Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  Mosorel’s right hand was swaddled in a large white bandage. It testified to a saw accident several months earlier, Andrei explained, in which Mosorel had sliced off his pinkie and broken his fourth finger while cutting up an old chest for usable lumber. Mosorel is a carpenter, sometimes. Sometimes too he’s a tailor; his nickname means, roughly, “Mr. Thread.” Until the saw accident, he had also been pulling shifts at a factory down in the nearby town. Like his parents, who still raise pigs, cows, sheep, onions, corn, beets, potatoes, and more than enough apples and pears for tsuica, Mosorel is a versatile man of diverse outputs. The hand injury didn’t seem to damper his spirits, possibly because some joyous aptitude for survival runs like a dominant gene through the family, homozygous on both sides of his parentage. As the sweet liquor spread its heat in our bellies, the talk turned in that direction—to survival, and how its terms of demand had changed.

  During the Communist era, Gheorghe and Aurica Surdu had been required to supply eight hundred liters of milk each year to the state. Andrei translated this fact, Aurica nodding forcefully: Yes, eight hundred. There were also quotas to be met in lambs, calves, and wool. Since the revolution, things had changed; no longer are Gheorghe and Aurica obliged to deliver up a large share of their farm produce, but market prices are so low that rather than selling their milk, they feed it to the pigs. So, I asked simple-mindedly, is life better or worse since the fall of Ceausescu? The talk rattled forward in Romanian for a few moments until Andrei paused, turned aside, and told me that Mosorel had just said something important.

  “At least we’re not scared now,” he had said.

  Just below the high village of Magura, at the mouth of the small river valley draining from Fata lui Ilie and other peaks, sits a peculiar little town called Zarnesti. Narrow streets, paved with packed snow at this time of year, run between old-style Transylvanian row houses tucked behind tall courtyard walls closed with big wooden gates. Horse-drawn sleighs jingle by, carrying passengers on the occasional Sunday outing. Heavy horsecarts with rubber tires haul sacks of corn, piles of fodder, and other freight. Young mothers pull toddlers and grocery bags on little metal-frame sleds. Kids ice-skate down the glassy snow-packed lanes. There are also a few automobiles—mostly beat-up Romanian Dacias—creeping between the snowbanks, and along the southern edge of town rises with sudden ugliness a cluster of five-story concrete apartment blocs from the Communist era, like a histogram charting the grim triumph of central planning. Beside the train tracks sits a large pulp mill that eats trees from the surrounding forests, digests them, and extrudes the result as paper and industrial cellulose. The mill site is cluttered with cranes, tanks, conveyors, piles of logs, a long eyeless building stuccoed in weary pink, and a few smokestacks. Beyond it is another neighborhood of concrete high-rises.

  You can walk all afternoon among the winding lanes of Zarnesti, down to the main street, past the Orthodox church, past the pulp mill, looping back through the post office square, and not see a single neon sign. There are no restaurants and no hotels—none that I’ve managed to spot, anyway. Yet the population is 27,000. People live here and work here, but few visit. For decades Zarnesti was a closed town. The reason for its closure was security strictures related to the other industrial plant, over near the police station, the one commonly known as “the bicycle factory.” The bicycle factory was really a munitions factory, founded in 1938, when Romania was menaced by bellicose neighbors during the buildup toward World War II; later, in the Communist era, it had thrived and diversified. It produced artillery, mortars, rockets, treads for heavy equipment, boxcars, and—yes, as window dressing—a few Victoria bicycles. This is the factory where Mosorel worked until mutilating his hand. For decades it was Zarnesti’s leading industry. But the market for Romanian-made rockets and mortars has been wan since the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, and the bicycle factory, which once employed 13,000 people, has laid off about 5,000 since 1989. At the pulp mill, likewise, the workforce has shrunk to a fraction of its former size. The town’s economy—at least the old economy, fed by geopolitical suppositions and mandates that flowed up from Bucharest—now resembles a comatose patient on a gurney, ready to be wheeled who knows where. Still, Zarnesti is filled with stalwart people, and a few of those people are energized with new ideas and new hopes.

