by John Fowler
Now I really don’t belong here! There is no reasoning my way out of this fear, which burns into me the most vivid memory of my time at Karisoke. And so we begin what my boss, Dian Fossey, will one day describe as the first time she had, “. . . ever been afraid of gorillas.”
A FOREST IN THE CLOUDS
ONE
MY OWN VISION OF THE WILD
As the youngest of four boys in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., I’d had more than the usual exposure to the natural world. My mother loved the beach, and my father loved the mountains. Before I could remember, my dad had built a cottage for Mom on Chesapeake Bay, and like wild kids, my brothers, Paul, Steve, Dennis, and I spent weekends combing the beach for fossilized shark’s teeth. Sometimes the bay would fill with stinging jellyfish we called sea nettles. Our desire to swim overcame our fear of these creatures, and eventually we learned to pick them up by their harmless pulsating caps. With stinging tentacles trailing on the sand we amazed passersby with our bravery. Doesn’t that hurt you? Nope. We also mastered the ability to capture blue crabs barehanded. With crab pinchers flailing madly before us, we chased after our innocent friends.
School field trips led to our nation’s capital’s great attractions. At the National Zoo, I reveled in the sights, sounds, and even the smells of living creatures from other worlds, marveling at the scale and scope of nature’s diversity in form and function, from the smallest birds in the giant walk-through aviary, to the great apes, large cats, and super-sized mammals like rhinos, giraffes, and elephants. Even the beguiling, lifeless bronze of a giant anteater outside the Small Mammal House captivated me; so puzzled I was at first by which end was which. In the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of Natural History, I lingered far behind my schoolmates, spellbound in the intimate vision each specimen afforded with their lifelike glass eyes. I could almost see them breathing as they posed and I wished to drift away into their dioramas of exotic habitat and new horizons, where Tarzan and Mowgli lived in idyll.
Dad liked animals too, and we were the only home in our Fairfax neighborhood of Pine Ridge with, in addition to dogs and cats, chickens, pigeons, and peafowl. But it didn’t stop there. Once, while Mom was out of the house, Dad was reading a Field & Stream magazine at the breakfast table, and in a near whisper, he called me into the kitchen. Pointing at an ad for mail-order squirrel monkeys, he said, “If you want to get one of these, go ahead and call this number.” I was ecstatic. I had been admiring the pet monkey ad with its photo of a beguiling squirrel-sized simian staring from the page with a human-like expression, but I never thought I could have such a pet. Apparently my dad wanted one too, and the next day we sent our check for fifteen dollars.
I never knew how Dad broke the idea to Mom, but he deftly assembled a large cage from wood and chicken wire, and a week after our exotic cargo arrived, the basement rec room permanently reeked of overripe bananas and monkey poop.
Although Casper was never affectionate with me, we had a mutual respect, and I was able to carry him around attached to a harness and leash. That was the year of the emergence of the seventeen-year cicada in Virginia. My new monkey’s favorite pastime was to perch on my hand as I ran through the front yard allowing him to grab cicadas out of the air and devour them, crunching and munching wings, legs and all like a handful of chips and creamy dip. That was the highlight of Casper’s captivity. When he was back in his cage, he sat forlornly on his shelf and stared out the window toward the forest that flanked our backyard.
One day, while I was cleaning his cage outdoors, Casper made a break for it and escaped. None of us were able to grab him, and my brothers and I soon watched the agile monkey disappear into the woods behind our home, the same trees he had stared at through the window from his cage. In spectacular leaps and bounds, he traveled through the canopy of tall oaks and maples as if it was his native tropical American rainforest. Despite my loss, I felt Casper’s exhilaration as he disappeared from view in the depth of what was, from my young perspective, an endless forest.
Dad also bought mail-order honeybees from Sears, Roebuck and set them up in a hive on the driveway behind our house. The bees were supposed to be docile. I had to find out for myself. Once as a young neighbor named Elisa looked on, I approached the hive to show her my bravery. Bees buzzed around me as Elisa gazed from a safe twenty feet away. The buzzing grew loud as they swarmed around my head next to the hive. One by one they began to light on me: arms, head, shoulders, and face. They began to accumulate around my eyes. Two, four, six, dozens—their mouth parts feeling for the edges of my eyelids then lingering, their tongue-like projections dabbling there.
