Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  After an hour of easy walking along elephant trails, we found ourselves blocked by another dark pond. “Bad news, boys,” said Fay. It looked as though the rainy-season waters were still up, he explained, which foreboded that there might be many such fingers of flooded forest between us and the coast. “If that’s the case, we ain’t gonna get through.” But with a little scouting we found a fallen-tree bridge across the deep part and from there waded to dry land.

  At the edge of the water stood another tree, a towering hulk with shaggy bark, a gracefully tilted trunk, and wide-reaching buttresses. Fay’s routine called for noting every major tree along the route, so this one went into his little book: Sacoglottis gabonensis, 1.5 meters diameter near the base. Loggers generally ignore the species, he had said earlier, because its ropy, twisting trunks don’t yield good lumber. The increasing abundance of Sacoglottis gabonensis was a further indicator that we were nearing the ocean. Still another was Tieghemella africana, a tree of high value both to timber companies and to elephants. Known commercially as douka, it grows to magisterial sizes—six feet in diameter and crowning out through the canopy—with straight, clean trunks, offering lovely wood for the sawmill. It also produces big green fruits, globular and heavy, each filled with sweet-smelling, pump-kiny orange pulp—not bad, but a little chalky to my taste. Elephants travel considerable distances to scarf douka fruits when they’re ripe and falling, and the well-worn elephant trails we had been following seemed to run like traplines from one douka to another. Take away those mature, fruiting trees (by selective logging, for instance) and the local elephant population would lose part of its seasonal diet. But for now the grand old doukas were still here, showing evidence of recent attention (fresh elephant dung, gnaw marks in the bark), and so were the elephant trails. We hit another short stretch of good walking, then heard another group of monkeys.

  This time, in response to the eagle whistle, there came a low, grunting chortle: chooga-chooga-chooga-chooga-chooga. Having heard it many times over the months, even I could recognize that as the alarm call of the gray-cheeked mangabey, Lophocebus albigena, another species dependent on fruiting trees. “It looks like the old gray-cheeks are gonna make it to the beach after all,” Fay said. “That’s cool. I was a little worried, ’cause we hadn’t seen them for three or four days.” The presence of Lophocebus albigena, overlapping here with its red-capped cousin, became another notebook entry. Then again we walked—westward, toward the beach—but only for five minutes, until the black lake stopped us cold.

  The black lake: too wide to bridge and too long to bypass. According to Fay’s map, it led northward into the Rembo Ngové floodplain, a riverine morass we didn’t care to enter. So Fay had gone straight across, on his solitary probe, and was now out there somewhere in the thicket, shouting back instructions. Jean-Paul Ango, one of the youngest and strongest of the crewmen, took his machete to a modest-sized tree, which fell pointlessly into the water near shore. That can’t be the idea, I thought.

  Impatient with this muddle, I waded out along Fay’s route to see if I could find the shallowly submerged ridge on which he seemed to have walked. Quickly I was neck-deep. So I decided to swim. Another crewman, Thony M’both, the man who told tales of Ebola at Mayibout 2, took the same notion at the same time, and we breaststroked across the black water on converging lines toward the thicket. Soon most of the crew had followed, some confidently, some reluctant to swim but more reluctant to be left behind. Strung out like a line of ducklings, they floundered variously with their waterproof packs, which were buoyant but too cumbersome to serve as water wings. Reaching the face of the thicket, Thony and I stopped. We treaded water. There seemed nowhere to go. I climbed up into the buttresses of a half-drowned tree, and one by one the others did likewise. In a neighboring tree I noticed Jacques Bosse, a big square-shouldered Bantu whom Fay had hired out of that gold-digging camp in northeastern Gabon. With a forceful yank, Jacques hoisted up his pack, to the outside of which was tied a large cook pot. He tossed back his head and muttered disgustedly to the sky that this was no kind of work for a man. We were stuck there, treed and frazzled like cats in a Mississippi flood, when Fay came out of the thicket and resumed command.

