Snow is the most iconic and idyllic of winter’s hallmarks. It brings with it bitter complaints from the Breconites (the residents of the most remote dorm, among whose number I count myself), delight from many of the students (including me), and, sometimes, fairly earned disgruntlment from faculty and staff. While snow beautifies the campus, turning the already magical appearance of the neo-gothic and oxford styled buildings into a completely different, enchanted scene.

For me, even when I’m not on campus and do have an obligation to shovel snow, I generally delight in winter storms, swirls of white gusting into the air after the snowfall is complete, flakes dusting every traveler through the fall, the morphing textures of snow from newly fallen, whether fluffy or heavy, to re-frozen after a partial thaw.

Part of my love of snow is surely the evocation of delights from my childhood: snowcream (a mixture of milk whisked quickly into the snow, with vanilla or other flavoring, making flavored milky snow), holding my mouth open to catch snowflakes on my tongue, snowmen, snow angels, snow fights with my little sister, and, above all, the thrill of whizzing down a well-worn sled track.

Indeed, some days when work is too heavy and snowfall plentiful, it feels like a taunt, as if to say, look, see, if you had less to do you could go sledding, you could feel the rush of air against your face. And yes, you’d never get a track as good as the ones you made in your late childhood and teens when you’d spend six hours packing down a track with your sister, packing it down until the ancient wooden sled would carry you so fast between the banks of the trail that your eyes stung and watered. But you could still feel some of that exhilaration. But even on most of those days, the snow coated world seems like a promise of renewal, hidden joy, and promise.

So it was with great delight that I watched not even twice, but thrice, the snow fall, blanketing the campus in a sheet no more than three inches at the deepest, yet still enough to transform the paths familiar to me from my years on campus during the fall semester. And there again, I stood last Saturday, as the snow fell from the sky like a promise that all is always changing and fresh and that always a magical view of the world is possible.

Two weekends ago, as the snow fell, I remembered the promises I made myself for the new year and the new semester: I promised to work hard, start my work promptly, exercise more, see more of my friends, spend time outside, spend more time enjoying life and campus, and work on my thesis.

And now, nearly a third of the way into the semester, I find that though I’ve not been perfect, I have kept most of my promises. I have started my geology thesis, by writing the application I need for the data. I have spent more time with friends and enjoying the campus and being outside. I have often spent Saturday evenings in conversation and laughter. I have often lingered to watch the red-tailed hawk that haunts a tree on one of my regular routes across campus. I have worked hard, and I have often started my work early. On the other hand, I have not been more active. I have not always started my work when I should. I have sometimes hurried when I should have stood still and watched. I have been slow-moving when I should have been fast. But overall, I am moving toward the promises I make myself, and those the world makes me.

Taft Garden, one of my two favorite places to read on campus.

When I come to school every year, I insist on bringing books with me. When I go away for a long time, I take at least one book with me. And not just books I haven’t read. I have a tattered paperback I bought in eighth grade with money from chores, one that I’ve read at least a half dozen times now. When I’m sick or feeling terrible I can go to its worn comfort and re-read it. I got a new, hardback, of A Curse Dark as Gold, the book in question, for Christmas, one of many other new volumes.

A partial view of my bookshelf over the desk

The book is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, set in a well-researched eighteenth century town in a fictional psuedo-England. The touches of darkness, the bargaining, the ridiculous and unwise bragging, all remain, but the injustice of the original, the cruel king and the foolish father benefiting while nothing is said of the girl, not even her name, those elements are changed. While I’ve always liked fairy tales and had heard Rumpelstiltskin my fair share of times on my own, I had never adored it the way I did some tales, but I loved the retelling, unequivocally. It had a stubborn main character, too stubborn and practical for her own good, villains with personalities and motivations; ones with whom I could empathize. It is certainly not my favorite book, but it is my favorite to read when I need comfort. For me, books can often give comfort. Just knowing I have a book to sweep me off to somewhere else is a comfort, even if I never open it.

My favorite place to read in my room, complete with a few books

I surround myself with books not only as comfort, but as a way to learn, as a way to enter someone else’s world, if only for a few hours. I learned words, feelings, empathy, and experiences from reading as a child, and I continue to cling to stories, both ones I remember and new ones, to soothe me, to challenge me, and to remind me of both the enormity and the inconsequentiality of my actions and self.

The words and worlds of books are a place I love. A good story, a folk tale, a literary triumph, a dictionary; all can enrapture me for hours, so even having them near me brings comfort.

Not to say that I am the only student at Bryn Mawr with a sizable library–far from it. In fact, since 1980, Bryn Mawr has hosted an annual book collection competition, one that this year, for the first time, I plan to enter.

