar, in “Dreams of Ingrid Capac-Nolasco” (pages 180-190) 9:08 PM, Bunk-bed by headlamp It is raining outside, but the frogs do not seem to mind. Lightning—thunder echoing through the walls, floor, and bed, waves traveling inside my chest, along the ribs. Frogs again—not even thunder has deterred their trills. I can picture them, clustered in the mossy crooks of trees and climbing over one another, arrayed along the rhubarb stems of palm trees, slick in the water and light, calling through the storm to their mates. Green bodies, dark by night, flanks striped yellow and blue like lightning pulse. Red eyes consumed by slit pupils that have dilated against the darkness. Rain falling harder now, sparks of light bouncing in the eaves; I hear drops on tin, droning, above me, and outside the white din of soprano frog trill and rumbling sky. I wish all the lights around the Station would go out; they make it so hard to listen to the storm, and to remember. The others have gathered in the library to wait out the rain before we leave for town—Emma’s going away party, whether she desires a celebration or not. I can picture them, as well, lounging on the mildewed chairs and laughing as they play cards. But I have not joined them; I need the time to write—and someone needs to be here, in this room. I have turned off the dormitory lights and now write by headlamp, though the balustrade sconces glow through the window screens. The incandescence seemed harsh, somehow, nighttime darkness and only the electric light from the clouds more appropriate. I walked a second nest survey this morning, again with Fidel. We moved south, away from the river-mouth, beyond town and along the stretch of beach unpopulated by people, where only lightning glows over the sand now. Miles away, we excavated another nest—the first of the green turtle nests the researchers marked this season. We dug, measured, counted out the fragments and pricked shells, and turned last to the intact eggs, the embryos. As I recorded the numbers in the logbook, Fidel pulled open the skin of the first egg and gasped. An embryo, alabaster white and gleaming, fell out onto the sand. “Una albina,” Fidel muttered, touching the turtle’s flipper with his gloved fingers. The turtle moved. Fidel’s hand recoiled. “Viviente,” he stuttered, surprise clear in his voice. I set the logbook on the sand and leaned forward, lying down on my stomach among the piles of shell to look at the un-hatched turtle. It lifted its head slightly—eyeless, with no nostrils, the face foreshortened and pulled into a point, jaws like tiny, curving lips, open to the air—and lay still. “Es deforme,” Fidel pronounced, still gaping at the turtle from afar. I looked again at the embryo that lay inches from my eyes, and it did not move. In the tumble from its shell, the baby turtle had landed with its plastron flat against the sand, each of its flippers unfurled and stretching out from its body like the points on a compass rose. Its yolk-sac lay in the sand behind it—lobes of orange, pink, and red, like an external heart, connected to the turtle’s unsealed stomach by a bundle of lavender veins. The baby turtle had not developed to the point that the plates of its plastron sealed shut, but somehow it had remained alive inside its shell while its siblings had hatched and emerged. I could see the markings of its larger self—what it might have become, what its nest-mates, those few that crawled into the sea after hatching and swam past the sharks and pelicans, what they might become—I could see this semblance in the facets and ridges of its carapace, as if molded directly from the white of the egg, in the folds of ivory scales that ran down the leading edges of its flippers, front and back, and in the notched skin that wrapped like fleshy mittens round the tips of its finger-bones, blushing pink as it thinned. With its flippers arched forward into the sand, the turtle looked as if it had stopped on its way to the sea. I knew the turtle’s posture to be a mistake, an accident of the fall. “Has it died?” I asked, hesitant to make this statement myself. “Muerto,” Fidel nodded gravely, “Yo creo que si.” I turned away then, stared along the path the other turtles would have taken across the sand and into the waves. Before I came here, I hoped to see a nest of baby turtles emerge from within the earth and scramble down the beach, their flippers marking out tracks in the sand like the tiny craters left by raindrops or the footprints of stilt-legged ghost crabs. “You’re going to see babies,” my mother whispered to me as she hugged me at the airport, her face smiling up at my own even as she began to