by Paul Allen
We had some unforgettable encounters there: a forty-foot humpback whale circling our tender, with its apple-size eye gazing at us in open curiosity; a bulbous gray leopard seal lazily basking on an iceberg barely large enough to hold it; thousands of squeaking penguins, as tame as puppies. I tried scuba diving in water one or two degrees above freezing, using a canister of argon gas to fill the suit and help keep me warm. The exposed part of my face went instantly numb, and my fingertips stayed blue for an hour after I got out.
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA is the opposite of the alien Antarctic—hot, rolling landscapes, deep green after the rains come, with the clean smell of wild sage in the air. Strangely, it feels somehow familiar; some think it’s our ancestral memory of this cradle of humanity. From the first time I set foot there, it became one of the most special places in the world to me.
I love to venture into Africa’s sprawling animal preserves, most of all to see my favorite animals, the elephants. They are smart and curious, and even seem to have a sense of communal responsibility. There’s an elephant orphanage in Nairobi for animals up to four years old whose mothers were poached by hunters. The young ones are fed with milk four times a day from the world’s largest baby bottles. If a juvenile runs off into the bush before he’s ready, wild elephants have been known to escort him back to his keepers.
We met a couple in Botswana who adopted three elephants when they were two and three years old, and that was twenty years ago. If you take a morning walk with one of them, you may find a trunk lightly touching your shoulder, like a friend placing his arm around you. (It’s called beaking.) In the wild, though, they are a force to be reckoned with, as we discovered on our first trip to that country, in 2006. It was winter there, when male elephants are often in musth, a hormonal condition that’s equivalent to a female going into heat. They secrete a pungent discharge from the sides of their heads and are unusually aggressive. When our Land Rover was a mile or so from camp, we spotted an enormous bull elephant fifty yards away, chomping his way through the grass. Our driver said, “I’m going to drive right past him.” And I’d never done this before, but I said, “No, he looks upset, let’s stop and let him eat.” There was something about the bull’s body language that bothered me.
The elephant kept eating till it was almost past us, and then our driver got restless and put the Land Rover in gear. The bull promptly wheeled and charged at full speed from thirty yards. It must have weighed twelve thousand pounds, twice as much as our vehicle. In a collision, we would come out second best.
Everyone’s head swiveled toward me, as though I’d know what to do next. But I was a rookie, too, and I had no idea. As the elephant closed to ten yards, a veteran guide named Sandor Carter sprang into action. He jumped up, threw his arms over his head, and shouted, “Knock it off!” The elephant pulled up and stopped and went back to eating. He had charged to let us know we were invading his space. By “getting big,” our guide had made it clear that we would assert ourselves, leading the bull to doubt the wisdom of doing battle.
The most memorable part of our trip came in Kenya’s enormous Rift Valley, where we stayed by the Maasai Mara game reserve. From a helicopter or hot air balloon, there are zebras and gazelles and wildebeests as far as you can see. They move in concert like a living lawn mower, up from the Serengeti and back down again in a circular path. Prides of lions lie at rest, waiting for the dark and a tasty wildebeest dinner.
The Maasai are a nomadic people who cling to tradition even as they’ve begun to use cell phones. As part of an animal conservancy that we’ve supported, they have agreed to let more wild animals return to the tribe’s grazing lands in exchange for a share of government tourist fees, which in turn help build schools and basic infrastructure. One night, in a barren salt plain close to the Tanzania border, we celebrated a new dam that we’d funded to bring water to the Maasai and their livestock. (Cattle are their primary asset, and also a source of protein in their milk-and-cow’s-blood tonics.) We set up a stage on the reddish, cracked-earth moonscape, with portable generators under an orange canopy. By late afternoon, we had a crowd of more than a thousand Maasai who’d walked dozens of miles to get there.
