Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  But that talk of compensation, of balancing value against value, of ransoming some of the world’s last ingenuous chimpanzees, comes later. As I stroll through the Goualougo with Fay, he turns the day into a walking seminar in forest botany, instructing me or quizzing Madzou and Morgan on the identity of this tree or that. Here’s an Entandrophragma utile, slightly more valuable but far less common than its congeneric Entandrophragma cylindricum. Its fruits resemble blackish yams festooned with wiry little roots, not to be confused with the banana-shaped fruit of another Entandrophragma species, candoliae. And here’s still another, Entandrophragma angolense. What about that tree there—what is it, Morgan? he demands. Um, an Entandrophragma? Wrong, Fay says, that one’s Gambaya lacourtiana. Of course to me these are all just huge hulking boles, thirty feet around, rising to crowns in the canopy so high that I can’t even see the shapes of their leaves. Morgan and Madzou are earnest students. Fay is a stern but effective teacher, sardonic one moment, lucid and helpful the next, drawing tirelessly on his own encyclopedic knowledge and his love for the living architecture of the forest. Now he directs Morgan’s attention to the fine, fissured, unflaky bark of Gambaya lacourtiana, which is not to be confused with the more subtly fissured bark of Combretodendron macrocarpum, which is not to be confused with…a pile of lumber awaiting shipment from Kabo.

  The good news from Day 8 is that Fay finds no Peracopsis alata, no standing gold, no caviar, at least along this line of march in the Goualougo Triangle. The bad news is that there’s an abundance of Entandrophragma, CIB’s bread-and-butter. By the time the prospection team arrives to confirm or modify those impressions, Fay will be somewhere else, continuing his own singular sort of prospection at his own pace and scale.

  From the Goualougo Triangle we make our way upstream along the Goualougo River, crossing back into the park. On the evening of Day 11 we’re settled near an idyllic little bathing hole, a knee-deep pool with a sand bottom and a fallen log nearby that makes a good shelf for my bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap. Peeling away my duct-tape socks after a gentle soak underwater, I feel exquisite relief. I wash my feet carefully, the rest of my body quickly, and then, given the luxury of deep clear water, my hair. I rinse my shorts and T-shirt, wring them, put them back on. It’s been a good day, enlivened by another two-hour encounter with a group of fearless chimps. For dinner there’ll be a pasty concoction known as foufou, made from manioc flour and topped with some kind of sauce, plus maybe a handful of dried apricots for dessert. Then a night’s blissful sleep on the ground; then fresh duct tape; then another day’s walk. Having fallen into his rhythm, I’ve begun to see why Mike Fay loves this perverse, unrelenting forest so dearly.

  Seated beside the campfire, Fay puts Neosporin antiseptic on his ragged toes. Several footworms have burrowed in there and died, mortally disappointed that he wasn’t an elephant. The ointment, as he smears it around, mixes with stray splatters of mud to make an unguent gray glaze. No, he affirms, there’s no escaping foot hassles out here. You’ve just got to keep up the maintenance and try to avoid infection. When necessary, you stop walking for a few days. Lay up, rest. Let them heal. Wait it out.

  So he says. I can scarcely imagine what Fay’s feet might have to look like before he resigns himself to that.

  At the end of Day 13 we make camp on a thickly forested bench above the headwaters of the Goualougo, which up here is just a step-across stream. Our distance traversed since morning, as measured by the Fieldranger, is 42,691 feet. Our position is 2E26.297 north by 16E36.809 east, which means little to me but much to the great continuum of data. This particular day, alas and hoorah, has been my final one of walking with Fay, at least for now. (The plan is that I’ll return months later to share other legs of the hike.) Tomorrow I’ll point myself toward civilization, retracing our trail of string and machete cuts to the Sangha River. Morgan and three of the Pygmies will accompany me.

