The gray VW bus was parked in the usual place down at the Kigoma harbor, and Nic drove Carole and Patrick in the bus to where they were all staying, which was the house of the captain of the Liemba—the giant steel boat built by Germans during colonial times a half century earlier that still managed to split the waters of Lake Tanganyika, delivering people and goods from one end to the other. The captain was just then out on the lake with the Liemba, but his wife, Margaret, was home. Nic, Carole, and Patrick left their overnight bags at the house and then drove on to the Kigoma Club and got drunk. As they staggered out later than evening, Nic affectionately draped his arm around Carole. It felt good, and she recognized that he had softened up a little. Perhaps, she thought, there was still hope for the relationship.
Early the next morning Pat walked over to Ramji Dharsi’s store on Lumumba Street to use the telephone in order to call Louis Leakey in Nairobi and inform him that Ruth’s body had been found. Pat lifted the receiver, depressed the button three times, and a woman’s voice spoke. While he chatted with the operator about getting through to Nairobi, Carole and Nic went off to the hospital to identify the body.
• • •
The hospital was a concrete building, and they were shown into a room with a concrete floor, a table in the middle, and a body beneath a sheet on the table. The weather was very warm, and the place had no refrigeration, which meant that the body’s decomposition was accelerating. A man stood in front of the sheet-covered body on the table, drew back the sheet, and Carole saw maggots and hair. But it was Ruth’s hair. Carole nodded, her vision turning into a wash of tears. The man silently pulled the sheet back into place.
It was still early, and Carole and Nic next walked over to the police station to contribute to the police report. Nic did most of the talking. Carole was still crying. But like all the other chimpanzee researchers, Ruth had carried with her a tape recorder to speak notes into, and although the recorder had been destroyed, the tape was miraculously intact. At the police station, they listened to the tape as it turned on a new machine provided by Ramji Dharsi. The sound was not easy to make out. Ruth never said the date, but they heard “down into Kahama,” which was enough to presume it described her last follow. The police said the tape should be transcribed, and Nic took Carole back to the house, where she sat down in front of a typewriter.
Carole wanted to do this. She wanted to hear from Ruth. She wanted to listen to her voice, know what happened, and she spent the next few hours carefully transcribing the tape. She was seated at a table in front of an open window, typing on an old typewriter, multiple sheets of thin white paper interspersed with black carbon sheets and the recorder off to one side. She played back the tape while a warm morning breeze passed through the window. White curtains lifted and fell in the breeze; and Carole sat there with the fresh, moving air caressing her face and hands, and typed out the final words from Ruth. The tape smelled faintly of death, but Carole was getting used to the smell.
She typed from the start of the tape, where Ruth said she left camp at 12:32 P.M. following Mike and headed south. Ruth lost him right away, but she heard chimp hoots coming from high on Sleeping Buffalo, and when she got there, she heard more hoots from Upper Mkenke. At 2:54 she reached the Mkenke Watu path and discovered a group of chimps there. Upon seeing her, they immediately broke up and headed south into Kahama. Mike wasn’t in that group. It was Faben, Figan, Sniff, Godi, Willy-Wally, Hugo, Hugh, and Charlie. A big group of males. Then Ruth changed the B-record target individual to Charlie. There was nothing unusual about the record. There were comments on feeding, grooming, a large bird passing overhead, the sound of a boat motor down on the lake. The chimps seemed to be steadily moving, while Ruth was clearly getting tired, gasping for breath, her voice ragged and rasping as she spoke. “So . . . ahhh . . . 3:14 . . . ahhh . . . Hugh catches up with . . .” She was laboring to keep up with the chimps and out of breath, but it was all normal. She had come far, and the chimps had been moving fast. Good observations. It made perfect sense. It was a chimp record. There was nothing depressed or despairing or suicidal in it. There was no tone of voice or mood filtering through to suggest that her thoughts were anywhere other than with the chimps and the sunny day and the long follow. She finally said, “I’ve lost them as they . . . coming down a dry stream gully.”
That was the end of the record. The time: around 3:45 p.m. And Carole was certain that the “dry stream gully” in the tape was the same place she and Ferdinand had come upon the day before—and also the same place where, the previous summer, Mike and the other four chimps had led Carole into Kahama. But unlike Ruth, she had managed to stay with the group, and they had led her right up to and around the waterfall, whereas Ruth, having lost them, must have followed the stream and walked right off the leading edge of the falls. It was a great relief for Carole to realize, after she had transcribed that tape, that Ruth had been herself right up to the end. She was following the chimps she loved. She was tired. She came to a place that was not easy to see. She lost her balance and fell, and in falling she lost her life.
• • •
Not long after Carole had begun transcribing the tape, Patrick showed up at the house, reporting that he had not been able to reach Leakey in Nairobi, although he did leave the message that Ruth’s body had been recovered. Patrick and Nic then went down to the harbor, where there was a boathouse and workshop. Nic said to the man there, “I need a coffin, and it’s got to be watertight.”
They found a carpenter to make a wooden coffin and a cross, and they hired a couple of metalworkers to fabricate an aluminum lining for the coffin. After that, they walked over to the town hardware store to look for coffin handles and something that might be used to seal the aluminum lining. The only sealant they could find was window putty, which they bought, along with a half dozen chromium-plated towel racks, short ones, to serve as handles. Pat then returned to Dharsi’s store to try calling Louis Leakey again while Nic returned to the captain’s house to find Carole. As soon as Carole finished her typing, she and Nic took the typed transcripts off to the police, and then they sat down at the station separately, each to give a final statement for the police record.
Patrick showed up at the police station some time later, looking for Nic and Carole. He said that the phone call to Leakey in Nairobi could not be put through until late that afternoon. Nic had finished his statement to the police by then, so he and Patrick left Carole and walked back down to the harbor to check on the metalwork and screw the towel-rack handles onto the wooden shell of the coffin.
Then Ferdinand Umpono appeared at the police station, having just been brought into Kigoma from Gombe so that he, too, could make a statement about what happened. He passed on to Carole the news that Dr. Leakey was right that moment on the phone at Ramji Dharsi’s, asking to speak to Patrick. Since Patrick was down at the harbor, Carole rushed over to the store and spoke to Louis Leakey on her own. It was by then four thirty in the afternoon. He said he could find no airline willing to fly a decomposing body anywhere, so he thought it would have to be cremated first. He also wanted to know if Ruth had died immediately. Carole said she had. Leakey said he would personally relay that potentially comforting information to Ruth’s family and also to Geza. Finally, he said he wanted Patrick to call him back.
Carole returned to the police station. Not long after she had finished her statement, Nic and Patrick showed up. Nic said that the metalworkers down at the harbor had been working on the coffin lining for the last eight hours and still weren’t done. Patrick said he had managed to reach Louis Leakey, who told him that it was not possible to get the body cremated in Tanzania, probably owing to Muslim traditions forbidding it. Thus, it had been decided that Ruth would be taken back to Gombe and buried there. It was highly unusual for someone, particularly a foreigner, to be buried in a national park, but Louis arranged it. Ruth’s parents had already agreed to the idea. It did seem like the best solution.
The metalworkers were finished by nine o’clock that evening, whereupon Nic and Patrick dropped the aluminum lining into the wooden coffin, and then they hauled it up to the hospital in order to put Ruth’s body inside. The body was far gone by then, and neither one of them could stand it. The sight was horrendous, the smell worse. They couldn’t do it, and eventually they paid a couple of orderlies to place her into the coffin. After that was done, the coffin was brought back outside. Ruth was under a blanket, but the maggots were crawling out from beneath the blanket. Nic and Pat lined the upper edge of the aluminum basin with a continuous strip of putty, then placed the aluminum lid on and screwed it down tight. Then they screwed on the wooden top and brought the coffin down to a cool and secure spot at the harbor.
