PART TWO
IN THE FALL OF 1970 I drove across the country with my dog, Willie, a collie-shepherd mix I’d picked up at the pound who was so smart and attuned to everything that was going on that a more invaluable and stimulating companion, a tighter bond, couldn’t have been asked for. It was my first trip across the country. I was more traveled in Europe and Greece, and had spent a summer working construction in Alaska, living off the salmon running up the river where I had pitched my tent, so many thousands you could almost have run across it on their backs. That was an unforgettable experience: a wilderness still crawling with wildlife, spruce trees sagging with plump spruce grouse, a bear or a moose around every bend. But I had barely dipped my foot into the wonders of the contiguous United States.
In the middle of the Arizona desert I turned off the interstate onto an enticing dirt track that went into the territory of the Mescalero Apaches, and after several miles I came upon a long-haired member of the tribe who was about my age—twenty-three—sitting on a rock, alone and far from anybody or anything human. He was looking out over the desert and didn’t respond, or even acknowledge my existence when I asked if he wanted a lift. He must have been on a vision quest I later realized. Traditionally, among Ojibway, or Anishinaabe people of western Canada, when you were in your early twenties, you went off “wonder wandering” for several years before settling down and raising a family. This is kind of what I was doing and am still doing, forty-seven years later. I have never stopped wandering and wondering. I was born to travel. It’s in my blood, going back to a famous polar explorer in the nineteenth century and his grandson, Andrey Avinoff, my great-uncle, who was one of the first foreigners to enter Tibet, in 1912. He was looking for new species of Parnassius, the tailless gauzy-white alpine Papilios. From an early age I exhibited an urge to hit the road. When I was four and we were visiting my maternal grandmother at the little red farmhouse in Richmond, New Hampshire, where she summered, I just took off. When my frantic mother found me, several miles down the road—I can still smell the golden floor of the needles below the tall white pines that lined it, and the tar bubbling out of the seams in the highway in the hot August sun—I was holding forth to half a dozen adults about how I was going to travel around the world and was going to be gone for two or three years. According to Mom, they were spellbound.
At this point I had shoulder-length hair myself and in keeping with the times—if I hadn’t come of age in the late sixties, my life would have turned out very differently—had dropped out and been living deep in the New Hampshire woods for the last nine months. There, as my mother put it, “nature hit me.” Particularly the birds, which I was painting watercolors of. I was keeping a journal of the fauna and flora I encountered and writing songs, about one a day, with lyrics full of nature imagery. My heart was bleeding for the beauty of universe. After several ecstatic trips on organic mescaline that put me in the rapturous state of oneness with all life that I had experienced as a kid in the woods in Bedford, every pore of my senses was open. But my “old lady” (as significant others were called in the hippie counterculture; she was a year older than me) and I broke up, and I was heading out to California, where there were two girls I wanted to be with who, when I got there, both turned out to be with other guys. I was still looking for my soul mate, who I believed was somewhere out there, and trying out different possibilities for what I was going to do with my life. I was now a singer-songwriter and a bird painter. I had given up being a newspaper reporter and trying to be the next T. S. Eliot, but I knew from the age of sixteen that I was going to be a writer. Not of fiction—truth is stranger than fiction any day of the week, it has more strange, improbable twists than the most imaginative novelist could possibly invent, and more verisimilitude, obviously. And coming from a family of natural scientists, I had too much respect for the way things are and trying to figure out the incredible intricacy of what was out there, and how everything fit and interacted, and the role of accident, to put out a narrative that cut corners. I was much taken with the new journalism of Tom Wolfe, especially The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and with the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but they didn’t give any ink to other species or the natural world, a major shortcoming. Why couldn’t you write about people and animals, let them all have a voice, and convey the endless fascination of what is actually out there, if you bother to look, which not many people do? So I would open their eyes then. This is the kind of writing I was beginning to see I was put here to do. Something that incorporated my love of people, nature, and world travel.
First Encounters with Environmental Horror
I started hanging out at Wheeler’s Ranch, an open commune on a spectacular ridge that ran down to the sparkling Pacific, above a funky hamlet called Occidental, an hour and a half north of San Francisco. I did a lot of jamming around the nightly bonfire with other guitar pickers, some of them drifters like me, but the sixties were over; the Age of Aquarius was acquiring a dark edge. Somebody OD’d and was found dead in the underbrush when I was there, and nobody even knew who he was.
