Woman in the Woods

 

Sandra Steingraber, "Woman in the Woods, Orion Summer 2021, pp. 54-63.

She finds in the woods a fully intact 2.5-acre deer exclosure constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1937.  There are sapling and understory pine trees growing inside the fence.  In the biological station library, she finds a cache of old species inventories that researchers and students conducted within and around the enclosure with data going back over several decades.  She learns the techniques of dendrochronology and reconstructs the history of the forest the forest thought tree ring analysis.
....

Off to the right, a truck with an official state license plate drives away down a rutted lane.  It seems that the park naturalist, cleaning out his office at the end of the season, unearthed some correspondence from years past and thought the grad student from Michigan might find something of interest, so he threw the boxes n the back of the pickup and drove them over to her campsite.
...

There is a small library cart of paperbacks.  Only one book per cell.  [Washtenaw County Jail]....
There is ransacking and chaos.  All around the women, bedding , books, letters, bars of soap, pencils, toothbrushes fly though the air.  Who has it?  Who has the blue makeup?  No makeup is ever found, But tucked inside the pages of a library book in the cart one of the men in blue gloves finds the shard of a mirror.  The library cart is removed.  No more books. Everybody back in their cells. Clean up the mess. 

COMMENT

A PhD student finds that The Park library has one version of landscape history; the hidden correspondence contains an entirely different and far more frightening story revealing that the study are was a testing area for Agent Orange and that ecological data was falsified in order to promote use of the herbicide. 

Steingraber becomes a reporter for the student newspaper.  She is singled out for police harassment, apparently for writing editorials against military testing,  and ends up spending 12 days in jail.  In jail  the guards again misuse authority as a tactic of intimidation.  As a punishment for having (or not having) forbidden makeup, the library books are taken away. 

The jail cell is described as a "bookless room" -- the suppression of information whether through secrecy or violence is a crime against humanity.