• • •
Meanwhile, Margaret, the captain’s wife, had taken Carole out to see a movie. Once a week a movie would be shown at some place in Kigoma, and this time it was at the Kigoma Club. It was an old film, a blood-and-guts adventure story about the French Foreign Legion called Beau Geste. Carole wasn’t enjoying it, and at intermission time Nic and Pat showed up wanting a couple of drinks. They had planned to go back to the captain’s house and take baths before heading off to bed, but instead they decided to go out to the Kigoma Club. They were joking with each other, a desperate kind of catch-and-throw repartee where every remark produced a laugh and another joke, and soon they were drinking as fast as they could manage. Carole and Margaret left the movie and went into the bar to sit with Nic and Pat.
Nic, sloshing down double and triple whiskeys, was the drunker of the two, which is why he gave Patrick his car keys. At some point, Pat stood up and announced, “I’m going home.” He staggered out and drove the VW bus back to the captain’s house. Then, at around twelve thirty, Margaret, who had young two children back at home, left—after locating a Belgian friend in the bar, Marcel, who promised to take Nic and Carole home when they were ready. So Carole stayed with Nic. He seemed in a cheerful sort of drunken state, and she felt a warm connection with him. He was no longer avoiding her. He was looking at her, offering her cigarettes, and after Carole stumbled over to visit the choo and then came out again, she found him standing outside waiting for her. “Hello, Carole,” he said. And then: “The way I see it, she’s only matter. It’s only matter now.”
They tripped their way back to the bar and continued drinking until Nic went back to the choo and didn’t come out. Carole eventually went to look for him and found him on the floor vomiting, unable to stand, so drunk he couldn’t see. He just lay on the floor and vomited for another half hour. Then he passed out, lying against Carole and snoring. After a time she tried to rouse him, pull him upright. “You can’t do it alone, Carole,” he murmured. “You’ll have to get someone to help you.” He flopped down like a dead fish—Carole gently inserting her satchel under his head to keep it off the wet, stinky floor—closed his eyes, and started snoring again.
Carole went into the bar, found Marcel, and together they drew Nic upright. They pulled and pushed him out to Marcel’s vehicle, levered him onto the back seat, stuffed his feet in. With Marcel driving, Carole in the back trying to keep Nic from flopping onto the floor, they made it back to the captain’s house, where they dragged Nic into his room and dropped him as gently as they could onto the bed. Marcel left. Margaret helped Carole undress Nic. They left him there with, next to the bed, a bowl to vomit in.
• • •
Carole had a terrific hangover the next day. Pat wouldn’t admit to one. Nic wasn’t in the mood to talk about anything. In the afternoon, he and Carole returned to Gombe in the Parks Department’s Triton in order to begin preparations for the burial.
Nic and Carole told the other researchers that Ruth would be buried at Gombe. They were, according to Carole’s recollection, “shocked and angry” to hear the news. They had endured so much already, and for the nightmare to continue was hard to bear. But Nic soon found a beautiful spot for the grave: on a grassy ridge just above the beach, beneath a myombo tree between Kakombe and Mkenke Streams, and with a good view of the lake. Then Nic arranged with Rashidi to make sure someone dug the hole. Other preparations included fixing up a place for Ruth’s parents to stay, since they were going to fly out. And getting a place ready for Hugo, since he was on his way back to Africa and would be escorting the parents from Nairobi to Gombe. In addition, a place had to be found for Ruth—her coffined body—to be kept overnight before the burial. In fact, there were many things to think about, since a number of people from Kigoma would be coming in for the ceremony, but what number? And would they expect to be fed? Who would officiate? What kind of priest or minister could they hope to get? What was Ruth’s religion anyway? Did she even have one?
Nic went back to Kigoma late that afternoon to rendezvous with Patrick and begin addressing some of those questions and issues. Carole, now at Gombe by herself, slept down at the beach in the Cage. I will imagine that Carole, restless and alone that night, missing Nic and feeling tired beyond reason but kept awake by grief and anguish, stepped out into the darkness and looked up. When the sky is clear of clouds at Gombe, it is possible to see a universe alive with stars. With only minimal spill from the flux and dross of civilization’s electromagnetic radiation in the visible wavelength—from house lights, streetlights, automobile headlights, and so on—the sky takes on a weighted and mystical presence. Instead of squinting at a hundred or five hundred faint, flickering points of light, you gaze up at an entire sea of them, ten million or a billion distant suns swimming within galaxies and clusters of galaxies, at times brightened by a moon—which, on the evening of July 20, 1969, was a waxing crescent. If Carole did go outside, and if she looked up and had the requisite clarity of vision, perhaps assisted by a good telescope, she might have discovered a dark speck moving across that drifting slice of moon. The speck was the lunar module of the American Apollo 11 flight, settling down at 20:18 Greenwich mean time onto a barren stretch known as the Sea of Tranquility. Inside the module sat two men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
By the time Armstrong opened the hatch and stepped outside, leaving a footprint in the dust and uttering a few clever words memorized for the occasion, Carole would have been asleep. It was nearly morning in Tanzania. In Washington, DC, it was still evening, and when Ruth’s parents settled into their room at the Jefferson Hotel, exhausted and depleted, hungry and beyond hope or consolation, they turned on the television to watch the same two men taking their first steps on the moon. Mr. and Mrs. Davis had already gotten their necessary shots, except the one for yellow fever, and they were expecting the State Department to issue emergency passports and visas in preparation for their flight the next morning to London and the start of their hard journey to Gombe.
Hugo had also returned to Africa by then, while Jane remained in Europe with Grub, and so it was Hugo who, on Wednesday, July 23, met the parents at the Nairobi airport after their flight from London landed at eight o’clock that morning. He greeted them, loaded their luggage into the back of the Land Rover, and then, after stopping at the American embassy for help in solving last-minute problems having to do return tickets and yellow fever shots, drove them out to Wilson Airfield on the southern edge of town. There they met the pilot, “a very nice young man,” as Mrs. Davis characterized him in her journal. They clambered over the wing and crawled through the side door of a four-seater Piper Cub.
After the funeral—with Ruth ceremonially blessed, lowered into the ground, and covered by a mound of earth and stone; with the hundred and more mourners of all colors and many cultures ferried from Gombe back to Mwamgongo and Kigoma and places in between; and with Hugo flying in the Piper Cub back to Nairobi alongside Mr. and Mrs. Davis, who would then catch their return flight to America—Nic found to his great relief that there was less to think about and do. The only obligation remaining was the inquest in town, which he, Carole, and Pat attended on Monday.
The courthouse consisted of a brick wall about three feet high with pillars, a roof on top, and a completely enclosed office along one side. It was open on the other three sides, so that a refreshing breeze could pass through. At the inquest, a representative from the police gave his report, while the coroner read the results of his autopsy. Nic thought the autopsy was thorough and the report well-written. It covered everything, including empty uterus. Ruth had not been pregnant at the time of her death, and she had never been pregnant. That information was significant, as was the fact that her skull had been entirely split open, front to back, which confirmed that death had been instantaneous. And, the police concluded, no foul play had been involved.