One afternoon word came that there had been a big oil spill in San Francisco Bay; thousands of waterbirds were coated in oil and volunteers were needed to clean them off. So we all piled into our rigs and drove down to the bird collection station where we worked through the night and all next day wiping oil off the bodies and tails and feet and necks and heads of western grebes and terns, mainly, with paper towels soaked in baby oil, and daubing their eyes, ears, and nostrils out with Q-tips. The birds were in terrified shock. Some of them died in our hands. This was my first lesson in, my first harrowing actual experience of, the death and destruction that the modern, carbon-fueled way of life is wreaking on the planet, the cost of the amenities and products we take for granted. It was transformative, eye opening.
In the fall of 1971, back east, I fell madly in love with Jane Frick, Aunt Helen’s great-niece, with whom I use to run around in the beautiful woods of Westmoreland Farm. She was a real nature girl who had grown up more with animals than people and had a remarkable ability to connect with them and feel what they were feeling, more than anybody I had ever met. She had become a marine biologist and an expert on green sea turtles and right and humpback whales and was working with Roger and Katy Payne, who were making the first recordings of haunting, ethereal, unfathomably complex whale songs.
That February Jane and I went together to Jamaica, my first trip to the tropics. We climbed Blue Mountain Peak and visited the Maroons, the descendants of slaves who escaped into the impenetrable Cockpit Country in the west-central part of the island and had their own treaty with the British crown. We looked for the Shoumatoff’s hairstreak, the little metallic-blue lycenid named for my dad, who had caught the first specimens known to science near Accompong, the Maroon’s main community, in 1934, when he was sixteen, but the only ones we found were the pinned dead ones he and Uncle (as our great-uncle Avinoff was known in the family) had deposited in the Jamaica Institute in Kingston.
We rented a bungalow in a little place west and inland from Ocho Rios called Bamboo. The bungalow belonged to Reynolds Metals. Behind it was a verdant rain forest, full of beautiful little birds found only on Jamaica, emerald-green todies and swallow-tailed hummingbirds, which Jamaicans call the doctor bird. Behind the rain forest were two hills that had been literally decapitated, cut off at the neck, and were oozing red earth like blood from a severed artery. Reynolds Metals had mined them for their bauxite and left them like that. This was my second lesson in the terrible cost of the modern way of life. Since then I avoid having anything to do with aluminum, as much as possible. A few years later I was climbing up an arroyo in the desert outside of Moab, Utah, and came upon some coyote scat. Half of it was fur and bones, but the rest was aluminum foil from some previous hiker’s candy or sandwich wrapper. The sight gave me a shudder as if I had bitten into the foil myself.
I had sublet a place on the Lower East Side, a block from the Hell’s Angels headquarters on Second and Second, and was supporting myself by writing articles for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice and going up to Bedford and doing tree work for my mom’s friends, and with the thousand dollars I had gotten for a two-year option on the songs I had written from the manager of Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez. I was still planning to follow in the footsteps of Bob Dylan. But then I scored a contract with Harper & Row for what would become my first book, Florida Ramble, about traveling around the Sunshine State in an old convertible with Willie, poking around in the swamps and talking to the crackers, retirees, fruit tramps, and so forth. Jane and I broke up, and I got involved with my editor’s adorable assistant, Leslie, and we decided to get married and live in Bedford. My brother was living up in Cross River with his English wife and curating the little stone nature museum at the 4,315-acre Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, the largest park in Westchester County. Despite the museum being only one room with a bunch of stuffed animals, Nick was doing amazing things, inspiring a whole generation of kids and their parents, turning them on to the rich natural and human history of where they were. He became an expert on the Lenape Delaware who had lived in Westchester, learned their dialect, Munsee, their ethnobotany, and everything else he could about them from old ethnographies and archaeological digs. In one family’s backyard he found a bear petroglyph, carved by the Lenape centuries ago on a big boulder, a glacial erratic. He made a big mandala that took up a wall of the museum and marked along its outer ring scores of local natural events over the course of a year: when the bears came out of hibernation, when the warblers returned, when the wildflowers bloomed, dozens of them, when the oaks were heavy with acorns; then in the next ring the Indians’ seasonal hunting and gathering and planting activities, also very numerous and coinciding with the natural events; then in the next ring the farmer’s seasonal activities, fewer but still geared to the seasons, and finally in the center, suburban man, who shoveled snow in the winter, cut the grass over the summer, and raked the leaves in the fall, and that was about it.