cry. Something about this comforted her and emboldened me. Walking away from the glass barrier at the terminal entrance that soon separated me from my mother, I felt as if I had embarked upon a quest—but I did not think the only living “tortugita” I would see would be like this— Lightning, thunder over the canal. On my thirteenth birthday, my mother surprised me with a visit to the specimen storage area of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. I had already begun to read of rain forests—posters of cobalt-winged parrots and red-eyed tree frogs hung on my bedroom walls—but a new, very particular passion had taken hold of me: learning all I could of the golden toad. Something in the arc of the toad’s story stayed with me, haunted me: discovered, early 1960s, in the muddy rain pools of the misted cloud-forests that sat astride Costa Rica’s tract of the Continental Divide; found only in the wind-stunted forest above the Quaker settlement of Monteverde, only in this small vertebra of the mountains’ spine; toads that appeared by the thousands in those first years of study, emerging from somewhere—the scientists believed from the ground, though no one really knew—only once a year as the rains began to fall at the close of the dry season to mate in gale-flooded hollows at the bases of trees before lapsing, again, for another year, into invisibility. Thousands those first years; greater than fifteen-hundred in 1987; ten in 1988; a single male in 1989; none since. At the time I discovered this new obsession, my mother taught in a university and she would return home from work with sheaves of articles—copied newspaper clippings, essays from scientific journals—about the toads and the world in which they had lived. I memorized Jay M. Savage’s words from the opening passage of his 1966 paper, the first to describe “An Extraordinary New Toad (Bufo) from Costa Rica”: “The first individuals collected were a small series of males,” he wrote, “all uniform bright orange in color. I must confess that my initial response when I saw them was one of disbelief and suspicion that someone had dipped the examples in enamel paint. The females proved to be equally astonishing, for they are olive to black with a series of large spots of the brightest scarlet and without any hint of orange in their coloration. The new form is assuredly the most spectacularly colored Bufo known and is among the gaudiest of anurans.” Bufo periglenes, he named them, Greek for a “very bright” toad. Many of the later essays labeled the toads as extinct, called them harbingers, bellwethers of environmental calamity, beautiful and tragic victims of a global amphibian die-off. The researchers blamed climate change, rising cloud levels spurred by rising temperatures, with the cool blowing humidity that had suffused the toads’ home lifted away from the mountain ridge in the disappearing fogs; they cited pollution from pesticides and cities, human incursion, water- and protozoa-borne disease. A few wrote of the toads with hope, choosing to put forward the theory—a sad impossibility for most—that the toads might reappear in an unexplored portion of their habitat or might be found to exist elsewhere along the Central American Divide, breeding once more in their manic and prismatic swarms. I clung to the beliefs of these optimists—I still do, I believe. I can picture the orange toads burrowed deep into the earth, hidden far down beneath the dark layers of rotten bark, leaves, and mud, sleeping in the cold and wet where their nestled bodies glow like pods of flame, where they wait, for some mythic cue insensible to humans, to climb up through the muck and begin their annual rain-fueled conflagration again. Thunder—softer, echoing from beyond the trees. I remember struggling to communicate in writing how I felt about the toads for a middle school English assignment. As my mother walked past the table where I worked at home, she offered her brief and harrowing assessment—harrowing because of the devotion her words implied and the almost overwhelming faith she seemed to have in my heart, and because, as soon as she spoke them, I knew her words to approach the truth. Rustling through papers in her briefcase, she had called the toads my “grail.” Again, thunder, in the distance, toward the inland mountains. A growing surge of tree-frog song. At the Museum, the specimen floor was dark, lit only by the periodic dim glow of fluorescent lamps hanging above the corridors that cut through the rows and rows of metal shelves. As we walked down one of these passageways, past the shelves that seemed to extend infinitely backward and forward into shadowy