The inquest was brief but as important as the funeral service, being another symbolic scrap of activity that brought substance and sense to a transubstantial and nonsensical tear in the world. And when Nic got back to camp, he pulled out the jacket he had bought for the funeral—a white, collarless Mao-style jacket of the sort favored by President Nyerere—and gave it to Rashidi. “Here you go, Rashidi. I don’t think I’ll be wearing this again.” It had been the only dress jacket available in Kigoma at the time, and Nic was glad to be rid of it. He was also grateful to Rashidi for his calm help during a hard time, and he thought that the staff under Rashidi’s direction had dug a beautiful grave. Nice and straight. They really put a lot of work into that grave.
Nic remained at Gombe for the rest of the summer, and then in September he went home to his parents on the farm in Kenya for a visit. When he returned in October, he discovered that the Gombe finances were a mess. It took him three twelve-hour days to straighten them out, and after that, and being fed up with Hugo’s administration, he decided to leave. He left on November 13. He and Cathy Clark had become a couple by then, and after a while they both went to California and got married.
They enrolled together as students at the University of California at Riverside, but the marriage didn’t last. They drifted apart, and he went to live with his brother in central California until he could afford a house of his own. Nic’s brother had earlier left Kenya and settled down in California, and Nic, while living there with his brother, got a job on a large almond farm. He worked as a mechanic and tractor driver, and he sprayed the almonds. It was a lovely life. It didn’t pay much, but it was fun, and he got to know America and Americans better.
Nic had liked Cathy a lot, but to him at least it was never completely clear why they got married. As the years passed, in fact, Nic came to believe that he did many things for reasons that were not completely clear. He didn’t know himself very well in those days, and it took a long time before he realized that he was actually a very naive person. He trusted other people far more than he should have. But over the years of living in America, he saw a lot, and by the time I talked to him in 2008, Nic was starting to get the idea that he could tell, after meeting someone for the first time, which side of the line that person was on. Being able to read others: some are born that way, while others are not. He was not. He was born completely innocent. He believed everything, and it cost him a lot over the years.
• • •
After the funeral, Carole stayed at the main camp in Kakombe and began joining the rest of the wazungu for dinner, although it seemed to her as if they all became more indirect and thoughtful whenever she appeared, as if she weren’t supposed to be there. Perhaps some of those feelings had to do with her own growing estrangement from Nic, who, she could see, was starting to develop an interest in Cathy. Yet Carole’s sense of being an outsider was more than that, she told me in 2009. She had spent all those months down at Nyasanga while the others had been socializing together in the main camp. And then, she thought, the others, during that superheated time of stress and despair as they searched for Ruth, had bonded as a group, while for most of that time she was overcome by malaria and lying in bed down by the lake. So she would go to dinner, but she began to feel that people’s words were saying one thing—welcoming her to dinner, expressing polite curiosity about how she was doing or feeling—while their bodies and faces said something else. Carole had learned to read body language from the best experts in the world, the chimpanzees, who compensated for their limited spectrum of vocal communication by being superb at reading gestures and postures and facial expressions. Carole had acquired some of that chimp social intelligence, and her chimp intelligence told her that she didn’t belong.
She stopped going for drinks or dinner or other group events with the other wazungu. Instead, she would wander over to Dominic’s kitchen or to his house. He and other people around would say, “Karibu, Mama Carole! Welcome! Oh, come in! Sit down!” She felt she had risen in respect among the Africans, and now these were the only people who comforted her, and for a long time after that she trusted black people more than white people. She hung out with the Africans during the final weeks she was there because they were safe. She also went and sat with the chimps. But the Africans, both men and women, were warm and welcoming, and they would say, “Why are you leaving us? Why are you going?” And she would say, “I don’t know. I don’t understand how it all has happened the way it happened.”
On the day she left, all the wazungu came down to the beach, and she took a picture of them. She wasn’t in it because she took the picture. And there they stood, all with what seemed to her like mildly uncomfortable smiles, because they were probably glad to get rid of her. That’s the way it was. At least that was Carole’s perspective on the matter, and she was devastated by the idea that they all had not been made better by the influence of living close to nature and knowing the chimps. The whole experience shattered her deluded dream that Gombe would magically make people better human beings.
She went to Nairobi and stayed there for the next three months, doing her best to remain in Africa and see whether she could heal herself. She clung to the hope of returning to Gombe some day, and she visited Jane and Hugo briefly in their home during that time, wanting to explain her hope to them. Jane told her that she was welcome to come back at any time. Jane was, in fact, very sympathetic. She said, “I understand you found Ruth’s body. That must have been pretty terrible.” Carole had by then learned to tone back her boisterous American style, and so she didn’t blurt out things the way she used to. She never told Jane the full story. She never said much about what it was like for her. She just said, “It was very, very hard.”
No one talked about post–traumatic stress disorder in 1969. Maybe the term hadn’t been invented then, even though all those Vietnam veterans were beginning to come back crippled with psychological injuries. But Carole concluded many years later that she must have experienced something like PTSD. She was scared a lot, on the verge of panic. People frightened her. She was unsure of herself, had trouble making decisions. She tried to make up her mind whether to leave Africa or not, and she couldn’t. She had not wanted to leave Gombe, and she didn’t want to leave Africa either. Gombe was the one place she wanted to be. But at the same time she was not healthy enough to be there. It would be dangerous to be there, in her depleted state. She was only twenty-one years old, and yet she hadn’t much physical stamina left, so she stayed in Nairobi and tried to figure out what to do next.
She reconnected with a few of her Quaker school friends, although the main group had gone on to India, while the FWI African headquarters by then had been moved out of the city and into a suburb. She briefly tried to renew the old relationship with her Gangster Boyfriend, but she wasn’t the romantic, heroic young woman she had been a year earlier. She was instead a needy, uncertain, traumatized person, and she didn’t trust the Gangster Boyfriend as a friend. She was not ready to tell him the whole story of what happened. When she once tried to describe it, he didn’t seem all that interested. She had been hoping for sympathy.
Another boy in Nairobi, Michael Levin, who was also an FWI student but staying in town on his own, was a more sensitive sort, and he became a friend. He listened to her story and was sympathetic. He introduced her to an African named Richard Lanoi and also to Hassad Said Mohammed, who was the game warden for Nairobi Park. Those three became her saviors. They comforted her and talked to her, heard her story and accepted her grief. But when she met other people in the bright streets of Nairobi, it was different. Someone would try to talk to her, say hello, and she couldn’t say hello back. Her throat would constrict. Her mouth would dry up and she would be unable speak.
After three months in Nairobi, Carole got a job at a place in Cornwall, England, called the Monkey Sanctuary, which was a sanctuary for South American woolly monkeys. Working there was a terrific experience, although she kept having terrifying dreams about Ruth, and the woolly monkeys were not as exciting, socially or intellectually, as the chimpanzees had been. Chimpanzees will eat for six hours and still have another six hours left over for playing, relaxing, scheming, and socializing. The woolly monkeys were not like that. She stayed in England for about a year until, in 1971, she returned to America and headed to California, where after several years of uncertainly and struggle including, at the age of thirty, the diagnosis of Type I diabetes, she completed a master’s degree in plant ecology and got a job working for the State of California as a plant ecologist.
It made sense. She loved being outdoors. It was the second best life she could imagine. The job lasted several years, and she was working on habitat restoration—but in spite of the pleasures of doing that, she always understood that she liked animals better than plants. Plants don’t look you in the eye or get to know you. Finally, after her second mother died in 1995, she bought a ticket to Africa. She spent five years working at various jobs in five different East African countries, and then she was accepted as a volunteer doing baboon research in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania. Mikumi was about six hundred times bigger than Gombe, but it was still in Tanzania, still East Africa, and now she was told she could still do what she had done at Gombe, except that it would be more savanna than forest and baboons rather than chimpanzees.
