Birthday Retrospective 41

Today is my 41st birthday, and I've been thinking about the last couple of years and how much has happened in my life. A year ago, I was in Québec (the city in the province), and a year before that I was in Waterloo, Ontario. Today, I am in Armidale, NSW, Australia. It's been quite a couple of years!

Being a post-doc is weird; this is something I say fairly often, probably a couple of times per week. I have been a PDF (post-doctoral fellow*) for about four years, and in that time I have done what seems like a pretty broad range of things at work. Besides the frequent moves - this is my fourth post-doc position, and more on that in a moment - I have taken turns working at particular skills that are typically important skills for university professors - and that is my career goal.

* Technically, I am a Fellow now, but my previous positions since my PhD have been "post-doctoral researcher"; the main difference is funding, in that a Fellow is supported by an award or funding from outside of the lab group or PI (primary investigator; a professor). Here at the University of New England, I have a contract and independent funding and my job title is officially a Post-Doctoral Fellow.

My first PDF, at the University of Waterloo, lasted about 2.5 years. In the final half year or so I started seriously looking for my next position, and I was contemplating relaxing my standards for advertised jobs I would apply for from strictly tenure-track to include interesting PDFs. The main busy period for such applications is the fall in Canada, but before I really got into a serious search - with a hard deadline for my position at U Waterloo of October 31, 2017 - I was offered a PDF with a professor I had met several times and already had the beginnings of a working relationship with. My U Waterloo PI was Dr. Maria Strack, and Dr. Line Rochefort at Université Laval had been one of Maria's PhD supervisors, about a decade earlier and they continue to work together. 

I moved to Québec at the end of September 2017, and in the personal chaos I lost track of world events; my first day of work at Laval was the day after Catalan held a referendum to separate from Spain - an event closely watched by many in Québec. My contract at Laval was short-term because Line was at the end of her main Discovery grant and had not yet secured funding for the next five-year period. She was applying for two other major grants in addition to renewing her Discovery, and needed a person to divert attention from her so she could focus on grant-writing ahead of deadlines in October and November. My job was largely to work with Line's students and others as the English-speaker: I was the only native Anglophone in a lab dominated by Québecois but with plenty of other nationalities and languages as well. I learned that I quite enjoy helping ESL scientists with the intricacies of technical writing in English.

The grants Line was applying for included funding for a PDF, and the unwritten agreement was that should any or all of the grants be successful, that position would be mine if I wanted it. The dates we would learn about the success or lack thereof of these grants were in late March, and my 7-month contract at Laval was set to end at the end of April. In late January, as I was struggling to make plans beyond that end-April horizon, other professors I had worked with forwarded a job ad to me, at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. 

Dr. Nathan Basiliko paid for me to visit Laurentian in late February - about a week after I first spoke with him and other professors at Laurentian - for a large meeting to bring together nearly everybody involved in a large collaborative grant they had been awarded. That was an interesting meeting, and at the end of the two days I agreed to move to Sudbury to work with Nathan. A big part of my decision was the 2-year contract on offer, as well as the opportunity to expand my expertise into different areas of Restoration Ecology.

Sudbury is a fantastic place, and I thoroughly enjoyed living and working there. After only a few months in Sudbury, I was made aware of an opportunity in Australia, to work with people I'd met when I visited Charlie in December, 2017. Dr. Romina Rader and Dr. Susan Wilson were willing to Nominate me for a UNE PDF, with the first application deadline in early July. There's a long story there, but the upshot is we were successful at the first stage, and I was invited to complete a full application with a 5-page proposal to replace the 1-page version in the first application, due in early September. We were successful again at this second stage, and a Skype interview was scheduled for mid-October; I was told I could expect to hear the decision in about a week.

Around 10 days after the interview, I was informed that UNE was offering me the position. This converted November and December into frantic preparations to move around the world. Charlie had joined me in Sudbury and we had to coordinate this massive undertaking while both of us continued to work - me at Laurentian, trying to wrap up what I could before leaving, and her with the lab work and data analysis stemming from her "summer" job in Sudbury. 

Somehow, we accomplished everything, and moved out of our Sudbury home and drove to Calgary just before Christmas, 2018. That is another story of its own. We were granted our Australian visas and booked our flights somewhere between Winnipeg and Regina, and flew without further drama on January 8th, and over the International Date Line on January 9th, consigning that day to the Time Vortex and landing on the 10th.

