A Primate's Memoir, page 27
Earlier in the year, Richard had ventured to Nairobi for what was in fact the first time on a mission worthy of Kafka; he was going to change the name of his child. Richard, being modern, had insisted that his wife, in labor, hobble the miles down from their mountain village to go to the obscure bush hospital in their district, rather than just have the baby at home. By the time Richard had rushed there from the game park, some ninety miles away, the child had been born. All along, he (and perhaps even his wife—this is not clear) had decided on the name Jesse, for J. Jackson. When he arrived at the hospital, Richard discovered that the doctor, too impatient to wait for Richard’s arrival to fill out the certificate (and, apparently, uninterested in whether the mother had any opinion about a name for the child), had chosen the name Hillary (although it now occurred to me that perhaps that doctor had consulted Richard’s wife and this was actually the name she wanted). The certificate was already filed, the child’s name was now Hillary, and the doctor threatened Richard with the police when he was churlish enough to express meek displeasure. So Richard was on the implausible mission of sojourning to the capital and its labyrinth of bureaucracy and incompetence to try to correct the name (unsuccessfully, naturally; Hillary thrives now with that appellation, and it occurs to no one, it seems, to simply defy the government and call the child Jesse anyway).
The manager of the tourist lodge where Richard lived heard about the planned expedition. He had always been fond of Richard and could afford a kind, generous gesture to someone of Richard’s status in his camp (as opposed to someone who was an employee and would thus appear to be receiving favored treatment). He arranged for Richard to be able to stay at the hotel in Nairobi that was also owned by the family that owned the tourist camp.
Richard reached Nairobi, followed the manager’s directions to the hotel. The man was sensitive and urbane enough to know that Richard would need help there but would be embarrassed by that need. The manager of the Nairobi hotel was awaiting Richard, greeted him, and tactfully explained that the entire room was his to use for the night, including the bathroom, explained the best news, that dinner and breakfast would come free to Richard as part of his staying there.
“Then, he took me into a small room with no windows. At first, I thought this would be the room I would be staying in, but it was something else. The door was closed, and suddenly it was roaring and my stomach was hurting so much I thought I was dying from Nairobi already. But the other man did not notice. Then, the door opened, and everything had changed! completely!—somehow, they had rushed and changed everything, the people and chairs were gone, the desk of the manager was not there anymore, instead there was this long path and these many doors. I did not know what was happening then, but now I know that was one of these elevators.”
He was deposited in his room. The curtain was already closed and Richard never considered touching it, so he never had a clue that he was no longer on the ground floor. He washed in the sink (assuming that the bathtub was far too huge to possibly hold water to be wasted on washing a person. A cow dip, perhaps?), luxuriated in the bed, had an excited, panicked start when answering the manager’s solicitous phone call (Richard had seen pictures of phones and how they were held).
All was bliss until Richard became hungry. He searched up and down the hallway for the dining room. No luck. He figured that the tiny room he had been taken into when his stomach flew had something to do with their changing the whole floor to the dining room, but he didn’t know where the little door was, or how to make it open, or how to have the area outside that door changed into a dining room. He wandered up and down the halls, felt too ashamed to ask anyone a question, and eventually retired to his room, hungry and disappointed. By midnight, there was now the added fear of not being sure how he would get out in the morning, let alone get breakfast.
By dawn, he was up, with a plan. He had his things prepared, lounged in the hall, and spotted the first person leaving their room in a similar packed state. He followed them nonchalantly, soon found himself in the elevator. His stomach lurched, he attempted to keep his discomfort to himself, and soon the floor had been rearranged to the lobby. Relieved and with his hunger of secondary importance to his desire to escape, he bid farewell to the manager and fled.
“Aii, I wish I had known it was one of those elevators. I think that food must have been good, because this was a big fancy hotel. And they said I could eat all I wanted.”
Later that evening, we went for more ice cream, in the hopes of healing the memory.
