Field trips are a fundamental component of geoscience-based curricula in higher education, as well as geoscience research. It’s not explicitly geoscience of course; there are other areas which make use of field trips, in the physical and social sciences alike. But I think they are so deeply ingrained in geoscience that they have become part of the subject’s soul. There are some who would tell you that you can’t be a real geoscientist unless you conduct fieldwork. I don’t agree with that; it seems like the sort of thing I’d have heard from the mouth of the old man asking deliberately obtuse questions to upset younger presenters (see #1 The conference), although I have heard such things from much younger mouths.
My experience of fieldwork began as an undergraduate. For clarity, I’ll handle my experiences of fieldwork as a teacher elsewhere. When it came to the smaller trips to relatively local areas, I actually found them quite easy to manage. Being outside actually reduced the ‘social claustrophobia’, if only by virtue of the sudden expansion of my local environment. There were still some concerns of course; each more trivial in their outward appearance than the last. The initial arrival prior to departure, scheduled for a very specific time and resulting in the general amalgamation of people milling around, inevitably made things quite uncomfortable, but as soon as I could get onto a coach and settle in to my little piece of somewhat protected space, I’d be happy. Even when the time came to get up and de-coach, a lot of the time we were having our collective academic hand held – it was only first year undergraduate after all. We were very much in the early days, being shown things for the first time.
I remember there was always the fear of being asked a question, which could of course force me to have to demonstrate something practical while the entire world watched and judged, a problem which was significantly less likely within more ordinary teaching environments, especially back in the days when traditional lectures were so much more prominent in education. And then of course, there was the fact that field gear could be very uncomfortable. I don’t think many people enjoy having to tog up in field gear, but I generally wear clothes made out very soft things like intricately-woven fairy eyelashes and cotton wool, with the labels cut out, and almost exclusively with bare forearms, just to avoid sensations which I really don’t enjoy. The necessity of wearing fully-covering waterproof plastic was deeply uncomfortable, especially when you were limited to the cheapest, leakiest waterproof imaginable. First world problems eh? If the best you can come up with is “I don’t like things touching my forearms”, some would say you’re doing alright. Others would say “you’re a dick” or “man up!”.
Residential Trips
Another major aspect of field trips which caused a degree of stress was the arrival of a residential field trip. I’d been on such things before, but only as a child. Back then, the problems were slightly different – how am I going to use a shower when that involves me being naked and I can only be naked at home? Now things were a little different; my newer concerns were more along the lines of how to go about sharing my space with other people. Quite often this sort of trip would involve relatively cheap, communal accommodation to keep the costs down; makes sense to me. But that meant that the sort of alcohol-fuelled socialising that typifies the vast majority of 18 to 21 year old university students would no longer be taking place far off in a student’s union, far from my dimly-lit, music-filled island of student accommodation. Now it was going to be very much localised on my doorstep. I was very lucky; I was adopted within my first year of undergraduate studies by a group of very kind and understanding, deeply extroverted people who seemed to accept what I was, and how I work, looking past my eccentric, unusual, probably rather embarrassing, and no doubt deeply self-destructive behaviour. I believe they were shielding me, as a few people in my life have, and to some extent defending me outright from the crueller elements of my cohort, acting very much as much older and wiser siblings despite our similar ages.
It was with this merry band of gentlemen that I more often found myself during field courses, just happy to be part of the group, which made the more day-to-day aspects of the trips much more bearable, if not outright fun. Here were people who had the patience to involve me and actually seemed to enjoy my presence, not as a court jester to provide entertainment, but as a individual who was genuinely part of the group, albeit a peculiar one. However, there were inevitably instances where their idea of a good time diverged notably from my own. There was no shortage of alcohol. There were, on at least one occasion, ladies involved, whether local ladies encountered somewhere in the area or ladies from the cohort or teaching team itself. There were undoubtedly some drugs involved, but I don’t really understand them now, so I certainly couldn’t comprehend them then (just not cool enough I’m afraid). I really didn’t have the skill to even be present during such events – I just wouldn’t know what to do. But nor could I escape. I had nowhere to go, and I couldn’t leave the accommodation unless I had somewhere specific to be travelling to. Somewhere to travel to and be present in. A target. It’s just one of the unwritten rules. I remember, for a long time as a child, I had to do everything in fours. For example, when walking, every transition in surface, from tarmac to a different type of tarmac perhaps, had to finish on a fourth step so that the new surface could begin with a first step. If that meant having to take two or three absurdly quick and short steps to ensure adherence, and in-so-doing making oneself look utterly ridiculous, so be it. It was just an unwritten rule that had to be followed. So I had to just had to sit on my bed or in my tiny room and amuse myself with a book, or one of the many eccentric activities I used to do to fill my time (they’ll come up at some point, no doubt). That bit wasn’t so much fun. It just felt like being a child surrounded by adults, but I suppose ASD is a developmental condition (if I’m using the terminology correctly), so I am probably, at my current age, at about the sort of level of ability and confidence that my colleagues were then.
Overseas Trips
I had never been abroad before. My parents had never been abroad either. My mother is terrified of flying, and we were never really well-off enough to afford overseas holidays. So when the time came for me to tag along with a cohort of geoscientists as they made their way to an airport and then on to a plane that took me further away from home than I had ever been (by a considerable distance), I was understandably daunted. I very much clung to my band of merry men, relying almost entirely on them and trying to follow their example, very much as a goofy younger sibling might. I don’t know if they knew, but I suspect they did. Then came the biggest problem of all; language. I’ve never been great with languages; I’ve always preferred to delve into languages that no-one speaks anymore, if indeed ever. I’d studied French and German in my childhood, but my unfortunate and somewhat unique route through secondary school had reduced my practical French to asking for a steak, and my equivalent German to a pronunciation of polizeiwache that I still enjoy very much. Imagine the stress on a poor British muppet with the social skills of a particularly dim-witted house plant when they encountered someone with whom they cannot even converse in a single language. I hasten to add that I was clearly the problem in this scenario. But the idea of trying to communicate with someone when they cannot understand your words, no matter how clumsily you employ them, was truly terrifying. I know now, with experience, that a lot of time you can actually communicate one way or another despite a language barrier, particularly with the application of humour, but that’s decades late.
There are, like many parts of my life, a great many happy memories that I derive from these field trips. I think that’s more or less the case for everyone who gets involved in them. There is a camaraderie to it, in which, despite the efforts of those few individuals who saw me only as an opportunity to poke fun, I was able to play a part. I may have been the weird relative from the side of the family that no-one really talks about, but I was in the family. There were also a great many low points. I’ve done a great many stupid and dangerous things when the crushing reality and inevitability of my situation came to the foreground of my conciousness. I personally find nothing quite as depressing as being reminded of my peculiarity. I’ll say it here, and no doubt at many points moving forward, it’s like everyone else knows some inside joke that I just wasn’t privy to, or indeed capable of understanding. I think that will always be the case. The internal management of the above situations was utterly exhausting, and rested atop the physical exhaustion of working in the field. I’ve been very lonely and very depressed on field trips, far from home, in an environment which some part of my brain is constantly telling me is incredibly dangerous, surrounded by people who often want to help, but also need to go about the world in their own way and cannot be expected to change just to accommodate me. When I try to imagine what it’s like from their point of view, which I rarely try to do, I realise just how far away we are from each other in the most fundamental aspects of how our minds perceive the world. It looks like it would be much more fun to be like they are.
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An Autistic Eye in GeoSci 