Hold the Enlightenment (18 page)

Suddenly, a familiar assertion rose up, entirely unbidden, and fully illuminated the universe as I knew it.

I thought, “What a funny little bird the frog are.” Not that frogs were birds, or that sea lions were humans, but it was surely possible to see them as translucent images shimmering deep within the mirror.

“I
am not a gorilla scientist,” I told the St. Mary’s third-grade class, “but when I went to Africa, I learned something about gorilla behavior that no one knew until that day.” I suspect the real scientists I was visiting in Rwanda talk about my discovery even now, almost twenty years later. And when they talk about it, I bet they laugh.

Which, I explained to the third graders, didn’t make it any less of a discovery. Just because people laugh about it.

“Can you tell the class what it is you discovered?” the teacher, Miss Larson, asked. She was tall and blond and impatient with the concept of suspense.

“Well,” I said, “I hurt my knee playing football in high school. Now it pops out of position every once in awhile. I fall down and scream, and I don’t even know where I am, because it hurts so much. That’s how I made my discovery. I contributed to the science of biology because I was such a bad football player.”

The third graders weren’t, I knew, particularly interested in my knee problems. I’m often invited to speak at local schools about my various travels, and I accept these invitations because I think it’s a way of giving back something to the community. Also, I get to advise kids to belch at the dinner table and tell their parents that it is science.

“Do you guys want to see some pictures of gorillas?” I asked.

They did, and said so at the top of their little lungs. I asked Miss Larson to turn down the lights, and I flipped on the slide projector.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s the first gorilla.” The on-screen image was that of a rather handsome human male wearing a photographer’s vest. The children squealed with laughter.

“It’s okay to laugh at this man,” I said. “He’s a photographer.”

Nick Nichols, a
National Geographic
wildlife photographer, had given me the set of slides to show in schools.

The first real gorilla up on the screen was a frightening portrait: a head-and-shoulders shot of an adult male, mouth open in what appeared to be a scream of rage. White teeth—canines the size of small carrots—stood out against the black face.

“Scary, huh,” I said. “But it’s really not, because that’s what it looks like when a gorilla yawns.”

And I was off on Phase One of my standard grade-school gorilla lecture: They’re not scary monsters at all; in fact, they’re very gentle. They don’t eat humans; they don’t even eat meat. I showed pictures of gorillas eating bamboo and nettles. The kids, like all kids, sat there staring at Nick’s photos with their mouths agape. On the grade-school slide-show circuit we like to wow ’em with charismatic megafauna.

I showed pictures of several gorillas together and explained that the animals live in family groups of two to thirty-five or more and that, most of the time, the oldest and biggest male, whose back is silver, is the boss. Silverbacks stand about five-foot-eight and weigh as much as four hundred pounds. During the day, the gorilla family will eat, rest, and move on until late afternoon. Just before it gets dark, they build a nest, almost like big bird’s nest, and that’s where they sleep.

I showed a picture of a blond-haired human male standing in the rain, taking notes.

“That man,” I told the students, “is a scientist. His name is Conrad Aveling. He gets to study the gorillas every day, rain or shine.”

To get a job like that, I said, you have to go to school for a long time and study a lot. This makes you a very precise and literal-minded person, so that if a journalist visits you and writes a story about the gorillas, you will be obligated to write him a long letter and tell him all the things he got wrong. If, for instance, the writer described a gorilla as being twice his size, the scientist would say:
“This is incorrect. The gorilla may be twice your weight, but he is not twelve feet tall.”

“Field scientists,” I told the third graders, “are a lot like Miss Larson, but their clothes are dirtier and they swear a lot.”

After the slide show, it was time for Phase Two: I asked the shyest of the girls and the most obstreperous of the boys to assist me. The girl would sit in front of the class, in Miss Larson’s chair. She would be the gorilla. The boy would be the scientist. He would try to approach the gorilla and learn about its behavior. If he did anything wrong, anything at all, the gorilla would just go away and never come back. I think this prepares boys and girls for the realities of later life. Boys more than girls, perhaps.

