The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

Into the Congo

lower stories of vegetation for a sign of the elusive antelope. But it was our ears that had to re-awaken, to step out of their supporting role to the eyes, and provide information. How many footsteps were those? How large was the animal? What direction was it going? What the hell was it? There was the flash of a red rump, less impressive than the thunder of its sound. In the quiet of the bongos’ retreat, a hornbill flew overhead with such gusto that its wings sounded like propellers. Perhaps to distract us from the disappearing bongos, Karl began to explain how hornbills effectively disperse seeds in the rain forest. The birds’ guts go easy on seeds, and their flight range is impressive, spreading the seeds a generous distance from the parent tree. No one had probably ever visited the Congo just to see a hornbill, I thought, a scruffy bird that looked as though someone had welded two beaks onto its face. Yet the Congo existed partially because of the work of these birds. As we emerged from swampy forest into dry savannah, nearly at the end of our walk, the forest emitted a loud wail to my left. I kept walking, assuming this was another yowl of a bird. But Karl gasped. “That is a chimpanzee!” Our heads whipped to the side, and yes, could it be?—there was a black form moving in the branches of the distant trees. Our hands flew to binoculars and cameras. Karl herded us into a semicircle, chattering with unconcealed excitement. “This is unbelievable! I cannot believe this! They have not even moved at the sight of us! This is incredible. Incredible! I have to say this could very well be the first time they have seen humans. Yes, this is very possible, even probable.” Wild chimpanzees, unaccustomed to any human presence— how many creatures left on earth could share that distinction? Chimps were even more skittish than gorillas, and it had taken years for Dr. Bermejo to get the gorillas to tolerate her.

Travelers wouldn’t come to the Congo with a hope of seeing a chimpanzee. A gorilla was a more reliable draw. A deep mechanical rumble jerked my eyes away from the chimps to see the supply plane ascending from the nearby airstrip. When I turned back, the chimps had melted away. No one had managed to take a decent photo; no long lens would ever be long enough. I would have to be content with the memory of that first long wail, the wobbly mental image of their long dark bodies. Still, we were exhilarated. We replayed the scene as we returned to camp in a Land Cruiser, revisited by the same enthusiasm we’d had for the gorillas. Night fluttered down on us, and ahead of the vehicle, two pennant-winged nightjars fireworked into the air, long feathers like a trail of smoke. I thought back to what Dr. Bermejo had said about our obsession with gorillas. Was it because we saw gorillas as extensions of ourselves? Was it because we believed that if every person came face to face with a gorilla and recognized him or herself, we would elevate their status to something that requires our urgent and personal care? But then again, I thought, people came face to face with gorillas all the time in zoos. There was something about the forest that activated their magic. As humans, we don’t see the forest as an extension of ourselves. But it began to dawn on me then that we, like the gorillas, were extensions of it. Being in its midst, I had the impression that if you leaned on a tree for just one cosmic moment, your hand might sprout into the trunk and you would coil up it for energetic miles until you burst into the canopy, gasping for light. That if you let a bare toe linger too long into the mud, your humanity would dissolve and you’d sweep up into the circulation of the rain forest. All of your cells would shoot up into the tree trunks and convert from matter into sugar and drop down to the ground as big fruit that burst open

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