  One new idea is large-carnivore ecotourism. It began in 1995, when Christoph Promberger was contacted by a British group who had heard about the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project and wanted to bring paying visitors to this remote corner of Europe for a chance to see wolves and bears. They came—not actually to Zarnesti but to another small community nearby—and the money spent on lodging and food, though modest, was significant to the local economy. Two years later Christoph and his colleagues repeated the experiment as an independent venture. They welcomed eight different tour groups totaling some seventy people, who were accommodated in small pensiunes, vacation boardinghouses run by local families. Although the likelihood of actually glimpsing a wolf or a brown bear in the wild is always low, even for experienced trackers like Marius and Peter, some nature-loving travelers were quite satisfied, it seemed, to hike or ride horses through Carpathian forests in which a sighting, or a set of tracks, was always possible. Meanwhile the wolf fieldwork came to focus on the wooded foothills and flats of the Barsa Valley, which stretches thirty miles into the mountains above Zarnesti. And adjacent to the Barsa is a newly enlarged protected area called Piatra Craiului Natural Park, a massif of limestone crags, high forests, and alpine meadows harboring several endemic plant species. Piatra Craiului, now supported with a grant from the Global Environmental Facility of the World Bank, has its own great potential as a tourist destination but little such traffic so far. Christoph discussed the tourism opportunity with a couple of venturesome folks in the town. Large carnivores, he pointed out, might attract travelers who wouldn’t come just for edelweiss and primroses. One man he talked to was Gigi Popa.

  Gigi Popa is a forty-six-year-old businessman whose trim mustache, balding crown, and gently solicitous manner conceal the soul of a risk-taker and a performer. Give him three shots of tsuica, a guitar, and an audience—he’ll smile shyly, then hold the floor for an evening. Give him a window of economic opportunity—he’ll climb through it. Gigi grew up in a small village near Zarnesti, the son of a sheetmetal worker. In the 1980s, he worked as a cash-register repairman for a large, inefficient government enterprise charged with servicing machines all over Romania. The machines in question were mediocre at best, and destined to be obsoletized by modern electronic versions. Gigi couldn’t divine all the coming upheavals, but he could see clearly enough that mechanical Romanian cash registers were not a wave to ride into the future.

  He and his wife lived in a little house behind a high courtyard gate, a place that was charming and solid but had lately come under threat to be leveled for more concrete apartments, in accordance with President Ceausescu’s systematization campaign. As the campaign approached to within wrecking-ball distance, Gigi and his family could do nothing but watch and dread. Then, blessed surprise, Nicolae Ceausescu himself fell before Gigi’s house did.

  “After the revolution, I change quickly my job and my direction,” Gigi says. He got out of cash-register repair and opened a small store in the back of the house.

  He was ready for the next step, not knowing what the next step might be, when Christoph told him about English, Swiss, and German travelers who would be coming to Zarnesti, drawn by the wolves in the mountains but needing lodging in town. Gigi promptly remodeled his home and his identity again. He became a pensiune keeper, with four guest rooms ready the first summer and another four the following year. He now plays an important partnership role to the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project’s program of tourism. Gigi’s pensiune is where Gordon and I have been sleeping, for instance, when we’re not sublimely geschtuck in the mountains.

  One morning I ask Gigi the same question I asked Mosorel: Has the new order made life better or worse?
“The good thing of the revolution is everybody can do what he have dreams,” Gigi says. “Because everybody have dreams. And in Ceausescu time you can do no thing for your own. Must be on the same…same…”—he makes a glass-ceiling gesture—“…level. Everybody.” Whereas now, he says, a person with initiative, wit, a few good ideas, and a willingness to gamble on them can raise himself and his family above the dreary old limit. The bad thing, he says, is that free-market entrepreneurship involves far more personal stress than a government job in cash-register maintenance.

  One day in the summer of 1999, Christoph and Barbara noticed a sizable construction job under way in the Barsa Valley, some miles upstream from Zarnesti. The foundation was being laid for a hundred-room hotel.