“They’re drinking from my eyes!” I said. Transfixed and horrified, Elisa just grimaced and stared, keeping her distance, but I was dazzled by this power that others feared. To be covered in bees is to be safe, because no one will come near you and I stood where others feared to.
Eventually, my dad, a carpenter and construction supervisor, indulged his yearning for the mountains and bought a one-hundred-year-old cabin in the Shenandoah Valley. As an escape from the city, it ultimately won out over the beach cottage, which was sold. Mom, outgoing and enterprising, decided it was Dad’s turn and took willingly to renovating the old cabin and spending weekends gardening, canning, and stoking a coal-fired stove reminiscent of her childhood in the strip-mining region of Pennsylvania.
The Blue Ridge Mountains were beautiful but sterile, I thought, relative to the rich vitality of the shore. At the beach, we had been unfettered and free—in the mountains there were chores. My older brothers adapted quickly to skills like carpentry and driving tractors, but menial tasks like weeding the carrots and lettuce, or shoveling coal into buckets to haul to the house, became my domain. The mountains, great tidal waves frozen in time, loomed like walls around me.
As the youngest of four boys striving for an identity of my own, and unafraid of wild creatures, I found myself in my own vision of the wild. At age seven, I knew I wanted a career with animals. The creatures and fantastic tales of Dr. Seuss spellbound me, and I wanted to be Max in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. In later school years, I pored through the World Book Encyclopedia and National Geographic magazines, aching for wild places far away, but when I envisioned a career in the wilds of Africa, I rarely spoke of it. At the time, careers like that were rare and I believed that others, including my parents and brothers, would see my dream as a weird and frivolous notion, impractical and unobtainable.
By the time I was thirteen, Dad had grown increasingly tired with commuting and working in the ever-expanding and increasingly congested Washington, D.C. suburbs. My parents sold the house in Fairfax and bought an imposing white brick two-story farmhouse in Mount Jackson, Virginia. From its wide porches, we could see the Blue Ridge to the west and the Massanutten range to the east, and I often thought of the world that was beyond these mountains.
Dad became a full-time gentleman farmer. Too productive, really, we grew and dug enough potatoes to feed ten families and then watched them rot in a huge pile. In the chicken coop, two dozen brown hens cranked out two dozen brown eggs daily. The basement filled with jars of green beans, tomatoes, beets, and sauerkraut. Dad was a good provider.
Mom started cooking in the mornings: applesauce from the apples, eggs from the hen house, slab bacon from the pigs. Our large kitchen had a fireplace, a big oak table and a gas range but no automatic dishwasher. “You practically have to wash them before you put them in anyway,” Mom always said. Instead, her prized possession was an enamel-coated, glossy, brown iron coal-fired stove, which vented through its own chimney. She cooked on its surface as adeptly as on gas or electricity. Breakfasts merged into lunches, which merged into suppers. “Do you want some applesauce?” she would ask each family member pausing at every chair. “No,” we would answer in turn, before she placed a large dollop on each plate. Three humming refrigerators—one in the kitchen, one in the washroom, and one in the guest house—brimmed with leftovers amon
g stacks of eggs in recycled cartons. Three dogs and three cats kept their noses in the air, hoping for scraps, and friends and neighbors strategically dropped in at meal times. They raved about Mom’s fresh applesauce and often left with a bag of potatoes and a carton of eggs.
From that great old homestead, the only house I could see from my upstairs bedroom window was across a wide cow pasture. It was empty. Bored with the Virginia countryside, I matured and was consumed by a desire to travel. Africa fixed in my mind, the place where exotic animals roamed free and by the thousands. On television I saw a veterinarian who worked in the national parks of Africa. That seemed just right. Virginia did not have a veterinary school, but the University of Georgia annually admitted seven Virginia residents into its College of Veterinary Medicine.