  And Fay? He’ll continue northeastward to the rendezvous with Nick, then loop down again through Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park before heading out across the CIB logging concessions and the other variously tracked and untracked forests of Central Africa. The Megatransect has only begun: thirteen days gone, roughly four hundred to go. Many field notes remain to be taken, many video-and audiotapes to be filled, much data to be entered in the computers, many kilometers of topofil to unroll. Then will come the challenge of making it all matter—collation, analysis, politics. When he reaches the seacoast of Gabon, Fay has told me, he’ll probably wish he could just turn around and start walking back.

  II. THE GREEN ABYSS

  March–July 2000

  It takes a hardheaded person to walk 2,000 miles across west-central Africa, transecting all the wildest forests remaining between a northeastern corner of the Republic of Congo and the Atlantic. It takes a harder head still to conceive of covering that terrain in a single, sustained, expeditionary trudge. There are rivers to be ferried or bridged, swamps to be waded, ravines to be crossed, vast thickets to be carved through by machete, and one tense national border, as well as some lesser impediments—thorny vines, biting flies, stinging ants, ticks, vipers, tent-eating termites, and the occasional armed poacher. As though that weren’t enough, there’s a beautifully spooky forest about midway on the route that’s believed to harbor Ebola virus, the cause of lethal epidemics in nearby villages within recent years. The logistical costs of an enterprise on this scale, counting high-tech data-gathering gizmos and aerial support, can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The human costs include fatigue, hunger, loneliness, tedium, some diseases less mysterious than Ebola, and the inescapable nuisance of infected feet. It takes an obdurate self-confidence to begin such a journey, let alone finish. It takes an unquenchable curiosity and a monomaniacal sense of purpose.

  J. Michael Fay is as obdurate and purposeful as they come. But even for him there arrived a moment, after eight months of walking, when it looked as if the whole venture would end sadly. One of his forest crew, a young Bambendjellé Pygmy named Mouko, lay fevering on the verge of death. Hepatitis was taking him down fast.

  Mouko’s illness was only the latest travail. Within recent days Fay had been forced to backtrack around an impassable swamp. His twelve Bambendjellé crewmen, even the healthy ones, were exhausted and ready to quit. That border crossing, which loomed just ahead, had begun to appear politically problematic—no Gabonese visas to be had for a gang of Congolese Pygmies. And then a certain Muslim trader went missing between villages along one of the few human footpaths with which Fay’s route converged; as authorities reacted to the man’s disappearance, Fay began dreading the prospect that he and his feral band might come under suspicion and be sidetracked for interrogation. Suspending the march to nurse Mouko, he found himself stuck in a village with bad water. He was running short of food, with not even enough pocket money to buy local bananas. The Megatransect was in megatrouble.

  If Mouko dies, Fay thought, it’s probably time to roll up the tents and capitulate. He would abandon his dream of amassing a great multidimensional filament of forest-survey data, continuous both in space and in time. He would stop recording all those little particulars—the relative freshness of every pile of elephant dung, the location of every chimp nest and aardvark burrow, the species and girth of every big tree—in the latest of his many yellow notebooks. He would stop walking. Human exigencies would preempt methodological imperatives and vaulting aspirations. If Mouko dies, he figured, I’ll drop everything and take the body home.

  Even from the start, in late September of last year, it looked like a daunting endeavor, far too arduous and demented to tempt an ordinary tropical biologist, let alone a normal human being. But Fay isn’t ordinary. By his standards, the first three months of walking were a lark. Then the going got sticky.

  Having crossed Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and that stunning wedge of pristine forest known as the Goualougo Triangle, having hiked south through the trail-gridded timber concessions and boomtown logging camps of the l
ower Ndoki watershed, Fay and his team angled west, toward a zone of wilderness between the Sangha and the Lengoué Rivers, both of which drain south to the main stem of the Congo River. What was out there? No villages, no roads. On the national map it was just a smear of green. Fay traveled along elephant trails when possible, and when there were none, he bushwhacked, directing his point man to cut a compass-line path by machete.