I got hired as the resident naturalist at the Marsh Sanctuary, a wildlife preserve on the edge of Mount Kisco, five hundred yards from the hospital where I was born. It came with a cottage, where Leslie and I lived, before and after our marriage. On one of my Sunday morning bird walks we saw the first red-bellied woodpecker ever reported in Westchester, the latest of a succession of species, following the tufted titmouse, the Carolina wren, and the turkey vulture, that were moving up from the south because of what is now recognized as anthropogenic climate change. But at that point only a handful of climate scientists knew about the greenhouse effect from CO2 emissions accumulating in the atmosphere. When I asked a paleometeorologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory why these southern birds were suddenly appearing, he said it was due to the interglacial warming period since the last glaciation going on longer than expected. It was overdue to end, and when it did we were going to be plunged into another ice age. This scenario, “Another Ice Age?” even made the cover of Time magazine in 1974.
Harper & Row signed me up for a second book, a cultural and natural history of Westchester County, and I got a job teaching middle school science at Rippowam. Many of my old beloved teachers were still on the faculty. I was supposed to teach a canned science course doing chemistry experiments and dissecting frogs, but I decided instead to teach the kids basic literacy in the local flora and fauna. My fifth and sixth graders learned to recognize thirty-nine species of trees and in the spring classes competed to see the most bird species. The kids had to write a detailed report on the geology and natural and human history of their property, which included interviewing an old-timer. Most of them loved it. I am still in touch with a dozen or so of my former students, now scattered around the world, on Facebook.
Commuting back and forth from the sanctuary to Harper & Row’s offices on Fifty-Third Street became too much for Leslie, so she got an apartment in the city, where I refused to live. She was a city person, and I was a country boy, so we only lasted through 1974. I quit Rip after the second year and finished my book, pouring all the love I had put into the Florida book, plus the love I had no one to give to now, and in the fall of 1975, with a contract from Sierra Club Books, I set out on a nine-month tour of the Amazon, which resulted in my third book, The Rivers Amazon.
At the very start of the expedition, in the Brazilian state of Pará, I visited the King Ranch, whose rain forest was being converted to pasture for cattle. The trees were being cut down with chain saws, dragged down by chains between tractors, and torched—a foretaste of what Davie and I will find happening in Borneo forty years later. I stood on a hill surrounded by miles and miles of thick black smoke pouring into the sky as far as I could see. And there were fires like this all over the Amazon, one on the Volkswagen Ranch that was reported to be bigger than Belgium (an exaggeration, but the fact that such a comparison could even have been made gives an idea of how big it was).
One of my main mentors for this book and many subsequent projects was Thomas Lovejoy, a visionary tropical and conservation biologist who coined the term biodiversity and pioneered the debt-for-nature swap, whereby developing countries were forgiven their debts to the International Monetary Fund in return for setting aside key portions of their still-intact wilderness areas. He also devised the minimum critical ecosystem study in the rain forest outside of Manaus, to determine how much reduction a forest can take before its biodiversity begins to be compromised, and the intricate web of interactions between its plants and animals breaks down, to help the Brazilian government regulate the massive deforestation that loggers and ranchers were doing in the Amazon. Lovejoy had predicted that if the incineration of the Amazon continued the way it was going, a million species would become extinct before they were even identified. That was one of the things that got me down there: I’d better see the Amazon before it’s gone.
I didn’t know it until 2013, when I met some of their cousins, but there were still uncontacted bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers in the vicinity of this massive conflagration. Obviously so much thick, black smoke must be having more than a local effect, I thought, and when I got back Lovejoy put me in touch with George Woodwell at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Woodwell was a pioneer in the measurement of atmospheric CO2 and explained to me the greenhouse effect, which was little known outside the climate-science community and still controversial.
