Following Fifi

by John Crocker

  Having Lisa with me on the journey allowed me to share my excitement and my insecurities about being in a foreign land. She won my heart early on because of a hair incident. That day, she had nodded off in her seat when two young girls with tightly braided black hair started touching her long, wavy blond locks. Usually serene and focused, Lisa looked rather startled when she opened her eyes to find the two girls gently stroking her hair.

  “Safi sana,” beautiful, they told her.

  “Asante sana,” thank you, Lisa replied, recovering—but then she went on to tell them in Swahili that she thought their hair was more beautiful than her own. That was Lisa in a nutshell: sensitive, thoughtful, and always thinking about others. We both felt an easy connection with the Tanzanians we encountered, especially when we tried to speak Swahili. Lisa’s subtle but penetrating smile during these moments added a deeper bond to our growing friendship.

  Lisa and I climbed off the train at its final stop, Kigoma, a bustling lakeside market town. With only a small suitcase and backpack apiece, we boarded a six-person, gas-powered boat driven by a park ranger for the three-hour trip along the shoreline of the immense Lake Tanganyika.

  Exhausted to the bone yet tingling with anticipation, I peered intently from the boat as we pulled up to the shore of Gombe Stream Research Center, just as Jane’s even smaller boat had thirteen years earlier when there were no signs of civilization and she set up camp with Vanne to begin her research. The wild, densely forested Kasekela Valley, where Jane conducted much of her study, lay before us. I stared at the barren Rift Mountains that lay farther up, above the valley, forming the eastern border of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. Along the lakeshore, pristine beaches welcomed us with lapping waves on the bright white sand. To the west, forty miles across Lake Tanganyika, were the hills of the Congo. Gombe Stream National Park, founded in 1968, ran ten miles along the eastern shore of the lake and two miles up to the mountaintops.

  Stepping out of the small boat, I was amazed by how clear the lake water was. “After you get back from tracking chimps through the rugged forest all day, you’ll appreciate this lake to cool your body and relax before dinner,” a staff member said to us in slowed-down Swahili. He was right. The lake would also add a few terrifying moments to my African adventure.

  Jane greeted us with a warm smile when we arrived at the only structure in sight, the thatched communal building where students and researchers gathered to eat dinner and discuss the chimps they’d observed during the day. She wore the same style of khaki shorts and sandals that she wore in the National Geographic movies and looked just as serene and sincere. With warmth in her twinkling eyes, she said, “I’m glad you both made it safely.” As I exchanged hugs with the renowned scientist, I felt like I was in a movie or dream, watching it all take place before my eyes. At the same time, I sensed that I would become part of the Gombe family and that we would all look out for one another in the coming months. I felt at home already.

  Surveying the area near us where Jane had first set up her campsite in 1960, and then looking east to the forest edge, I imagined I could see David Greybeard, the first chimp who had trusted Jane enough to allow her to observe him closely. He had lived and died here, his life made famous by Jane’s observations. Fifi and her chimp brothers Figan and Faben were still here, perhaps in the same valley. I was struck by the enormity of human history—from our evolutionary roots until now. Despite feeling like such a small speck in this grand scheme, I briefly shivered as I realized it all fit together beautifully! And along with the thrill of being at Gombe, I was humbled by the fact that I would be working alongside such a famous scientist.

  That afternoon, Lisa, a field assistant named Esilom, and I hiked from the beach camp to the upper camp, twenty minutes higher into the valley. From the trail, we noticed tall grasses, tangled vines, thick bushes, and massive trees—some with leaves two feet wide. Esilom let us know we would be tramping through that type of terrain at times and that the plum tree thicket and the waterfall would be challenging and might require acrobatic talents to navigate. He joyfully enacted swinging across the stream at the base of the waterfall by grabbing hold of a four-inch vine nearby, and my stomach tensed a bit. Luckily, chimps, baboons, and human researchers had created natural pathways that allowed us some upright trekking.