21
The Mound Behind the 7-Eleven
I am fairly hardened when it comes to the suffering of animals. Other more euphemistic terms might be used—I am pragmatic, or unsentimental, or internalizing. But I am hardened, I do not feel as much as I once did. When I was a kid, up through college, all I wanted to do was live alone in the bush with wild animals and study their behavior. Intellectually, nothing was as satisfying, as pure, as the study of their behavior in and of itself, nothing seemed as sacred as to just be with animals for their own sake, and the notion of animals being pained was intolerable. But my interests shifted, behavior for its own sake somehow began to seem insufficient. “Isn’t this behavior miraculous?” became “Isn’t this miraculous, how does it work?” and I became interested in behavior and the brain, and soon I was interested in the brain itself, and soon how its functioning fails. And by the end of the unstable years in the troop, my laboratory work had shifted exclusively to the study of diseases of the brain. Nine months each year I would spend in my lab, doing my experiments, and the suffering that the animals would endure there was appalling. They’d undergo strokes, or repeated epileptic seizures, or other neurodegenerative disorders. This is all to find out how a brain cell dies, and what can be done to prevent it—all to do something for the couple of million people each year who sustain brain damage from stroke or seizure or Alzheimer’s disease. My father was nearly half a century older than I. Once he was an artist, an architect, a dean of a school of architecture, a passionately complex, subtle, difficult man. But he sustained one of those neurodegenerative disorders, and there were times that he could not identify family members, or tell where he was, or experience any of the pleasures of living that require an active, pulsating, inquisitive mind. And when I would sit in the laboratory, there were times where I’d think that there was nothing on earth that I would hesitate to do to learn how a neuron dies and how to bring my father back.
I tried to compensate for my work, but probably not enough. I remained a vegetarian when in America. I would work hard to cut every corner I could in my research, to minimize the numbers of animals, the amount of pain. But there was still dripping, searing amounts of it for them. My first day as a student when I was taught to do brain surgery on a rat, I threw up. Now, I was reaching the stage, as a postdoc, of beginning to train students, sending them off to begin the same process. I’d be horrified when my intuitions about the next step in my research would turn out to be wrong and a hundred animals would have paid for that dead end. I’d have dreams where I was Dr. Mengele—I’d wear a fresh new lab coat, and welcome the animals to their “hotel,” the euphemistic nature of the word being discernible by them despite my Germanic accent. But unlike some Nazis, I was not just following orders, I was often giving them and was my own agent; but I was at war with the infarcts and ischemic cell changes and pan necrosis in my father’s brain, and there was little I would not do to avenge his melting. And I was feeling less and less for the animals.
Thus, each year, I was having more of a need to return to the baboons. Among the dozens of other reasons to be there, it was good to be in a place where I was not cutting up the animals, where I was not killing them. It was good to be in a place where they didn’t live in cages. In a perverse way, it was good to be in a place where they were more likely to kill me than the other way around. As an additional pleasure, I might even indirectly do them some good with my research—find out something about how some sort of environmental stressor disrupts their fertility, makes them more prone to an infectious disease. Small potatoes, but at least some pluses for a change.
One of the baboons died during a darting once. I will not tell who it was or how it happened—that story will wait for the final chapter. He died, and he was one of the ones I really cared about. Should one feel guilty about caring more for some baboons than others? Is one allowed to wish it had been a different animal? He died. Of all things, in my arms, while anesthetized, while in trouble. I tried to revive him. I did CPR, I shoved an endotracheal tube down his throat. I pounded his chest and infused an insane amount of epinephrine into him. And still he wouldn’t breathe. He had actually made a death rattle, and each time I flung myself on his chest, he made a bit of a gargly sound again, and each time it triggered hope and shivers. Finally, I had pummeled and pushed and pounded and cursed until I was exhausted. I would have guessed that trying not to lose someone would be emotionally exhausting; I had no idea that it could be such a physical battle.