“It is sometimes hard to find the gorillas,” I said. “You have to remember where they were the night before and start from their sleeping nests. Then you track them through the grass and bushes.” Sometimes, I explained, you can smell them before you see them. The silverback has an odor like skunk and vinegar, only very faint. And then you may see them moving through the shafts of early-morning light that fall through the trees. They walk bent over, on their knuckles, and look like bears shambling through the sun. When you see them, you should fall to the ground and approach carefully.

My eight-year-old scientist began crawling up the aisle toward the gorilla in pigtails sitting in Miss Larson’s chair.

Locate the silverback, I advised. Make sure he sees you. Don’t get between him and any of the babies, because he will try to protect them, and then he could hurt you. Look at the silverback’s face. It reads just like a human being’s face. If he frowns at you, go away.

You should also know how to say some things in the mountain gorilla language.

“The gorilla hello,” I said, “sounds like this.” I made my voice phlegmy and hoarse and then breathed out twice, in a kind of gentle growl. “It means, ‘Hey, I don’t want to fight or hurt anyone’s babies.’ Scientists like Mr. Aveling call that sound a double-belch
vocalization.” I encouraged the kids to work on their belches and to demonstrate the science they’d learned at the dinner table that evening.

As the boy scientist crawled forward, belching loudly, I advised him to keep his head down. Watch the silverback’s head. Wherever it is, yours is lower. If you stand above him, he thinks you want to fight. Scientists call that an aggressive posture.

The gorilla will be watching your face, and you can smile at him, but don’t show your teeth. Gorillas who show their teeth often want to fight. Look at the silverback, but keep dropping your eyes. Gorillas are like humans: they get mad at people who stare right at them for a long time.

Mr. Aveling, I said, taught me all those things about gorillas, and he was very strict. He said I should observe “proper gorilla etiquette” at all times. And it was true: If I minded my manners with the gorillas, I could sometimes sit near them and watch their behavior for hours. Sometimes I even exchanged double-belch vocalizations with silverbacks.

When the animals wanted me to go, they frowned at me and said another important gorilla word. “It’s called a cough grunt,” I said, “and it sounds a little like a train just starting up.” I made a series of quick, soft coughs in the back of my throat. “That means ‘Go away.’ ”

The gorilla in Miss Larson’s chair did a pretty good cough grunt and the boy scientist crawled backward down the aisle. There was applause all around.

And I was into Phase Three: Only 650 mountain gorillas exist today. That’s all. (Some scientists think the population in Uganda’s Bwindi National Park are not mountain gorillas, but a species of the more populous lowland gorilla—or a unique subspecies. If so, there are only 320 or so mountain gorillas alive.) These numbers haven’t changed much in the last couple of decades.

It is tempting, at this point, to dramatize the mountain gorillas’ plight by setting up a morality play of good guys and poachers, but the real problem facing the gorillas is loss of habitat. Virunga and
Volcano national parks, where the gorillas live and are protected, are a mere 149 square miles. In the aftermath of the genocidal wars in Rwanda, over 700,000 returning refugees have flooded into the area near the base of the mountains. These people want land to farm. Families must be fed.

And yet the forests of the Virungas act as giant sponges, feeding the streams and rivers during the dry season. Destroy the forest for farms, and everyone starves during the next drought. It’s a vexing problem, with no easy solutions, and what I tell the children is that the surest way to kill the gorillas is to destroy their habitat. It’s true for any animal.

My friend the photographer, Nick Nichols, wanted to show the habitat problem in his pictures. One day we were standing on a very steep hillside, watching a family of about nine mountain gorillas who didn’t know we were there. There were three of us—me, Nick, and Conrad Aveling. It was about noon, the hottest part of the day, and the animals had just finished feeding for the morning. The silverback was sprawled out on his back, bouncing an infant off his rather considerable belly. A female lay with her head on the male’s thigh, dozing in the sun.

I felt as if I were staring down into Eden. And yet, if I lifted my gaze, I could see down past the periphery of the park, right into Rwandan farmland, which rolled bare and treeless up to the very edge of the forest. That was the picture Nick was trying to get: the gorillas at rest, the threatening farms close below.

I was just standing there, watching him work, when I shifted my weight, slipped on some moss, felt my knee pop, and heard myself saying,
“ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.”
Clutching my knees to my chest had the effect of turning me into a human bowling ball, and I began rolling faster and faster down the steep and grassy slope.

