by John Crocker
We set out once again to follow the chimps. Abdul guided us throughout the day as we encountered different groups of chimps, baboons, and colobus monkeys leaping in the treetops, pausing at streams now and then to cool our faces. Toward late afternoon, we decided to visit the peak that had served as Jane’s lookout point in her first sighting of the chimps in 1960. I wanted Tommy to see the exact spot, a small clearing overlooking the main valley, where Jane had waited patiently for several months while the chimps gradually lost their fear of her. Several National Geographic films show her at this location, observing the chimpanzees in the valleys below with her binoculars and rolling out her sleeping blanket to spend the night.
“I will take you to Dr. Jane’s Peak,” Abdul said. Abdul knew the entire history of Jane’s journey at Gombe, even though it began well before he was born.
By five in the afternoon the forest was calm without a lot of animal calls, and the seventy-degree temperature combined perfectly with the light breeze that blew across the lake. Birds chirped softly all around us when we emerged from the thick brush onto the small grassy bluff called the Peak. Tommy and I were panting hard, though Abdul seemed less fazed by the steep climb.
“I feel like we’re flying over the valley in an airplane,” Tommy said, looking down on Kasekela Valley. In sharp contrast to the all-engulfing dark green of the forest, the open area where we stood was bathed in golden sunlight. Occasional chimp calls and baboon grunts echoed from the leafy forest below. The three of us stood quietly for several minutes; our silence felt like a moment of prayer or meditation. Standing there was like entering an old cathedral whose stained-glass windows and high ceilings whispered an ancient spiritual message.
“I love this spot in the forest,” Abdul confided. I looked at him; peace and serenity shone from his face. I let out a slow, deep breath in response.
For me, the Peak symbolized Jane’s hard work, isolation, and achievement during her early years here. Gazing out over the valley down to the lake and up to the Rift Mountains, I imagined her in 1960, at age twenty-six. The loneliness must have been difficult, yet Jane had always emphasized that these were treasured moments. She might have spent grueling days trekking through dense underbrush, risking exposure to tropical diseases and injury, but there were rewards: the peace of the forest and the excitement of seeing the chimps in their natural environment were gifts beyond price and made all the hardship worthwhile.
Jane admitted, however, that she would have been foolish not to worry about the leopards, Cape buffalo, snakes, and malaria, but her self-discipline and determination were powerful. Her strong commitment to the chimps and her work motivated her and allowed her to risk the dangers and endure the isolation far from her comfortable home and family in England.
In her book Reason for Hope, Jane wrote, “I was supposed to be there and I had a job to do.” She thought she had a pact with God, and she had said, “I’ll do this job, God, and You look after me.”
Despite huge obstacles and unknown dangers, her dream of working with wild animals in Africa came true. Those genes from her car-racing father and her consistent, caring mother may have been at work. In My Life with the Chimpanzees she wrote, “I wanted to learn things that no one else knew, uncover secrets through patient observation.”
At a lecture I recently attended, I was fascinated to hear Jane say that looking back at the early years, it had seemed impossible to succeed, but she’d persevered anyway. “I felt strongly after my first few frustrating months at Gombe that I needed to complete the work I was sent here to do.” To her credit, after fifty years, her life’s work studying the free-living chimpanzees in Kasekela Valley is still in progress. It’s the longest-running study of great apes in the wild. Because of its longevity, her research has revealed new information that could not have been discovered otherwise. As a mentor, Jane had a long-term outlook that impressed on me the value of always keeping the end goal in mind.
I was ruminating on all of this when I suddenly thought of something. I had a persistent need to document “special moments,” even though I knew that doing so might interfere with my enjoyment of the actual moment.
I handed my video camera to Abdul. “I’d love to record Tommy and me sitting in the spot where Jane sat in 1960,” I explained. He nodded, looking down at the device in his hand.
We found the location that we assumed was the exact vantage point for Jane’s first observations, and while Abdul recorded us, I began talking with Tommy to create a narrative of the moment. Suddenly there was a loud click. “It stopped,” Abdul said, frowning.
Examining it and pressing some buttons, I figured out that the battery was dead. I shook it in frustration. “I thought it had more power,” I said. “Maybe I could go back and get another battery.” Both my son and Abdul just stared at me in disbelief. I came to my senses; it would have taken three hours round-trip. Insane. I was frustrated with myself for not being prepared. While I kept tinkering with the camera, Abdul wandered away a bit and Tommy followed.
The forest has a way of making petty annoyances seem insignificant. One of Gombe’s great lessons for me was teaching me to distinguish what was important from what wasn’t. It’s a lesson I continually learn in my personal and professional lives.
Taking a deep breath, I realized I was focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of being preoccupied with the mechanics of taking pictures and video and narrating “special moments” for people back home, I could simply be in my special moments.
I turned toward Tommy and Abdul, who were talking and laughing about their lives and the chimps. I was delighted to see these two young men in their twenties from very different backgrounds joking and enjoying a growing friendship—a scene that could have taken place on any college campus or in the town of Kigoma. It had taken place for me in Gombe, when Hamisi and I started our own lifelong friendship. I was glad it was happening again now before my eyes at Gombe, as it brought me back even closer to that period in my own life. I forgot about the video camera and just observed for a while.