In places the flames of the burning trees on the King Ranch were so hot and high that some of the trees had been sandblasted and landed upside down with their buttresses in the air like the fins of crashed rocket ships. This was the third seminal encounter in my education as an environmentalist. I didn’t plan on being one. The word wasn’t even in vogue yet. I was a naturalist and nature writer. I just wanted to experience the natural world and visit far-off places, but half the time, in the decades to follow, when I got to these remote Edens, they were being destroyed by the modern world’s appetite for wood, oil, gold, rare minerals, and by local population growth, with its need for more farmland, charcoal, and money. Few people from my world were going to get to these places, so I felt an obligation to tell them what was happening. Increasingly, this became the mission of my writing: to evoke the beauty and fascination and preciousness of what is being laid waste to in a way that the reader starts to care and maybe even wants to do something about it.
On that first trip I went completely off the grid, back to the late Stone Age, and met hunter-gatherers living the way humans have lived for all but the last ten thousand years. But even they were planting a few crops like bananas, manioc, and papayas. Again—the story of my life, and everybody’s—I caught the tail end of something. I spent a month with the Mekranoti, who wore nothing but penis sheaths and wooden lip discs—their nearest neighbors were the still-uncontacted Kreen Akrore, three hundred miles to the west—and made the first collection of their medicinal plants, all of which were in chemically active families, including a contraceptive the women said they took to space out their kids; one dose was good for two years. The only nonactive plant was a penis-shaped saprophyte on the forest floor, which the Mekranoti believed women had to eat to get pregnant; sex was purely recreational.
New Year’s Day, 1976, I spent in a communal maloca, or thatch longhouse of Yanomami, near the Venezuela border that had never been entered by anybody from the outside world. Their shaman snorted the powdered hallucinogenic snuff of the Virola tree and as its effects came on, he became his rishi, his animal alter ego who was living a parallel existence to his somewhere in the forest, which can be a jaguar, a monkey, even a butterfly. In his case it was a hawk, and he flapped around the communal thatched-palm maloca and made piercing calls like a hawk. The Yanomami, I learned, were juggling thirteen different layers of reality, not just the physical material world that the Western rational-scientific mindset maintains is all there is (except for religious Westerners who believe in heaven and hell). This was my first of many encounters with what the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “indigenous multiperspectivism”: Europeans think there is only one reality but many ways of seeing it, while indigenous people think there are many realities but only one way of seeing them.
I had given a family of caboclos, mestizo river people, who were laid out with falciparum malaria my round of pills for this often fatal mosquito-borne disease, which turns your urine the color of Coca-Cola (hence its colloquial name, blackwater fever). A few weeks later, high in the Peruvian Andes, on my way up Mount Mismi, an extinct snow-covered volcano then thought to be the ultimate source of the Amazon, I contracted it myself and came within an inch of dying. I probably only survived because I was young and strong and in great shape, having just paddled up a river for eleven days then loped through the forest with Yanomami for a week. But I have permanent scars on my heart from the stress it endured, as each day the attack came punctually at noon and my temperature spiked to 104 degrees and remained there for four hours, my heart pounding all the while like a sprinter’s. The local people, the Quechua, were wary and withdrawn but invariably hospitable and did what they could to help this gringo who had landed in their midst and was obviously very sick.
After several mornings of being taken from village to village, when I was still able to walk, I had a classic near-death experience. Barely making it to somebody’s stone croft and collapsing on the dirt floor, I saw the radiant light at the end of the tunnel, which in my delirium was at the bottom of the Apurimac gorge, which I had just climbed down into and crossed on a rope bridge. I saw—or thought I saw—that death wasn’t the end, and that it was nothing to be afraid of. Now I wonder if it wasn’t a hallucination, like the out-of-body experiences people in the throes of desert thirst and mountain climbers in extremis have reported.
The radiant world at the end of the tunnel was beckoning, welcoming, but it was not my time. Next day I caught a bus to Cuzco, and after five days of which I remember nothing I came to in a hotel bed, still here. From then on I wake up each morning grateful to be alive and have tried to make the most of it. I would never have had five sons or gone on to write nine more books (including this one), so I have always felt there was a reason why I didn’t die then, and this has given me a sense of purpose, fortified my heroic narrative.