The diabetes was always a serious concern, however. Before starting at Mikumi, Carole flew to South Africa to buy a years’ worth of insulin and syringes and test strips, along with three blood glucose meters. In Tanzania, she bought glucose powder, and she packed the powder in film canisters. Then, once she began at Mikumi in the fall of 2000, she was prepared to deal with the diabetes. If her blood sugar level went low, she could open one of the film canisters and pour some glucose powder into her mouth. If it went high, she could give herself a shot of insulin. But even without those exceptional events, she was giving herself a minimum of four insulin shots a day, including one long-acting dose before she went to sleep and a short-acting one just before the bowl of oatmeal she ate for breakfast. After breakfast, she would pack up her day’s supply of water, food, insulin, and glucose powder. Then, joining up with the ranger who always accompanied her, Carole made the ten-mile drive from camp out to the sleeping tree of the baboons and sat beneath that tree waiting for the baboons—feisty little guys with Swahili names like Amka, Heshima, Huruma, Mbilikimo, Pumzi, and Upende—to wake up, climb down, and start their day.
• • •
Back when she was at Gombe, Carole had stopped taking photographs, because what was the point? You had this flat little representation of what was in front of you, but the forest was everywhere. No photograph could begin to show it. So Carole had always wanted to thank Hugo for making that wonderful film about Gombe called People of the Forest. And after her work was finished at Mikumi in early October 2001, she was able to speak to Hugo in person about the film. He said that the editing alone took him five years, and it nearly bankrupted him. She said, “Well, you did make the most wonderful gift to the world with that film.” She really meant it.
When Carole saw Hugo that time, he was old and crippled by emphysema, most likely caused by heavy smoking and the Serengeti dust. He had lived in his tented camp in the Serengeti for many years, photographing animals, but now he could no longer do that sort of photography or tolerate that environment. He was approaching the end of his life yet still smoking, only now he had to be satisfied with tiny puffs. And even though he and Jane had been divorced by then for nearly thirty years, Hugo went to Dar es Salaam and began living in the guesthouse of the seashore property Jane had inherited from her second husband after he died. Hugo had nowhere else to go. Carole was there only one afternoon, and she had come mainly to see Jane and get her permission to make a return visit to Gombe. After getting that permission, Carole got on the train the next day and rode west to Kigoma and Lake Tanganyika. She made it back to Gombe at last, and she had two weeks there.
Things had changed so much that it was frightening. Thousands or tens of thousands of people who had been displaced by wars and conflicts in neighboring states—Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi—were settled into large refugee camps around Kigoma, and all the trees that had once been visible outside the park’s boundaries had been cut down. The land from Kigoma up to the park’s southern boundary was now a barren sea of eroding brown hills, and, as Carole soon learned, the devastation affected not only the flora outside the park. The people camped there, poor and displaced, had begun setting snares inside the park.
At the same time, however, she could see that there were several promising changes. Perhaps the most fundamental one began as a direct result of Ruth’s death. It would have happened eventually in any case, I believe, but Ruth’s death prompted the new rule that any researcher going into the forest had to be accompanied by a field assistant. As a positive sequel to that new rule, the African field staff became professionalized more quickly and thoroughly than they might have otherwise. Within a few weeks or months, they knew the forest as well as any of the visiting researchers did. Within several months, everyone on the field staff had learned to carry out basic scientific observations on chimpanzee behavior. When Carole returned to Gombe in 2001, the research station was run significantly by Tanzanians, with an expanded staff of around twenty-five, and it was supporting first-rate international behavioral studies on chimpanzees and baboons, as well as several other species. There was plenty of good work going on, in short—even though, as Carole soon discovered, that expanding success was accompanied by increased restrictions for visitors. All visitors were required to stay at least twenty-five feet from any chimpanzee in order to avoid transmitting infections. Non-Tanzanian tourists were required to pay a hundred dollars per day to enter the park, plus more for food and lodging. They were also expected to hire field assistants to serve as guides.
A few of Carole’s old friends and acquaintances from the staff were still there, but Rashidi Kikwale had died of malaria about ten years earlier. And hardly any of the chimpanzees Carole had known back then were still alive. Flo, Figan, and Faben were all gone, as was Geza’s friend Leakey. The four males Ruth had favored—Humphrey, Mike, Charlie, and Hugh—were also gone. Mike died of pneumonia in 1975. The other three were probably killed during the intercommunity war that took place in the latter half of the 1970s. Nevertheless, Flo’s daughter Fifi was alive and thriving, and she had by then produced eight offspring, including two powerful and socially ambitious males, Freud and Frodo. Both had risen to alpha status during the 1990s, Freud first in 1993 with his younger brother Frodo wresting away the crown four years later. Frodo, notorious as a large and unpredictable bully, still reigned as alpha when Carole visited—although he would soon, within a year, be overthrown during an extended illness by a rebellious coalition.
On her best day there, Carole had a chance to follow Melissa’s daughter Gremlin. Gremlin had been born a few years after Carole left Gombe in 1969, and now she was a fully mature female, a mother with three children: eight-year-old daughter Gaia and a pair of five-year-old twins, Golden and Glitta. By good fortune, there was no one else that day, no human present other than Carole and the field guide who came along as her minder. They went out for three hours, and the experience was the closest she came to returning to the paradise in her memory. There was one lovely moment when they crossed a stream. Mama Gremlin carried one of the twins, Golden, and she crossed the stream by moving through the trees overhead. Eight-year-old Gaia was with the other twin, Glitta, not carrying her, and Gaia jumped across the stream. The little one behind her, her sister, whimpered and couldn’t make it. So Gaia turned around. She was merely a youngster herself, but she reached back with her foot to bridge the gap, and little Glitta climbed onto Gaia’s bridge and crossed the stream that way. It was a beautiful vignette of helpful family relationships, and Carole concluded that the older sister Gaia was part of the reason that the twins, Golden and Glitter, were still alive after five years. It was a sweet thing to see, Gaia being helpful like that, and Carole liked her a lot because of it.
Geza had been in Pennsylvania on July 15, 1969, trying to make sense of the data from Gombe for his graduate work, when he received the telegram from Hugo in Holland informing him that Ruth had been missing for three days. He immediately drove down to Lynchburg, Virginia, to be with Ruth’s parents and her two sisters. Her father was an engineer with General Electric, and, like Ruth, he was reserved, never one to talk or reveal much. Her mother worked in an office. They lived in a new, ranch-style house with landscaping, flowers, a ravine and creek out back, and Ruth’s bedroom at the end of a hall. The room was sunny and feminine, with a fancy bedspread and pillow shams and ruffles on the lampshades.
It was an excruciating few days marked by bitter coffee and solemn words. Geza talked about what Gombe was like, what might have happened to Ruth, what probably had not happened. Everyone tried to act hopeful, and he felt beside himself with dread and guilt. He was the one who had brought Ruth to Africa, after all, and now that she was missing, or worse, his strong impulse was to fly back and find her himself. He should fly back, but how? He had no visa. Getting one would mean going back to Washington, and it would take days. He had no money. He had no ticket and no way of getting one. His savings had been used up paying his own return flight back to the States, and his graduate fellowship at Penn State would not begin paying anything at all until the fall term.