  This was not long after Christoph had begun discussions with Gigi Popa and a few other local businessmen, as well as the town mayor, about not just tourism but a vision of sustainable ecotourism for Zarnesti. The crucial premise of that vision was to let the Barsa Valley remain undeveloped—and thereby to preserve an intact riparian ecosystem, as well as habitat for large carnivores, with their attractive appeal to foreign visitors—while the infrastructure to support those visitors would be built as small-scale operations down in the town. If the valley itself was consumed by suburban sprawl and recreational development, Christoph had explained, then the carnivore habitat would be badly fragmented, if not destroyed, and the Large Carnivore Project would be forced to move, taking not just its research focus but also its ecotourism activities elsewhere. But if the Barsa habitat was protected, then the project could remain, channeling visitors to whatever small pensiunes might be available in Zarnesti. Everyone had seemed to agree that this was the sensible approach. Yet now the hotel construction revealed that someone else—an investor from the city of Brasov, fifty miles away—intended to exploit the proximity of Piatra Craiului Natural Park on an ambitious scale. And belatedly it was revealed that the town council had approved open development zoning for the entire valley. “So this was disaster,” Christoph remembers thinking. “Absolute disaster.”

  Christoph himself had to leave the country just then, for a short visit back in Germany. Fortunately, Andrei Blumer had by that time joined the project as a specialist in rural development. Together they shaped their best argument for valley protection plus in-town entrepreneurship, so that Andrei could present that argument to the mayor.

  Zarnesti’s mayor is a mid-fortyish man named Gheorghe Lupu, formerly an engineer in the bicycle factory before Romanian bicycles lost their tactical military appeal. Bright and unpretentious, his dark hair beginning to go gray, Mr. Lupu wears a black leather jacket at work, keeps his office door open to drop-by callers, and describes himself jokingly as a “cowboy mayor.” About the problems of Zarnesti, though, he’s serious. Tax revenues yield only 10 percent of what they did before the revolution; the pulp mill has laid off two thousand people, the bicycle factory even more; the sewage system and the gas supply network need work; the roads too cry out for repair. There was little basis to assume that this harried man would muster much sympathy for protecting wolf habitat, notwithstanding the fact that his own name, Lupu, translates as “wolf.” But would he be able at least to grasp the connection between large carnivores, open landscape, and tourism? It was a tense juncture for Christoph, having to absent himself while the whole Barsa Valley stood in jeopardy.

  Just before leaving for Germany, he received a terse electronic message on his mobile phone. It was from Andrei, saying: “Lupu stopped everything.” The mayor had moved to reverse the council’s decision. Let the tourists eat and sleep in Zarnesti, he agreed, and pay their visits to the wild landscape as day-trippers. He had embraced the idea of zoning protection for the valley.

  But to announce a policy of protection is one thing; real safety against the forces of change is another. Barbara and I get a noisy reminder of that difference during an excursion to set traps for her lynx study.

  We’re twenty-some miles above Zarnesti, where the Barsa road narrows to a single snowmobile trail. Barbara has driven her Ski-Doo, loaded with custom-made leg-hold traps and other gear, me riding my skis at the end of a tow rope behind. In the fresh snow at trailside we’ve seen multiple sets of lynx prints as well as varied signs of other animals—deep tracks from several red deer that came wallowing down off a slope, fox tracks, even one set from a restless bear that has interrupted its hibernation for a stroll. Late in the afternoon, just as Barbara finishes camouflaging her last trap, we hear the yowl of another snowmobile ascending the valley. At first I assume that it must be Christoph’s. But as the machine throttles back, I see it’s a large recreational Polaris driven by a middle-aged stranger in a fur hat, with a woman on the seat behind him. Then I notice that Barbara has stiffened.

  She exchanges a few sentences in Romanian with the stranger. He seems rather jovial; Barbara speaks curtly. The man swings his snowmobile around us and goes ripping on up the valley. When he’s beyond earshot, which is instantly, Barbara explains what just transpired.