I was with my band and our special featured singer, Dan Aykroyd, a kindred spirit and true lover of the blues, whose absurdist humor never fails to crack me up. That night he sang and played harmonica, and danced as only Dan can. As we made our way through our set, the Maasai men answered by jumping in their red and orange and turquoise robes, spears in hand. Then a woman’s clear voice sailed over the top of their layered chants. We were together in spirit but not always in tempo, and I felt the urge to create a song that would mix our two cultures, like Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” But that’s not something you can do on the spot, so we stuck with what we knew.
Halfway through Dan’s rendition of “Messin’ with the Kid,” the Maasai suddenly switched from their regional chant to the staccato rhythms of our song. They even changed their dance to a stomp and a little stutter step, mimicking Dan. And they sang along with the chorus:
What’s this I hear, well there’s a whole lot of talk,
People say they’re trying to mess with the kid—hey hey hey. …
It was transcendent, sharing that Junior Wells song with the Maasai on the salt flats. A few bars later, they returned to their original rhythms, but we all felt that we’d connected. The sun set. As the stage lights came on, every six-legged flying thing within miles converged on us, and we called it a night. The Maasai seemed delighted. For most it was their first live encounter with the low frequencies of a bass guitar. As a chief told us afterward, “I liked your music because I could feel it in my stomach.” I knew just what he meant. I’d felt the same way, the first time I heard rock live.
FOR VISITORS WHO’D known it mainly from stereotypical jungle movies, Africa is filled with an amazing variety of landscapes and peoples. One of my favorite places is the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where the river ends in an inland estuary and creates a verdant swampland. In the rainy season, when the floodwaters are high, the tops of hillocks become small islands. There are ebony and fig trees and an amazing profusion of predators and prey: hippos, giraffes, impalas, lions, leopards, African wild dogs. A few years ago, I leased Abu Camp. (It’s named after its famous late resident, the bull elephant who costarred with Clint Eastwood in White Hunter Black Heart.) The camp stables train elephants who have been separated from their herds, and guides will take you through the lagoons in the golden light of the early morning or late afternoon.
I also love the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, where storms from the Kalahari Desert keep pushing the Atlantic coastline westward. In the nineteenth century, untold numbers of New England whaling ships were wrecked there in the treacherous currents. From a helicopter you can see miles of masts and splintered wood, like weathered matchsticks by the brilliant cobalt blue water.
Namibia is a dry, stark, isolated place. It feels like the edge of the earth, and you meet some intriguing people who thrive there. One was a guide named Chris Bakkes, a wild-haired, red-bearded South African who fought in the war in Angola and is also a fine published author. During our first dinner together, there was talk about the monstrous river crocodiles we’d seen that lie in wait for the zebras crossing the water. Trying to make conversation, I asked Chris how close he’d ever come to a crocodile.
The burly guide stared at me, raised the stump of his left arm, and asked, “How close do you think, Mr. Allen?” He’d lost the rest of it to a pair of crocs as a young game ranger in Kruger National Park.
Chris sometimes lends his services to Flip Stander, the Cambridge-educated carnivore expert who founded the Desert Lion Conservation Project. Flip lives out of a ramshackle truck and goes everywhere barefoot. He darts lions to sedate and collar them, then tracks their wanderings over hundreds of miles of the Namib Desert. When a collared lion is flagged as it approaches civilization to prey on cattle, Skip rallies Chris and others to set u
p a Land Rover picket line. The light and noise deter the big cats from coming in and getting killed by the farmers.
On one darting expedition, Skip invited me to check out a sedated lion up close. The animal’s forelegs were massive, its paws a foot across. It wasn’t so hard to imagine it breaking a zebra’s back with one blow.
Skip said, “You need to smell the paw.” Ignoring every primal instinct, I knelt down and stuck my nose a few inches from those razor claws. The smell was surprisingly sweet, but I didn’t push my luck and linger too long.