It seemed as if the phone was ringing all the time. There were regular calls from friends, associates, members of the extended family. There were daily long-distance calls from Hugo and Jane in Holland, and at five thirty in the morning on Saturday, July 19, a call from Western Union relayed the message from Louis Leakey in Nairobi that Ruth’s body had been found and that she was going to be buried at Gombe.
Geza returned to Penn State and buried himself in his work. He felt numb. He didn’t cry. He didn’t talk. He couldn’t think. Nothing made sense.
They had planned to be married at Gombe. They had talked about the idea to Jane back in March when he was getting ready to fly back to the States for his army physical. Jane had seemed thrilled by the romance of it and the novel idea of a wedding at Gombe among the chimpanzees. That was how they left it at first: they would get married at Gombe soon after he returned in June 1969. When the Penn State anthropology department informed him that he would be required to stay and finish his work using the data he had already acquired, they agreed to marry when he returned in January. And their letters to each other since he had left that March were warm, intimate, and loving—although sometimes strained by distance and the uncertainty that distance can entail.
After her death, he put away the letters and photographs and mementoes. He finished his work on the subject of chimpanzee predation at Gombe, which became his master’s thesis, and when he became a PhD candidate at Penn State the following year, he decided to return to Gombe in order to gather new data for the big dissertation. It must have been a painful decision; but in the summer of 1970, he flew to East Africa, dropped in to visit with Jane and Hugo at their camp in the Serengeti for a couple of weeks, then flew on to Kigoma. He finally stepped onto the familiar pebbled shore on the warm afternoon of July 22, a day he would years later mistakenly remember as July 12, the first anniversary of Ruth’s disappearance and death.
• • •
By the time Geza arrived at Gombe that summer, only two researchers were present who had known Ruth from the year before. They were Loretta Baldwin and Patrick McGinnis. Lori had taken over Carole’s old job of trying to habituate the stranger chimps down south in Nyasanga Valley, so she was not often at the main camp. Pat took Geza to see Ruth’s grave, which was a heap of stones marked by a weathered wooden cross, but visiting that grave was about the only contact the two of them had that recalled Ruth or implied she had once been alive at Gombe. Even in normal circumstances, Geza’s general demeanor and self-possession could make people careful around him, and now, given the discipline with which he avoided talking about Ruth and kept to himself, no one voluntarily raised the subject. Not Pat. Not any of the African staff. Not Jane or Hugo.
Geza visited the aluminum rondavel where he had lived and which Ruth had taken over after he left. It was inhabited by another researcher now, someone young and new to Gombe, and not a single object remained in the hut that recalled Ruth or her work. All her things were gone—taken, so he imagined at the time, by her parents a year earlier when they came to Gombe for the funeral. Geza had left some of his own possessions in that rondavel with Ruth when he returned to America in March 1969, and those were gone as well. As for the most important object of all, which was Ruth’s personal journal, he presumed that Mr. and Mrs. Davis had taken away that treasure as well. It was not in the hut.
He went up to the main camp to look through the filing cabinets inside Pan Palace. The narrative record, both the A- and B-records, had been discontinued immediately after Ruth’s death in favor of timed behavioral checklists. But Geza soon found in the old A-record file a reference to Ruth in a footnote at the bottom of page 674, which was the final page. The footnote went like this: “July 12. 12:34. Ruth follows Mike out S. and does not return. We search this evening and until the 18th of July when we find her. Record A is discontinued.” He could find no other mention of Ruth’s disappearance anywhere, and since that terse footnote mentioned only that she had been found, without identifying the condition in which she was found, it is also the case that he discovered no reference anywhere in the files to her death.
It was strange, particularly in a place like Gombe, which, as he would later write, “was awash in paperwork about everything that happened every day to everyone working there year after year.” But since he himself had begun working to forget, he was not sufficiently troubled by those minor signs of institutional amnesia to protest or to search further. Instead of fretting about such small mysteries, he did his best to concentrate on his work and following chimps. Oh, there was that new senior scientist from Amsterdam University who wanted to cut paths in Kakombe Valley for the sake of someone’s convenience, and Geza felt that cutting those paths would invalidate his own data about chimp movements and preferences. He also saw the plan as a variant of the idea that doing science justifies casual destruction, so he and the senior scientist had an apparently dramatic confrontation over the matter. But generally Geza did his best to avoid drama. He stayed out of trouble, did his work, tried to fit in.
By September of that year, Jane had finished writing her popular book about Gombe, In the Shadow of Man, and it was with tremendous relief that she sent off the manuscript. In the same month, the book about East African carnivores that she and Hugo had labored on for so long, Innocent Killers, was released by the American publisher, and soon she was off to America to publicize that book in dozens of media interviews. She then traveled west to give several fund-raising lectures while also conferring with Professor David Hamburg at Stanford University. Within a year, she would be appointed a visiting associate professor at Stanford; but now, in the fall of 1970, she and Hamburg were actively developing their plans for the big alliance between Gombe and Stanford. Since the National Geographic Society was continuing to withdraw support, this promise of a major new partnership was welcome indeed, and when Jane returned to Gombe on the final day of 1970 and reviewed the latest research and the people involved in it, she was brimming with positive spirits. “Gombe has NEVER, NEVER been better,” she began in an enthusiastic letter to her mother that ended with a bit of happy gossip: Geza and Lori Baldwin were “having a passionate affair!”
At that point, in fact, it may not have been so passionate or even much of an affair, but Geza’s emerging association with Lori could still be regarded as a sign that he was dealing with his grief. He finished his study in the summer of 1971 and returned to Penn State. A few weeks later, Lori followed, and they became a couple in a relationship that lasted for about ten years. He completed the PhD in 1977 and soon turned from academics to conservation. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, he and Lori worked together in Sierra Leone, West Africa, surveying chimpanzee populations, tracking the exports of live chimpanzee babies out of the country, and beginning the legal, political, and publicity battle that would ultimately put an end to that harmful business. And then, in 1986, he and Jane began working together on national and international matters having to do with chimpanzee conservation and care.
• • •
By 1989, as I mentioned at the start of this story, the three of us had decided to collaborate on a book about chimpanzees and their problematic relationship with humans. During the two or three years we three worked together, I never once heard Geza mention Ruth. I first heard the story of Ruth’s death in a highly abbreviated fashion from Jane. If I had then thought more deeply about it, I might have imagined Ruth’s death to be an unhappy event that was finished and fixed in time: insect in amber. I would have concluded that Geza had recovered from the trauma and gone on to become the person I then believed I saw before me: a self-confident, vigorous man fully engaged with the world. His successful relationship during the 1990s with Heather McGiffin, their happy marriage and family life, their talented son, their pleasant home in suburban Washington: all of that suggested to me a life undisturbed by regrets or ghosts from the past, the kind of life made whole and even possible by the gift of forgetting.
When Geza first telephoned me in 2006, saying, “Dale, I need to talk,” he had stopped trying to forget and was working to remember.
Remembering brought its own trauma, marked at first by the event of September 27, 2006, which I described in the opening chapter: Ruth’s strange appearance one night in a fashion or form I referred to as “a vision or visitation or visit.” Perhaps I should have chosen more boringly clinical terms. It was a haunting, true, but one that came entirely from the self. It was a psychological phenomenon, in other words, a vision or hallucination provoked by profoundly unresolved grief from the past combined with the present crisis of a body assaulted by poison and falling to pieces.