After two years of core curriculum at Lord Fairfax Community College in Middletown, Virginia, I enrolled in UGA’s pre-veterinary program and headed south. I had always had an aptitude for languages and art, but considered these frivolous and impractical pursuits, relegated to the realm of avocations and hobbies. But majoring in zoology, the discipline of real science caught me off guard. In my first quarter I dropped out of calculus, but lingered in physics beyond the deadline and flunked it. Determined, I linked up with other students having the same problem who convinced me to join them in taking physics the following summer at Gainesville Community College, forty miles away. The credits were transferable, and I scored an A!
From then on I strategized. I took remedial math and learned who the best teacher was in each subject before registering for a class. I also partnered with other students to discuss assignments and study collaboratively. This way I was able to tackle calculus, organic chemistry, and microbiology, and raise my grade point average to qualify for vet school.
Socially and intellectually, college was a great escape from rural Virginia and led to opportunities for exploration and discovery. In the spring quarter of 1979, a fellow pre-vet student, Leslie Smith, told me she was going to East Africa during the summer on a study program from Georgia Tech. Envious, I asked her for details. She had seen a flyer posted on the bulletin board in the biology building. She said the registration deadline had already passed, but the contact person was Dr. Terry Maple in the psychology department at Georgia Tech. I called him that day.
“Yes, we could fit one more in,” Dr. Maple informed me on the phone. In his resonant baritone, he gave me the details. The trip would cost two thousand dollars and last fourteen days. In Kenya, we would be housed in a dormitory at the University of Nairobi. From there we would make trips to the country’s national parks to observe animals in their natural habitat and learn about animal behavior research and conservation. This was too good to be true, but asking my parents to pay for a $2000 course made me feel terrible. I was nervous when Dad answered the phone.
“I guess we could if that’s what you want to do,” he said.
Yes! If he could go for it, Mom would be easy.
It was difficult to concentrate on spring finals with Africa waiting for me on the other side, but I got through them. I marveled at my first passport when it arrived and dreaded the series of shots I needed for entry into Kenya. The nurse said the gamma globulin shot for typhoid would hurt when she stuck the needle in my butt. It did. I was surprised by the malaria preventative—a big pink M&M-looking tablet disguised a bitter quinine derivative within. It had to be taken daily two weeks prior to departure, and for six weeks after returning. It is supposed to kill the malaria microorganisms that enter your body when a mosquito bites you, but it doesn’t always work.
It was 3:30 A.M. on July nineteenth when our plane landed at the Nairobi airport. The cool air surprised me so near the equator, as did a pervasive smell of burning wood. No one offered an explanation for that. From the airport, our group of seven men and five women, led by Terry Maple and his student assistant Mike Hoff, shuttled to our dorm rooms. I strained to see through the darkness. In the headlights I could see abundant flowers in hedges of bright red, purple, and orange flanking the boulevard—bougainvillea. A quarter moon hung upside down, floating like a silver gondola transporting me to another world.
Our dorm rooms were on each side of a hallway at the top of a flight of concrete stairs. At each end of the hall, perforated concrete block walls let cool night air drift through. The rooms were simple, with twin beds and bookcases fixed to the walls. A vent at the top of each window was open to the outdoors. This room in the tropics was chilly.
Excited but exhausted, I slept soundly until dawn when I woke to a deep, reverberant noise repeated in a series of six booming notes—a natural sound, a creature! It was distant but loud and completely alien. I wondered what it could be—a baboon I imagined. I rose, pulled on my clothes and trotted down the dorm’s cold staircase into the morning’s chill. The smell of firewood was stronger than the night before. In time, I came to understand that the smoke was coming from the home fires in the communities of pale stucco houses that flanked the campus and mingled with other buildings of the city.
A large tree on the lawn outside the dormitory, with a trunk two feet thick, was covered in wide conical spines fading where the branches began ten feet above. Impossible to climb, I thought like a child. And as with a child, everything was foreign and new to me. I tapped on the trunk between the spines and it made a hollow drum-like sound, as if empty. A brown dove with a black mark at the nape of its neck fluttered down and landed on the grass twenty feet away. It bobbed its head as it walked, then stopped to cock one eye at me. The eye, brilliant red, gleamed like a polished ruby cabochon.