IN 2008 I returned to Africa to visit the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, the fertile habitat for half the world’s endangered mountain gorilla population. With our guides using machetes to hack a path through the dense vegetation, our party of five trooped down into a sun-dappled ravine. Three hours in, we spotted a big silverback, the alpha male: eight hundred pounds of primate muscle, knuckle-walking up the slope. Whenever we got within twenty yards, he’d move on, not wanting to be bothered. Then I happened to look up. Directly overhead, a juvenile gorilla was sliding down a moss-covered tree. When he was eight feet off the ground, just a few yards away, our eyes made contact in one of the stranger moments of recognition I’ll ever have. Then the gorilla grabbed a vine, swung into the brush, and was gone.
From there we had to climb farther down and then up the back side of another ravine. Drenched with sweat in the misty humidity, I felt unusually tired and had to cling to a staff member’s pack to get up the last series of hills. I took it as a sign that I was out of shape. I didn’t know that I’d soon face the most challenging period of my life.
Two days later, after our tour boat skimmed past colonies of crocodiles and stopped before a stunning waterfall, we cast our lines for some Nile perch. The next thing I knew, I had collapsed in the bottom of the boat. I immediately went back to Seattle, where I had a similar episode on a walk around Green Lake. I felt odd and sat down to have a drink, and then I couldn’t get up. An emergency room EKG found an arrhythmia that called for an immediate heart valve replacement. That weekend I was in surgery.
I woke up fitted with some internal technology, my pacemaker. Then one problem led to another, as fluid built up in my left lung. In March 2009, I had the Bill Clinton surgery, in which they deflate the lung and peel off scar tissue. “It went great,” the surgeon told me. “Everything’s going to be fine.” But during a trip to Jordan a few months later, I became so short of breath that I could hardly make it up a flight of stairs. After a buildup of fluid in my other lung, a chest biopsy revealed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the disease that had so terrified me when I was misdiagnosed as a young man. I had the most treatable variety, but the cancer was so aggressive that it had already reached stage IV, spreading beyond the lymph nodes.
I was feeling far worse than I had with Hodgkin’s, and I thought my number was up—that the deadly threat I’d dodged twenty-five years earlier had finally caught up with me. My internist was optimistic, my oncologist more down the middle. The standard chemotherapy was a cocktail called R-CHOP, which included a monoclonal antibody to stimulate the body’s immune system. With luck, it would eradicate the lymphoma, though the odds of a cure were less than 50 percent.
In November 2009, I began treatment: six rounds of chemo, with three weeks between each round. It takes about six hours to pump a dose of R-CHOP into you, and I stayed overnight in the hospital the first time to make sure I could tolerate the treatment. Aside from a mild allergic reaction that turned the top of my head bright red, everything else was normal. Chemotherapy makes your body a battleground, and the first cycle kills so many tumor cells that it stresses your kidneys. There wasn’t any nausea, but the fatigue was intense and lasted for days each time.
Early on, I thought I could hunker down and handle everything myself, but it was a bad idea to be alone. Nights were the worst. Jody was terrifically supportive and came over each evening to watch movies. I appreciated the company, though her choice of programming left something to be desired. She recommended a BBC miniseries of a Dickens novel, and at least one or two characters died of tuberculosis in each episode.
“Boy, this is really bleak,” I complained.
“What do you expect?” Jody said. “It’s Bleak House.”
Throughout this difficult period, one of my most regular visitors was Bill Gates. He was everything you’d want from a friend, caring and concerned. I was reminded of the complexity of our relationship and how we always rooted for each other, even when we were barely speaking. It seemed that we’d be stuck with one another for as long as we lasted.
I’d begun working in earnest on this book, and there were days when I feared that I’d never see it in print. It was only after the second round of chemo, when my scans came back nearly clean, that I had any confidence that I might actually pull through. In late April, after my sixth and final round, I nervously awaited the results of another pair of scans. That phone call was euphoric. I was officially in remission.
I wasn’t totally back to normal, however. The tips of my fingers were slightly numb for a while from the treatments, which didn’t improve my guitar playing. It takes months after the end of chemo before you feel completely normal again.
