Caryn Sullivan was 39 when she sold her house and most of her belongings, kissed her grown children goodbye and headed off to college for the first time.
Caryn Sullivan was 39 when she sold her house and most of her belongings, kissed her grown children goodbye and headed off to college for the first time.
The Fredericksburg-area native didn�t know where her quest for a marine science degree would take her, or if she�d even enjoy the journey.
But seven years later, Sullivan�who�s now a 46-year-old grandmother�is having the time of her life. She�s working on her doctorate at Texas A&M University and studying manatees in Central America.
And, she�s helped found an international association that will teach others about manatees, the gangly looking �sea cows� whose closest cousins are elephants, not dolphins.
�I am doing something I absolutely love,� Sullivan said. �If I hit the lottery tomorrow, I wouldn�t change a thing, other than to buy my own research boat.�
Local residents who knew Sullivan when she sold houses and trained other Realtors might be surprised by her living quarters these days. When she�s in Texas, she shares a cheap apartment with another grad student. During monthlong visits to Belize, she lives in a fishing camp, a structure built on stilts over the water, with no electricity. And, when she comes back to Virginia, she camps out in the basement of her parents, Jim and Barbara Self of Confederate Ridge in Fredericksburg. She has no permanent place of her own. Her wardrobe consists of four swimsuits, lots of T�shirts and shorts and as few shoes as possible. Most of the jewelry she wears�and she doesn�t wear much�is made from shells.
�To me, there�s something special about marine science people,� she said. �We don�t dress up ... we go barefoot. We�re beach bums with an education.�
�Crabs are my favorite food,� she said.
But when Sullivan got married at 16 and had her first child at 17, her focus turned to family. She spent the next 23 years raising Angie, now 29, and Patrick and Sarah, 25 and 24. Sullivan calls the last two, who are 11 months apart, �Irish twins.� �Only the Irish would be crazy enough to have two children in one year,� she said. Sullivan sold real estate during the boom years of the �80s and enjoyed the hectic pace. She trained more than 100 agents and was president of the Fredericksburg Association of Realtors.
After she and her husband, Gilly Sullivan, separated in 1984, Caryn Sullivan started to think about the higher education she never got. By 1991, her youngest child, Sarah, was checking out colleges, and Sullivan decided to do the same. She visited Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina and considered it the perfect fit for her. But she still wasn�t convinced that she should go. During her Coastal visit, Sullivan learned that her boss back home had killed himself. Whatever doubts she had about making a change disappeared. �I realized life is too short. You need to be enjoying yourself and pursuing your goals,� Sullivan said.
At first, Caryn Sullivan took the recommended course load, but soon added more. She was used to 60- and 70-hour weeks and wanted as many credits as she could get. That�s why she earned a major in marine science and two minors�math and biology�from Coastal. Sullivan kept busy away from class, too. She recorded humpback whales in Australia and counted bottlenose dolphins in Myrtle Beach. She cleaned and fed beluga whales at a Connecticut aquarium and counted plankton in the Chesapeake Bay.
It was all academic, and Sullivan loved it. She didn�t want her studies to end and decided to get her master�s at Texas A&M, a university 2,500 (sic) miles from Fredericksburg. Sullivan later switched to a �straight-shot� track toward a doctorate. If she hadn�t, she�d have taken some classes for her master�s degree, then had to repeat them for her doctorate�s.
In her second year at A&M, Sullivan earned a prestigious National Science Foundation fellowship. Worth about $75,000, the grant covered tuition for three years. By this point, Sullivan knew she wanted to study marine mammals, but so many were observing what she calls the glamorous species of dolphins and whales. She decided to focus on the elusive manatees because so little is known about them.
She started visiting Belize, a Central American country, and probably spent more time in the water than on land. She watched mothers and babies. She listened to the noises they made. She documented when manatees visited certain reefs or channels. �Dolphins and whales are more charismatic with their whistles and clicks and songs,� she said. �Manatees just kind of squeak and squawk.� But even during mating season, the half-ton mammals never got aggressive. She saw two kiss once�she says there�s no other way to describe the way they locked lips, with short snouts that look like small elephant trunks. Sullivan�s closest encounter came with a friendly manatee named Claire. The mammal rubbed against the researcher and touched her snorkeling mask. But Sullivan�s never been kissed by a manatee�yet.
The mammals, also called sea pigs or mermaids, are found in Florida but don�t get much attention outside the United States. Sullivan wants to change that with the organization she helped create, Sirenian International. The nonprofit group wants to pool information that scientists around the world are gathering about manatees and dugongs, their shorter-nosed cousins. The organization would also like to raise enough money to give $1,000 grants to five students. �One grant will go a long way in helping a student do a research project,� Sullivan said. �And from there, who knows?�
(c) 2000 The Free Lance-Start, Fredericksburg, Virginia (http://fredericksburg.com)