He was lying on his back when I gave up. I was sweating and hyperventilating, and I lay down on my back, with my head on his stomach, as if I were a child again with my father. I thought that if he had ticks, they would be all over me soon, but I did not move. I thought that I should dissect him, add his skull to my collection, but I did not move. Instead, I held his stiffening hand, and I must have slept a bit. I awoke to find a group of Masai mamas from one of the other villages, on their way to collect firewood, staring in frightened fascination. They pointed at my face and pantomimed tears on my cheeks. In Swahili, I said, “He is dead,” and that seemed to do nothing to decrease their wonder or fear. It did not seem to explain anything to them, and they ran off.
In my sleep, I had decided. I carried him to a spot under a favorite tree, and dug a hole for him there. I would not leave him for the hyenas. The Masai do that with their dead. And with their dying. For a while, teaching American school kids that such things happened in certain cultures, and might even make a certain sense, would guarantee that abuse would be heaped upon you by some Southern senator, branding you as a cultural relativist or a secular humanist. It does make sense for some cultures, but it is still sad and creepy. Laurence of the Hyenas discovered a dead Masai child, perhaps two years old, abandoned near the hyenas once. She was wrapped in an old cloak, and her head was resting on a drinking gourd. In case she became thirsty in the afterlife? More likely because it was feared that the gourd had become contaminated with whatever illness she had.
I would not leave him for the hyenas, and dug instead. It was punishing work that left me with great respect for grave diggers and grave robbers. I thought the labor would cleanse me, but it just exhausted me. I would stop and rest on him some more, caress his head. The Masai women returned with their firewood and stood awestruck at the sight of me digging a grave for a baboon. They began to approach closer, but I shouted and gesticulated like some madman, and they fled.
The hole was done. I cradled him and placed him in. I arranged a circle of olives and figs, his main foods, around him, and thought, This is not because I believe in an afterlife, this is to confuse any paleontologists who dig him up. Then I sang Russian folksongs from my youth and Mahler’s Kindertoten-lieder, and covered him with dirt and covered the mound with acacia thorns to deter the hyenas, and I went and slept in my tent until the next day.
So that was how my first baboon died in my hands. In the coming months, because of the problem whose story I am not yet ready to tell, I returned to that tree again and again to bury more. But that was the first time. When the coming disaster swept over me, it reminded me viscerally of what I already knew, why, despite my childhood desire to be a primatologist and live in the field, I had retreated from that and spent only a quarter of my time out there. It was just too hard, and too depressing. I had my hands quite full enough already trying not very successfully to keep individual brain cells from dying. It was too much to try just as unsuccessfully to save whole species and ecosystems. Every primatologist I know is losing that battle, whether their animals are being done in by habitat destruction or conflict with farmers or poaching or novel human disease or shit-brained government officials bent on harassment and maliciousness. The full-time primatologists I know always remind me of stories I read of Ishi, the last member of a particular Indian tribe, a person whose mother tongue was a dead language. Or they make me think of someone whose unlikely job would be to collect snowflakes, to rush into a warm room and observe the unique pattern under a microscope before it melts and is never seen again. Always a losing battle, and all very sad, and quite a bit too much for me, thank you.
So it was at the end of the unstable years, just after Nathanial had abdicated his alphaness, that I went to where the snowflakes are the rarest and nearest to melting, that I visited Fossey’s gorillas and Fossey’s grave.