My illness didn’t turn my head around the way Hodgkin’s had, but it has left its mark. I want more than ever to cram as much as I can into life. Shortly before my last treatment, I traveled to Tahiti for my first scuba dive in three years. It went fine, though my pacemaker limited me to a 50-foot descent. (I might go back for an upgrade to a model rated for 220 feet.) A week after my last report, I went white-water rafting in Utah’s Cataract Canyon. I love the red-rock canyon lands, and the one-day outing sounded harmless enough. Failing to check the fine print, I hadn’t realized that I’d have to splash through twenty-nine separate rapids over a two-hour span or that we’d get battered by the storm of the year, with horizontal rain and forty-mile-an-hour winds. That trip wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done, and it left me with a touch of pneumonia. But it also affirmed that I was very much alive.
RECENTLY I RETURNED from my annual trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, a magical mountain town with some of the best theater on the West Coast. I took in a play called American Night, about a young Mexican immigrant who learns about U.S. history in unexpected ways while preparing to take his citizenship test. It was highly satisfying theater, even more so because our foundation’s funding helped make it a reality.
I find regional and local philanthropy truly gratifying because you can see how one well-placed grant can make a difference. My first major effort was to help preserve endangered old-growth forestlands in the North Cascades, which circled back to my father’s passion for green things and his love of the outdoors. (When you grow up in the Northwest, the impulse to safeguard the environment seeps into your consciousness.) Partnering with the Trust for Public Lands and other conservation groups, we purchased privately owned tracts, reconnected wildlife corridors, and repaired vital ecosystems that lend our region its health and natural beauty.
Of the billion dollars or so that I’ve given to date, the greater part has supported the work of nonprofits in the five states of the Pacific Northwest, my roots. Now in its twentieth year under Jody’s leadership, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has five areas of focus that reflect my long-held personal interests: medicine and technology, community development, safety-net social programs, education reform, and arts and culture. In response to the Gates-Buffett challenge, I recently announced my long-held plan to leave most of my estate to these efforts.
In particular, I haven’t forgotten my weekly childhood jaunts to the Seattle Public Library and what they meant to my development as a thinker. We’ve contributed $22.5 million to build an endowment for collection acquisitions and to help construct a children’s center in the new downtown facility.
Outside the foundation, much of my giving is channeled into scientific research. I like to inaugurate small investigative programs wit
h breakthrough potential or resuscitate worthy efforts that have stalled for lack of funds. We’re also active in support of learning institutions and museums that celebrate some aspect of our common history, like the EMP—or the Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Washington. Inspired by my father’s service in the European theater, I’ve assembled fourteen vintage warplanes from the main combatants in World War II aviation: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan. They’ve been painstakingly restored inside and out with period materials, and most of them take to the air on “fly days.” Some are the only models of their kind in existence, and all are living relics of sacrifice and bravery. Seeing them takes me back to my boyhood plastic kit model warplanes, which I’d glue together and paint with just the right camouflage markings.
Whenever I visit Flying Heritage, I feel uplifted by the beauty of those machines and their watershed technology. Two days before the museum’s formal opening in 2008, I arrived for an emotional moment. Bud Tordoff, an eighty-five-year-old veteran, climbed into the cockpit of the actual P-51D Mustang fighter that he’d flown more than a dozen times over Germany. Bud recounted a 1944 mission on which he’d shot down two enemy planes to protect some B-17s, an event we’ve been able to document with gun-camera footage. (When the media asked him if he was tempted to fly the plane again, Bud reminded us all of the passing of time. “My wife won’t even let me drive,” he said.)
While I remain committed to our region, I also want to help Africa, where we’re making some small headway at the Abu Camp and my other holdings in Kenya and Zambia. We’re supporting vermiculture (worm composting) as part of a project to encourage sustainable farming, along with community development initiatives, micro-enterprise funding, and school subsidies. Recently Jody and I donated $26 million to Washington State University, the largest private grant ever given there, to finish construction of the Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health. An important part of the school’s mission is to build up Africa’s capabilities to respond to animal-based diseases. Research will focus on improving detection, blocking animal-to-human transmission, and discovering new vaccines to protect livestock and all the livelihoods that depend on it.