Field Notes on Vanishing
Entry 1: The Silene tomentosa was confirmed extinct in the wild in 1992. It was rediscovered on the Rock of Gibraltar in 1994. I have been thinking about what it means that a thing can be gone and then not gone — whether the category of extinct has a kind of optimism built into it, a tacit admission that we might simply have stopped looking in the right places.
Entry 4: The research station is cold in the mornings. I make my tea and sit with the ledgers from previous researchers — some of them decades old — and I think about continuity. These are the hands that touched these pages. These are the things they noticed and the things they missed. I do not know how to separate the science from the grief.
Entry 9: My mother called today. She asked when I was coming home. I said: when the fieldwork is done. She said: the fieldwork is never done. She is correct. I did not say this to her.
Entry 14: Collected samples today from the high ridge. The light at four in the afternoon came through the pine canopy in a way that I could not describe in my notes and did not try. Some things should stay inside the field and not be pressed flat between pages.
Entry 21: A colleague asked me why I study plants that are disappearing rather than plants that are thriving. I told her: because something that is almost gone requires more precise attention. She said: that sounds like love. I said: most science does, if you do it right.