  His first act was to holler sternly at Emmanuel Yeye, the shyest of the Pygmies, for letting his pack soak in the water rather than pulling it up. This gave way to a scathing harangue against the whole crew. Fay derided them for their fecklessness, their incompetence, their childishness and stupidity and insubordination. It was all in French, but what I missed in vocabulary I could gather from tone. It went on and on.

  Nick and I had each witnessed earlier episodes of such castigation, going back to the first days of the Megatransect and Fay’s Congo crew of Bambendjellé Pygmies. We had seen it after the walk through Minkébé, when some of the current crewmen got drunk and disorderly during their furlough at a resupply stop. We had seen it elsewhere. I had even begun to expect it (in my notes I called it, for shorthand, the Riot Act) as a calculated, self-conscious performance that Fay used periodically to restore discipline and focus. But this time both Nick and I felt he was going too far. Fay said blistering things of the sort that only a drill sergeant, an abusive father, or an especially caustic seventh-grade gym teacher might utter. He ranted and scorned. He recited the crew’s failings. “Ça me rend fou,” he growled repeatedly. “It makes me crazy.” Well, maybe so. At that moment, given our circumstances and the brave plunge these men had just taken, I thought that perhaps our brilliantly unorthodox Dr. Fay had indeed gone off his nut.

  I was wrong. Later events and conversations with Fay, combined with what I knew of his personality and background, would convince me that this ultimate Riot Act tirade, as we all hung in trees above the black lake, was rational and carefully calibrated. Fay was stressed, yes, but still utterly in control. The deeper I scratched him, the more layers of ornery complexity and courageous bluntness I found. He wasn’t always likable; sometimes he seemed piteously isolated; sometimes he seemed cynical and mechanistic about human relations; sometimes just too demanding and harsh. But in my final judgment, reached slowly, Fay is a formidable man with a strong sense both of mission and of fairness.

  “Chaos breaks out very quickly and very easily,” he would tell me days afterward, in the quiet of a tent pitched on a sandy hillock overlooking the Atlantic surf. “You’ve got to be a complete and utter hard-ass. And I don’t enjoy being a hard-ass. I do not have some kind of sadistic element in my mind that makes me enjoy dominating people. But if you accepted that responsibility…” Thinking back over his fifteen months of risky travail, he dropped the second-person pronoun and spoke plainly. “Everything was my responsibility. Anyone who died on the Megatransect, it would have been my responsibility.”

  Mouko had nearly died of hepatitis, and it was Fay who nursed him until evacuation was possible. A crewman named Roger had almost drowned, tangled in his pack straps at a river crossing, when he larkishly flouted Fay’s instructions. There had been several other close calls in water, and several other medical emergencies. “I take that very seriously,” Fay said. “And I take the data collection very seriously.” All along, he explained, he’d had three overriding goals: to finish the entire walk as originally conceived, to maintain an unbroken regimen of data-gathering, and to get everyone through the experience alive. Democracy on the trail and his own popularity on any given day were not even secondary concerns.

  The data would eventually be collated, cross-referenced, elaborately crunched and analyzed during the months of his follow-up work. Which forests seem to be richest in gorillas? How quickly do elephants recolonize an area where elephants have been poached? What’s the linkage between logging roads and the presence or absence of duikers, forest hogs, cercopithecine monkeys? Everywhere, every which way, he wanted to ask and to answer: What are the correlations? He hoped that question would lead to another: What are the implications for wise management? Fay would write a report or a book, maybe both, and then also make
it all available through a Web site.

  “On this Web site people are going to see very clear patterns,” he vowed as we sat above the beach. “Nobody is going to be able to deny that there is something there.” Referencing one slice of data to another would in some cases yield high statistical correlation, and observers (so he imagined, supplying their words) would say, “Wow! Look at this, man. Douka, elephant: correlation, point nine.” He meant that the degree of congruence between douka trees and elephant trails might be .9, of a possible 1.0. “That’s pretty cool.” Fay hoped, anyway, that observers would find such a relationship and offer such a response. “Just seeing those patterns is going to make people realize that this is a viable methodology.”