When I got back, now married to Ana, the incandescently beautiful librarian at the National Indian Foundation in Brasília, I found that my Westchester book had been taken by the New Yorker. It was a joyous time after all the uncertainty and turbulence of my twenties. William Shawn, the magazine’s legendary editor, told me cheerily at our first meeting, “We’re interested in whatever you’re interested in,” and for the next ten years I made full use of this carte blanche and traveled to remote places like Madagascar and the Ituri Forest and the Nhamundá River, up which the fabled Amazon women were supposed to have lived. After a few years, the New York Times called me “consistently one of the farthest-flung of the New Yorker’s far-flung correspondents,” and Timothy Ferris, Rolling Stone’s New York editor, called me “the only journalist in America who goes to places where you can’t get a coke” and “a genuine citizen of the world, at home with people everywhere.” The more remote indigenous people I visited, the more fascinated I became in their widely divergent and often elaborate cosmologies, and how most of them seemed to be saying that this is not the real world, but only one of many.
Visiting Madagascar in 1986, I experienced “a world apart,” as the lemur primatologist Alison Jolly called this amazing archipelago below the southeastern tip of Africa. Fifty percent of its inhabitants were animists who believed that they would become crocodiles, boas, or lemurs when they died. There were ancient trees dripping with offerings from their human descendants. But the Malagasys were laying waste to their rain forest because their numbers were growing exponentially and they needed more and more land for their crops, and more and more trees to turn into charcoal. They were, in Jolly’s words, “sacrificing their future so they can survive in the present.” So “this insular sub-region . . . one of the most remarkable zoological districts on the globe,” as the Victorian naturalist and biogeographer Alfred Russel Wallace called it, was also under assault. Species that had evolved there and were found nowhere else were going up in smoke, including ones that hadn’t even been discovered.
In the pristine boreal forest of Manitoba I met Ojibway (Anishinaabe), who believed that everything, including trees and even rocks, has a spirit, and across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, Mohawks who believed that everything has orenda, its own unique spiritual power—rabbits, flowers, even a song. And in the Arizona desert, Navajos who believed that every creature has a “way,” a role to play and the right to be here, which must be respected. Humans must learn to “walk in beauty” like them, as they do just naturally and with perfect grace, no false moves, no delay between thought and action. A woman told me that when something bad happens, it’s no accident. Either you brought it on yourself—you transgressed the “way” of some animal of natural force, or you were delinquent in a ceremony, or forgot to give thanks, or your wants got the better of you, or someone did it to you—black magic. “Like my husband, Kee Richard,” she explained. “He started getting nosebleeds and went to the hospital in Flagstaff, and the doctor told him he had a tumor, he had cancer, and it had to be zapped with radiotherapy. But my aunt, who is a medicine woman, took one look at him and asked, ‘Did you ever kill a porcupine?’ and he said, ‘Well, yes—when I was ten. One night a porcupine came up to our campfire, which was not normal. Porcupines don’t do that unless something is wrong with him. So I beat it on the nose with a stick from the fire and killed it.’ Kee Richard’s aunt told him he had to offer turquoise and abalone to the porcupine, so he did, and he also had the radiotherapy, and his nose stopped bleeding. We never found out which cured him.”
Dinétah, the land of the Navajo, was on a very different, much more ancient wavelength than the rest of America. It was a parallel universe. The landscape was sacred. Every outcrop and spring and old piñon tree had a story, as in the Australian outback, whose indigenous people traveled along “songlines” they had dreamed that took them to the places where they could connect with the spirits of their clan.
I was fascinated by all these belief systems and cosmologies and mythologies, which had arisen from local landscapes and made perfect sense in their context. Each one was part of a puzzle that I was putting together in my mind, that the Western rational scientific worldview was missing many pieces of, but the multiperspectivist worldviews of local indigenous people had, for so long they were almost second nature. I began to reinvent myself as an animist, to reconnect with the experiences I had had as a child in the Phillips’ woods and see them in a new light.
