“Sagebrush Thinking Study” by Austin Hawkins

Moving to Bairoil was ill-advised.

I thought this as I placed the last beaker back into the cabinet and carefully shut the door. It wasn’t the first time I had this thought; in fact, it was a recurrence nearly every day. And every working day, I would repeat affirmations as I washed my hands while convincing myself that it was a good job, and my future was secured. But on this particular day, the affirmations failed, and the thought clung to my mind.

I scrubbed my hands and said to myself, “Most of the people you went to school with are not working scientists. You deserve to be here and the work you are doing is important and vital.”

As I did this, I looked into the mirror. The bags under my eyes seemed darker than normal. My skin was ashen, and my shirt stained with fertilizer. I hated what this place had done to me.

I roamed around the office slowly getting ready for the day. None of my work was time-sensitive; one could even argue my work mattered very little at all. Most of my colleagues made that argument regularly, in fact. After all, I'm only a federal government employee studying the intricacies and supposed communication of sagebrush.

If you don’t understand what I mean by the communication of sagebrush, don’t worry – I wasn’t too convinced at first either. It wasn’t until I landed this job that I found out students at the University of Wisconsin discovered sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) seemed to be able to communicate, similarly to aspen groves. Like aspen, big sagebrush reproduces through sprouts that shoot up from an underground rhizome. Dissimilarly from aspen, they are also able to reproduce from seedlings. The seedlings are what caused a conundrum in the communication theory.

There are four offices for the study: Twin Falls, Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah; Denver, Colorado; and Bairoil, Wyoming. Government jobs are squirrely, and oftentimes during the hiring process, a desirable location (Denver) will be dangled as either a potential home office or an office to aspire to. This is before they inevitably tell you that your office will be in Bairoil, but you can have your choice of Jeffrey City, Muddy Gap, or Bairoil for living accommodations. It took some doing, but I convinced myself I wasn’t disappointed when I accepted the job and understood I would be working in Bairoil for the next two years. There were some perks –I was only four hours from the east entrance of Yellowstone and Lander was only a little over an hour away. If I scrunched up my face and wasn’t honest with myself, Denver was close enough, too. I could live with all of that.

But my ex couldn’t. He had a large, Matthew Shepherd-sized fear of living in Wyoming, and I couldn’t necessarily blame him. Although Salt Lake and Twin Falls wouldn’t have felt much safer, something about the idea of Wyoming specifically rattled him. It rattled him enough that I knew as soon as I mentioned the job, our relationship was over. The light of his eyes glazed, and his breath became rhythmic as he began calculating how he could afford to stay in our apartment and what his life would be like alone. I began doing the same. It wasn’t the first circumstantial breakup I had gone through, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.

So, there I was, stuck in the middle of a hundred-seventy-million-acre sagebrush ocean, with nothing but the damn plants to keep me company. Initially, they were lousy conversationalists.

At first, I was entirely above-board with the whole study. I would come into the lab and carefully measure the temperature of each plant after I created a stimulus. My theory was that the plants communicated through temperature; when good things happened, warmth, water, sunlight, they exuded a slight uptick in temperature. And when something bad happened, they were chilled. I was mostly right.

Each day I harassed or delighted my little shrubs, and they responded warm or cold. That was until one day I began speaking to the plants, off the record, about my personal life. I told them each about my ex and how he couldn’t commit. I told them about my relationship with my mom and the fact that I would always be the weird little theater kid to her.

And I cried. A lot.

It was cathartic and the plants responded in a warmth, which felt like an embrace. It was almost as if the whole greenhouse smelled like perfume, and I sensed that they cared.

This went on for entirely too long, as they lulled me into a false sense of security. It happened so gradually that I think a less diligent scientist would never have noticed.

Their first prank was to respond to the stimulus in the opposite manner. It didn’t matter very much –this was a two-year study, and one day of weird results wouldn’t affect the experiment as a whole. But then I noticed something else. They were all leaned away from me so that I had to bend over and measure awkwardly. My shirt hung untucked, allowing my unfortunate-looking and rather hairy belly button to become exposed. It was as if I could almost hear a giggle in the room.

I quickly pulled down my shirt and tucked it back in. Sagebrush eyes were upon me, and I sensed whispers about the tubby, gay nerd all around the room. I quickly left the building.

I needed to clear my head. As soon as I stepped outside, the thousands of sagebrush surrounding the building made me chuckle to myself. I was cabin feverish. Or bored. There wasn’t much to stimulate me in Bairoil, so I made the conscious decision that moment to dedicate more time to my work, directly in the line of fire of my tormentors.

