singing over the bones

consortium

I know when I’m not wanted. I don’t always feel that I should be deterred by that fact. In the Dining Hall, seated at the first seat of the first table, is the Permit Holder of this camp. She is rigid in all the ways that make her seem slippery and fluid to me. A smile that stretches across her face but doesn’t reach her eyes. Spine straightened, a snake standing up, coffee in both hands (“Hot, I like when my coffee is actually hot” she tells me one of these early mornings), notebooks splayed open before her- prey to be digested with meticulously neat handwriting and the specificity of an obsidian blade. When I first met her, I held my hand out for her to shake and I saw her thinking “What the hell are you doing here?” At night, when I am sweating on top of my borrowed sheets and all the heat from the day has gathered into the fine stitches of my bug net, I am thinking, “Hey what the hell am I doing here?”

It’s been a few weeks already and we must have gotten used to each other quickly. That, or a preconceived missive from the gods had been received, downloaded into each of our subconscious ability to interact with each other. “The jungle amplifies what’s already there.” My colleague says, trying to remain impervious to the environment. It’s already in all of us though. The way that I look out across the field and I see them all, working as hard as the monkey network in the trees above us, the jaguars prowling, the wild peccaries digging about. It’s in us in the pathetic fallacy of it all. The days are long, humid, sweaty and we turn abruptly into thunderstorms and torrential downpour. Lightning strikes near my director. He spends a whole day cutting through the tree that had blocked his path.

Somewhere in my journal, I write “I shouldn’t be this involved with everything. I can’t help it. I’ve always wanted to belong.”

In my head, I picture sliding right across the table from her, looking her in the eyes. I sit a few tables away instead. There’s something mysterious about it all. A lone woman running this entire field station, not by herself though the way she holds it in the lines of her shoulders suggests otherwise. I am always fascinated by women in this field, though lately it seems every woman I know is an archaeologist, or otherwise. Still, a certain grit is retained. And in the jungle where everything in this camp remains in situ 1986, I understand her completely.

The same way I understand the competition from another student. The way this student has been plotting this entire time, the way she has taken it seriously from the beginning. I watch her study power lines from day one, and follow them throughout the group. I watch her calculate exactly where to place alliances and just as quickly, exactly where to change them. She is here for the connections she can make, not the techniques she can learn. In a way, she is more prepared than most of the students out here. Myself included. Field school is not “adult summer camp” when the stakes feel this high. This is conference. This is academic setting. This is consortium.

This is the Field. Capital F, and way too illuminating. Everyone has access to you, all the time. Forget privacy, the camp has ears everywhere. The howler monkeys wail at daybreak, a warning surely of how far things can echo. So it’s a surprise, completely, when this student sits across from me. Outside, the camp is slowly waking. The sky is pink orange, and the sad croaks of the frog in the latrines have died out. The student sitting across from me folds her hands together, rounds her shoulders forward in conspiracy.

There’s something you should know. I am an approachable person. “It’s your Libra Rising,” a friend told me once. “People want to tell you things.” I am thinking of a time in middle school when I would sit on a grassy hill alone, and my classmates would trek up to meet me, tell me their secrets, then walk away. I carry those stories with me still, think of them all the time. That is what I am thinking when this student leans into my space and spills hearsay from her lips.

My stomach is sinking, the coffee curdling unpleasantly with the mixture of the words that I’m hearing. “They aren’t teaching us what they’re supposed to teach us.” A question of morality, of faith. And more. “They’re horrible at what they do. They shouldn’t be invited back.” A shake of the head, a strong jaw resolute in her decision. “You don’t know, there’s even more that I’m not saying.” And the final blow. “I’m going to tell Dr. __________ about this.”

I want to be diplomatic. I want to ask this student to reconsider who she talks to. I also want to scream at her, just a little bit. These are your future colleagues, I want to say. These are the people who will be entering grad school at the same time as you. You’ll see them at conferences, on other projects, on future publications. This is your cohort. You would turn so quickly and so early against them based upon the word of monkeys and peccaries.

Camp has fully woken up, and there is no time for me to say anything other than to try to urge her to speak to our Director. He may not be the most approachable, but he at least can do some sort of damage control. But fire is what this student wants. In a quick flurry she is rising from the table. I am left waiting all day to see the burn.