Haunted, in any case, by that resurgent reminder of someone who embodied a glorious time and place taken away so outrageously, Geza turned to the difficult task of recollecting and reconstructing a life experience that had, since the summer of 1969, been packed up and locked away. It was an intense burst of activity, that process of unpacking and unlocking, which finally produced five very large binders filled with old and new correspondence, written recollections, maps, photographs, and other materials.
Geza’s immediate motivation for remembering may have been to counter the lingering rumor that Ruth had committed suicide, which he regarded as offensive and false beyond consideration. I’ve long admired Geza’s thoroughness as a researcher, but I also understand that his version of events could never be considered perfectly complete or fully reliable. The past is a forbidden nation. We are all biased memoirists cursed with disintegrating memories. And so, for example, his insistence that Ruth could not possibly have jumped deliberately, seems to me an instance of opinion buttressed by emotion, a strong wish rather than a reasoned argument. Suicide cannot be so readily ruled out. It is reasonable to insist that any final theory about how she fell take into account her mental or emotional state.
For most of those who were involved in the immediate aftermath of Ruth’s disappearance and death, including the researchers and the police and the experts who signed the autopsy report, the conclusion that Ruth had not committed suicide led directly to a second possibility: that it had been an accident. This second way of falling is what Carole strongly believed, and she described for me in dramatic detail her own memory of having walked up to within a few feet of the leading edge of the Kahama waterfall without—because of obscuring vegetation—recognizing the danger. My written reconstruction of the final day’s search is largely based on a long personal letter Carole wrote to her friend Tim Ransom a few days after the discovery of Ruth’s body, combined with Carole’s own vivid recollections, told some forty years after the discovery. Those two sources, separated in origin by four decades, are not perfectly congruent. The early letter to Tim describes the daily progress of the search, but it says nothing about Carole almost tumbling over the falls herself because of obscuring vegetation at the top. For Geza that incongruence was a critical issue. If it really happened the way she had begun to tell it, why did she not say so in the letter written only a few days after the event? Geza argued that Carole had inadvertently created a false memory of the moment, the supposed moment, when she and Ferdinand came to the high edge of the Kahama falls and were momentarily tricked by a vegetative trompe l’oeil. Geza also insisted that Ruth’s geological education and her intense interest in the subject should have kept her from failing to see the edge of the falls. “Every time she went some place, she was aware of what she was looking at,” he insisted, and that awareness would imply that Ruth knew where she was and where the cliffs and waterfall could predictably be found as she followed Kahama Stream down toward the lake on her way back to camp.
But if she didn’t jump deliberately or fall accidentally, what does that leave? The third way to fall—by being pushed—is an alternative that Geza was reluctant to consider in full. During our extended conversations, I observed the painful ebb and flow of this third theory as he struggled with an uncertainty about the facts combined with the normal disbelief most ordinary people would have about such a radical alternative. The idea was never fixed or consistent. He “wavered,” he told me—and yet still, as he once summarized the basic problem: “Something is not right about this whole business, and I don’t know what it is.”
• • •
The something not right Geza referred to was complicated, and for me to grasp it required, first of all, reviewing the hundreds of letters, emails, documents, stories, and assessments he had gathered into those five very large binders. In the end, I began to understand that it was important to consider not what was available and placed before me in those five binders, but what was missing—and to think about how the presence of absence, that state of apparent missingness, might have happened.
As I mentioned earlier, when Geza returned to Gombe in the summer of 1970, he discovered a strange scatter of things-not-there that should have been. Ruth’s old hut, which had previously been his, was completely cleared out and being inhabited by a new person. And so, where were the missing items of his own that had been stored in the rondavel?
Years later, Geza acquired a copy of a journal Ruth’s mother, Dorothy Davis, had written when she and her husband, Price, traveled to Gombe in 1969 for their daughter’s funeral. Following a long flight in a small plane from Nairobi, Hugo van Lawick arrived with Dorothy and Price Davis at around seven thirty in the evening of July 23. Ruth’s parents were exhausted and despondent. They rested briefly at the beach hut—the Cage—and, after a quick dinner, turned in for the night. After breakfast the next day, they endured the necessary marathon of greeting a long line of mourners, followed by the memorial service and burial, followed by another necessary marathon of farewells until it was time to consume dinner and be consumed by sleep. Not until after lunch the next day, July 25, were the Davises brought upstairs and shown Ruth’s hut. What they found must have upset them. Mrs. Davis wrote, “I had expected to find it just as she had left it and that her presence would be very much there.” Instead, they found the place “bare,” since “the girls,” meaning Lori Baldwin and Cathy Clark, “had packed everything.” With what seems to me like a forced graciousness, Mrs. Davis finally concluded that the cleaning and packing up of everything in Ruth’s rondavel was actually an example of “beautiful thoughtfulness and . . . help over a difficult place.” She and her husband sat on the floor and sorted through what was there, and they did so decisively. “Most everything we just left and asked the researchers to dispose of clothing and such personal items as we decided not to bring home with us.” They then packed a single suitcase in order “to take with us [some] of her books and such personal things as we wished to keep.”
The mother’s account never describes which personal things she and her husband took with them and which they left. It is reasonable to believe that Geza’s own possessions stored in the hut—clothes and camera equipment, for example—were given away then and thus are permanently gone. But Ruth had saved Geza’s letters, and they, too, never again surfaced. Where are they? When Ruth’s mother wrote to Geza, after she and her husband returned to America, she mentioned nothing about his letters or what they had taken of Ruth’s possessions. Geza later imagined that they would have taken some of their daughter’s favorite books and other personal mementoes, but Ruth’s own personal journal should have been by far the most compelling thing, and yet the parents never mentioned it.
The journal was impossible to overlook. It was a highly visible object, clearly an important document. While Geza was there, she typed her entries regularly, most evenings. By the time she disappeared on July 12, her journal should have contained several hundred typewritten, single-spaced, legal-size pages. The pages were punched with two holes and fixed into an office-style document binder, which had a pink cover with the trade name, Kant’s Flat File, embossed on the front. Geza, who spent many hours watching or listening to Ruth type up those entries knew that she always kept the binder in her hut and out in the open. So, it is reasonable to ask: What happened to Ruth’s personal journal?
After the search for Ruth was over, Nic Pickford prepared an official report in multiple copies for each of the six days spent looking for Ruth, describing where each search party went, and he included with that report several supplementary maps. The original report and maps and all copies of them seem to have disappeared. What happened to the official report and maps?
Then there was the B-record. Geza was distressed back in 1970 as he looked through the filing cabinets at Pan Palace to find that the B-record maps were missing. It was part of the established procedure that each B-record was accompanied by a hand-drawn route map showing in detail what route the target chimpanzee had taken that day. What happened to the B-record maps?
Thirty-seven years later, Geza was able to consider the B-record at a more leisurely pace. By then, all the Gombe records, starting from the first field notes written back in July 1960, had been consolidated and archived and were being digitized for computer access by a former Gombe student from the early 1970s, Anne Pusey. Pusey began this massive project in the 1980s while she was a professor at the University of Minnesota; Geza communicated with her about Ruth and the B-record between 2006 and 2008. But when Geza began to review an electronic version of this massive archive, the existing B-record sent by Professor Pusey, he found anomalous gaps in the very places where he had hoped to learn something about Ruth’s movements during the weeks before her death. What happened to those missing pieces of B-record?
In short, several things had disappeared in what seemed like a deliberate pattern of selective amnesia. Almost nothing about Ruth’s final weeks remained. And in his darker moments, Geza began to imagine that that pattern was, in its totality, a faint echo of the noise produced by a hidden and malicious actor, someone who tried to conceal the location of Ruth’s body from the searchers.
