Field Trip Highlights

By John Hayes 

Georgia Karma. In the early days, not having access to a college van, we drove cars on field trips. When we camped at Stephen Foster State Park in the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, signs warned about feeding the wildlife. Ignoring those and Bob’s stern lectures about helping wildlife become too used to humans, Dan Brown fed peanut butter out of a half-filled gallon jug from the dining hall to the abundant raccoons. Sometime in the middle of the night, Jon Friedman awoke to find about a dozen raccoons, having climbed in through the open sun roof, inside Dan Brown’s Saab. They had opened the peanut butter container and spread oily tracks all over the cloth seats. It doesn’t seem like Bob could have dreamed up a better “I told you so” moment.

Costa Rica Body Surfing. In January 1981, Bob, John MacArthur, my then-wife Joanne, our daughter Stefanie, and I traveled to Costa Rica. For part of the trip, we camped out on Playa Naranjo in Santa Rosa Park to watch enormous leatherback turtles lumber up the beach to lay eggs while bioluminescent dinoflagellates lit up the surf with each crashing wave and the Southern Cross and other constellations that we can’t see in Vermont lit up the night sky. During the day, we body surfed on gigantic waves that tossed us head over heels up onto the beach. While Bob and I treaded water waiting for the next big wave, all of a sudden Bob took off swimming for the beach. When he got about half way there, he turned and yelled “Shark!” I looked around to see a giant fin out of the water maybe 20 feet away from me. Statistics show that sharks kill only about 5 people each year worldwide. Fortunately for me, I was not one of them. Bob undoubtedly knew about the low probability of attack; otherwise, why would he have taken off for the beach before pointing out the fin? 

Red in Tooth and Claw. Students over the years have parodied Bob’s “love for all life forms.” We’ve watched him let mosquitoes bite him rather than squash them. He didn’t reflexively pull away when critters got a hold of him when he held them loosely, not wanting to hurt them. Invariably, some of these led to blood, often lots of it, such as the time a collared lizard clamped down on his finger in a California Joshua tree woodland, or when a garter snake grabbed the back of his hand in Yellowstone Park, or when someone’s or his own parrot bit down on his hand while handling them. No matter how hard most of us try, it’s almost impossible not to jerk one’s hand away when one is about to be or is being bitten. How Bob always held steady is an eternal enigma.

Hernias, B Hole, and Cactuses. While in Oaxaca on a tropical biology field trip, Bob was feeling “puny.” We took him to a clinic where the doctor diagnosed a hernia, which he wanted to operate on immediately. Unsurprisingly, Bob did not want to go under the knife deep in southern Mexico. So, we made a group decision to start out that night and to drive our several vehicles around the clock to McAllen, Texas, about a 20-hour drive, but extended 2 hours by getting split up in Mexico City. (So much for everyone’s advice not to drive at night in Mexico.) Bob wasn’t able to drive, so he tried to sleep in the back of B Hole, his Volkswagen bus, of which he was very protective. If you got above 60 mph, he could tell by engine pitch, and he would shout out to slow down. Of course, we wanted to spend as little time driving as possible, so there would be frequent shout outs. Along the way, we stopped by a field to pee. All of a sudden there was screaming, as Joanne had squatted on a cactus in the dark. Thanks to Kathy Welling and Chuck Hutchinson, Joanne was relieved of the cactus spines. Of course, with all the commotion, Bob roused from the back of the bus. When he found out that it was just a cactus and not a rattlesnake, there were recriminations about too much noise. Off we went again, arriving at the border at dark. At a clinic in Texas, Bob found out that he didn’t have a hernia and that all he needed were some little pills that would cause “some action” a little later. Having risked life and limb and cactus spines driving through the Mexican night, it’s no wonder that later on we came up with some descriptive phrases for Bob’s ailment, such as “Hernia, my ass” and “Bob sure had a shit-eating grin on his face when he came out of that McAllen clinic” and “Next time, we’re going to make sure that Bob drinks the water.”