“Back home, some people hire personal trainers to help them get started with exercise routines and weightlifting,” Tommy told Abdul as they talked about the still-remarkable Frodo. “Maybe Frodo could be hired as a personal trainer for people who want to be extra-strong.”
Abdul burst out laughing and clapped Tommy on the shoulder.
As I watched them compare stories, I felt envious of their youth, but also empathetic about the uncertainties they faced with regard to their careers, finances, romances, priorities, and purpose in life. I remembered my twenties as a tough decade, even with its exciting times. Back then I questioned if I had what it took to become a doctor. I worked hard but found mastering physics and biochemistry difficult. I had good friends in college, but lacked confidence in developing more intimate relationships. Because of my conservative upbringing—and because I was naturally shy and reserved—I found it hard to make easygoing connections with people. Observing uninhibited wild animals in the African forest had been good for me. Some of my own inhibitions and self-conscious feelings had melted away after months of watching the natural, spontaneous interactions of the Gombe chimps. I found it easier to be myself, and I worried less about what people thought of me. In some ways, the chimps’ confidence in their world had given me confidence in mine. I learned what it was to be absorbed in an activity that was meaningful for me as an individual while I contributed something important to a larger community. Learning to live life with both purpose and pleasure gave me enormous happiness.
Through his study of Buddhism and meditation, Tommy was currently exploring the idea of living in the moment. He was trying not to dwell on the past or future in his everyday thoughts. It was also clear he didn’t want a career track that precluded being “mindful” of others. Abdul too was mindful. He placed great importance on caring for his ailing mother and having a strong faith. In conversation, he was very attentive and present, making a lot of steady eye contact. He and Tom
my were both rugged, fit young guys, vigorous and spontaneous, and both were well integrated into their communities. I wondered what contributions each would make to those communities over his lifetime.
As Tommy and Abdul continued in their lively conversation, I stepped back a bit. Noticing some distant puffy clouds over the hills of the Congo across the lake, I faded off into my own reverie, recalling a time Jane and I had spent together a few years earlier.
Jane had come to speak in Seattle, and in midafternoon, she and I went out onto a terrace for a glass of wine. It was a mild day, and we enjoyed sitting in silence for a while, enjoying our own thoughts together. I watched a squirrel rustling around in the cluster of trees in front of us.
I was watching the branches on one of the trees, which were moving gently in the breeze when Jane broke the silence. “I have a tradition of making a toast to the people in my life who have passed on” she told me. “Each day at around five P.M., I think about my mum and about Derek.” Jane’s second husband, Derek, had died from colon cancer only five years after they married. Her “mum,” Vanne, who had nurtured her in childhood and provided emotional support during her early days at Gombe, had died a few years prior, at age ninety-three. They had been very close.
“I have lost so many good people through the years,” Jane said. We were quiet again for a while, and then Jane started talking about other loved ones who had passed away. She spoke of them with warmth and with joy. She talked about Hugo, her first husband, who had also passed away too young; Danny, her grandmother, with whom she had spent much time; and of course Flo, the chimpanzee matriarch, whom she had come to know well in her first years at Gombe.
I looked at Jane, whose face was still and serene, and moved over closer to her. Remembering her effectiveness with nonverbal communications, I simply gazed at her and smiled. She did not need me to reply.
Jane contemplated the deep-blue sky with puffy white clouds and said, “I guess it’s time for a toast to the Cloud Contingent.”
I came to appreciate her inner spirit even more as she described her way of keeping in touch with those who were no longer part of her physical life. Each day since their deaths, Jane told me, she thought about these precious people in her life, which she called her Cloud Contingent. The cloud formations were like her connections with these loved ones, constantly changing but always there. Her closeness to them and to nature seemed tightly intertwined.
So as the puffy clouds blew by, Jane and I toasted: “To loved ones who have passed.”
Now, recalling that afternoon, I watched from the Peak as the clouds moved across the hills of the Congo. Reaching out, I grabbed a large leaf and made a primitive cup out of it. Tommy and Abdul, startled by my sudden movement, looked at me as though I’d been out in the sun too long, but I held the “cup” pointed up to the clouds, saying, “Here is to life on Earth now, to Jane for all her hard environmental work, and to the Gombe chimps.”
Tommy and Abdul both flashed me big smiles, and they held up their hands as if holding cups to toast with me. My son looked at me with appreciation in his eyes as he held his imaginary cup to his lips, and my heart was full.
Looking around us from our spot on Jane’s Peak, feeling uplifted and surrounded by divinity, I thought about my mother. I had first learned about spirituality from her. While I was growing up, she read books about Edgar Cayce, a spiritual healer who believed in reincarnation and predicting the future. I remember being skeptical but also interested in the stories she told me about Cayce discovering answers to medical problems in patients while he was in a trancelike state. Grounded in her faith, my mom had a calm and confident response to emotional turmoil and health concerns in our family. “Just turn within and find the truth,” she would say in a trusting voice. “God is within each of us.”