  Claims he’s from Brasov, she says. But he is not Romanian, to judge from his accent. Probably a wealthy Italian with a second home. When he heard what Barbara was doing—setting traps to catch lynx—he thought she meant trapping for pelts, and he acted snooty; when she added that it’s for a radio-tracking study, he graced her with his patronizing and ignorant approval. Oh, you’re doing wildlife research—okay. His ladyfriend, on the other hand, was worried. “She asked if it would be dangerous to continue, with all the lynx in here. Ya, it would,” Barbara says caustically. “Keep out.” The upper valley is closed to joy-riding traffic and those two have no business being here, Barbara explains. Unlimited motorized access, along with development sprawl and other symptoms of the new liberty and affluence, are now a damn sight more threatening to the lynx population—and the wolves, and the bears—than fur-trapping, judicious timbering, or even the crude, spoliatory hunting once practiced by Nicolae Ceausescu, with all his minions and helicopter pads.

  Barbara has never before seen a recreational snowmobile in Zarnesti, let alone up here. “Aaagh,” she says, as the roar of the Polaris fades above us. “It all starts with one. There are so many rich guys in Brasov now.”

  On the following day, the last Sunday of January, the pattern of nightly snowfalls and frigid temperatures breaks to a thaw. Down in Zarnesti, the lovely deep drifts on roof eaves begin to sag weightily. By noontime the main streets are full of slush. The polished white lanes near Gigi Popa’s pensiune, where the horse sleighs and skating children lent such a flavor of timeless grace, have turned to mush. Cars flounder like mud-bound elephants. From being cold, hard, and gorgeous, the weather has turned warm and ugly. We have survived our reckless excursion to Fata lui Ilie, descended from that mountain, and now the valley is showing us a very different sort of face.

  Gordon departs for America, and Uli Geertz heads home to Hamburg. I stay behind. In early afternoon I set off in my rental car through a sleety drizzle toward the city of Brasov. The rain makes everything seem grimier and more joyless, especially the half-idle pulp mill at the edge of town. Just beyond that, I find myself stopped at a railroad crossing. In my fog of rumination, thinking about the death of the old regime and the rise of the new one, about carnivore research and ecotourism, about all the odds stacked against the possibility that big predators will survive on our planet much longer, I’m slow to recognize that the vehicle in front of me is Christoph’s. He climbs out and comes walking back.

  “Marius just called,” Christoph says. “Tsiganu’s been shot. He may be dead.”

  The details are still blurry, but it seems that a couple of boar hunters let fly at the wolf for no particular reason except his wolf-hood. Probably they were poaching, since no gamekeeper was present, as mandated for a legitimate boar hunt. Tsiganu is wounded, hard to say how badly, but still on his feet at last report. Marius heard the shots. He came upon the hunters a few moments later. Marius is still out there, Christoph tells me, followi
ng a trail of radio beeps and blood spoor through the wet snow. Before long he will either find Tsiganu’s fresh carcass or else run out of daylight without knowing quite what’s what.

  Having told me this much, Christoph jumps back in his car and the train barrier lifts.

  I do my business in Brasov, distractedly, and return to Zarnesti. A day passes. Still there’s no definite news of Tsiganu. On the morning of the second day, again a warm one, I set out tracking with Marius and two project assistants.

  We park the Dacia truck on a roadside above a village and begin hoofing along a farm lane into the foothills. At first we slog through slush and mud, then up into knee-deep snow, then still higher into a zone where the crust has barely softened. We follow a snowed-over lane on a climbing traverse between meadows, along wooded gullies, beyond the last of the farmhouses, the last of the barking dogs, past two men hauling logs with a pair of oxen. Marius moves briskly. He’s a short, solid fellow with good wind and a long stride. He cares about this animal—both about Canis lupus as a denizen of the Romanian mountains, that is, and about Tsiganu as an individual. But Marius is a home-bred Romanian forestry worker, not a foreign-trained biologist, and his attitude is complexly grounded in local realities.