I’ve tried to see this from the gorillas’ point of view. Here you’ve just had breakfast, and you’re ready for some quality time with the kids, followed by a nap. Then there’s this hideous noise:
ah-ah-ah-ah-ah
. And when you look up, the foliage is parting in a rapid downhill vector. Whatever the horrible thing is, it’s coming right at you.

The gorillas fled in all directions as I rolled directly through them
and came to rest against a low shrub. My first coherent thought was that I had breached every single rule of gorilla etiquette. I sought to apologize to Conrad Aveling.

“Well, yes,” he said. “On the other hand, a lot of us have wondered what would happen if a human charged a group of gorillas.”

And that, I told the third graders, is how playing football very badly can lead to important scientific discoveries.

I
t was raining fiercely along the equator the day the protestors blocked the Pan American Highway with barricades of burning tires. We had left Quito, Ecuador—where a volcano looming over the city, Pichincha, was in a state of near-constant eruption—and were driving south toward Baños, where another volcano, Tungurahua, perfectly cone shaped, was booming and roaring, spitting up great blocks of burning rock, flows of lava, and copious clouds of ash and steam. Baños, a town of some twenty thousand people situated at the foot of that bad-boy volcano, had been evacuated by the government. The townsfolk had been given a single day to get out, because the danger of a catastrophic eruption was great and imminent, or so said the geophysicists, who ought to know.

I was driving toward Baños and we’d been slaloming over the narrow two-lane highway, hydroplaning on the wet pavement, dodging axle-busting potholes as well as any number of dead dogs that littered the roadway.

“There are,” I told photographer Rob Howard, “no old dogs on the Pan American Highway.”

A truck passed me on the right. We took up the whole roadway, the truck and my four-wheel-drive rental vehicle, as did the pair of buses passing one another and coming the other way. Presumably, we’d all be back in a safe and sane single file several moments before the deadly collision. It was the way of the road in Ecuador, where the driving is seriously dangerous business, and people pay attention.

I slowed to allow the truck to pass, and pulled over toward the right shoulder, then had to swerve to avoid a fresh canine corpse.

“There’s another one that’s not going to get any older,” Rob said.

“Poor son of a bitch.”

And then the truck ahead of me hit its brakes hard, and when I pulled around to pass, there was no traffic coming our way. Instead, we saw black smoke rising from the roadway, and a solid wall of flames ten or fifteen feet high fiercely burning against a pewter-gray sky. Trucks and buses and cars were pulled over willy-nilly on the Pan American, and I thought we were approaching the scene of some hideous accident. Then I saw the demonstrators, most of them young and well dressed, standing four or five deep across the roadway in the rain. They were singing and shaking their fists and shouting slogans. The Pan American behind them was piled high with giant truck tires, which had been doused in kerosene and set afire.

We pulled far off the road, rolling over some green, soggy grass, parked, and walked a quarter of a mile to talk to the demonstrators. They were mostly students from the college in the nearby city of Latacunga, but there was a smattering of tough-looking older men, who represented various local labor unions. As in the United States, it is rare for these two disparate groups to join one another in a demonstration, and that fact alone suggested a unanimity of purpose and anger.

Two of the students, a handsome couple in their early twenties named Luis and Monica, said that working folks and students had come together to protest the lack of jobs and the high cost of living: inflation was running at about 60 percent, the highest rate in all of Latin America, and only a third of the working population was employed. Corruption was rampant and flaunted at the highest (and lowest) levels of government. Anger was focused on Jamil Mahuad, the president, who was said to be not only corrupt but incompetent.

Luis had no idea how long the demonstration might last, and most of the truck drivers were dozing in their cabs, waiting patiently,
as if such blockades were an ordinary cost of doing business in Ecuador. The ones who weren’t sleeping said they agreed with the students. The country was in bad shape. The fact that there were two live volcanoes—one threatening Quito, the capital city, and the other spitting ash all over Baños, the premier tourist destination in Ecuador—seemed to be of little matter. There was always some volcano spewing out great ash falls and burping up poison gases.