Australia has been excellent and wonderful so far, and promises to continue to be so. I baked myself a Birthday Cake today and both Charlie and I have been relaxing and taking it pretty easy all day. On Charlie's suggestion, my Sunday Drives - restarted after a long hiatus in Ontario and Alberta - have become "Sunderday" Drives, a term coined by a good friend of Charlie's in Sudbury. The Sunday Drives were never tightly linked to any particular day of the week, but the move to Saturdays (three such drives have been completed so far) flips the feelings of the two weekend days. Previously, Saturdays often became unpleasant errands-and-chores days, with long hours spent shopping for non-exciting, necessary things and little time to maintain our home with such tasks as laundry or general tidying-up. Now, Saturday mornings are given to shopping for furniture and other necessary things (shops, especially thrift stores, are open limited hours on Saturdays, often closing shortly after noon, and are largely closed entirely on Sundays), with our departure for more fun driving and sight-seeing happening after lunch. This makes Sunday a wide-open day where we can each decide to accomplish as much or as little as we like. Today, for example, I hung an Art on the wall, and baked the afore-mentioned cake. I'll make supper and maybe wash some dishes, otherwise the day is filled with far less useful tasks.

I've been trying to get into a habit of photo-editing, with some success, so here is a recent photo.

My Boring-by-Comparison Fort McMurray Story

My summer 2016 schedule is a bit different from last year's. Instead of staying in one place, working at a single site for four months, I am spending this summer travelling to several different sites. My job this year is primarily to help the graduate students in our lab get their field work established, and set up a side-project Maria and I came up with that adds a little bit of extra work to the day-to-days of the students and research assistants. I give a bit, I take a bit.

Summer field work in Canada south of the Arctic Circle often gets started in May, or late April if conditions allow. There are four sites in northern/central Alberta where I'd like to do some science, and two conferences to bookend this early-summer setup season, so I created a plan back in February / March to spend around one week at each site, covering the last week of April through to late May.

The first site to visit was Fort McMurray; we're continuing work with Suncor on their wetland reclaimation / restoration project, and we have a handful of "reference" sites in the area. Sarah, a master's student in our lab, was planning to spend the entire summer working at Fort McMurray on these sites, and because her work is largely focused on hydrology (especially the transport of dissolved materials through the study systems), she wanted to get some instruments into place as early as possible. In an ideal year, that would have included snowmelt, but given how weird 2016 has been pretty much everywhere, we had to satisfy ourselves with the last week of April.

I flew from Munich, Germany (my weekend in Munich will be the subject of another post, sometime) to Calgary on Monday, April 25, stayed with my parents one night - a too-short visit by far! - then picked up my rental car Tuesday morning. I drove up to Fort McMurray, an entirely uneventful 7-hour drive up the middle of the province.

We had our Kickoff meeting - a general overview of the project, with an emphasis on safety with our contacts / immediate supervisors at Suncor - on Wednesday morning, then Sarah and I got to work installing her runoff collectors and carrying out other beginning-of-field-season type work. I've had to explain these tasks in varying levels of detail to a range of other people - safety folks at Suncor, passers-by, other researchers, etc. - and to be honest, the details have kind of blurred together at this point. Digging and playing with soil, for the most part.

Suncor has tight rules regarding photographs at their property, and while I do have a valid camera pass, I have to submit any photos I plan to share with the world (websites, scientific conferences, etc.) to a manager at that company, and at the moment I think they have higher priorities to worry about. I have lots more to say about this issue, but not right now. So, no pictures of Sarah's experimental apparatus, or anything else at Suncor.

We can only work at Suncor on weekends if we really need to, and we didn't, so we had a chance to visit the reference sites on Saturday and Sunday. My side project, a look at the effects on greenhouse gas exchange (especially methane) of the cutlines so abundant in the Canadian boreal forest, needed to get started. Sarah and I went to Saline on Saturday, expecting a modest day - maybe 6 hours of work - and a need to work fairly hard given the still-frozen soil in many places and the long walk in to Saline. Saline is, as the name suggests, a fen (a wetland with a direct connection to groundwater, contra a bog, without such a connection) with high levels of dissolved ions in the local water supply. The vegetation community is dominated by sedges and reeds, with very few mosses able to tolerate the high salinity.


The Saline Fen. The pipes sticking up in the front-left are a nest of piezometers, used to measure water flows through this fen.