Every year, during fall break, the geology department has a field trip. This year the field trip was to the greater four corners region to study the evolution of the Rocky Mountain system. Our adventure began early, though not bright, on the fourteenth, when fifteen students and three professors gathered in a parking lot behind park science at the bus which took us to the airport. Between 4:45 AM, eastern time, and 1:00 PM, mountain time (a total of more than eleven hours) we travelled from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to Montrose, Colorado.

Every day for the next week we began the day  with meeting at and packing into the three cars, whose walkie-talkie call signs became Carlo, Cartherine, and Pedrover, named after their respective drivers (our professors). Always, we had our field notebooks ready with pencils and water aplenty and jackets to mute the autumn mornings’ chill. Every day’s work ended with supper, typically shared with at least a few of our classmates, and, more than once, with all seventeen of our compatriots.

Our learning was nestled among landscapes so magnificent as to make poor photography a challenge. Every day we visited at least a national monument, and nearly every day we visited a national or tribal park.

Day One:

Our first day, we saw the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a masterpiece of precipitous smoky, crystalline rock cliffs, water carved claws showing us the most ancient of the origins of the Rocky Mountain system.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is carved mostly from rocks between 2.0 and 1.4 billion years old, rocks that erupted violently in island arcs, then  collided with the western margin of what would become North America, driving themselves deep into the crust and folding them over and over on themselves. Not only are the rocks of the Gunnison important because they are ancient, they also hold a clue as to the formation of continental crust. While oceanic crust is produced by pure mantle melts, continental crust, a more buoyant material, has to be produced iteratively,either through partial melts of the mantle, or through melting of pre-existing crust, each melt first melting the rocks with the lowest melt points. Over time, this leads to lighter, lower melting point rocks. The rocks of the Black Canyon, derived from island arcs in mid-oceanic subduction zones beautifully demonstrate how continental crust can be made and accumulate.  This is not to say that, by themselves, the rocks of the Gunnison solve all questions–indeed their positioning raises its own questions.

During the trip, we spent less than a day at less than a mile of elevation above sea level, but many of the rocks we saw were marine in origin. The black rocks of the Gunnison not only represent a partially marine environment, they were metamorphosed and partially melted–typical for materials in the deep crust. The rocks of the Gunnison were likely buried more than thirty kilometers below the earth’s surface, yet today the top of the ancient rocks sit more than two kilometers above sea level. There are two sets of answers–ocean level change, and elevation change of the rocks, caused by mountain building and similar processes. The latter is responsible for the Black Canyon.

How does a modern river cut through some of the highest topography and the hardest rock in an area? Inevitably, this question arises when you see the imposing spires of the Gunnison. While the location of the rock itself poses questions, with its features pointing to a burial of over thirty kilometers at one point, the most striking features of the Black Canyon are its sheer cliffs and its elevation. The rim of the canyon rises above the surrounding landscape, rocks which lie below the rim outside of the canyon obliterated on the rim. The displacement follows a fault more than a billion years old, where it thrusts the canyon above the landscape, a landscape that it has lain below, level with, and on top of. When the present day Rocky Mountains were rising, the crust buckling and bending as it thickened, old weaknesses failed again. Rocks slipped along old breaks, lifting up, down, sliding and making way for the deformation. One of these lifted the rocks of the Gunnison back up. Later, vulcanism encased the landscape, bestowing new topography. It was among these volcanic mounds that the Gunnison river began to flow, etching its way over a low created by the absence of volcanic peaks. The years wore away the soft vulcanic peaks, but it was too late–the river was trapped in the unyeilding path it had carved for itself. The land was still rising and the river bore down. And the newest rocks on top? the ones that made it a low spot? Soft compared to the rock from which the Black Canyon is carved, they melted away.

Day Two:

The next day, we traded our foreboding peaks of black with ribbons of pink  for the buttes and near mesas of burnt oranges, pale yellows, and near blacks that make up Mesa Verde. Here we saw sandstones that spoke of desert seas, like today’s Sahara, rivers, coasts, and deep marine environments. In these rocks\ we could read the creation and erosion of two sets of mountains, the anscestral rockies, and the sevier. The rocks themselves, in their enviroments, showed us sea-level changes, and mountain growth. Among the rocks are further treasures–the ruins of the Mesa Verde Anscestral puebloan’s society. Between around 1 AD to 1300 AD, the Anscestral Puebloans called the mesa home, and their homes remain, giving silent testament to their skill and ingenuity. Near perfect masonry, multi-story homes, complex ventilation, and impressive agricultural skill flourished by 1100 AD, and the area was one of the largest settlements in North America.