They were on their best behavior for the next few days, and I began to believe maybe I was just tired that day and that’s why the results were off. Perhaps, I dreamt it all.

No sooner had I fallen back into my old routines, the sagebrush decided to be hellions once again. One day there was no response. I rubbed them with ice, starved others of water, and still every plant was silent.

The next day every third plant responded, and not in a way that made any sense. Some of the plants responded as expected, others the opposite, and then some almost an exaggerated, manic response. The only commonality was that it was the third plant in each row.

On the third, and worst day, the plants were completely frigid to the touch. My breath hung in the air as I stepped into the greenhouse, and I knew that they were up to something diabolical. I reached out to measure the temperature of the first plant and the cold stung my hand. I yelped and breathed on the red, tender skin to warm it back up. I hated those plants.

With all the grief the plants caused, I stopped caring about keeping up appearances. I would roll out of bed and go to work in my pajamas. They were stained with mud and sage and sweat. The plants relished the decline of my mental health. The smellier and worse I got, the warmer and happier they seemed to be. Giddy in my demise.

To test this, I decided to put effort into my appearance and make note of the reaction. I showered, shaved, and put on a tie. Every single plant was cold to the touch. They hated that I decided to take care of myself.

I sipped my coffee as I wrote that day's report. The steam rose and fogged my glasses. I wiped them and continued my email to the other teams.

"I'm not making an official note of this in the report, but I had a general question for the group. Has anyone noticed that stimuli not directed at the plants causing a reaction across all specimens? I don't want to get into specifics quite yet, but I think the plants are making fun of me."

I pressed send and before I closed my laptop, it dinged with a notification. I opened the email to, "Twin Falls here. I thought it was just me. My kids bought me a Big Bang Theory tie and the sagebrush was cold to the touch."

I gasped. The sound of the cold Wyoming wind blew against the window and still my gasp was louder. The sagebrush was bullying all of us poor scientists.

I began to wonder what other things the sagebrush would bully, or if it just picked on sad, newly single men and schlubby, middle-aged dads. This seemed to be punching down to me.

A plan formed inside my head. It was held together by a strong scientific curiosity, an angry sense of justice for bully victims, and a little bit of spite for my ex. I wanted to show him that my work mattered. I said nothing to the plants and left for the day.

The next morning, I cleaned up the beakers I left out the day before. I cursed Bairoil and tried to convince myself that my work mattered. Or, at the very least, that I mattered. I threw open the door to the greenhouse with gusto, ready to tell the plants off one by one. I certainly wasn’t going to let them have the last laugh.

I hoped it would do two things: piss the plants off and confuse them into not being sure whether to communicate that I was good or bad. But as soon as I was in the room, I realized they had anticipated me doing something crazy, as I went from plant to plant and mocked them. Each one was alternately cold and hot. One would be hot to the touch, happy as a clam. The next would be frigid, almost to the point of wilting. I threw my hands up in frustration and left the greenhouse before I could review each. And I sensed them mocking me behind the closed door. All warm and totally smug.

I marched over to the shed and threw open the door. The metal banged against the wall as I rummaged. Each tool was thrown loudly aside until finally I spotted the handheld blowtorch. At that moment, I hadn't planned on committing herbicide, just a slight menace. But the longer I stood with the blowtorch in hand, the further into madness I fell. The mocking. The bad science. All because the damn plants thought they were funny. Bullies without opposable thumbs don't often get away with their crimes.

I burst into the greenhouse and interrupted a raucous celebration. Each plant was warm and giddy with its efforts to mock and harass me. I pulled the trigger to the blowtorch to show the crowd I meant business. They didn't care, it was as if seeing my reaction made them happier. I could sense the sagebrush outside the wall hearing the commotion and wanting in on it –the knowledge of how big of a dweeb I was had jumped to outside the experiment. It raced from plant to plant, across Wyoming, then west to Utah and Idaho, north through Montana and south all the way to the Mexican border.

A single species across a third of the country all knew how pathetic and miserable I was, and my thirst for vengeance could no longer be quenched with just menacing. I picked up the nearest shears and cut one plant apart viciously. Then moved on to the next. I pulled out the blow torch and began indiscriminately burning everything in sight.

I stood at the door of the greenhouse and realized quite suddenly that I would lose my job. The burning smelled earthy and clean.

About Austin Hawkins
He/Him/HIs

Austin's stories have appeared in Twenty Bellows, Duck Head Journal, and SeaGlass Literary. When he's not writing, he can be found wandering around outside. Austin currently lives with his wife and son in Lander, Wyoming.