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forests have oU but disappeared due to hundreds of years of fire sup
pression, logging and clearing for agriculture...
Dr. Odum had been talking as we walked but stopped, mid-sen
tence, as we reached the trees. He bent back from his waist to survey
the messy pine crowns and then hunched
far over, dragging a foot through the grass,
and cnuckled grimly, shakinq his head.
"These don't belong here. This is just silly.*
In the cafeteria, he interviewed each of
the diners about whose idea it was to plant
longleaf pine and wiregrass between the
Ecology and Forestry School parking lots.
Nobody knew. He went on to explain that
although there were a few stands of lon
gleaf pine on the Georgia piedmont, the
ecosystem in which longleaf and wiregrass
were found together, and where their rela
tionship with fire, wildlife weather and a
thousand other ingredients created a
unique ecosystem was, in Georgia, found
only on the coastal plain and not here in
the northeastern piedmont I was probably
the only person at the table who didn't
already know this, but the scientists
nodded contemplatively. A graduate stu
dent—a tall man with a tic who studied
rodent behavior—offered to investigate the
misplaced plants. To this day, the trees, the grass, the interpretive
sign remain in the fat wedge of ground between the lots.
^THE WATERSHED
In the 1940s, Dr. Odum and his wife Martha, (who died of cancer
in 1995), bought several hundred acres of land r.ear Ila and named
it Spring Hollow. There was a cabin where they and their two boys
vacationed. They had chosen the property because it was its own
watershed: dozens of springs surfaced on the hillside below the
cabin and formed a small creek.
"Nobody in 1942 was looking for a watershed!"
We were driving to Spring Hollow from the cafeteria, and he
turned his neck and grinned toothily at me from behind the
steering wheel.
"I told the man I wanted my own watershed, and explained the
thing to him, and he said 7es sir. I think I know what you're get
ting at.' ana he took us around—Martha and me—for months. We
kept on looking at places—beautiful places—but none of them was
its own watershed. I would say to him, 'Mr. Alewine this one's nice,
but it's not a watershed,' and he would say, 'No, I reckon not, Dr.
Odum, but I thought you would like to see it. It's got a creek on it
see?' When he finally showed us this one, and I said it would do, I
thought Mr. Alewine was going to kiss me."
We got out of the car in front of a gate blocking a road leading
back into a dense wall of hickories. In addition to the watershed
and the cabin in the woods, the Odum property included a dumpy
yellow house close to the road, across the street from a line of
chicken houses. From this house now issued a stream of dogs of all
»!ce; 3iKf....riptions, followed by a fat, limping elderly man in
covera'ls a.vi a NASCAR cap. We parked and hounds swarmed around
the car, baying and heaving their heads and paws onto the hood,
smearing their jowls on the windows. I opened the door a crack,
and they jammed their noses into it, snuffling heavily and whining.
Several of them were missing eyes, and the smallest was dragging a
hind leg, limp as a pork chop.
The old man approached the car too, waving his arms angrily and
yelling the dogs off the car with a battery of lusty threats. He was a
sturdy man with a rosy, pock-marked face, but his most remarkable
physical feature was his left earlobe, which was dark red and not
attached to his head, but hung from a thin piece of cartilage about
halfway up his ear. As he hobbled through the pack of dogs to Dr.
Odum's door, the earlobe twisted and bumped against his neck.
"Hello, Mr. Donaldson." said Dr. Odum though the hullabaloo. "I
see you've collected a few dogs."
"Oh, these ain't my dogs, Mr. Odum," said Mr. Donaldson, as he
teetered uneasily amidst the snouts and fur and teeth. "They was
left here mostly. That little brown one's mine, but I can't take her to
the senior's home with me. I figure she'll do for herself. They like
bein' in the pack like that."
Mr. Donaldson—"Champ," as he introduced himself to me—was
going to live in a retirement home in Royston with his brother-in-
law, "on account of my bum leg."
Dr. Odum was trying to find a replacement for Champ Donaldson,
and I was the first prospect. Champ's job was to live in the yellow
house and make sure no one was driving down the dirt road to the
cabin or building deer stands on the property. From the sounds of
it. Champ was also supposed to be recording weather and tempera
ture data, but his great, tangled eyebrows rose in genuine astonish
ment at Dr. Odum's inquiry into how this project was going: "No, I
reckon I haven't been doing that 'tall Mr. Odum."