  I reflected back on my childhood, picturing my mother standing far below us, hollering at my friends and me, who were swaying in the tops of the trees in our backyard, ordering us to come down. Later, in high school, my two brothers, my sister, and I hooked up a rope trapeze that swung across a ravine. We played on it every day, building up our arms. I hoped those experiences might help me feel more confident in the Gombe forest. I guessed time would tell.

  Soon after our arrival at the upper camp, several other Tanzanian field assistants, a few of the European researchers, and I gathered at a grassy area among the palms and talked about the state of the forest this time of year.

  June was the end of the wet season, so the flowering plants and edible leaves were at their peak of growth. Wonderfully flavorful mabungo fruit was ripening throughout the valleys. Blue monkeys swung through the treetops while Cape buffalo and the occasional leopard roamed on the ground. Although confronting a leopard sounded terrifying, no one at the camp had seen one in years. Herons, crowned hornbills, and great spotted cuckoos might be seen in the ficus and tall oil-palm trees. The seventy-five to eighty degree temperature seemed about right for my attire: khaki shorts, a cotton shirt, and plastic sandals. This was so much more exhilarating than a classroom setting, and I could hardly believe that I would receive academic credit for my two quarters of “African Field Study.”

  A researcher named Bill told me, “You’ll get hooked on this place.” Bill was tall, with thick black hair and a full beard. He seemed completely relaxed and happy living at Gombe while doing his chimp research. He fit seamlessly into the scene of humans and animals living close to one another, partly because he was so hirsute.

  Peering around at the lush jungle, I imagined Jane herself, thirteen years earlier, arriving here and conducting her study. She’d had little knowledge of what to expect. The National Geographic films had showed Jane in a similar setting, only higher in the forest, looking down from “the Peak” at the valley and searching with her binoculars for signs of chimp life. I was in awe of the fact that she had slept on the Peak alone, without even a tent, completely exposed to the elements. “These were some of my happiest moments,” she had revealed during one of her lectures at Stanford.

  Enjoying the moment, I tried not to think about the myriad of tasks ahead of me and the things I had to learn in the coming few weeks. For example, I had just met Hamisi and Yasini, two of the twelve field assistants when another field assistant also introduced himself as Hamisi. “Hujambo, Bwana Johni,” he said—Hello, Mr. John. When I looked confused, he explained he was Hamisi Mkono and not Hamisi Matama, whom I had met earlier. In addition, I knew I would soon need to distinguish individual chimps, such as the two- and three-year-old Skosha, Prof, Freud, and Gremlin. I would record their behaviors and memorize their faces, body language, and sounds. It seemed daunting.

  During this orientation, my self-confidence waxed and mostly waned as I began sizing up the disparity between the eloquent speech and experience of the four doctoral researchers and mine. They hailed from Cambridge and Oxford, and some were already published authors. In contrast, the casual and less mature nature of the three other Stanford students brought me solace; I identified with their playful and sometimes goofy behavior, though we were all serious about our work. And despite my initial perception that the English and Scottish accents of researchers around me projected more sophistication, this feeling rapidly melted away as they genuinely welcomed us with open arms.

  And I had to adjust to Africa itself—the heat, the smells, the stripped-down outdoor living. I would live alone in one of the huts scattered a half mile from the beach camp—each solitary hut out of sight of th
e others. Sleeping alone in the dark in an African forest seemed an intimidating prospect.

  To my amazement, on that very first day at Gombe, several chimps calmly walked into camp while the researchers and field assistants were briefing me about my role on the study team. The first chimp I saw was Figan, the top-ranking male and son of the former matriarch, Flo, who had died a year earlier. Figan arrived with his brother Faben and the huge Humphrey; they swaggered into camp with powerful stances and serious facial expressions.

  The sight of these strong, beautiful animals stunned me. They seemed to study their surroundings, paying no attention to their human observers. When they came so close that I could catch their unfamiliar scent, I couldn’t help but startle a bit. We were very quiet and moved slowly to avoid interfering with their behavior. We were united in our strong belief that this forest was theirs and that we were merely visitors whom the chimps allowed to coexist with them. Our only job was to watch and record. We all grew to appreciate the long months Jane had endured before the chimps finally allowed her to get close enough to study them. Now observers had become just part of the landscape to the chimps.

