All Good Things Must Come to an End

Eric Wagner is a graduate student in biology at the University of Washington. He reports from China, where a group of students and faculty from UW and Sichuan University is working to help create a management plan for a popular national park.

I felt a strange melancholy when I woke up this morning, my next-to-last in Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve. I suppose it was inevitable, given the intensity of the past nine days. Still, it seemed that the day was intent on preventing happiness. Clouds hung over the mountains and drifted among the trees. Usually, they have the decency to wait until evening. Also, it was raining. We'd been told we'd miss the rainy season, but apparently it started early to make sure we'd get a taste, no matter how fleeting. (An uncanny condition of my last day anywhere is that it always rains.)

Yesterday was Teaching and Training Day. All the students went for a hike with park staff into the Hai Jaei valley. James Taylor, a UW archaeology grad student, and Chen Shi, an undergrad anthropologist from Sichuan University, had spent much of their week in an abandoned Tibetan village up in the valley. The village has one inhabitant, an old half-deaf, half-mute Tibetan man. "You should see how he can talk with his hands," James told us. "It's amazing -- any little tool I show him, he can demonstrate exactly what it does through sign language, and how it's made. He built the house he lives in."

Our ecology group had hiked up at 7 a.m. to set up vegetation plots. In our days here, we've found that while the park monitors a lot of environmental parameters, they sometimes do so in helter-skelter fashion. Having a database of standardized observations would be helpful. Although the park was started in 1978, they've only begun monitoring things such as forest health within the past few years. Sometimes that data goes unanalyzed for a while. We thought we'd give them some additional quick, easy ways to determine the state of their forests, among other things.

The science staff arrived around 10 a.m. Amanda Henck, a geology grad student, started the day with a show of some GPS tricks; James talked about the importance of preserving cultural resources; and our group talked about things like fuel moisture indices (which determine forest fire risk); forest basal area monitoring (a measure of stand health); belt transects (which help monitor human impacts on vegetation); and tree coring (to find stand age). Then we all picked up litter, and then it was time to go home.

We spent most of our last full day in the Jiuzhaigou with the science staff, talking about what we'd learned this year and what could make next year more successful. And then it was off to our last formal dinner. (We knew it was formal because our Irish guide, Andrew Scanlon, wore a sport jacket -- his father's father's -- over his usual sweatshirt and hiking pants.)

As much as I appreciate the food here, I'm now wary of Chinese formal dinners. They're great fun, but they quickly dissolve into rather straightforward drinking rituals under the guise of toasts. Through a set of rules that I still don't understand, you're not allowed to drink liquid of any sort unless you raise a glass to someone or they raise one to you. So you'll be picking at something with chopsticks, and suddenly someone taps you on the shoulder. (The strength of the tap correlates strongly with the lateness of the evening.) Turning around, you'll see someone you may or may not know who may or may not be able to focus on you. "To you!" they'll say if they can't think of another reason, and they drain their glass, and you do, too, because that's how it's done. And then off they go to find someone else. And you return to the chopsticks, which have been getting harder and harder to use as the night goes on.

Especially pernicious is when a table decides to "target" someone, sending a stream of people one after another to toast a victim to the floor. The UW students tried to do this to forest ecology professor Tom Hinckley, but he outmaneuvered us by drinking tasty yogurt-milk. I guess that's why he has tenure.