In 1984 my grandmother Mopsy, who became a portrait painter after fleeing the Russian Revolution and had been such a huge influence on my life, had showed that it was possible to make a living making beautiful works of art and being your own boss and not working for the Man, died at the age of ninety-three. The last time I visited her, at her deathbed in Glen Cove Hospital, they had put tubes up her nose, but she managed to whisper, “We are all transitional characters.” A few days later I was having Sunday lunch at a Brazilian writer’s home forty miles north of the hospital, and I suddenly felt an inexplicable wave of nausea. This was at just the moment that Mopsy, I found out when I got home, died.
There are many such accounts, from cultures all over the world, as well as accounts of dogs getting excited and rushing to the door, at the moment their master, ten miles away, decides he is coming home. The explanation, I wouldn’t learn for another thirty years, may be related to the discovery by quantum physicists that two molecules that were once connected can communicate instantly even if they are light-years away from each other.
Of course I found these “whiffs of the uncanny,” as Nicholas Shakespeare calls them in his biography of Bruce Chatwin—things that Western science is not yet able to explain, but nevertheless happened and are out there—particularly interesting, especially the ones I experienced personally.
The Tarahumara people of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental, whom I have been to see three times, traditionally believe that males have two souls, and females four, so gays have six and are revered as shamans with special powers. They also believe that when you die, you have to retrace the footsteps of everywhere you have been and present them, along with your hair, to God. I am presenting these selected footsteps from my world travels between 1960 and 2013 to readers who might be interested in following them, although this is of course impossible, each of us having his or her own life journey to take and own heroic narrative to find and realize, and the world I have known is much changed. Many times I have returned to a pristine Eden in some far-flung corner of the globe, and found it gone, completely obliterated, or in the process of being destroyed. Humanity is overrunning the planet like a virus. But voices for the animals and plants and the indigenous subsistence cultures that evolved with them and are part of the same ecosystem are needed even more desperately.
In 1986 I wrote my first piece for the newly resurrected Vanity Fair (its previous incarnation having gone under in 1936) about the murder of Dian Fossey. Ana had born me two boys, Andre and Nick, only seven and six but already seasoned explorers, and I brought them along. We climbed up to her research station, between Mount Visoke and Mount Karisimbi, a few months after she was found with her skull split open by her own machete. The next morning we went to meet one of the habituated mountain gorilla families, who were in the bamboo forest below, munching stinging nettles and wild celery. There were twelve of them—Ndume, the silverback, his three mates, and their eight kids. We just hung out together, my family and Ndume’s. It wasn’t often that they got to meet human kids, so his kids were really curious. Ndume, who weighed about three hundred pounds and ate about forty pounds of vegetation a day, had lost his right hand in a poacher’s snare. He knuckle-walked to within two feet of me and sat down, facing the other way, completely ignoring us. His head, with its massive brow ridge and powerful jaws, was huge. After fifteen minutes, he ambled over to a comfortable-looking spot and, snorting contentedly, proceeded to sack out. There he remained, dead to the world, limbs every which way, until we left. The other gorillas circled us curiously. Safari walked out to the edge of a branch and jumped up and down on it. The branch snapped, and she came tumbling down into a thicket and dropped from sight. Kosa, the subdominant male, reached up to a shrub and pulled it toward his mouth, releasing hundreds of fluffy seeds into the air. An unnamed young female walked toward us, briskly beating her chest for a few seconds (it was more like fluttering than pounding and seemed to be meant more in friendship than intimidation), sat down beside Nick, my six-year-old, put his poncho in her mouth, bashed him on the knee a couple of times, and then went over to her mother. I tried to catch a glint of recognition in the gorillas’ soft brown eyes, but they remained glossed over, wild. It was clear, though, that they trusted us, maybe more than they should have, and it felt as if we all could have started a conversation, if we had only been able to find the language.
This was a major breakthrough for me. It was like Adam’s Wall, as the barrier between us and other animals has been called, didn’t exist. Of course I had never felt there was any barrier between me and our various dogs and cats, and these were our close primate cousins, who share from 95 to 98 percent of our genes, depending on what is counted. Only chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related to us. The only comparable experience I had had with a primate up till then was with a spider monkey in a mangy zoo in Iquitos, Peru, ten years earlier. He looked at me imploringly from behind the bars of his cage. His message was clear: please, mister, get me out of here.