oblivion, urn-shaped bottles of preservative and the preserved drifted past in neatly stacked lines. Bottled coral snakes, entwined in their dust-colored fluid like a red, black, and yellow, Gordian knot, appeared and then receded into the dark; terrapins, salamanders like pickled okra, legless Caecilian amphibians all followed. Frogs, next. And then toads. The man who had led us to the elevator and through locked doors into the basement of the Museum, the man who had helped my mother arrange this visit, turned into a row of shelves labeled “Bufo.” Moments later, he emerged with glass jars in hand, and pointed us toward a lab table set amid the lines of shelves. There, he switched on a lamp and unscrewed the lids of the two specimen jars, flooding the air round the table with a fresh burst of formaldehyde, a scent that already permeated the room—thick, stale, and undisturbed. The light glared against his shirt, ricocheting off the images of Central American dart frogs, Malagasy Mantellas, and Australian marsupial frogs that we had used to identify him in the Museum lobby where he had stood, waiting, at the feet of two taxidermied elephants, their skin coal-black and varnished to shine. Appropriate in that sunlit lobby, even more so for a researcher in the “Division of Amphibians and Reptiles,” his shirt now seemed garish, almost vulgar in contrast with the graying creatures contained in the jars before him. In his essay, Savage had mentioned this transition, as well: “In preservative males uniform faded yellow. Females similar to life colors although generally duller and colors somewhat faded,” he wrote. The man reached for a pair of forceps resembling flattened knitting needles and tapped the jars’ peeling labels with their metal tips. “Bufo periglenes” each read, “Collector(s): Jerry James, Norman Scott, Jr, Jay M Savage; Date of collection: 14-15 May 1964; Type: paratype.” One male, one female. My eyes widened: these were the individuals Savage had taken from the forest in that original expedition when the toads flooded the rain-pools to breed, and no one worried for their future, the individuals whose descriptions I knew by heart. Savage, I thought, as I watched the tips of the forceps dip into the fluid and pluck out two of the toads—one male, one female—from within, had no doubt forgotten to allow for the effects of time. No doubt he had assumed that many future trips into the Monteverde cloud-forests would add to the collection of one-hundred-seventy-three toads he himself had taken. In nearly forty years, the toads had grayed to the distasteful hues of old, overcooked meat; no fire lit up the male’s skin, and the female’s “scarlet” spots, while present in shape, instead gave her the appearance of some victim of pox or palsy. I remember my mother standing behind me, holding gently to my arms as the man placed the toads stomach-side-down on a plastic tray beneath the lamp. I felt—I felt confused, at once shocked to see evidence there before me that such a mythical creature in my mind had really existed, and then full of grief at the pastness of it, as I realized that the skins glistening on the table—for each toad had been slit open from the tip of its snout down along its belly, cleaned of its organs, its eyes receded and shrunken—that these skins were the most I might ever see of a golden toad. “If they are gone,” my mother whispered to me, “I thought—at least you should have this.” I nodded, as the man turned the toads over on the tray. “Thank you,” I said to him, and I grabbed my mother’s hand. The man picked up the toads from the tray and dropped them, one by one, back into the preservative where they sank down to dozens of empty bodies contorted together at the bottoms of the jars. “You’re welcome,” he said, “Though I wouldn’t give up hope. I’m sure some German hobbyist somewhere bought a pair on the black market and now has an entire colony breeding away, hidden in his basement.” He smiled, screwing the lid back into place, and stood to return the jars to their shelf. I watched the bottled toads in his hands as they disappeared down an adjoining aisle—like eggs mounded inside a nest, like turtle hatchlings folded into one another inside their chamber, like the leathery hides of the empty turtle eggs the hatchlings leave behind, I can still see those glass jars of toads. Like the sleeping creatures I still dream to exist; but for these, floating in their ether, separated by sex, the lantern light had gone out. This morning, I did not watch as Fidel tore open the remaining eggs and scooped the shells and embryos into the chamber. I assumed he had ladled them all back into the