  A strong-armed and equable Pygmy named Mambeleme had laid permanent claim to the point-man job. Behind him walked Fay with his yellow notebook and video camera, followed closely by Yves Constant Madzou, the young Congolese biologist serving as his scientific apprentice. Farther back, beyond earshot so as not to spook animals, came the noisier and more heavily burdened entourage—twelve Pygmy porters and a Bakwele Bantu named Jean Gouomoth, nicknamed Fafa, Fay’s all-purpose expedition sergeant and camp cook. They had proceeded that way for many weeks, in a good rhythm, making reasonable distance for reasonable exertion, when gradually they found themselves submerged in a swale of vegetation unlike anything Fay had ever seen.

  Trained as a botanist long before he did his doctoral dissertation on gorillas, Fay describes it as “a solid sea of Marantaceae”—the family Marantaceae constituting a group of herbaceous tropical plants that includes gangly species such as Haumania dankelmaniana, the thorny ankle-ripping nuisance, and its near cousin Haumania liebrechtsiana, a more vertically inclined plant that can grow into stultifying thickets, denser than sugarcane, denser than grass, dense as the fur on a duck dog. The Marantaceae brake that Fay and his team had now entered, just east of the Sangha River, stretched westward for God only knew how far. Fay himself, with a GPS unit and a half-decent map but no godlike perspective, knew not. All he could do was point Mambeleme into the stuff, like a human Weedwacker, and fall in behind.

  Sometimes they moved only sixty steps an hour. During one ten-hour day they made less than a mile. The green stems stood fifteen feet high, with multiple branches groping crosswise and upward, big leaves turned greedily toward the sun. “It’s an environment which is completely claustrophobic,” Fay says later, from the comfort of retrospect. “It’s like digging a tunnel, except there is sunlight.” The cut stems scratched at their bare arms and legs. Sizable trees, offering shade, harboring monkeys, were few. Flowing water was rare, and each afternoon they searched urgently for some drinkable sump beside which to camp. When they did stop, it took an hour of further cutting just to clear space for the tents.

  On the march, Fay spent much of his time bent at the waist, crouching through Mambeleme’s tunnel. He learned to summon a Zenlike state of self-control, patience, humility. The alternative was to start hating every stem of this Marantaceae hell, regretting he had ever blundered into it—and along that route a person might go completely nuts. Mambeleme and the other Pygmies had their own form of Zenlike accommodation. “Eyali djama,” they would say. “Njamba eyaliboyé.” That’s the forest. That’s the way it is.

  But this wasn’t the real forest, woody and canopied and diverse, that Mike Fay had set out to explore. It was something else, an awesome expanse of reedy sameness. Later he named it the Green Abyss.

  They reached the Sangha River, crossed in borrowed pirogues, then plunged westward into more of the same stuff. Fay had flown this whole route in his Cessna, scouting it carefully, but even at low elevation he hadn’t grasped the difficulty of getting through on foot. Villagers on the Sangha, whose own hunting and fishing explorations had taught them to steer clear of that trackless mess, warned him: “It’s impossible. You cannot do it. You will fail. You will be back here soon.” Fay’s response was: “We have maps. We have a compass, and we have strong white-man medicine. We will make it.” He was right. But it took ten miserable weeks. Having spent New Year’s Eve in the Green Abyss, he wouldn’t emerge until early March.

  “We drank swamp water for three weeks in a row. We did not see any flowing water for almost a month,” Fay recalls. “Miraculously, we only had one night where we had to drink water out of a mud-hole.” It was an old termite mound, excavated by an aardvark or some other insectivore and lately filled with rainwater. The water was thick with suspended clay, grayish brown like latte but tasting more like milk of magnesia.

  Food was another problem, since their most recent rendezvous with Fay’s logistical support man, an ever-reliable Japanese ecologist named Tomo Nishihara, had been back at the Sangha; they were now days behind schedule and would be on starveling rations long before they reached the next resupply point. So by satellite phone Fay and Tomo arranged an airdrop: twenty-kilogram bags of manioc and fifty-can cases of sardines dumped without parachutes from a low-flying plane. The drop was a success, despite one parcel’s ripping open on a tree limb, leaving a plume of powdered manioc to sift down like snow and fifty sardine cans mooshed together like a crashed Corvair. The men binged on the open sardines, then resumed walking.