Breakfast is, as always, beans and eggs and fruit and coffee. I am tired of it by now, having had it for the last few weeks. I am craving yogurt, an acai bowl, a smoothie. Something that doesn’t taste stale and bland, something that isn’t filled with useless calories. Today is tool clean up day. No one is eager for this. My colleagues walk themselves into the Dining Hall with less gusto. Our conversations the evening prior are already at the surface. There is part relief in knowing that this student can’t make her complaint just yet. But only because there are bigger trees falling. Things she has no idea about. Things that are more important than academic rivalry and knocking out your competition before they’ve even had a chance to show you their game.

Our director walks slowly on the path from the cabanas. I see when he is intercepted by another student, a different one with a different kind of grievance. I see when the characters sitting at the smoking circle lose their smirks, and when their cunning faces fall. I see when he takes in information that has been disclosed. Does he even eat breakfast with us? I’ve sat at his right hand since the day I got here, and I cannot remember this. All I remember is the sound of the truck pulling out of the parking lot and driving down that dirt road that we were all on hours before, when we needed to scream into the jungle at night.

~

So we go clean our tools. Everyone walks out from the lab holding pick axes, hand picks, trowels, buckets, brushes, line, stakes, tarps. We begin to lay everything we have used for the entire season out on the lawn. A full month of manual labor means that I am seeing how everyone is handling everything. With much more ease, more certainty. The first day, I taught some fellow students how to swing a pickaxe, and now I see them lift it all with much more confidence. I wonder if they could, would they swing it fully now? Would it make contact with the clay soil, or explode a limestone plaster floor, break through a burial, or snap a tree root like a neck?

We are scrubbing each tool by hand, which takes us about two hours, when the truck reappears. Our director walks into camp, accompanied by the former permit holder, an esteemed Archaeologist who essentially built this camp. Next to me, a student is holding his breath. The oldhead directors had been talking for awhile. Though none of us will know exactly what was said. It’s hard to parse when an accusation of racist behavior is taken seriously out here. There aren’t really checks and balances, after all. The student next to me, is the one who has the grievance. He is the only Black man out here with us, and he has been feeling the full force of the hosts who “greeted” us. I think he is well within his rights to make a complaint about them. I think he’s well within his rights to put this all on blast, when we receive internet and a connection to the Real World once again.

This Real World doesn’t occur out here very often. In fact, I think it’s a shock to the people who live out here every summer when they’re reminded of it. There are the Oldheads who have sanctioned this place as their summit. I can think of several reasons why, beyond a love for the field and the appreciation of what can be rediscovered. It’s the same as it was on the island. People like to belong. And people like to have power.

As an archaeologist, I like to observe spatial context. There’s that saying that Field School is it’s own ethnography. But I think its also a fascinating mapping problem. The Permit Holder, for example, situates herself in a cabana close to camp. She can hear everything in that way, but it’s also a bid for her to try to know everything that is happening in camp. The lab is situated directly below the dorms, perhaps in convenience, but I think it has bred resentment from its staff, particularly the fact that the Lab Director must remain below the students of a director who he dislikes so thoroughly. There’s this Older Volunteer who situates herself at a corner chair in the Smoking Circle, which is placed in the direct center of the camp. When you walk in, the first thing you see is the Smoking Circle. A collection of plastic chairs and wooden stumps for muddy boots, a communal lighter tied on a string, several empty cans of bug spray. It looks directly into the kitchen, out at the showers, the direction of the cabanas, the Lab, the dorms and the latrines. (My favorite part of leaving camp was seeing the jungle before me, knowing that the Circle was behind me.)

At this moment, this Volunteer is getting ready to hold court. She and the Lab Director sit there, catty-corner from each other like mirror images with different brands of cigarettes. The rest of the plastic chairs are empty, but by tonight they will be filled with the student from earlier, and anyone else who has been found wanting by our crew and were thus inclined to cross camp from the Dining Hall into this shrine.