Day Three:

On Tuesday, we spent our day in a desert full of meaning and wonder, fire-colored rocks shedding sediment onto the ground, where it mimicked the same wind-blown dunes that had catagorized the area when the rocks had formed. We learned about the culture of the Diné (the name that the Navajo people give themselves) and desert varnish, a coating of manganese oxide that appears on desert rocks. We looked at the breaking patterns of the rocks to guess at the directions in which stress had been applied to the rocks; we were privileged to glimpse how the desert and these places are sacred to the peoples who live and have lived there. Again we saw evidence for sea-level changes and the uplifts, but truly, when everything began to come together was the next day. There we learned about the interior seaways, vast sand seas. and the Ancestral Rocky Mountains.  and  while the third day showed us more of the origin of the more familiar parts of the Rocky Mountain system: those parts which arose no earlier than 90 million years ago. The fire-tinged rocks amid the desert, whose life showed itself in the green of sparse plants and the plentitudes of tracks awed us in Monument and Mystery Valleys, where too we learned more of the history of the indigenous peoples.

Day Four:

On our fourth day, we arrived at the Grand Canyon, our first of two days there. While all our days were spectacular, the sheer scale of the Grand Canyon, even from the rim, as we saw it the first day, is unrivaled. Rim to rim, the average width is ten miles, as we found out after making bets on the distance at a particular point. The very oldest rocks in the Grand Canyon are between 2.0 and 1.7 billion years old, while the youngest we saw were around 270 million years old. In the park, there are, igneous caps of rock as young as 10 million years. The grand canyon’s average depth is 1.6 kilometers, its time span as much as 1.6 billion years, even without the newest, igneous rocks, though nearly half of that time is not represented in any rock in the canyon.

Day 5:

For our second day in the Grand Canyon, we hiked four and a half miles, each way, of the bright angel trail, descending roughly halfway. We spent time examining the stratigraphy and we saw the faults and folds that testified to the multiple mountain ranges the rocks had seen built. We saw temporal equivalents of rocks we had seen before, and filled in other missing spots. We saw the canyon, teeming with life, and we found companionship while we learned and hiked.

On the way back up, I measured our progress by counting off rock formations and, for a time, followed a bushtit, a small grey bird, that hopped across each switchback at my approach, only to reappear on the other side. I reached the top tired but exhuberant, and celebrated with ice cream, with my classmates, who arrived, as I had, in twos and threes.

We all ate together that night, most of us fatigued but happy, and ready for our final day of field work.

Day Six:

While I, at least, was not ready for the end of the field days, I was ready for the San Francisco Volcano fields, our last stop, and also the youngest. The San Francisco Volcano Fields were formed just after the bulk of the Rocky Mountains and remained active until recently. Here we saw the ending of the Rocky Mountain system and its long term ramifications in cindercones, shield volcanoes, and stratovolcanos, with the youngest eruptions as recent as 1000 years ago. We stood in the inside of an eroded cindercone and walked on the broken lava flows of mere thousands of years ago. Then, too soon, it was time for us to drive to our final stop–a hotel for the night.

That night, many of us stayed up late,

Clockwise: Me on days one (photo by Stephanie Widzowski), two (photo by Jake Bernstein), four (photo by Emily Kampmeyer), and five (photo by Erina Kironde).

laughing, talking, even singing as we celebrated a wonderful trip. While we went to learn, and learn we did, we also formed new and stronger friendships and saw around us the incredible majesty of life, both human and non-human, amidst wondrous sculptures of rock. We were surrounded, always, by the vast, the monumental, the incredible, and yet always we had levity and companionship. We learned of the intimate connections between the presences of vast continetal seas and explosive vulcanism and we made jokes about the rocks we saw. We exchanged ideas and shared friendship, both of which continue, even with our trip over.

In celebration of #ChecklistDay, here’s my checklist from this weekend:

One day last week, the sun, as it sometimes does, woke me up. It poured in through the dormer window that illuminates my small, fourth floor room in a building more than five times as old as I.

A view across my room, from my bed.

Maybe I should have thrown a pillow over my face and turned back over to go back to sleep, and some days I would have later regretted that I didn’t, but I got up. It’s an unusual trait for a college student, but I revel in the mornings. The promise of a fresh day always seems laden with hints of magic. The stirrings of life beckon me to my walk across campus. I don’t always make the walk across campus to Erdman—many mornings I merely eat microwaved oatmeal with dried fruit and nuts—but I never regret it when I do. The quiet of campus when few other students are crossing the greens and ducking through senior row is a treasure, a time for me to reflect and think. As if that weren’t reason enough, in and of itself, breakfast often offers one the chance to eat with one of my best friends, Rachel.