We use 60x60cm collars to isolate patches of ground and measure greenhouse gas exchange. Ours are constructed of steel, and rust rapidly in the salty peat of the Saline Fen.


My new collars (actually, just relocated old collars that were not too rusty), on the cutline that cuts right through the Saline Fen. I'm not sure why this cutline was constructed; possibilities include to provide a winter road or temporary access to areas beyond the fen, a seismic survey looking for buried deposits (in this part of the world, oil), or some other reason.


The cutline, continuing on to parts unknown.


On our way out - surprisingly early, we were back at the truck by 11:30 - we spotted a couple of caribou (Rangifer tarandus).


One seemed a little curious about us.

We returned to the house in Fort McMurray rented by the University of Waterloo, and had a few small tasks to complete mostly concerned with getting ready for Sunday, with a visit to Poplar, a tree-covered bog.


Poplar Bog. Both the "Large" and "Small" cutlines are visible here, along with the patch of "undisturbed" bog between them where I placed my reference collars.

Despite a greater number of collars to install and more difficult soil conditions - ice was close to the surface at Poplar, and abundant tree roots made cutting into the peat especially challenging - we were again finished before lunchtime. My plan was to drive to Peace River, a road distance of nearly 700 km, on Monday so I could attend a required safety training course in Peace River on Tuesday morning. Sunday afternoon was thus spent in quiet relaxation. Later in the afternoon we noticed the smoke plumes to the south and to the north, indicating wildfires. Wildfires are not particularly rare in the boreal forest, and given the hot, dry conditions the area had experienced all April, such a fire in the forests near Fort McMurray was not surprising. 

We treated the circling firefighting aircraft - we saw at least three water-bombers plus at least two helicopters carrying buckets and one "birddog" control-and-direction airplane - as a pleasant and interesting diversion on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I was a pretty enthusiastic airplane nerd when I was around 10 years old, and I snapped a few pictures.




Suburbia-and-smoke shots


It's hard to see, so I've highlighted the water stream, but a neighbour a few houses down was watering their lawn. I took this picture thinking it made an amusing contrast, but in hindsight it takes on more of a futile-gesture feeling.


I snapped this shot off at an awkward angle, but it shows the red stain from the firefighting foam this airplane has been dispensing. I saw none of the famous Canadair scooper-type waterbombers, and these 'planes need to return to an airport after dropping their loads. The advantage of the foam over water is greater wetability - water isn't actually that wet, especially when splashed onto burning trees. And, I'm not certain that a scooper would be able to operate effectively around Fort McMurray - the Athabasca river has very few straight parts, I don't know how deep it is, and there are few large lakes in the area.





Sunday night was quiet - I don't think waterbombers usually operate at night - and Monday morning included a heavy haze of smoke over the city. I dawdled my morning, sticking around long enough to wash and dry the sheets from my bed, and triple-check I wasn't leaving anything behind.

Conditions cleared up completely once I was about 15km south of town, and my drive down the infamous Highway 63 was about as calm and uneventful as is possible. Highway 63 is infamous because of the high death rate during the peak boom years, about 4-5 years ago. The news across Canada would periodically cover the more spectacular crashes, most of which were generated by young men with large incomes and powerful cars beyond their abilities to properly control driving at ridiculously high speeds and making dangerous passes on the two-lane undivided highway. Last summer I saw intense construction activity all along Highway 63 from its junction with 55, about 250 km south of Fort McMurray; this year, they appear to have completely twinned the highway except for one short section that feels like a normal construction zone. I stopped for fuel in Wandering River, and continued on my way.

The rest of that drive is more interesting, but I'll save that for another post. It wasn't until Tuesday evening that I realized the wildfires I had seen near Fort McMurray were actually forming an existential threat to the entire city. Sunday afternoon we'd joked about the smoke, asking each other how far away that fire might be, and I remember saying something like "It must be pretty far away, they'd pull out all the stops if it gets too close to the city. There's no way they'd let Fort McMurray burn." The amazing damage to the city and the total evacuation puts the lie to my confidence in the unlimited abilities of northern Alberta firefighters. This fire - apparently now named "The Beast" - is beyond any normal human efforts, and I can only salute the crews working to minimize the damage from my safe vantage point.

Peace River is living up to its name, in stark contrast to the catastrophe I accidentally avoided.