Our director and his TA’s lead the former permit holder and the current Permit Holder into the lab. Outside, we rinse the tarps. A group exercise, made more difficult by this point. By this point, I believe we are sick of each other. Or maybe I am sick of all of them. It is hard to be a thirty something surrounded by twenty somethings and the occasional forty or fifty something that acts like a preteen. It’s not the first time I’ve been in this situation, but I was once nineteen on an island picking up after a middle aged alcoholic, so I am swallowing my deep resentment down with every swipe I take at washing this plastic tarp.

~

A break afterwards, to clean ourselves up a little, and head into “town.” Town is a Mennonite Costco on the edge of the jungle where we get WiFi connection and soft serve ice cream. Nothing sweet for me though, because I am still holding onto what that student has told me this morning. I am anxiously stalking the aisles, a desire to look anything other than like myself has taken grip. I pick up bottles of foundation, different nail polishes, a face mask. I have not done any sort of skin care, nor even really taken more than a few glances at myself this entire trip. I had not thought it mattered until now, when the idea of subterfuge has been foisted upon me. This entire time, I resolved to be exactly myself, that the jungle would take me as I am with my scars and my sunburn and my pink bleached out damaged hair. I hadn’t even thought about the Real World until today. Now, I would like to be anywhere else at this moment, but instead I am here, staring at skin care from CVS being resold under florescent warehouse lights in Belize.

I have to make a decision, and I am unsure if this is the right one.

I recall an inside joke from earlier in the season, when we were all excited to work together. “Hell or Super Hell?” We had laughed easily back then, a mere two weeks ago.

In the cab of one of our old pickup trucks, on the way back to camp, I am surrounded by friends and colleagues and the two TA’s whose futures are being sealed for them. One of them, I know, is planning to do his master’s thesis here. Or was. Because I tell them what was said to me before breakfast and Super Hell has arrived.

“Why do they always talk to you!” he yells at me. (Spatial analysis; he is the TA and should have been spoken to directly by this student.)

“Just yell it out!” A friend advises.

He yells and yells.

I want to yell also. I want to scream “I didn’t survive cancer for this! For this!” But I feel guilt instead.

We exit the cab upon arriving in camp, and my stomach is churning. As we enter camp, the Circle is there waiting, and the Volunteer has her full court now. Lab Director, Permit Holder, some students. She silently watches us come in, chin tilted up as she blows smoke from the corner of her mouth. She has always hated our director. Now, I can tell, she is parsing what ammunition she might have against him. (And for what reason! I am still struggling to figure this out. What reason does SHE have, out of everyone in camp? The Permit Holder’s resentment, I understand. The Lab Director too. But this Volunteer, this cook at a bowling alley kitchen who doesn’t have a research project or any stakes in this game whatsoever, what could be her reason to ruin the academic careers of two young students just because she hates this man!)

In this moment I know that the words from that student at breakfast were not her own. In this moment I see the way the smoke has clouded judgement, has infiltrated these earnest minds. It’s as clear as the day gets, and I know also that there will be no more rain this season. We are finishing out our final hours on the sunniest days in the jungle, meaning the shadows are smaller and harsher. It’s evident to me that this place, this camp, feeds on this type of dynamic. We weren’t just students here to learn, we were amusement by academic godkings and their courts. Made entirely more dramatic due to the magnifying glass we sat under, cooking slower and slower. This field station typically holds up to a hundred students each session. What happens when there are only twenty?

We pack up the tools that we had cleaned off. I notice our director squirreling away some tools that were nicer, perhaps not his own but maybe petty theft of trowels and root clippers is common here. Wouldn’t be the worst thing, at this point. Sometime in the middle of all of this, I shuffle my feet through the gravel and gnaw at the inside of my cheek. A friend tries to calm me down. It would have worked except halfway through packing the last box of tools, the TA yells at me again.

“You really shouldn’t have told me that!”

~

Afternoon still. I lay in my favorite part of camp- a hammock strung between two trees, and far away from the center. There are four hammocks actually. A square in which all of us who have worked together before (Our director’s Darlings, as it were) have positioned. They call it “Staff Hammock City,” because the TA’s and other student staff are all in cabanas in the same area. Not me though. I’m not a student anymore, nor am I “Staff.” I’m not really anyone of any consequential note out here, just someone shopping for thesis ideas and hoping to make some connections in the field, caught in the limbo between undergrad, work experience and grad school.