Before long, I heard the voices of fellow students, and dishes clanging in the dining hall adjoining our building. Breakfast was being served and our group was filing down the stairs to eat. Inside the cafeteria, a row of six smiling Kenyans served us food reminiscent of English colonialism—hard fried eggs on slices of toast that was also fried rock hard. An oddly tart-tasting fat round link sausage was added with a small plump tomato that had been pan-seared on its sliced top and bottom. I sampled everything with wonder. One attendant poured coffee, while another brought pitchers of hot milk and topaz-colored crystals of natural sugar. Yellow and reddish fruit juices were served in carafes. More sweet than tart, and tasting unfamiliar to us, we guessed what they might be. Orange-mango? Pineapple-guava? I reveled in the newness and difference of every detail of this new world, from the food, to the air I now breathed.
At the table, Dr. Maple chatted with a cheerful university representative and local Kenyan. They discussed details of our travels while in Kenya. What days would we be at the University, and what days would we be away to other parts of the country? Would we need boxed lunches, or would we be out overnight? This gentleman greeted our group in his crisp native accent, and asked us about our trip. I asked him about the sound I had heard at dawn. “That’s a red-eyed dove,” he replied, with a gleaming smile.
Our first field trip was to the Nairobi National Park. We loaded into two kombi minibuses and drove to the park’s entry just outside of town. As we entered on a dusty dirt road through a thicket of acacia trees, Dr. Maple advised us not to shout nor shoot an entire roll of film when we saw our first animal. We laughed. We were much too sophisticated for that.
As we rounded a curve out of the trees into wide rolling grasslands, a towering giraffe stood thirty feet away grazing on the high branches of a tall acacia. “Giraffe!” we shouted clambering to our feet to poke our heads and cameras out of the kombi’s open sunroof. “Shhhh . . .” we chided each other, each member of my group as giddily enthusiastic as I was. The kombis stopped and camera shutters clicked frantically at the giraffe who chewed a bolus of leaves while staring complacently at our ecstatic group.
As we traveled farther down the dirt road, we saw three more giraffes that moved along beside our vehicle thirty feet on our right. We stopped to admire them, our group drunken with awe, as these towering behemoths glided before us to cross the road. Their long necks undulated gr
acefully at a slight gallop, making them seem like a slow-motion optical illusion at fifteen feet tall, bedazzled with orange-brown puzzle-piece markings.
Ahead, a group of more than twenty zebras trotted along. We caught up with them and they veered away to the left. Fifty feet away, they slowed and paused. Fine-lined faces peered at us from beyond a jumble of bold black and white barred rumps. Tails swished, and skin quivered to shoo biting flies. We had to suppress the urge to shout and point, and temper the fingers on our camera shutters.
Terry Maple tried to channel our energy to the perspective of field research, instructing us to look for differences in each zebra’s set of stripes. We began to notice the lines on their bodies, like fingerprints, were different on every individual. Terry informed us that field researchers keep photographic records to distinguish animals in a herd.
Our days in the field were followed by nights at an outpost camp or back at the University. We drank cold Tusker beer at the Serena Hotel near the campus or outdoors around a campfire. Terry Maple shared stories from a previous trip or talked about animal psychology. After a beer or two, he would often burst into one of his “psongs,” as he called them—his own lyrics involving natural history or characters like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, cofounders of the Theory of Evolution, sung, or psung rather, to a popular tune. Among this group of people who shared my interest in the natural world, Africa strummed the chords of my emotional and intellectual core.
We had serious meetings too, when we would talk about our days in the field and how our observations related to our assigned texts on animal behavior and ethology. One of our reading assignments was Portraits in the Wild by Cynthia Moss, a comprehensive and monumental compilation of information on many East African mammals. From this we learned the social structure of animals like elephants, which live in groups of females and their young, led by a dominant matriarch. Male elephants travel alone or flank the herd seeking a receptive female for the opportunity to breed.