• • •
A logical flaw to that dark theory, it eventually became clear, is chronological. At least one of the important missing documents—Nic’s official report—was obviously created after the body was found, so it could not have been disappeared in order to obscure the location of the body. Given that chronological clue, along with some others, Geza finally came to believe that the person who most likely created the pattern of amnesia was not a malicious actor but an anxious one named Hugo van Lawick.
Hugo was there at the right time. His stay at Gombe that July was defined and chronologically framed by his role as official escort for the grieving Mr. and Mrs. Davis during their small-plane flight from Nairobi to Kigoma on the evening of July 23 and back again to Nairobi on the morning of July 26. He left after Nic had completed his official report of the search, and he arrived a couple of days before the Davises were shown Ruth’s hut and failed, apparently, to find her personal journal.
Hugo had been in Europe with Jane and Grub, attending and celebrating his brother’s wedding, when Ruth disappeared, and so his motivation could not possibly have been to affect the direction or quality of the search. His motivation might have been simpler and more mundane than that. Hugo could have been worried about potential lawsuits directed against the Gombe project and perhaps against himself and his family. It would be natural to worry about such a possibility under those circumstances, and it could be that Hugo’s concerns were amplified by conversations with his brother, Godi, who was an attorney in Holland. Thus, Hugo might have had a motive for tampering with and destroying documents: to erase anything having to do with Ruth and her emotional condition during the last few weeks of her life, including her self-described “depression” and her general state of unhappiness.
Hugo also had the opportunity. Indeed, as codirector of the Gombe project, he had the extraordinary opportunity to go anywhere in camp and do almost anything he liked at any time without having to justify his actions to anyone. After Hugo arrived with Mr. and Mrs. Davis at Gombe on the evening of July 23, they went to bed as soon as they were able. He could have spent hours scouring Ruth’s hut and going through Ruth’s personal items at that time. Cathy and Lori sorted and packed up Ruth’s things at the direction of Steve Stevenson, which must have happened before Hugo arrived. But Hugo’s search for any personal items of Ruth’s that seemed potentially damaging to the operation would then have been greatly simplified. Hugo similarly had the opportunity to go through filing cabinets in Pan Palace at his own pace and to remove all of Ruth’s hand-drawn maps in the B-record as well as any of the entries he imagined might be of concern.
Everyone was under stress during the funeral, and Hugo must not have been pleased about being forced to cut short his family time in Holland. It’s clear that he and Jane were by then having serious financial problems; I believe they were also by then experiencing marital conflicts that would soon lead to their estrangement, separation, and then divorce. So Hugo may have felt upset and under pressure when he showed up at Gombe for the funeral, but was he actually capable of removing and destroying documents from the files and personal items from Ruth’s hut? Geza thought he was.
• • •
In the course of working to reconstruct the memory of that long-ago time, Geza managed to get in touch with most of the people who had been at Gombe during the latter half of 1968 and the first half of 1969. He sought out contact information for Nic Pickford somewhat late in this process; but by early March 2007, he had discovered a telephone number for Nic, who was living in semiretirement in Southern California.
Geza dialed the number. After the second ring, he heard a voice with a trace of Kenyan-British accent. The voice was different from what he remembered, rougher perhaps, but marked still by familiar inflections and phrasing. Geza asked: Was he born in Kenya? Had he worked at Gombe? After an affirmative response to both questions, Geza identified himself, and Nic responded warmly: “I remember you well! I remember you well!”
Nic was happy to hear from Geza, and Geza was moved by the enthusiastic response and by Nic’s unhesitating openness about recalling the past. He seemed just as Geza remembered him: calm, helpful, straightforward. Since he had been camp manager, rather than a researcher, he was in a position to know more than most about practical developments and the comings and goings of people. He had worked closely with Hugo and had directed the search for Ruth’s body, and he also happened to have an excellent memory. Nic’s memory of Hugo, during the time he was there with Mr. and Mrs. Davis for the funeral, was not of a concerned or patient or grieving man but rather of an impatient and angry one. It seemed to Nic as if Hugo was angry at the researchers, as if somehow Ruth’s death and disappearance had been their fault.
Nic and Geza continued their catching-up communications: phone calls and emails followed by, in September of that year, Nic’s visit to Bethesda, Maryland, where he stayed with Geza and Heather for a few days. That extended contact with Nic added another dimension to the story and to Geza’s thinking by, first of all, reminding him of what an impressive trek Ruth must have made on the afternoon of July 12, 1969. She had gone far beyond what anyone in camp had imagined. It was a long distance in a short time; and since both Nic and Geza understood through intimate experience the challenging nature of Gombe’s terrain, they recognized that the satellite’s-eye distance from camp to the Kahama Valley falls, which was perhaps two miles, would have in reality amounted to about six to eight miles involving a vertical gain in elevation of somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet. Ruth covered that distance following chimpanzees over a period of three to three and a half hours on a hot afternoon.
She weighed about 105 pounds. She had been missing dinners, which meant she would have been snacking on leftovers in Pan Palace. In other words, she had some serious limitations even before she started, and the follow itself must have been exhausting. Such was confirmed by Carole’s memory of the tape, which suggests that Ruth was breathing hard, gasping between words, speaking in broken sentences. When Ruth lost the chimps, according to Carole’s reconstruction, she was still comparatively high in the valley, still some distance away from the waterfall. At that point, she would have had two choices. She could have climbed up and found the trail on the ridge—the Mkenke Watu path—or she could have simply followed the stream down through the valley. Because she seldom carried water, Ruth would typically look for a stream to quench her thirst. It made sense, then, that she did seek and find the stream, and from there headed downhill. It was not yet dark. The tape recording had stopped at around 3:45, and she would have started not long after that, albeit in a state of serious exhaustion, to follow the stream.
Aside from an appreciation of the physical stresses of that day’s follow, Nic added, in a later email, another important piece of information. After all the work done in Kigoma following the discovery of Ruth’s body—visiting the morgue, reporting to the police, and so on—Nic returned to Gombe and walked up Kahama Stream in order to consider freshly the place where Ruth’s body had been found. He never climbed up to the top of the falls. He stood at the base, at the edge of the pool, and he looked up, carefully examining the cliff face. He noticed something anomalous in the vegetation to one side of the falls: “I remember looking carefully at the cliff face and seeing the path she had followed as she fell, there were bushes bent down and a scar (fresh earth) in the red dirt at the top where the fall had started,” Nic wrote.
The “path” Nic referred to was something typical for an obstacle like a falls or high cliff at Gombe. It was path made by animals: bush pigs, perhaps, or chimpanzees. “The path was at the absolute edge of the cliff face,” according to Nic, “and although the chimps would have had no trouble walking it, a human would have had to bend low to avoid bushes and would have had to grasp bushes to help stay on the path.” Nic’s conclusion: Ruth grabbed a bush and used it to swing around. The bush gave way, and she dropped headfirst over the cliff and onto the rocks below.
That is a reasonable and reassuring conclusion, one that Geza came to accept. I do not. At least not completely. I don’t believe that Ruth fell simply as the result of an unfortunate accident. Nor do I believe that she intentionally jumped. Nor do I imagine that she was deliberately pushed. None of these three ways to fall explains fully or clearly what happened.