  The thrill of meeting members of the Kasekela chimp community—the fifty chimps Jane came to know at Gombe—soon overshadowed my worries about living in the African forest. I felt lucky to know I would observe Flo’s offspring, whom we called the F family, consisting of Figan and Faben and their sister Fifi. Fifi was fifteen years old and the mother of two-and-a-half-year-old Freud. Two families I studied included older siblings. Adolescent Goblin still traveled with his mother Melissa and sister Gremlin; likewise, Pom with Passion and Prof. Some of the roaming young adult males, including Satan, Jomeo, and Evered, also added character to the fascinating and engaging community of chimps.

  A few miles to the south lived the smaller Kahama community of chimps, also named for the for the valley they inhabit. They interacted on occasion with the Kasekela community, but another group to the north stayed completely separate. This made for a total of about 160 chimpanzees within the steep valleys of Gombe Stream National Park. The vegetation of this twenty-square-mile park ranges from grassland to alpine bamboo to tropical rain forest. This was the chimps’ world. Now that I was here, Jane’s original campsite and the chimps she wrote about became alive and real for me. Africa was alive and real for me. I would begin to follow these extraordinary creatures—and begin to learn from them—early the next morning, my second day in camp.

  Later that evening, I ate what I could of the fish, rice, and beans prepared by our Tanzanian cook. My gut was battling an introductory bug, manifested by a slight fever and lack of appetite, but I was thankful for the home-cooked meal. I glanced at Lisa, who knew I wasn’t feeling well. She threw a frown my way and told me from across the table, “I think I may have the same thing starting.” At least I would have company I thought, grimacing.

  Then two other students and a British researcher led Lisa and me up through the forest in the moonlight to our huts. The cicadas were particularly loud, and the night air was more humid than I thought possible. I took a deep breath, contemplating being alone in the dark forest all night. Walking single file, staying close to our leaders along the trail, I noticed some vines moving back and forth. At first, murmuring to each other, we assumed that the bush pigs people had described to us were active at night, or perhaps that the night breeze was moving the vines.

  “Stay calm,” our guides whispered.

  My heart pounded in my throat, and I wished I could quicken our pace. Where are the huts? I wondered, nervous. I tried to catch Lisa’s eye but couldn’t make out her face in the shadows.

  As we continued, the movements in the vines gradually reached a thrashing level, and right next to the trail loud screams, crackling branches, loud grunts, and howling began and then increased in magnitude. I panicked, unsure if I should freeze or flee, and Lisa looked at me with enormous eyes.

  Suddenly, three human forms jumped out at us and burst into laughter. “Surprise!” Our fellow researchers were performing what was apparently the Gombe initiation ritual. Not very funny to us, but after recovering we could at least fake a laugh or two.

  My hut was the farthest from the beach. By the time I reached it, Lisa and the others were already in theirs, slightly lower in the valley. Jim, another student, accompanied me and made sure that my candle was burning and I had a pillow and sheets for the mattress on my small wooden bed.

  Until this moment on my first day at Gombe, I had felt well supported and relatively safe, but after Jim said good night and I could no longer hear his footsteps as he walked back to his own hut, I felt quite alone. Without human voices, the sounds of crickets, bush pigs, and occasional gusts of wind grew more noticeable. I did not yet have any real sense of where I was in the forest in relation to the lake, the mountains, and the valleys. Thoughts of my noisy college dorm back in California, with hot showers and lots of friends in the hallways, peppered my deep loneliness.

  As if the initiation weren’t enough to frighten me that night, alone in my cabin I suddenly saw a large centipede poke up through a crack in the concrete floor. At Gombe, the researchers and field assistants were more worried about centipedes than snakes. Back home, where the tiny bendable creatures would travel through the garden on their many hairlike legs, centipedes seemed harmless, but at Gombe, they were described as big, shiny red, and highly poisonous.