  Other problems were less easily solved. There were tensions and deep glooms. There were days that passed into weeks not just without flowing water but without civil conversation. Not everyone on the team found his own variant of Njamba eyaliboyé. By the time they reached the Lengoué River, Yves Madzou had had enough, and Fay had had enough of his enoughness. By mutual agreement, Yves left the Megatransect to pursue, as the saying goes, other interests. He was human, after all.

  Fay was Fay. He marched on.

  After six months, Fay and his crew paused for rest and resupply at a field camp called Ekania, on the upper Mambili River, within another spectacular area of Congolese landscape, Odzala National Park. Odzala is noted for its big populations of forest elephants and gorillas, which show themselves in the small meadowy clearings known as bais, sparsely polka-dotting the forest. Mineral salts, edible sedges, and other toothsome vegetation at a bai attract not just elephants and gorillas but also forest buffalo, sitatungas, bongos, and red river hogs, sometimes in large groups. Of course Fay wanted to visit the bais, which he had scouted by plane but never explored on foot; he also wanted to take the measure of the forest around them.

  Odzala’s elephants suffered heavily from poaching during the late 1980s and early ’90s, until a conservation program known as ECOFAC, funded by the European Commission, assumed responsibility for managing the park, with a stringent campaign of guard patrols and a guard post on the lower Mambili to choke off the ivory traffic coming downriver. Access deep into Odzala along the Mambili, a chocolaty stream whose upper reaches are narrow and strained by many fallen trees, is still allowed for innocent travelers not carrying tusks. That’s how Tomo brought the resupply crates up to Ekania. It was a ten-hour trip by motorized dugout from the nearest grass airstrip, and on this occasion I traveled with him.

  Fay, bare-chested and walnut brown, with a wilder mane of graying hair than I remembered, stood on a thatched veranda taking video of us as we docked. Without pulling the camera from his eye, he waved. I can’t remember if I waved back; more likely I saluted. He had begun to remind me of a half-mad, half-brilliant military commander gone AWOL into wars of his own choosing, with an army of tattered acolytes attending him slavishly—rather like Brando’s version of Conrad’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, only much skinnier.

  It was the first time I’d seen Fay since Day 13 of the Megatransect, back in October, when I split off from his forest trek and walked out to a road. Now his shoulder bones stood up like the knobbled back of a wooden chair, suggesting that he’d lost twenty or thirty pounds. But his legs were the legs of a marathoner. The quiet, clinical smile still lurked behind his wire glasses. Greeting him again here on Day 182, many hundreds of miles deep in the equatorial outback, I felt like Stanley addressing Dr. Livingstone.

  “Every day that I walk,” Fay volunteered, “I’m just happier that I did the Megatransect.” He said “did” rather than “am doing,” I noticed, though in fact he was only halfway along. Why? Because the advance planning and selling phase had been the most onerous part, I suspected, after which the actual walk felt like raking i
n a poker-game pot. Aside from a chest cold and a few footworm infections, and notwithstanding the weight loss, he had stayed healthy. His body seemed to have reached some sort of equilibrium with the rigors of the forest, he said; his feet, I saw, were marked with pinkish scar tissue and pale sandal-strap bands against the weathered brown. No malaria flare-ups, no yellow fever. Just as important, he was having fun—most of the time, anyway. He described his ten weeks in the Green Abyss, making clear that that passage, far from fun, had been “the most trying thing I’ve ever done in my life.” But now he was in Odzala, lovely Odzala, where the bongo and the buffalo roam. He had a new field companion to help with the botany, a jovial Congolese man named Gregoire Kossa-Kossa, forest-hardy and consummately knowledgeable, on loan from the Ministry of Forestry and Fishing. Fafa, his crew boss and cook, had grown into a larger role, which included data-gathering chores earlier handled by Yves. And his point man, Mambeleme, now with a buffed-out right arm and a machete so often sharpened that it was almost used up, had proven himself a champion among trail-cutters. The rest of Fay’s crew, including the brothers Kati and Mouko, had suffered badly from that chest cold they all caught during a village stop but now seemed fine. Mouko’s more serious illness, along with other tribulations, was yet to come.