The problem is our natural tendency to think in categorical terms about shattering events, such as the sudden death of someone young and promising, as if they represent intellectual puzzles to solve in the style of a fictional detective. Unlike an artfully packaged mystery in a work of fiction, this unpackaged mystery from long-ago real life will never be so neatly resolved. Many things are gone. Important people have died. The world has shifted. More to the point, however, we have so far been examining this drama without fully considering its fundamental nature, which is psychological rather than physical.
Let me be more specific. When the searchers first went looking for Ruth, they imagined precipitating events based on the most obvious dangers of a place like Gombe: bad case of malaria, serious fall, bite of a poisonous snake. They failed to consider an additional danger, which is the possibility of becoming emotionally disconnected from one’s human companions to the point of severe social alienation.
I don’t believe anyone intentionally shunned or ostracized Ruth. In fact, I can believe quite the opposite, that the others in camp made sincere efforts to include her within their small community. Those efforts were not successful. Ruth was reluctant to talk in the chattering style, exceptionally slow to reveal herself or make new friends. She was a classic introvert. After Geza left, she found herself in a situation of cultural and social tension where her somewhat passive introversion was challenged by an assertive extroversion, and she found her own strong beliefs about how to do animal behavior science seemingly under attack from others who had learned a different kind of animal behavior science.
Ultimately, though, the social isolation that Ruth experienced at Gombe was ordinary rather than extraordinary. It happens in a less intense form to people everywhere, because people are members of a group-living species. The glue of belonging that holds together groups—of people, of chimpanzees, or of any of the thousands of other social species within the mammalian group—is an emotional and psychological substance that consists of contrary, push-and-pull affective systems that give, on the one hand, that painful stab of social rejection and, on the other, the liberating pleasure of social gregariousness. These are such universal emotional or affective experiences that we often stop recognizing them consciously, and so we unconsciously arrange our lives—through careers and marriages, stable families, steady friends—in a way that achieves a pleasing stasis, a steady sense of intimate belonging. This occurs whether we think about it or not, and usually we do not.
The need to belong is not a lust of the flesh but a hunger of the soul, and since the experience of belonging becomes lodged in memory, it exists as an essential part of the self. Not belonging, in its extreme version—that is, severe social alienation—can be painful indeed, and ultimately it will have damaging effects. Describing the experience as “loneliness” entirely misses the point. Describing it as “depression” fails to clarify the cause. And while depression most often makes people feel sad, severe alienation can make them feel mad. A failure to belong has the potential of turning people into angry misanthropes or even violent terrorists.
In explaining the root of Ruth’s mental or emotional difficulties, Geza always preferred the theory of a sudden hormonal imbalance caused by discontinuing her birth control pills. While I can imagine that a sudden change in her hormonal economy could have had a significant effect on her mood and mind, I consider it secondary to much more potent events and situations. Learning in mid-May that her best friend from high school had been killed in Vietnam must have been devastating. And surely even more devastating was the realization that there was no one in camp, no intimate friend or quiet ally, with whom she felt she could talk about it. Even worse than her grief, then, was her sense of isolation.
By July 4, after “long periods of depression,” she was attempting to “straighten myself out,” as she phrased it, which involved “going deeper into my shell.” She had found “an endless number of things here, both big and small, that I could concern myself with and worry about, but I have decided not to. The only thing I care about is the welfare of the chimps and when that is in danger, I will fight until death (literally!). I do not understand the people around me and, since I have no respect for most of them, I cannot be bothered trying.” Those words were written eight days before she died, and one is struck by the phrase: I will fight until death (literally!). It is a strikingly self-conscious pronouncement. But there is no evidence that Ruth’s declaration was anything beyond dramatic hyperbole declared in anger. Ruth wrote other angry things, of course, but it is clear to me, finally, that a more revealing sentence is the one immediately following: I do not understand the people around me and, since I have no respect for most of them, I cannot be bothered trying.
• • •
Ruth’s failure to find an intimate connection within that tiny human community was compensated for in part by her success in knowing the chimps and her sense of discovering an intimate belonging with them.
She was fortunate to have that experience. Gombe in the late 1960s was the one place on earth where a few chimpanzees had accepted a few humans as part of their world without being forced to, without the usual case of people locking them up in prison in order to learn more, and it was run by someone who allowed people doing research to develop in more than one direction. Jane Goodall let people follow their interests, and she did not insist on everyone using the same protocol. If Ruth had gone on to do academic work at some venerable institution, she would have been expected to frame her research in a certain way. She would probably have been forced to learn theory and statistics and analytical methods, and then, after a few years, she might have become a supposedly objective observer within a professional culture that identified certain particular systems as appropriate for doing, seeing, and representing. At Gombe, however, she was starting to know the chimps directly and intuitively and emotionally, becoming in her own skilled amateur’s way a watchful presence. In spite of the obvious dangers in doing that, she was bravely moving farther into the chimps’ physical and social worlds, for longer periods of time, than anyone else was doing or, conceivably—with the exception of Jane Goodall herself—had done.
Among people, Ruth was a natural outsider: a fish out of water, an odd duck. Such dismissive clichés are sometimes used by people who are natural insiders. These are the people who find it simple to blend in, whose lives are made easier by a quick facility with the appropriate phrase, the engaging smile, the right gesture and facial expression at the right moment. Natural insiders are fish in water and ordinary ducks, and their absence of social uncertainty or questioning can also make them predictable and even staid creatures. They see what others see, think as others think, believe what others believe, are comforted most when dressed in a social camouflage that disguises the world’s jagged edges and inconvenient truths. Outsiders, because of their distinctive social weaknesses, can be colossal failures. Even among chimpanzees this may be true. Worzle, conceivably because of his strangely humanoid eyes, was low in the dominance hierarchy, and perhaps we can say he suffered as an outsider. But those same weaknesses combined with a certain degree of intelligence, craft, and intensity of will can also make outsiders successful, especially given their capacity to see what others don’t see and to think what others don’t think. Perhaps Mike, with his clever wizardry, his use of stolen kerosene tins to astonish and frighten the others, is an example of the successful outsider. But among humans at least, an outsider with the right ability and training might hope to find real success as a creative artist or a creative scientist or simply a creative person.
Someone like Jane Goodall, whose talents and self-confidence combined with an outsider’s remarkable vision to help revolutionize the science of animal watching in the middle of the twentieth century.
Or someone like Alphonse, who made his place on the shores of Gombe as a flawed man unable to stand upright in his pirogue because he had only one foot, a lost Mfipa from the south come north to fish alongside the Waha—and, finally, a creative fisherman who introduced the long drift net, the makira, to that part of the world. It was always true that the makira might become unattached from its moorings and drift away. In the dry season especially, an early morning wind could appear, blowing strongly from the east, and that strong wind might become stronger and push an unattached makira out toward the middle of the lake, where the waves are huge and fierce and the net could be lost forever. That far out on the lake, a person could become lost forever, too, which was Alphonse’s fate a few years after Ruth fell off the cliff. Alphonse disappeared one morning, having followed his drifting makira too far out on the lake, and it might be said that Ruth, too, disappeared while following her net too far.
She was not deliberately pushed by anyone, but she was pushed by social circumstances. She did not intentionally jump, but, troubled and even desperate, she pushed herself too far for too long, so when she came to the edge of the Kahama falls she arrived without her full capacity for observation and planning. She fell accidentally, but only because, conceivably, she followed the chimpanzee path that went around the top of the falls and then, at a critical moment, tried to make a move, grab a bush perhaps or do something else that would be hard for a weak, two-handed and two-footed human ape but easy for a powerful four-handed chimpanzee ape.
And so she fell.