Later I learned more about spirituality from Jane, who shared my belief that the forest was the most divine of places. While at Gombe, I could see the depth of Jane’s spiritual life in her observations and interactions with nature and wildlife. I felt an echo of that in my own soul then, and I felt it now, on the Peak. As Dale Peterson wrote of Jane in Africa in My Blood, “As she came closer to nature and animals, she came closer to herself and in tune with the spiritual power she felt all around.”
After I left Gombe, Jane had told me of a difficult time in her life when, in 1974, her marriage to Hugo was breaking up and her affections were moving toward Derek. One day in the spring of that year, while feeling despair and sadness, she happened to walk into Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. She was immediately surrounded by the thunderous notes of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” playing at full volume for a wedding. The music throbbed around her while the sun illuminated the great Rose Window, and Jane paused “in silent awe.” Peterson, in Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Defined Man, beautifully described the moment, and Phillip Berman, in Reason for Hope, also captured Jane’s thoughts in the cathedral:
It was the glorious reverberation of the organ in an ancient place of worship, sanctified over hundreds of years by the sincere prayers of so many thousands of people. The impact was so powerful, I suppose, because it came at a time when so much was changing in my life, when I was vulnerable. The experience forced me to rethink the meaning of life on Earth.
Standing there on the Peak, I remembered those words. I too was standing in a place that had an ancient spiritual imprint. Looking out on a forest that was millions of years old had a profound spiritual charge to it. Getting to intimately know the lives of the animals that lived there and having had the privilege of seeing our human connection to our chimp cousins there gave me a sense of both the vastness of the world and of the specifics of our moment in it.
My feet felt rooted to the rich soil; I stood there with my son, who was seeking his own way into a more spiritual and connected life. I felt profoundly grateful for both Jane’s and my mother’s earthly and spiritual influences, and I was filled with the wonderful awareness that I was seeing my son experience this remote landscape and history in his own manner. It was natural at that moment for my thoughts to turn to another female role model, no longer alive on this earth, who had influenced and inspired me as well—the magnificent matriarch Fifi.
Remembering Fifi
While Tommy and Abdul were contentedly talking and starting to explore the Peak together, I wanted to take a little more time to reminisce on this historic spot. I called to Tommy, and as he approached I said, “I need a few minutes to think about Fifi.”
I meandered over to a knoll of dry grass near a fig tree, where I could sit and reflect upon Fifi and her effect on my life. How lucky I was to have been able to come alongside such a highly successful chimp mother raising her first offspring. Lucky, too, that my observations had taken place during eight months of Freud’s formative years, when a lot of learning occurs. Fifi’s remarkable mothering skills—and how we humans might learn from them—were often in my mind when I began to work with patients.
I couldn’t help but have some guilt that I hadn’t seen her again. For many years before my return trip with Tommy, I kept telling myself, “I’d better go back before Fifi dies.” At age forty, chimps start to show signs of aging and are more susceptible to pneumonia and other infections. Some may live to fifty in the wild, but not many. I really wanted to see Fifi again.
In July 2004, however, before I could return to Gombe, Tony emailed me at work, telling me that Fifi was missing. Doing the calculations, I realized she would have been close to forty-six. I knew Fifi well enough to know that she would not be missing for anything. She must have died. Fifi, the successful mother of nine, daughter of old Flo, focal point of my student observations because of her superb mothering skills, energy, and confidence, was no longer alive.
I felt terrible. I told myself, How can you feel guilty about not seeing Fifi before she died when you meant nothing to her? Since researchers didn’t interact with the chimps (unless it was unavoidable), I had probably been just another strange, upright
ape to her. But for me, the five stages one goes through after the loss of a loved one held true even in a one-way relationship with a wild chimp: disbelief or shock, guilt, anger, grief, and eventual acceptance. Our sense of loss isn’t always mitigated by how much we meant to someone we lost—it’s about how much they meant to us.
One month after hearing the news, I wrote Fifi a long letter about how proud I was of her accomplishments and how much she’d taught me about mothering. I wanted her to know how much she had influenced me and how I continued to pass that influence on to patients who have young children.
Sitting on the Peak, I remembered that evening in the office, looking up at her picture while getting out the pad and paper. I thought she would prefer it handwritten.
Dear Fifi,
Although physically not present on Earth, you are still often in my thoughts. You lived forty-six amazing years in the wilds of the Gombe forest.
For eight months I watched you as a young mother raising your two-and-a-half-year-old son Freud. You were my favorite of the four mothers I studied because of your endless patience, playful manner, and overall confidence in life.
To the astonishment of everyone at Gombe, including Jane, you successfully raised nine offspring over a thirty-year period: Freud, Frodo, Fanni, Flossi, Faustino, Ferdinand, Fred, Flirt, and Furaha. Three of your five sons achieved alpha male status and helped maintain the community’s protection and vitality for many years.
You were an engaging chimpanzee like your mother, Flo, and won the hearts of people around the world who saw you in National Geographic films and read about you in Dr. Goodall’s books. Your notoriety has contributed to more awareness of the urgency to conserve forests to protect threatened species such as chimps, orangutans, gorillas, and other precious animals.