Around me are the people who I have come to recognize as Good Colleagues. Maybe friends? I’ve known them for two-three years, have worked with them on projects before but this is the first time I’m seeing them. They are all in agreement now. If our director isn’t coming back to this project next year, neither will they. This is too much politics. They are here to dig.

Our director comes back earlier than expected; we had thought he might show at dinner. A long day of delegating and grading and likely trying to put out fires has him exhausted. I watch him trudge up to his cabana with the gait of a sleepy bear. But he is top of the food chain out here, so it’s that idea that marks my next decision. The one I should have made in the first place, this morning which felt like so long ago. My colleagues regard me with a lazy weariness as I step out of my hammock. But they don’t stop me. So it’s to my penance I go.

Inside of my director’s cabana is a desk covered with his papers and bottles and bottles of water, electrolytes, etc. He’s a messy sort of person, disorganized but in a way that comes off as calculating genius. (My cabana for comparison is spartan. I want nothing in there but what can be used for the field. My only personality is shown by the two dime-store paperbacks I brought, sitting on the shelf.) My director is seated at a chair and offers me to bring one of those plastic ones on the deck inside. So I do. I sit when he gestures at me to sit. And I speak, when he tells me to speak.

The whole saga comes tumbling out.

“Oh is that why _____ is acting like…?”

“Yes.”

He listens, and then he leans forward. Elbows on his knees (despite injuring both his right elbow and his right knee this season), he closes his hands together in a pointed gun gesture. I see him calculating. Reacting to the news that the two students he handpicked to lead his operations and his field methods and his research out here, his precious TA’s who he is going to bring up in this Field...his Choices are being once again torn asunder. He closes his eyes briefly, then he opens them and looks straight at me.

“Can you do something for me?”

~

There are going to be little things that all of this overshadows. Things that really make all of this worth it for me. Riding in the bed of the truck, all of us laying across each other in a tangle of dirty limbs, and I am looking up at the canopy rushing past. The sounds of howler monkeys as we hike through an ancient city. The downpour of rain, and the way my colleagues looked as they figured out the tarp system to protect our operation; soaking wet, exhilarated and happy. Buckets and buckets of artifacts, crowding around each new find and wanting to feel where ancient hands once felt. This tiny, insignificant piece of chert or a sherd or debitage meaning so much in the grander scheme of things. The leaf cutter ant hills that we jokingly dub an ancient city upon its own right. The satisfying sounds of metal trowels scraping against limestone. A plaster floor found under a few strokes of a firm bristled brush. And the glimmer of hope that I have, in the handfuls of soils I rub between my fingers as I collect it. That there could be something in there that tells us of the climate, the landscape, the collapse of a civilization once so great and intelligent and terrible as ours.

~

It is evening, after dinner but before Last Call and Lights Out. Everyone is resting away from each other, so only myself and a friend are sitting together on the steps above the Lab. We are sneaking sips from Heinekens, a beer we had to purchase earlier in the day. The only beer served in camp is Belikin, which is terrible, and I don’t want to place any further tallies next to my name on that bar tab sheet. (The Volunteer’s tab, by now, has forty or fifty marks just under the Beer section alone).

We are recapping the day in whispers. My friend is telling me more things that have happened, while I am gnawing on my bottom lip once again. My part in this whole thing is miniscule. It is nothing compared to everything else- the secret camp rules, the dynamic between staff, the casual racism- it is simply a professor defending himself through his students. In academia, this is all too common. Out here, anything it seemed, would be enough reason for the camp staff to hate us on the Permit Holder’s dime.

The Permit Holder’s cabana is lit from within. A dim amber light from where her bedroom must be. Other than that, the porch light is off, and there are no signs that anyone would be welcome. Still the crunch of the gravel alerts us from our perch. From where I sit, I am watching as that student from this morning makes her way down cabana row. She is walking, head high, nose in the air as she has been walking for most of the season. There she goes, following that power line.

I don’t have it in me to be surprised anymore. Instead there’s a deep set of exhaustion in my bones.

“Will you go to her afterwards?” My friend asks.

I shake my head. There is a different task that I’ve been assigned. We watch the student knock on the Permit Holder’s door. We watch her disappear into that amber lit cabana. And we do not wait up for her. We drink the rest of our beer, and we go to bed.