A photo from a garden next to New Dorm Dining Hall, showing one of my favorite spots to spend time after eating.

Food has, over my time at Bryn Mawr, become a ritual of friendship. Shared meals in the dining hall, lingering a bit longer than we should are a treasure—everyone needs to eat eventually, so eating together is an easy way to meet. I grew up in a family where we ate together, and as I went off to college I suppose I continued to do so, in a way. I eat supper nearly every night with people who are linked to me through traditions, part of my traditions family, I eat breakfast with a friend from my first-year hall, I eat lunch with friends from my first year, geology field trips, and friends with whom I have similar bonds.

Some days I don’t eat with friends and instead I read, but either way, the time I spend eating is a way of cementing my sense of place here.

On Monday, we were supposed to have a field trip to Beltsville, PA. The site is an outcrop of Devonian shale and siltstone–fine grained, mud-derived rocks that formed more than 350 million years ago.  Eager for my field day, I got up at 6:30, dressing in cargo shorts, a sturdy button-down, emptying my backpack save for necessities for class, sliding my holstered swiss army knife onto a belt, and tying my hair back in a bandana. A few hours later, I grabbed out my raincoat and threw it on, shrugging my backpack on top. I set out for breakfast, walking through the rain on campus.

Unfortunately, our field trip was cancelled, a fact of which I was blissfully ignorant until I arrived in the paleontology lab, where we were to meet for our trip. While we were denied the field work that I was so looking forward to, we still had a wonderful time.

A few samples of fossiliferous rocks with a hand lens.

When I walked in, I noticed more than half a dozen trays, jammed full of fossiliferous shale. When we had all assembled, our professors, Pedro and Katherine Marenco, explained that the rainy conditions made the field site too hazardous. The trays were full of samples collected by students on previous trips to the same location. Our task? To fill up gallon bags of rock, two apiece, and catalogue the fossils in each rock.

A sample showing crinoid stalks and brachiopods.

We spent the next three hours and more identifying fossils, puzzling over cryptic patterns in rock, and trying to figure out whether the fossils were in the same shapes as the original organisms or inverted. Each rock held new samples–this one another fragment of a trilobite exoskeleton, another a new brachiopod (a shelled organism). The different organisms told us the environment must have been marine, a shallow sea. Reef-builders, such as earlier corals and bryozoans (a coral-like organism) plentiful in the Devonian. Some fossils were deformed, stretched out of shape, showing us that the rocks had been subjected to considerable strain after they formed. Many fossils were broken, not from the deformation or from rocks breaking, but from the original environment’s energy.

A well-preserved external mold of a brachiopod.

A fragment of a trilobite.

From the rocks we could build pictures of the oceans that must have existed near the shores of what would become North America. Flower-like crinoids would have sprouted from the floor, which would have been sprinkled with corals and bryozoans (coral-like organisms). Brachiopods and some bivalves (both shelled organisms) would have lain on the floor while trilobites swam and crawled around.  With just a little thought, work, and a microscope, we can see so much. Here, in the rocks, we can see just a fragment of the mysteries that scientists are still working to unravel.

To quote Rachel Carson, as she wrote, in The Edge of the Sea, “to stand at the edge of the sea… is to have knowledge of things that are nearly as eternal as any earthly life can be.” So it is with these rocks, these traces of ancient life, some foreign to our eyes, some barely different in appearance than some of our modern organisms.

My name is Amelia McCarthy; I’m a geology and math double major at Bryn Mawr and I have a love for field work and ecology. I also love to read, play music, learn new words, dance, and draw, when I’m not busy in lab, doing homework, or distracted by trying to figure out what kind of organism or creature I just found.

This summer, I went to SEA, or Sea Educational Association, for a study abroad program. I spent my summer doing academic work, sailing a tall ship (the beautiful Robert C. Seamans), and conquering my fear of jumping off the bowsprit.

The Seamans at anchor off Orona, Phoenix Islands, Kiribati. Photo by Claire Bradham

The summer started in Cape Cod, with twenty-five students of college age sharing two cottages, three or two to a room. We cooked each other meals and went to class together. We went grocery shopping together and negotiated each day’s food plan. We spent time after our classes, which took up just shy of six hours a day, studying, playing games, reading for our classes and pursuing research topics that we picked.  While the shore component was wonderful, it was eclipsed by the second part of the summer, for which we were preparing.

