Only weeks after I completed the Conservatory program, Evelyn and I—we’d been dating some months already—migrated to sunny California, where she went after her Bachelors and then her PhD at UC Berkeley, and I managed to help keep things afloat as a rather accomplished piano player-for-hire throughout the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Nothing legendary to speak of for me. I’ve played my fair share of conventions and society shows, and thoroughly enjoy my music-critic-at-large gig at The Examiner. There have been some bright moments along the way, though, like the night, some years ago, when I sub’d for San Francisco Symphony’s principal keyboardist and covered the harpsichord chair for an evening of J.S. Bach concertos at SFS’s own Davies Hall.
“You’d really do the Yellowstone trip?” Evelyn said over the phone that day, sounding as if she were thinking seriously about my offer. “Take a full week in Yellowstone? I mean, out of the blue?”
Just then a booming male voice filtered in through my cell, someone at the podium at her conference, informing all that “recent investigations into Western Australia’s Warrawoona Group indicate fossilized microbial life forms that inhabited the region some 500 million years earlier than previously thought.”
“Hey, Evie,” I said over the intruding voice. “Still there?”
“I’m here. I gotta go, though.”
“Okay, but I’ll do it, all right? I want to do it.”
“It’ll be five plus days in the field,” she said, her words barely discernable over the speaker. “Dawn to dusk.”
“I know that. Hey, maybe we can take some time afterward. I haven’t been there in years.”
She said that was an idea, but she’d have to call back later and fill me in. A new lecturer was about to give a talk on the tempo and mode of cyanobacterial evolution she didn’t want to miss.
“Okay,” I said and got off the phone, wondering at how many tempos cyanobacteria evolved.
***
Our DNA sample procurement underway now, I have twenty-five Falcon tubes, little plastic test tubes with blue screw-top caps, leaning against my leg, and I’m putting on vinyl surgical gloves so I can open them one at a time without putting my DNA into them. The Falcon tubes are filled with a fixative called glutaraldehyde that, if it spills out on my hand, will kill every skin cell it encounters and leave a deep black scar (another reason for the surgical gloves). I’m seated cross-legged right beside Evelyn––our thighs are touching––and just a foot or two from the edge of the hot spring. Piles of half-dried buffalo shit dot the area all around us, and one is particularly close to my left shoe, though that is the very least of my worries. One wrong foolhardy move here by either one of us, and our bones could pile up on the bottom with those of the buffalo that are already down there. The wind is swift now and icy against our backsides (I’m still thinking about that Gore-Tex shell), but it’s swirling, too, and every few minutes it reverses itself and the perpetual sulfurous steam cloud the hot spring gives off washes over us. We have no choice but to turn our heads from time to time and wait for the wind to go back the other way.
Evelyn has in one hand a long pair of lab tongs that curve sharply at the end, and she’s leaning over the hot spring and probing the heated water with it. There is a silicified stony ledge some nine or ten inches below the surface and the lip of the hot spring edge, and on it rest half a dozen smallish aluminum trays that look like egg slicers and hold twenty-five microscope slides each. She and some of her students submerged the slides there over a year ago so the microbes that flourish here would colonize them. The slides are made up of the same thing the microbes become in their death: silica. Though they are microscope slides, these particular microbial samples will never be seen through the kind of microscope most of us non-science people are familiar with. They will, though, be scraped or somehow taken from the slide in the lab and processed in a number of ways. Some will go to various high-resolution electron microscopes for analysis, some to a collaborator’s lab in Colorado for DNA coding, others somewhere I’m not so sure about.