In my cabana I look at my notebook of research questions. It seems like a long time ago that I wanted to study plants and people. Terms like “phytoliths” and “Terminal Classic Drought” and “Agroforestry” all float there in that lined space. Names of researchers who I can contact when I get back to regular service. Areas of the world I want to research in. Areas in Belize I want to research in. But what takes up a majority of my field notes are not the plants at all. It’s all of the people.

Little clunks from fruit and flowers and whatever else falls from the trees on the tin roof of my cabana. It’s far too early to turn in for the night but I have no desire to go out on the road or to sit in that Circle. I know when I’m not wanted somewhere, and right now I don’t believe I’d be welcome in either of those places. I am a ticking clock, and paranoia tells me that everyone in camp knows this.

That all comes crashing down in the next few hours.

Two vodka seltzers later, peach flavored and sweating, I pulled myself out to the patio to look across at the park where The Museum is located. There are conversations happening that I'm lost in. Or not included, rather. The team of students refuses to chat with me, on account of one of them having been offended by my assistance one day in the lab. The head of Field Research has been introducing his star student otherwise, to every visiting researcher that is in attendance of this party. This stupid party, in a glass tower that we all have paid for either in time or labor, the view of the park and the emptiness of the cubicles. There is a microscope in one such cubicle, a fossil cast on another's desk- every time I have been up here my shoes squeak across the floor but the sound has never reached anyone else's ears. It's a place that should feel homey since we all work right across the street, but instead it feels like we've been put upon ourselves to act in caricature. Folks have straightened up a bit, have started speaking in different tones, have started mentioning the future of The Museum and the remodel and the structure and all the things that I thought we weren't supposed to look at too closely. Not yet. Not ever. I had this vision of us, in that underground bunker drinking beers on the roof of that structure after hours and joking about the bigwigs in their shiny new office building, in my mind for so long. But here we were. In a tower in the sky, and across from me is sat the Executive Director and I am....gleefully showing her kittens on my phone?

(Elsewhere, the Union's Bargaining Committee is meeting, and I am missing it.)

I had to excuse myself. It was too hot, too cramped, too much. In the bathroom, I padded damp paper towels to the back of my neck and wiped away excess eyeliner. I shifted my lanyard to hide the Union pin (shameful) and I considered taking it off altogether so that the executives who had descended upon us (they hear word of a party in the new building and they arrive exactly when the champagne is popped open) won't know my name. It was futile however, when the Curator gave a toast to each of us, naming us in the process of packing and helping with the collections in this time of dire need. I returned to the kitchen, looking for a glass of water and ran straight into the Curator and her Assistant. For a second, it was like seeing two girls gossiping in a corner, but then the Curator stood a little taller and I watched her Assistant defer to her opinion. Motherhood, or something like it was happening between the two of them. (Not something I am ever really an expert in, but I understand the desire nonetheless.) Still, as I approached them, I too plastered a winning expression and prepared some sort of joke to tell her.

There wasn't a need for a joke. Instead, she acted like we had already had one. Leaning forward enough so that I could smell the perfume (shockingly sweet and floral, for someone who is not...how I would describe as gentle) she winked at me when asking how things were going in my department. "Stick around long enough, and we'll make you Head of Education here" she had said once.

Now, she looks at me with that knowing eye and asks, "Why do you think everyone at the other Museum doesn't like how close you are to us?"

Her assistant piped up. "It's because it's Education. You know. Everyone in Education wants to be in Research." So they're jealous, was left implied.

I thought back to my undergrad days, when all I wanted was for one kid to care so much about a plant that they'd go tell their friends. Or the time when I was leading a hike up a mountain and the kids I was with were so tired they started throwing mud at me. We had a mud fight and we came back glowing and happy and shiny. Then my own childhood, chasing my dog through the redwood trees and sliding down invasive grass filled hills and collecting shiny rocks at the beach, and riding on the back of my dad's ATV and the whole wild nature of living in the Park Service. Research hadn't ever crossed my mind.

Not until now. Not until I had decided only just a few years ago that I had a mindset that was focused on wanting to complete something. To study something more so that I could offer it to others. Becoming a professor is still my end goal. Education, or something like it, might be with me forever.

They laughed regardless, both looking at me like I was in on this joke.