Botanist finds balance in theater

It’s no wonder Jen Asebrook was hired as the publicist for the Whitefish Theatre Co.

She can make trees sound interesting.

Or, more precisely, she can make white pine trees and their ongoing battle with the nefarious little mountain pine beetle sound interesting.

“(Scientists) have figured out this pheromone packet, they look like these little tea bags, and you go staple them to the tree, and these pheromone packets … they tell the bugs ‘This tree is full. There is no more need room for you. You need to leave,’” she said, her excited pace quickening.

“So that’s one pheromone. That’s one tactic. Or they tell the bug that the tree is an alder, and that’s not their type of tree and they also leave.”

And that actually works?

She smiles.

“It works.”

ASEBROOK SPLITS her time between two worlds that, on the surface, sit on opposite ends of a spectrum.

As the development director — her official title — at the Whitefish Theatre Co., a position she has held since 2013, Asebrook manages the promotion of performances at the O’Shaughnessy Center, blasting out emails, posting on social media and helping create brochures to advertise each new season.

As a botanist at Glacier National Park, where she has worked either full- or part-time for the last 24 years, Asebrook monitors plant growth, inputs data and studies, sometimes over painstakingly long periods of time, the lives of countless plants in the 1-million-acre park.

“It’s sometimes the Montana way and it’s certainly the Flathead Valley way for people to have more than one job but it’s also not unusual for them to have completely different job from each other,” Asebrook said.

“I know a ton of people who are lawyers and musicians, artists and bankers. They are completely polar opposite with, you would think, opposite parts of your brain.”

Asebrook’s left brain, logical and analytical, helped her graduate from two rigorous universities and study to be a marine biologist before switching to plants. Meanwhile her right brain, curious and imaginative, led her and her husband, Richard Menicke, to buy season tickets at the O’Shaugh-nessy Center long before she worked there.

But there is crossover, too.

Asebrook writes grants, which she lovingly called “science papers,” for the theater, much to the delight of her co-workers.

“A lot of people over at the theater are like ‘thank God you like to do this’ because they hate it,” she said.

And her curiosity has served her well at the park, guiding her to the white pine and cutting-edge research that is trying save a tree that has seen its population decline by 70 percent since the start of the 20th century.

“In the late ’90s, we just had this idea,” she said. “We were like, ‘OK, all of these trees are dead except for this one? What’s happening with this one?”

WHAT WAS happening was a genetic mutation. A Darwinist quirk saving a tiny fraction of white pines from blister rust, the fungus that has been decimating five-needle pine trees since it snuck into the states from across the Pacific Ocean more than 100 years ago. It’s a threat much larger than the ever-present mountain pine beetle.

The short version goes like this: the blister rust uses a handful of shrubs, often gooseberry plants, as a host, then spreads spores that infiltrate pine trees through their needles. The rust kills the needles, reaches the branches, kills them too, and by the time it hits the bowl the whole tree is dead.

Asebrook, who speaks with an unbridled passion about her projects, does not tell the short version of the story. She bounces breathlessly from thought to thought, even catching herself at one point and exclaiming, mid-sentence, “This is a long story!” before picking up where she left off.

Her passion for the white pine stems from her understanding of its value. In between reflections on the majesty of Glacier National Park she bemoans the many “ghost forests” at high elevations, which are simply the naked trunks of dozens of dead pine trees.

“It’s more than just the tree,” she said. “(White pine) is the starter of the tree line, it’s the holder of snow for late-season water resources down to lower elevations, it builds soil, it’s a habitat for really specific groups of animals, including the grizzly bear.

“It’s tied in to a much bigger circle of impact.”

ASEBROOK FIRST came to Glacier Park in 1992 and quickly fell in love, in more ways than one.

She grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and stayed primarily on the East Coast for most of her early adulthood, studying sea turtles for The Nature Conservancy for four years in Florida after graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. When she was ready to leave Florida — “I was way too young to have so many friends over the age of 50,” she quipped — Asebrook enrolled in the school of environment at Duke University.

Then, one day, fate guided her west.

“Literally, it was me walking by an employment board at the school and seeing this thing that said ‘Setting up a native plant monitoring program for a restoration program in Glacier,’” she said. “And I just caught it out of the corner of my eye and I was like, ‘that’s it!”

Asebrook was accepted into the program that summer and packed everything she could fit into her car, driving the 2,300 miles to West Glacier. Her housing, provided by the park, wasn’t glamorous, but the collection of 20-something scientists, researchers, trail workers and visitor’s center employees grew close and spent their off-hours trekking through the park.

“This is pre-cell phone, so you’d go knock on their door and be like ‘hey, when are we going hiking tomorrow?’ and all of your weekends were spent exploring with people you didn’t necessarily know all that well,” she said. “There’s no better way to really get to know someone than by trudging along a trail all day long and looking at things and talking about things.”

The New Englander also connected with the place. Montana spoke to Asebrook and called her back for the next two summers before she graduated from Duke in 1994 and returned to Glacier Park full time.

“I feel like landscapes that you live in are meaningful to just how you are,” she said. “Even now, we go a lot of different places in the park for our jobs, off-trail, various places to do plantings that we do, and every summer that place brings me to my knees.

“There’s just something about the landscape that’s unlike anywhere I’ve ever been.”

THERE WAS one other love that grew out of Glacier Park.

One day in the summer of 1992, just before she was going to head back to school, Asebrook headed out to meet up with a pack of fellow park workers for a mountain bike ride. It was raining and when she arrived at the rendezvous there was only one other person there. His name was Richard Menicke.

Menicke was at Glacier Park to work in Geographic Information Systems and continues to be employed there to this day — along with jobs teaching GIS in local schools and coaching cross country at Whitefish High School — but on that rainy day in the wilderness in 1992 he and Asebrook first connected. Then they split, one in school in North Carolina and the other in the mountains in Montana.

“It was also in the very early days of the internet, and if anyone was going to have the internet it started with the federal government and universities,” Asebrook said. “I was here and he was there and we would send emails to each other. It would probably take two days to get from him to me, and then about two days for mine to get back to him.

“We had probably one of the first internet romances.”

Asebrook and Menicke were married in 2000 and have two sons, Sam (15) and Gabe (12), who have accompanied their parents to shows at the O’Shaughnessy Center. The boys even tried their hands at acting a few times, taking part in local productions before busy school and extracurricular schedules interfered.

The problem, Asebrook said, was that there just was not enough time for everything.

“Just like anything it takes time,” she said. “It has to be your passion. It has to be sort of a priority.”

Unless, of course, it’s passions, plural, and then you find a way to make them all work.

Entertainment editor Andy Viano can be reached at 758-4439 or ThisWeek@dailyinterlake.com.