  But before any such epiphanies could happen, he needed the data. They had to be continuous. They had to be rigorous. Toward that end, his organizational model for the Megatransect was unabashedly autocratic. During one milder fit of annoyance, provoked by a food shortage after some crewmen had evidently jettisoned provisions in order to lighten their packs, I heard Fay tell the men that if this were a military operation, they would all be in prison. “It’s very much like a military operation,” he said to me now. “I am the commander in chief on the Megatransect.” That might sound “radical” to some ears, he acknowledged (or maybe “offensive” or “retrograde” are the words you want there, I thought), but to anyone who had shared the many months of daily effort and frequent peril, it would make perfect sense. There could be only one leader giving orders, and those orders had to be followed without malingering or debate, or else the whole effort would unravel and the three goals wouldn’t be met.

  Where did this military style come from? Fay is too young to have experienced Vietnam or the draft, too old to have signed on for the first Iraq war, and has never served in any branch of the armed forces. It’s hard to imagine how he ever could have. Three or four months of basic training and regimentation would no doubt have aggravated his own insubordinate tendencies to the point of court-martial or discharge. But the lore of certain military operations intrigued him—Vietnam particularly, maybe because it was a jungle war and he’s a jungle guy. The American fiasco there, I once heard him argue, reflected the plain fact that American troops weren’t at home in the ecosystem. (Undoubtedly that had been part of it, along with several millennia’s worth of cultural differences and political history, plus a few other factors.) During my earlier visits to the line of march, I had brought him some of the better Vietnam memoirs for trail reading—Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years, Michael Herr’s Dispatches—which seemed to engross him for a few hours at night after his data-entry chores. He occasionally mentioned that if he weren’t an ecologist, he might be tempted to find work as a war photographer. And he was fascinated by the Lewis and Clark expedition, which besides being an exploratory trek was a mission, under full discipline, of the United States Army.

  Back at the start of the Megatransect, in the disheveled little library of his cabin in Bomassa, the research camp in northeastern Congo that had served Fay in recent years as a base, I had found his own dog-eared and heavily marked copy of Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose’s account of the life and character of Meriwether Lewis, as revealed most gloriously during his journey with Clark. That journey was, of course, America’s own first and greatest Megatransect. One passage in the Ambrose book, completely underlined by Fay, caught my eye: “Two years of study under Thomas Jefferson, followed by his crash course in Philadelphia, had made Lewis into exactly what Jefferson had hoped for in an explorer—a botanist with a good sense of what was known and what was unknown [and] a working vocabulary for description of flora and fauna, a mapmaker who could use celestial instruments properly, a scientist with keen powers of observation, all combined in a woodsman and an officer who could lead a party to the Pacific.” A botanist, a woodsman, a leader. Reading that, Fay must have felt some tingle of identification.

  Never mind the sad fact that Meriwether Lewis, addled by acclaim and alcohol after his big success, eventually killed himself. Fortunately for Fay, the parallel between him and Lewis isn’t really so close. Lewis stepped into a mission that had been dreamed up by President Jefferson, whereas Fay himself, no one else, concocted this one. Lewis and Clark’s enterprise was premised upon the goals of commercial exploitation and easy travel for traders, whereas Fay’s Megatransect has a drastically different goal: protecting big areas of rich forest from reductive human impact. Fay has had a better scientific education than Meriwether Lewis, and unlike Lewis, he seems not very susceptible to booze or self-doubt. Another advantage is that whereas Lewis headed off into a difficult sort of landscape he’d never seen before, Fay had twenty years’ experience in various Central African forests.

