River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl and his willful ignorance.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.

The Teachable Moment: A Feather

When I retired from college science teaching, I thought I would continue teaching in an informal capacity. I have continued to write books and blog essays (you are reading one). I also have two grandchildren who are at the discover-the-wonder-of-the-world stage of childhood. I thought that I would impart to them fragments of my vast knowledge about the world.

Of course that is not exactly how it worked. They (ages 7 and 5) have a nearly unlimited capacity to ignore whatever anyone is saying to them, even mid-sentence. What I had to do instead was to wait for a teachable moment, when they showed spontaneous interest in something, or could be led into it.

They were playing with their nature treasure boxes, which included pigeon feathers. (Pigeons make up most of the bird biomass of Alsace.) These particular feathers were fine and delicate. I said I had a story about feathers that my mother (their great-grandmother) told me. Lena immediately said that people used to dip quills in ink to write. But, I said, they had pens by the time my mother was a little girl. Instead, I told them about how my grandfather, their great-great-grandfather, used a turkey feather to put medicine on my Mom’s face. This is not what they were expecting.

My mother, as a little girl, got into the natural world in Oklahoma by brushing poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) against her face. Of course, her face swelled up dangerously. Her father went to town in his wagon (other people had cars, but not him) to get medicine, which was probably some ointment with mercury or something in it. He used a turkey feather to gently apply it to my mother’s face. It was important to not break the skin, which would leave a scar, and also allow bacteria to infect the skin. The in my granddaughter’s box opened up a discussion of infection.

And of allergies. Poison ivy is not poison. Urushiol, found also in poison oak (T. diversilobum) and poison sumac (T. vernix) is not poisonous. It just provokes a massive allergic reaction in most people. But not in everyone. Some people do not react to urushiol at all. One of the main characteristics of allergies is that they differ from one person to the next. I told them the story of the girl with a peanut allergy who died after her boyfriend ate a candy bar and kissed her. (I heard this on the news, but have been unable to trace a source for it.) Most of us do not have peanut allergies. But Lena knew a distant cousin, on the French side of the family, who did.

Urushiol does not cause allergic reactions in all mammals. Deer eat the leaves, and squirrels eat the berries. Horses can eat the leaves. The urushiol comes out in their sweat and you can get it on your legs from riding the horse. I do not know if dogs and cats can get poison ivy, since they are primarily carnivores; but if your dog runs around in poison ivy and then runs up to you, beware of giving the dog a hug.

But it was not just science education; it was also cultural education. An Asian species, T. vernicifluum, produces sap that is used in the production of Chinese and Japanese lacquerware.

All this biology education, just from a feather in my granddaughter’s nature box. She showed genuine interest and surprise. I could easily have missed this teachable moment, had I not been watching for it.

Poison Ivy Isn't Poison

Yes, you heard that right. Poison ivy is not poison. I recently posted a YouTubevideo in which I cuddle up next to a poison ivy plant (they are ubiquitous in Oklahoma) to address this topic.

Plants—all plants, all the time—are engaged in a silent struggle for existence. You cannot see it, especially in a peaceful forest, but you can imagine it. Leaves contain thousands of different chemicals that are mildly or very toxic to herbivores. This makes perfect sense, because any plant that did not defend its leaves against herbivores—any leaf that said, “Come and eat me!”—would quickly disappear down the gullets of extinction. Each kind of plant has its own cocktail of poisons.

But when a plant defends its leaves, it is an investment decision. Plants that produce too much defensive chemical, and thus waste their precious resources, risk extinction just as surely as a plant that produces too little. A leaf has to pay for itself by photosynthesis, but also by not having excessive maintenance costs, including defense.

None of this, however, explains poison ivy. In poison ivy and related species within the genus Toxicodendron, a set of chemicals collectively called urushiol harm humans, but not most other mammals. According to this scholarly article (which can be downloaded here), “Deer, goats, mice, and other mammals readily eat poison ivy foliage without apparent discomfort.” I have seen squirrels eating the berries. Clearly, urushol is not a metabolic poison.

The human immune system reacts to urushiol as if it is a pathogen. That is, urushiol is an allergen, not a poison. Poison ivy itch is a massive allergy. Some people are more allergic to urushiol than others, just as is the case with other allergens such as pollen (hay fever), gluten, etc. But why does poison ivy affect only humans? It seems incredible to me that humans might have exerted an evolutionary pressure on poison ivy sufficient to select for the urushiol response.

As far as I can tell, no one has explained why poison ivy plants produce urushiol. It must have some function unrelated to defense. There will always be mysteries and unanswered questions in science!

I am working on a book, tentatively entitled Silent Struggle: The Hidden World of Plants. Watch for it!