When The Colbert Report calls about her research, marine biologist Skylar Bayer finds an unexpected collaborator and friend in the fisherman helping her get scallops.

Skylar Bayer is a marine biologist, a storyteller, and a science communicator. She completed her Ph.D. in the secret sex lives of scallops, a subject that landed her on The Colbert Report in 2013. Since then she has dabbled in a diversity of science communication activities, all of which you can read about on her website. She's an alum of the D.C.-based Sea Grant Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship program. Currently, she is a National Academy of Sciences NRC post-doctoral Research Associate at the NOAA Milford Laboratory and is the Secretary of the Ecological Society of America's Communication & Engagement Section. Her heart, husband, house, two dogs and a grumpy cat all reside in Maine. She also enjoys Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the gentle art. Follow her on Twitter @drsrbayer.

This story originally aired on April 12, 2019 in an episode titled “Limelight.”

Story Transcript

I’m driving back to my house and, across my phone, there's an alert that flashes and I see the words Colbert Report.  I am excited and anxious at the same time. When I get home, I open my laptop and I open my email. What’s weird is the alert is from my blog email, and no one reads my blog.  Then I keep reading and it’s from a producer, or person claiming to be a producer, from the Colbert Report and I immediately Google her name and she is in fact a real person.

She had been reading this story in the Associated Press and other news articles about this man who had lost some buckets of mollusk guts and my blog post was the only thing that existed on the internet that clarified that they were specifically samples for me, a graduate student, that a fisherman named Andy Mays had lost.  The samples were actually specifically scallop gonads.

Only a few days prior, I think, I had been sitting in a parking lot at the Somesville One Stop, which is a gas station in Mount Desert Island on the coast of Maine waiting to meet up with the one and only Andy Mays and this is the first time I had embarked on a cooperative research project.  Cooperative or collaborative research is when you, as a scientist, work with a non-scientist on a research project.

Andy is this tall, lanky, strong fisherman with these glasses and he's absolutely one of the toughest guys I've met.  He goes scuba diving for scallops in the middle of winter when it’s 30 to 50 degrees, because that’s when you harvest them.  And he always seems like he's scheming. He's a little bit like Wile E. Coyote, but somehow comes through like the Road Runner every time.  I’m not really sure how I feel about if I’m ever going to get my samples that I trusted him with back, because he's such a schemer.

So I see him in the parking lot and I go, “Andy, I’m here.  Where are the samples?”

He's like, “Well, I put them in your car.”  

I was like, “No.  No, you did not put them in my car.”  

And he points to this now-empty parking space across the lot and he's like, “Well, I put them in that car,” and the car is gone and so is my confidence in this collaborative research project.  

So I am back at my computer absolutely excited and horrified and wondering what I should do about this producer.  The Colbert Report? It’s my parents’ favorite show, it’s my favorite show, it’s amazing. I’m a second-year grad student.  What the hell do I have to lose? But what is the university going to think? What is Andy going to think?

The university, none of the higher ups, including my adviser, Director of the Marine Center at the time, the PR Department, no one really wants me to do it.  They won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. But that’s okay because, again, I’m a second-year grad student. I don't have anything to lose. But I really care about what Andy thinks.  Although Andy and I have a passion for the scallop fishery, we have a lot of differences.

He's a very devout Catholic Christian and I’m a Unitarian Universalist which is like being part of a spiritual book club that meets once every few years.  He has conservative political leanings. I’m pretty sure he supported governor LePage in Maine twice which, for those that don’t know, is sort of the original Donald Trump but governs Maine.  I’m more part of the group of people in Maine who supported ranked-choice voting in reaction to governor LePage getting elected twice.

Then finally, he believed that climate change was a hoax and I know that climate change is real.  So asking him, the person he is and the group of people that he's from, to go on a liberal media TV show that makes fun of people like him and ask him to be the butt of that joke is a really big ask.  That’s a big ask.

And I ask him and he's like, “Oh, it’s going to be great, Skylar.  I think this is a great idea. Like you think it’s a good idea, I think it’s a great idea.  I was class clown in college and in high school. This is it. This is my jam.”

So the producers come.  They film. It’s glorious.  Everyone who doubted me at the university now love me.  I’m getting emails from deans I've never heard of. And there we are on this TV show, Andy and me representing Mainer scientists, fishermen and invertebrates everywhere.  

But after this grand adventure where, really, Andy was the only person who truly believed in me and really upped my confidence in science communication, we kind of went our different ways: he in his sort of conservative fisherman world, as I perceived, and my liberal scientist, over-educated world.  I kind of felt guilty. I felt like I had somehow used him for professional gain, for fame, although not fortune. And my guilt really deepened a few years after that when I had found out that he had been diagnosed with cancer and I hadn’t really seen him. I was kind of ashamed that I hadn’t known.

So I call him and his wife up, Michelle, and I say, “Is there anything I can do?”  

He said, “Oh, I have some chemotherapy treatment.  Why don’t you come visit me and talk to me until it kicks in,” because usually he’ll fall asleep.  

I go and see him and he's still the strong, devout Catholic Andy with his faith in God that I had met.  His spirit is so strong, he looks strong, he's great. And I really have faith in that moment seeing him that he's going to do just fine.  For a 48-year old man, he was in amazing shape and he was continuing to scuba dive even while on chemotherapy treatment. He's tough.