  He knew the ecosystems from bottom to top—from the plants to the elephants and the gorillas. Equally important, he knew how to walk through this world. Beginning in the late 1980s, when he did his doctoral fieldwork on lowland gorillas in the Central African Republic, tracking them through the forest with his Pygmy mentor, Mbutu Clement, Fay developed the habit of making long, restless explorations by foot. The little Suzuki trail bike that he had used during his Peace Corps days, up in the savanna country near the border with Chad, was no longer useful and no longer necessary. He discovered that by adapting his body and his outfit (river sandals, one pair of shorts, and no shirt, since bare skin is more easily washed and dried than clothing) to local conditions, he could cross flooded forests, streams, boggy clearings, and swamps that most other people considered impassable. He also learned that he could walk into a village or town anywhere in Central Africa and, within a day or two, hire a crew of men who were glad for the work of carrying bags and making camps. Employment was scarce, and he paid better than most. He learned how many men were required for transporting this much scientific equipment, that many tents, and enough food to sustain them all for, say, twenty or twenty-five days between points of resupply. By trial and error he developed a style of personnel management that worked.

  One element of that style was his imperious sense of command. Another was that he never asked anyone to accept discomfort or risk that he wouldn’t accept himself. The historian Plutarch, in his life of the Roman general Marius, wrote that “there is nothing a Roman soldier enjoys more than the sight of his commanding officer openly eating the same bread as him, or lying on a plain straw mattress, or lending a hand to dig a ditch or raise a palisade. What they admire in a leader is the willingness to share their danger and hardship, rather than the ability to win them honour and wealth, and they are more fond of officers who are prepared to make efforts alongside them than they are of those who let them take things easy.” In Fay’s case, it was manioc and salted fish, not bread; a roll-out pad on the forest floor, not a straw mattress; and a machete-cut corridor through a blackwater thicket in lieu of a raised palisade.

  When I asked him later about his blowup at the black lake, he conceded that “it certainly looked like I was pissed off, there’s no doubt about it.” And yet he hadn’t been, he said. It was just another bit of tactical histrionics. From his perspective (though he was too discreet to say so), I had exacerbated the confusion myself when Thony and I triggered the group swim. He had intended to proceed methodically, but my impatience foiled that. “I was simply taking chaos and putting order into it. And the only way to do that is to say, at the top of your lungs, ‘Everybody stop! Everyone who is here present, stop! Do not move. Do not breathe. Stop. And I’m going to tell you what to do.’”

  Fair enough, though as the moment had unfolded, I didn’t wait to be told. I swam back to the east side of the lake, found my own waterproof pack where I had left it, double-checked its seal for the sake of my notebook and binoculars, and swam out again to the thicket. By the time I got there, nudging the pack ahead of me like a water polo ball, the others had begun moving down Fay’s hacked-out corridor. The water here seemed to be eight or ten feet deep. I fell in behind Sophiano Etouck, the most stalwart of the crewmen, and
Nick, who was managing somehow to dogpaddle along with his pack on his back and his Leica to his face like a snorkel mask. God love him, Nick even now was shooting. Sophiano led the way, swimming with his right arm and wielding a machete with his left. Every few yards he rose high in the water to whack a limb out of our path, then sank away beneath a boil of bubbles. When Sophiano first went under and stayed under, Nick and I both worried that he had tangled himself in some vegetation; then, exuberant as an otter, he exploded back up to take another swing. I followed him for fifty yards through this watery tunnel of limbs and roots, a passable route that Fay had opened during his missing hour. Finally the thicket cleared, the water shallowed suddenly, and we climbed up a high bank onto firm ground.

  While Nick and Phil examined their cameras for damage and their bodies for leeches, I dropped my pack and went back in the water to see if I could help with another load. After swimming down one blind alley, I found the tunnel again and retraced it to the east edge of the thicket. Fay was there, still perched in a tree, having meanwhile swum the lake to retrieve his own pack.

  Now he was shepherding along the last of the crew. He knew from experience which of the men were steady swimmers and which needed assistance. He was giving instructions, but the strident moment had passed. In fact, he seemed subdued. I took the pack of Augustin, the botanist, who preferred climbing through the thicket to swimming under it, and Fay came behind all of us as sweeper. He even brought my sleeping pad, which had gotten unpacked during some emergency reshuffling of the loads and been temporarily stowed in a tree. He handed it back to me dry.