Peril in the Ponds: Deformed Frogs, Politics, and a Biologist's Quest

5. The Peril Widens

{ 77 } CHAPTER 5 THE PERIL WIDENS 7 With renewed hope, Mark and I made plans for surveying frogs and sampling ponds. In 1995 we had logged hundreds of misshapen frogs in a few different locations in the state. But what if Granite Falls repeated itself and no deformed frogs appeared in 1996? If that happened we could be accused of wasting taxpayers’ money, of raising a false alarm. Doubts hung over our plans. Getting out to frog ponds in time was uncertain at best. We were both absorbed by an onslaught of queries about the frogs; we battled to preserve our other projects; we struggled against the tedium of the state’s agonizingly slow process for even small technical contracts . I pushed my mental accelerator hard, sometimes literally. Driving late one icy morning, I raced to a government building for a day-long training session so I could qualify for the new voice-mail system. I fumed: couldn’t they just hand us a manual and have a contact person available to answer any questions? Rarely could I stop thinking about the frogs, which, thankfully, the media kept in the public eye. One news article ran a photo of Mark and me in the MPCA biology lab; looking deadly serious, we’re pictured holding jars of pickled, deformed frogs, like a Grant Wood portrait of a stark farm couple. Late in March, Verlyn and I drove to Milwaukee, where I gave a talk about the frogs at a meeting on the amphibian decline held at the Milwaukee { 78 } CHAPTER 5 Public Museum. On the way back across Wisconsin, we talked more openly about where we’d like to live. Even though we’d not yet committed to marriage , we had had started looking at houses in areas of St. Paul that would be close to my workplace. At the end of April I flew to Boulder, Colorado, to speak at the EPA’s Biological Monitoring meeting. I stayed at my son’s apartment. Steve, a hydrogeologist , had just started his job at a consulting firm, where he would model pollutants released by mining operations into streams. When he’d interviewed for the position, he’d asked his new boss, “You’re not someone who believes that heavy concentrations of metals like arsenic are there only naturally, are you?” While I was at Steve’s, Verlyn called from Rapid City where he was helping his elderly mother. “Are you ready for this?” he asked, pausing for effect. “Will you marry me?” For some strange reason, I laughed uncontrollably, mostly out of happiness. We were soon engaged and agreed to hold the wedding in the fall, knowing that I’d be away doing fieldwork in wetlands for most of the summer. My fears about what might happen the coming summer ran deep. Could I handle everything: our intensive project to train volunteers, several presentations at meetings both local and out of state, and speaking to faith communities on weekends? After one talk I gave to a coalition of churches and environmental organizations that spring, a Catholic sister, who held deep convictions about protecting the environment, sent me a thank-you card. Inside it said: “The candle consumes itself as it serves others by shining.” What did this mean? Was I consuming myself while I served the public interest? Shining? I was grateful when Sister Gladys called me periodically at home and encouraged me to keep going. As summer approached, work accelerated even more and I struggled to keep up, spending time on weekends and staying late into the evening, sometimes after the security guard turned off all the floor lights, not knowing I was still at my desk. I had to find the appropriate switches in the closet of circuit breakers. I brought in a flashlight. “Mark,” I said one day. “How is it that I have eight talks to give on the frogs and wetlands in less than two weeks?” I had commitments to talk at a nature center, to the legislature, on an EPA conference call, at the Society of Wetland Scientists, at our division retreat, to TV’s Nick News at the Ney farm, to staff at the state Health Department, and to a group that Verlyn belonged to called People of Faith Peacemakers. Mark shook his head and asked “How much do you want to give up for { 79 } THE PERIL WIDENS this job...