The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

Into the Congo

My eyes opened to darkness at 4:30 the next morning. Outside, a creature cried and cried, its lungs ramping up until it was all-out screaming. As the sky bruised into dawn, we gorilla pilgrims ate breakfast in silent meditation. Our minds were already with the gorillas, imagining what sharing their space would be like, wondering if the dials on our cameras were poised to the right settings. Before we hit the trail, Karl introduced our trackers, men critical to the success of our expedition. David and Calvin had grown up just miles away. They were among the few people on earth who had mastered the language of broken twigs and decaying fruit, who could isolate the single important notes in the vast jungle orchestra. While we sipped coffee in the dark, they’d tracked the gorillas to their previous night’s nests. With this head start, they would trace the gorilla’s steps—and swings, and swaggers—through the marantaceae to wherever they were now. Backpacks swung onto shoulders, we departed camp. Raindrops hung indecisively from the tips of marantaceae . Insects tuned their instruments. I wasn’t sure how far or long we’d walked when we heard the first, heart-stopping bellow; I would realize later that the Congo obliterated the concepts of time and mileage, scrambling these units of measurement. David brought out a pair of garden-type shears and clipped the foliage for what seemed like years. Finally, in the dim growth, I saw a face—a gorilla, concealed by marantaceae and, by the sound we’d heard, annoyed by our approach. It saw me, too, and moved its head to better perceive me through the forest. He or she stood still, focused and surprised. Then, in a tree, we saw a female gorilla appraise us, touching her finger to her lips as if unsure what to do. She turned and climbed higher, her ropy limbs hooking on vines and trunks, her motions circular and fluid, regarding us over her shoulder

from time to time. Time hung like a weight as we watched a whole family emerge. For the first time since we’d arrived, the forest felt silent. Our camera shutters boomed like slamming doors. All too soon, at a signal from David, we snapped our final pictures and returned to camp. Back in camp, I sat on my deck and replayed scenes of an hour that had been planned for months but that was already in the past. I scrolled through the images on my camera. Elation was replaced by something that resembled disappointment: There was nothing there that National Geographic hadn’t already done better. No image was adequate to communicate what I’d seen. There was no new information here that would persuade the world against extinction. I set my camera aside and tried to discern if I’d found new clarity about the state of the world. I fumbled for something inspiring to say when people asked what I’d learned. Yes, I had pictures of the gorillas. But I was increasingly sure that I hadn’t absorbed their primate wisdom. Hours passed as I sat on the deck. Slowly, the forest seemed to habituate to me. Spiders the size of my thumb flickered up the edge of my pants. Butterflies settled on my discarded hiking boots and froze there in a sort of trance state. I accumulated ants and fallen twigs. When I stood to shake them loose, the butterflies convulsed into life, saturating the air so completely that I had to shut my mouth to avoid breathing them in whole. ~~ “Back to reality now,” one of my fellow pilgrims had sighed as we trudged back to camp, though in fact we still had a week to spend in the rain forest. In the days following our gorilla sighting, we plunged again and again into the vibrating rain forest. On an excursion out of camp one afternoon, Karl pointed out a brilliant jewel-pile of butterflies feasting on a heap of dung. I squatted to zoom my lens in on them. I thought of

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