Typical Day
Lisa Connor stirs the contents of her saucepan in a metered, hypnotic spiral. A cup each of organic oats, almond milk, and filtered water swirls around diced fig cubes and strips of an artfully shredded apple. She adds a dash of Rapadura sugar, and then lets the oatmeal simmer while she refills the water dish for her corgi, Newt.
Newt is the only animal in Lisa's house—a choice that perpetually confuses people when they learn of her work.
"Wow, your house must be filled with snakes! How can you stand that?" her uncle, a career firefighter, once asked her over a birthday dinner.
"Is your house constantly on fire?" she'd asked him. "No, Uncle Mort, like you, I opt not to bring my work home with me." Ooh, burn.
After ten minutes, Lisa removes breakfast from the stove and pours it into a small thermos, topping her creation with a sprinkle of flaxseed and a dab of maple syrup before screwing the lid closed.
The lab is a fifteen-minute drive from her three-bedroom apartment, and she arrives there ten minutes early, as planned. Just because she doesn't keep reptiles and amphibians at home doesn't mean she hates spending time with them; she chose to dedicate her studies and career to them, after all.
She walks past the office space into storage where hundreds of tanks and cages are placed on stacked shelves covering the walls. She checks the dry food and water levels—the mice and cricket feedings she'll leave to Jeff, who's always enjoyed that sort of thing—and refills the dishes and bottles as appropriate.
Lisa walks back to her desk to eat. She's in a hurry to continue her work and contaminants (regardless of how organic, nutritious, or masterfully prepared they are) aren't allowed within fifty feet of the equipment. She finishes just as her team arrives.
Jeff walks past her first and eyes the open storage door. "Did you already—"
Lisa shakes her head.
"You're the best, Dr. Connor," he says, rubbing his hands together and loosing a quiet but maniacal laugh. "Here, mousey mousey mousey...."
Sandra's close behind him, and she approaches Lisa's desk with an armful of photos.
"These finished processing last night," she says. "Frederick and Carroll Counties."
Lisa takes the folders and flicks through the printed images inside. Amorphous green blobs of varying size speckle a black and white landscape in small clusters.
"Have Jeff run a numerical analysis on the drop," she says, pushing her slipping glasses back up the bridge of her nose with her thumb.
Sandra doesn't move.
Lisa chuckles. "Yes, yes, we'll need to wait for the numbers to be sure, but it certainly looks like we're going back to Maryland."
"Yes!" Sandra exclaims.
"Well, don't get too excited. It means an entire species is nearing endangerment."
Sandra's glow fades.
"Sorry," Lisa says quickly. "I know your boyfriend lives there. I'd be excited, too. Let's just remember why we're going, okay?"
They'd been working under a state grant to monitor a potential decline in populations of crotalus horridus, a rattlesnake indigenous to the area. Lisa's husband had told her that she'd have an impossible time of convincing the tight-fisted government to invest a quarter of a million dollars into a small team hoping to protect a group of venomous snakes, but he'd, of course, been wrong.
The money came easily—the state Commission is all too familiar with the dangers of letting any creature slip quietly out of the ecosystem—but finding and tracking the snakes had taken longer than expected.
The rate of decline that the satellite images were showing this morning meant yet another expensive trip to Maryland and weeks upon weeks of seeking out young rattlesnake babies and marking them for tracking. She didn't mind the work, but it meant putting the lab's other ongoing projects on hold, which meant hiring temp workers into the lab again, which meant even less money to finish her rattlesnake research.
Sometimes Lisa wishes that falling behind would just mean a delayed product launch or a low sales quarter. In her line of work, it could mean irreversible effects to an ecosystem that had been perfectly balanced for millions of years until a contractor felt like expanding his condo empire.
She spends her day recording the satellite data, contacting the doctorate students who managed the animals six months ago, and logging three hours of observation on the reaction of allobates femoralis to her altered marsh biome. Lunch never happens, and 6:30PM shows up about two hours before she expected it to.
It's been a long day—even longer than most—but despite not being able to eat her homemade vegetarian osso buco until eight that night, Lisa can't help but feel completely relaxed back at home. Yes, her friends' snake jokes will continue on and on...and, no, her husband will probably not understand why she'll be gone for another month tagging baby rattlesnakes in northern Maryland.
But despite the few headaches and time commitments, she knows she's doing something that matters. She's saving the planet, in her own small way. Even if no one ever understands how, she knows. To her, that's what matters most. She eats another bite of her mushroom-asparagus orzotto, and smiles.