Oh, what new can I say about Dian Fossey? She’s been enshrined in the movies, featured in books; there will no doubt be posthumous Dian Fossey exercise videos. She was clearly the stuff of legend. She was a large, imposing, awkward woman who looked not one bit like Sigourney Weaver. By chance, the mother of a member of my lab went to high school with Fossey. The mother related that she was already difficult, withdrawn, marked. The lab member once brought in the yearbook. At age seventeen, Fossey had the hunted, ostracized, unhappy look of the high school weirdo destined to become either a reclusive field biologist or a serial murderer. At a relatively late age, she fell in love with the idea of Africa and of the mountain gorilla—the largest and last-discovered of any of the apes, studied in the field only once, cloaked in legend and misconception. Without any formal training, she decided to go to Africa and live with them. She encountered Louis Leakey, the famed paleontologist and sponsor of female primatologists, convinced him to send her to the Mountains of the Moon to study gorillas for a short stretch, and stayed on for decades. She immersed herself utterly in the gorillas, broke all the objective rules about not touching them, not interacting with them, and managed to observe astounding things about their behavior. In the process, she became more reclusive, more difficult, drove away possible collaborators and colleagues, isolated herself. She did little science of note beyond observing amazing things by sheer dint of her persistence, was openly contemptuous of most scientists doing fieldwork, and clearly wanted little more than to be a gorilla herself.
I met her once, as an undergrad at Harvard, in the mid-1970s. My scientific interests had not yet shifted from gorillas to baboons, and gorillas still resonated emotionally with me in an extraordinary way; during the intermittent periods of depression that plagued me, I was dreaming more about gorillas than about humans. Thus, it was not surprising that Fossey was one of the humans I most admired. On my wall, I kept a poem that Adrienne Rich had written about her. I thought I would swoon with pleasure at meeting her.
Fossey was at the university against her will. Despite her contempt for science and rejection of how most primatologists went about their work, she still knew more about gorillas than anyone, and other primatologists were interested. Her funding sources basically had to force her to act like a proper citizen of the scientific community—to finally finish her thesis, publish some of her information in scholarly journals, give a lecture or two. She was in Cambridge on one of those forced excursions, resentful and sullen. It was an evening seminar in the living room of the senior primatology professor, and it was jammed. Quickly, one had the sickened, guilty, voyeuristic sense of watching a bear forced to perform in some medieval circus. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest and then suddenly burst out, pacing back and forth in front of the room, bent so that her hands hung near her knees. She mostly talked to herself, in a monotone, and nearly yelled at people when they asked questions. Once, she did yell. One professor had his young kid sitting on his lap, the kid making occasional four-year-old sounds, and suddenly Fossey stopped, pointed, and said, “Child, shut thy mouth or I will shut it for you.” She rambled about her gorillas, showed that she was unaware of and disinterested in most of the questions that dominated the field, and was a bit incoherent.
I was mesmerized and more than a litde bit horrified. Afterward, I went up to her and asked the question I had been preparing since I was ten—could I go to Rwanda as her research assistant and devote my life to the gorillas? She scowled at me and said yes, told me to write to her. She was allowed to escape shortly after that, I returned to my dorm in a transcendent euphoria and sent her that letter by midnight. Which she never answered. I later learned that this was her standard way of dealing with the acolytes and petitioners who would engulf her when forced into the public; say yes to anything, tell them to write, never answer.
Thus, my sole meeting with Fossey. Soon after that, her difficulties and difficultness began their attraction that was to finish her. In the rain forests of Rwanda, since time immemorial, were Batwa tribesmen, hunter-gatherers who lived by catching forest bucks with snares. Inevitably, a gorilla would step on a snare now and then and be trapped. Gangrene, death. The best evidence indicates that these first deaths were accidental. Fossey freaked. She began to fight the tribesmen, destroying their snares, their source of food. And they began to fight back. Things escalated, and soon they were killing her gorillas intentionally, dumping their decapitated bodies on the paths to her cabin, high up in the volcanoes, while she, in turn, kidnapped those tribesmen’s children.
Ultimately, some of those killers were poachers of the worst sort, killing gorillas to sell as souvenirs, but some were just tribesmen living as they had always done. Some of the gorilla killings were savage and intentional, but some were accidents. Undeniably, a more stable, rational person would have dealt with the situation in a less inflammatory way, but a more stable, rational one would never have been there to witness what was happening.