nest, covered them again with sand to keep the coatimundis and dogs away. When he had finished, we walked back to the Station in silence, shading the seaward sides of our faces from the sun with uplifted hands. Stirred from the sand by our approaching steps, yellow-bodied grasshoppers took to the air above our heads and flew north on the breeze. Rain growing quieter—the rattle on the tin no more than drips from the leaves above. Fidel pulled the albino embryo from his backpack only when we had arrived in the kitchen—poured it from a plastic bag onto lined paper, photographed and measured it with a show of purpose, as if proud of his find. The revulsion from the beach had disappeared. I stood at the freezer door with bagged cereal clutched in my hands and wondered, stared at the dead embryo displayed on the counter; the researchers awake for breakfast walked past—Ingrid, perhaps Hisham, though I only saw their hands—examined this new oddity, and left it behind. No one save Oliviana, who frowned, distraught, crooning “pobrecita,” and pointed toward the sea, remarked upon its presence in the kitchen. No one questioned Fidel when he pulled an empty mason jar from the pantry and placed the turtle inside, covering it over with water from the tap. He used no alcohol, no formaldehyde, only the liquid pumped up from the Station well. I could understand his desire to add the embryo to some Station collection—if one exists, I have not seen it—but Fidel has not placed the turtle in an underground labyrinth of metal shelves and glass bottles. He has brought it to the dormitory, placed it—where it sits now, hidden in the shadows—on top of the safe-boxes. Radiating out from the jar, the sand dollars and mollusk shells he has collected over the course of the summer frame the white turtle in a calcium sunburst. And above it—for it is not yet his time to sleep—Fidel’s lavender underwear spans the darkness. The rain began after breakfast, and I have lain here since, at vigil, drifting in and out of sleep, wading along the flooded pathways outside only at lunch and dinner. I have watched the shadows change on the turtle—the silhouettes muted beneath the gray of the storm—have watched from my bunk as Hisham and Fidel awoke from their rest, stumbled away, and returned to their beds, no more than glancing at the bottled embryo. A baby—a fetus— I wonder—I wonder if it is cruel to keep it here, to have removed it from its natal sands and placed it, a trinket collected on the beach, alongside the wave-smoothed skeletons of clams. Like the shoes Hisham has gathered, a newly matched pair displayed atop his bunk. I comfort myself, reason that we are giving the turtle its only berth in water—yet somehow I doubt this thought has passed through Fidel’s mind; we might as well have released it into the sea. I look at the shells and the embryo, tell myself they are the same; and yet, I wonder why the mineralized corpses disturb me far less than that which still bears flesh. I wonder if it is a misuse. The golden toads stowed away in the bowels of Chicago—the first of their species captured and likely the last that will remain—they are not what they were. They have begun to decay, floating in the shadows, bleached, eviscerated, eroded. This tortugita, immersed in water and nothing more, will much sooner begin to rot. It will pass from deformed to monstrous, its smell that of the disintegrated pig whose bones now lay scattered like rune stones on the beach. We already look at it as a curiosity, a genetic misstep; soon it will become the bottled creature of a circus freak show. I wonder if we would have done better to leave it on the beach where we might have remembered it as something more beautiful, something more mythic, than a bottled relic wafting the stench of rot. I am glad that I saw the toads years ago, that I know they existed, but I can only imagine what form they might have taken, how magnificent they might have become in my mind, had my mother never arranged for us to view their pebbled skins. I never enjoyed the idea of collecting, of killing for the sake of study and display, but I wonder, beyond this act, which is the more selfish: to kill and collect, and to collect those that have died, to remove them from their homes and preserve them in suspended death, where the decades watch them age and decay like glass-boxed saints, or to let them die, to leave them be, and to choose epic memory over the desire to bottle a slowly graying reality. Perhaps neither is fully heinous or fully possible. At least I know the turtles continue to breed— The frogs have stopped singing; the rain has let up. I hear footsteps on the stairs.