A beach in the Pago Pago area. Photo by Claire Bradham

After three weeks in Cape Cod, counted in solid understandings of topics we’d barely heard of before, finished research proposals, trips to the beach, sweaters at night, and a growing camaraderie, we left for our week-long break, to regroup in Pago Pago, American Samoa. There we would join our ship, the Robert C. Seamans, our home for the next five weeks as we sailed north to within three degrees south of the equator, and meandered through the Phoenix Islands.

Me, jumping into the waters just offshore of Orona. Photo by Claire Bradham

The Seamans underway with the mains’l, main stays’l, fore stays’l, and jib set. Photo by Cassidy Manzonelli

SEA has a two part mission: involve undergraduates in and enchant them with meaningful research, and preserve a heritage of sailing. This summer, they offered a trip to the Phoenix Islands, a remote chain of atolls in the equatorial and sub-equatorial South Pacific. The Phoenix Islands are part of an incredible protected area, PIPA, set up and overseen by the government of Kiribati, which is, itself, a small island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Along with my scientific research–which examined the connection between diversification of plankton, organisms that cannot swim against the current, and the proximity of islands–I was responsible for a research paper on policy and its effects, focused on the area, with a field research component.  I was also responsible for helping with the ship’s work during normal operation, and during one of our stops. Once a week, the entire ship gets cleaned as much as possible in three hours, and every morning one watch is responsible for a less extensive cleaning. There was plenty of work to be done, though there were times, such as dawn watch (1-7 a.m.) where you might find yourself with some spare time. Then, whoever was not busy might be sent to work on their academics.

Each day on the ship, I stood at least six hours of watch. One watch, six hours, is followed by twelve hours off: hours for sleep, eating, studying, relaxation, and sometimes more ship’s work and class. Everyday, save Sunday, class was held in the afternoon, with all of us crowded onto the quarterdeck. Some days we focused on oceanography, some on natural history, and some on the history. Class was an update on the ship’s scientific mission, a time to see the rest of the crew, and a time to learn more skills and information.

While class may have been called class, on the ship, most of the learning took place outside of class. If you were on watch, you were practicing or learning skills, whether in lab, doing and processing deployments (plankton nets and water sampling devices), or on deck, looking after the ship and sailing. If you were off watch, you might be relaxing, but chances were good that if you weren’t asleep, you were still learning. You might be working on your research project, or asking how to tie a knot, or learning how to clean the head (bathroom) faster.

Leading up to the trip, one of the most frequent questions people asked when they heard about what I was going to be doing was “do you get seasick?” The answer is yes. That being said, seasickness was a small price to pay for the trip. I got to glimpse some of the most pristine reefs on earth, meet incredible people, do science that matters, and sail.

A picture that does no justice to the area–Kanton atoll, Phoenix Islands. Photo by Claire Bradham

There is something indescribably beautiful about the open ocean, out of sight of land and, more often than not, far from any other ships. When squalls drenched our decks and dimmed the skies, it was no less awe-inspiring than clear nights when the milky way stood out starkly above the darkened waters or clear days when the ocean was the most brilliant hue of blue. Close to the islands, there was the interruption of the horizon, but we were rewarded for our sacrifice of the grandeur of the open ocean: glimpses of sharks and fish, a plethora of birds, and, when time and weather permitted, snorkeling and exploring the islands were a few of the benefits.

For me, it was an especially rewarding experience. The intensity and limited showers certainly aren’t for everyone, and conditions can get uncomfortable, but I want to do field research in ecology someday, probably in the oceans, and such an immersive environment, so close to what I want to do, was magical.

It wasn’t just the science, the academics, the ocean, or the sheer beauty; it was more than even the combination of those which made the trip so incredible. It was the norms, routines, companionship, and atmosphere that both the experience and the way it was structured fostered. When they were off watch, the paid crew could often be found playing music, staring out at the ocean while conversing, or playing cards. A waiting list formed for certain books on board the ship–books read in our precious and, in truth, stolen, free time. We could laugh and talk freely on trivial subjects or about deeply held convictions. We learned each other’s personalities, quirks, and favorite parts of the trip. In short, the trip left an indelible mark, and one that I carry with pride.

Returning to land was difficult–most of us had at least some culture shock on re-entry. For me, there were two things that made the return more bearable–a trip to visit where I grew up, in Illinois, and the knowledge that I would be returning to Bryn Mawr.

Even when I find Bryn Mawr difficult, I find here some of that same sense of companionship and beauty. Here the stars are harder to see at night, but on the right nights, they are speckled instead with lanterns.