Then the next year I got married.  My husband and I decided to have a party where we invited everyone we knew, mostly so people wouldn’t yell at us about being exclusive.  We did a Facebook invite and I invited Andy. Andy lives three hours away. I don't expect him to necessarily show up and he gets so excited.  

He messages me and he's like, “I’m so excited, Skylar.  I love weddings and I can’t wait to come to your party. I'll bring lobsters, I’ll go lobstering and I'll bring some and it will be great.”  

I went, “Wow!  That sounds really great, Andy, but no pressure.  It’s a long trip and that’s a lot to ask.”

So I’m not really expecting to see him but that day, a couple of hours in the party, he shows up in sort of a clouded dust with his truck coming up the driveway and he's got twenty lobsters, at least, that he went fishing for that morning.  And he drove three hours from Mount Desert Island all the way to our house with these lobsters.

Then he boils them outside, he boils all of them and cooks them for all of us.  He finally comes inside and I hadn’t really seen him with his coat and hat off yet.  He's smiling but as he takes his coat off, I notice that he's probably lost about 50 pounds and he doesn’t have any hair.  He doesn’t hair on his head, he doesn’t have eyebrows, he doesn’t have eyelashes. And the chemotherapy started taking a toll on him.  

He stays late.  Everyone has left and so it’s just me and him talking.  

I’m like, “How are you?  How are you doing?”

He's like, “You know, chemo is kicking my ass but I’m hanging in there and I’m still going scuba diving everyday.”

I’m like, “Scuba diving?  That seems dangerous on chemotherapy, like on a good day.”  

And he's like, “Well, while I’m underwater, it’s the only place I can forget that I have cancer.  It’s my life.”

Then he's like, “Well, how are you doing?”  So I start complaining about grad school and grant writing and not having a career with funding, and there's actually this collaborative research project that we’re going to write a grant proposal for again, and actually letters from fishermen would be really helpful.  

He's like, “Yeah, Skylar, it sounds like a great idea.  I'll write you a letter.”

I’m like, “Okay, Andy.  That sounds great.”

He drives back that night and I said, “Can’t you just stay over?”  

He's like, “Well, the chemo doesn’t let me sleep so this is actually good.”  

He messages me later that night and he's like, “Oh, such a perfect night.  The sky was clear, the stars were out, the moon was bright. Thank you for inviting me to your party.  It was the best time.”

The next year, my husband and I are coming back from a trip to Iceland.  As soon as the plane lands, I turn on my phone and I have all these text messages, some of them are from Michelle, Andy’s wife informing me that Andy is now in hospice.  The cancer had spread to his brain and spinal cord and they didn’t know until just now.

I message her back because she said, “You're one of the people that Andy would like to see while he's in hospice.”  

And I’m like, “Is it too late?  Did I miss it? I'd been gone for ten days.”  

She's like, “No, no, no, no.  You have time.”

So that weekend I drive up to Mount Desert Island and I come to see him in his hospice room and his house.  He's physically just a shadow of his former self, but he's still in there. I can see his eyes working. The cancer doesn’t really let him talk and it’s so hard because Andy was such a talker.  He just loved to talk.

So I tell him a little bit about Iceland.  He'd have a question but he couldn’t say it.  He just couldn’t get it out and he'd get frustrated.  

I spent a couple of hours there and some other friends came and went.  When I left I said, “I'll see you later, okay?” Because I don't know what to say to my friend who’s dying.  Do I say goodbye forever? That’s not very comforting.

A couple of days after Christmas, which was just a few weeks after that, Andy passed in his sleep.  He got to live through Christmas which was his favorite holiday. So my husband and I decided to go to the memorial service, a three-hour drive.  It’s at a Freemason’s lodge and I didn’t even know Andy was a Freemason, and I still don’t really know what a Freemason is.

We go in.  There's like a hundred people crammed in this tiny building and we say our condolences to Michelle, Andy’s wife.  We don’t know anyone so we’re standing around awkwardly.

And this man that looks kind of like Andy but actually a lot shorter, he looks like he's in his 70s, he comes running up to me and he goes, “Skylar,” he said my name a million times, “it’s so good to meet you.”  

He's like, “I’m Andy’s dad.”  And he says like, “that Colbert clip was just so funny and so amazing and we love it.”  

The thing is that clip, apparently, everyone in Andy’s life had watched that like a million times.  

He's like, “And I follow on Facebook, like how he went down to the wedding and he brought all those lobsters for you.”  And this guilt that I had been carrying around that I had somehow used him for professional gain or whatever started to melt away because I had realized that I had given Andy adventures.  That’s who Andy was. He lived for adventures. That’s what he had lived for. He lived for that and making new friends.

They said, “You're his friend unless you haven't met him yet.”  That’s what his dad said.

So that Colbert clip, that silly, stupid, little piece was quintessential Andy.  It was the way his family like to remember him and it was the way that I like to remember him, as my friend in that Somesville One Stop Gas Station who put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You know, Skylar, I fuck this shit up all the time.  But we’re going to figure it out, fix it and maybe we’ll make some new friends along the way.”

Thank you.