  As it emerged and began to crawl across the floor, I grabbed the jar I saw in the corner and went after it. The sweat from my panic began to merge with the sweat from my fever. Instead of trying to catch the creature, I gave in to my fear and tried to crush it. The edge of the jar cut the centipede in half, and to my horror, each half kept crawling. Now I’m alone in my hut with two poisonous centipedes! In my feverish state of mind, I pictured the hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny centipedes that would soon be crawling around my hut. Finally I brushed both halves out the door and put a bucket over the crack.

  Perhaps the scare was good for me, as it used up my last ounce of energy. I couldn’t wait to slip into bed—after checking the sheets for centipedes—and restore my energy for a big day of following the chimps.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SETTLING IN

  A warm night breeze rushed through the screened window of my hut and blew across my face. The candle on my desk flickered and cast shadows on the letter I was writing to my parents, recounting my first day following two chimpanzees, Fifi and her son Freud, through the forest. Halfway around the world from my family, I tried to help them visualize some of the highlights of my “jungle” adventure. The wet season was ending, I explained, and the abundant plumlike parinari fruits were attracting the chimps to these trees high in the valley.

  My hut, amid leafy trees, communities of chimpanzees, troops of baboons, bush pigs, and colobus monkeys in the canopies, was a twenty-minute hike from the Kasekela waterfall or the camp’s main gathering place on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. I could see no signs of civilization from this spot.

  For the next eight months, this would be my home. I found the hut’s aluminum walls and thatched roof reassuring—they were strong enough to keep big animals out—and the cement floor was solid. The large window and its firm wire-mesh screening made a generous opening that allowed the night breeze to blow in, but also made it possible for small critters and snakes to enter. Venomous black and green mambas inhabited the Gombe forest, but given the choice of this strong metal window and the occasional slithering visitor or a flimsier fine mesh, which the more aggressive baboons could easily push through, I was content with what I had. The wasps’ nest on the ceiling and the friendly geckos climbing on the walls kept me from feeling too lonely.

  Pondering what more to include in the letter, I glanced through the window to catch a glimpse of the moonlight shimmering on Lake Tanganyika. The only sounds were crickets and the occasional snort of a nearby bush pig. I realized that I was just starting to feel comfortable alone at night in my small dwellin
g surrounded by thick vegetation and roaming forest animals.

  Later that night, a huge gust blew through the window, and the aluminum door flew open, jolting me from a sound sleep. My heart pounded; I thought I had been awakened by an explosion. Then I realized it was the prelude to a fierce thunderstorm. I felt more exposed than ever to the elements. Wanting to crawl back under my covers, I instead forced myself out of bed to close the door and survey the hut for damage. The roof had good thatching, however, and the hut was tucked deep in the forest so I was at least partially protected. As I tried to settle down and get back to sleep, I told myself that if the chimps could survive high in the trees, I could survive on the ground in the aluminum-walled structure. I didn’t sleep well the rest of the night.

  The next morning, as bright sun shone through the forest canopy and I felt only a soft breeze on my face, I thought about the many times chimps in the wild were confronted with sudden weather changes, such as downpours, heat waves, or thunderstorms, all of which they seemed to take in stride, showing few external signs of distress. Over time, their apparent confidence with nature rubbed off on me. I didn’t worry so much about getting my khaki shorts and shirt soaked when it rained, knowing the sun would appear and dry them out. I didn’t get nervous about the snakes and centipedes as the chimps were never harmed by them as far as we could tell. Yet being hungry toward the end of a long day in the forest was another matter. I discovered my own food-seeking drive was just too powerful to overcome. I sometimes detoured briefly from my trekking across Kasekela Valley and ransacked the upper-camp kitchen for another peanut butter and jelly sandwich when the chimps traveled in this vicinity.

  Early on, most of my days centered around getting to know the four mother-infant pairs I was assigned to study: Fifi and Freud, Melissa and Gremlin, Passion and Pom, and Nova and Skosha. All the infants in this group were between two and three years old—the perfect age for me to observe their fundamental learning and development. As I followed them through the jungle, taking copious notes and watching closely, the chimps became my “jungle professors,” showing me firsthand how remarkably skilled chimp mothers are at rearing strong and adaptable offspring.