Once out of the car, the swarm of dogs lured away by a truck
passing on the road, we walked around the house, and I wondered if
I would be a satisfactory replacement—or reclaimant—in the wake
of Champ Donaldson's tenure as caretaker of Spring Hollow. I decided
I wouldn't There was a discussion about who would feed the dogs,
who would clean up the pile of old tires behind the house, who
would haul away the disintegrating carpet plywood and asbestos
shingles moldering under the house. The place stunk of chicken
manure, the yard was spotted with dark, flame-shaped motor oil
stains, and next to the water oak beside the house, several cans of
latex paint lay rusted and leaking on the ground, victims of past
target practices. As we surveyed the house and grounds. Dr. Odum
became increasingly vexed, but Champ remained cheerful and ready
to answer any question: that was his nephew's mess under the house,
the neighbor's tires, he didn't know whe dumped most of them dogs,
but they would find somebody to feed them. Dr. Odum's smile
became tight-lipped and his eyes hooded. He began to look tired as
he shuffled through the house behind Champ's heavy limp, noticing
bum marks on the walls near the gas heater and the hole in the
kitchen floor, punched straight through to the red clay crawl space.
As we left Champ and the house, the dogs sprinting down the
gated road after the car. Dr. Odum turned to me and asked if I could
read a mercury thermometer. I said I could.
"Good. I want whoever runs this place to collect phenological
data twice daily. There's a thermometer in the shed. And a clip
board." He retained that tight-lipped look, though now that he was
out of the hour®—and away from Champ's cheerful, backslapping
blamelessness—he seemed more irritable than overwhelmed.
We got out of the car at the bottom of the road, where sat a log
cabin with a wide front porch. We walked behind it into a quiet wood
full of tall naked hickories. He scuffed down the trail for a bit gruffly
pointing out groundpine, green briar and little brown jug as I fol-
s lowed, feeling a little tired and disgruntled myself. At the bottom of
o the hill he stopped in the path, and I looked up from my shoes and
§j over his hunched shoulder to see a group of 15 cardinals feeding on
* seeds in the trail soft brown females and scarlet males, all with bril
liant jewel-orange beaks. Some of them skipped into the air at our
approach, but fluttered back to the ground when we backed up a bit
"Cardinals," he said.
I nodded, "They're pretty."
"Beautiful" he corrected.
4»LAST GLIMPSES
I decided that day that I didn't want the job at Spring Hollow,
but for several weeks I kept in contact with Dr. Odum: he came to
dinner at my grandmother's, I visited his house and he showed me
his garden and gave me a book of Martha's paintings. I drove with
him to the property to show a few scientists around who might be
interested in setting up experiments. Champ Donaldson moved to
Royston, but the dogs remained at Spring Hollow and grew very
thin. On my last visit the littlest one with the bum leg was
missing.
A few months later, I took a job at the Institute of Ecology as a
field technician, and I saw a lot of Dr. Odum, though as time
passed, he seemed not to recognize me when I said hello in the
hallway. His was a comer office with glass walls, and I could see
him in there most days, working at a small Apple computer monitor
with a glowing green and black screen. He was working on the 6th
edition of Fundamentals of Ecology. In the foyer of the building,
there was a bust carved in his likeness with a brass plate affixed to
its base: "The ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts."
He was something of a local celebrity—always in the newspa
pers and University publications, but I wondered if anyone in
Athens knew what Eugene Odum meant when he said "the
ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts." I wasn't sure I knew
exactly, but it felt good to say it, like an incantation or a Hail Mary.
On a sweltering August afternoon in 2002,1 met Dr. Odum in
the copy room, greeted him a little vaguely, and took a seat on the
paperclip table. He was wearing a pair of shorts and the air of
intractable purpose he assumed whenever he conducted business
around the office. As I waited behind him in line for the machine, I
examined his legs in the baggy shorts, hitched up high with a belt.
It struck me that I had never seen his legs or any quite like them
before: they were thin, purple ?r.J potholed; dark nets of vein and
large, shapeless liver spots peppered their surface. I thought to
myself that those looked to be the oldest legs in the world. And as
he left the room, I noticed he shuffled less spryly than he did the
day I met him. He looked to be the oldest man in the world.
I remember that day because it was the last time I ever saw Dr.
Odum. A couple of days later, I heard that a friend had found him in
his garden. He had been working and had fallen. He died gardening
on a sunny Saturday, a month before his 90th birthday.
After his death, a friend of mine in Athens made kittle Eugene P.
Odum buttons, about the size of a quarter, a photo of Dr. Odum's
grinning face, with the earth from space behind him. They are
kitschy—a little silly—but not disrespectful in my opinion, so I wear
mine from time to time. The button goes generally unnoticed, but
sometimes people ask who the old man with the world is, and I tell
them, "He was a scientist" If I'm in the mood, I tell them he was
the Father of Modern Ecology. People respond with a nod of reveent
almost embarrassed recognition, as though they had known Eugene
Odum all along, but had temporarily forgotten. Because of Eugene
Odum, we are all bom with the word ecology on our tongues.
Jesslyn Shields
Dr. Odum in his element: out in the held with students.
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