Decompressing

For me the Ugandan trip is over. Everything will be a decrescendo from the gorillas. Tomorrow we travel to Lake Mburo National Park. The hope of seeing a leopard is dangled in front of us like a carrot in front of a donkey. It is meant to keep us going and our interest up. But it doesn’t work. I am treading water until I get to Entebbe and the airplane home.

The trip to Mihingo lodge is broken by views of ordinary Ugandan life seen from the windows of a speeding land cruiser. 

Small boys hawk guavas along the roadside. Men haul bundles of sticks. Women haul benches balanced on their heads. In the town of Ntungama we pass a Universal Health Care Clinic. A sign advertises X-Ray and Ultrasound Scan. The clinic is in a ramshackle building, doorless and dusty. We pass another shop. It appears to be selling decorative floor covering. The building is decrepit and worn. Outside a man is talking on a cell phone. Two very modern cars are parked in front of the store. These scenes send mixed messages. Is the country poor? Yes. Is it extremely poor? Well, yes. But who owns these cars? And how does that man pay for his cell phone?

We pass men hauling bananas on bicyles. We pass the town centers they are hauling them to. We pass the trucks that load up on the bananas hauled by the men on bicycles. We pass vegetable markets and butcher shops. A shack of a building with a rusty corrugated iron roof that looks like a storage facility for aging farm equipment has an awning with a sign that says Ruti Peoples Clinic and Laboratory Services. When we reach Mbarara, I see a sign announcing Mbarara University of Science and Technology. 

The sign is part of a gaudy advertisement for Coca Cola. Everything I see is incongruous. You have to live in a place for a long time to know it. These split second scenes might as well be messages from outer space.  I haven’t a clue to where I am and who these people are.  It is a strange feeling this, looking at a world that I don’t belong to thinking that perhaps I could.

Just before I enter Mbura National Park a herd of Ankole cattle cross the road. A herder as thin as the staff he is carrying is shepherding them out of our path. My wife, Nancy, asks Cliff to stop for a picture. She stands up and pokes her head out of the top of the land cruiser. When she does, the herder picks up a stone and hurls it at her. It is a warning shot across our bow. It sailed high over Nancy’s head. I have the feeling that had he wanted to, he would surely have hit her. He picks up another stone, this one much bigger. He threatens us with it. Cliff tells him to put down the stone. That is no way to act, he says. Then, negotiating, he says, “You put the stone down and we will leave.”

The herder lowers the stone but he doesn’t let go.  Cliff puts the land cruiser into gear and slowly moves away. He says the herder was worried that photographing the cows would take away their spirit. It would make them worthless. I have been to African ten times now. This was the first hostile act I have ever seen.

The Ten Commandments, under one interpretation, forbid graven images. So, too, do Australian aboriginals.  So, too, does the herder receding in the distance behind us.  He is, I think, what a prophet of old looked like.

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Gorillas and Original Sin

8:30am, at the start of the gorilla tracking, we divided up into three groups. I was assigned to the M group. (M for what? Murder?) The day before there had been a fight between the silverback we were tracking and a solitary male. The solitary lost. For safety’s sake the silverback took his band deeper into the forest. We walked 13 miles to find them, seven miles into the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and six out. The miles were not on level ground.

The climb to the crest of the first hill took two hours. We started down into the valley beyond. Joseph, our leader, heard over his walkie-talkie that the gorillas had swerved back toward the village. We climbed back up to the crest and followed a long ridge. Joseph held up his hand. We stopped. The gorillas were only 300 feet away. He motioned us off track, a short cut to the animals. Now everything was whispered. Our trackers hacked a passage through a thicket of stinging nettles, climbing vines and thorn bushes. Here the forest developed a mind of its own. Every step was impeded by a thorn, sometimes into socks, sometimes into sleeves, at least once into my forehead and leg. The climb’s level of difficulty ratcheted up. It teetered between hard and an ordeal. The heat was oppressive. We wore gloves against the nettle stings.

Finally, we came to a clearing.

“They are here,” whispered one of the trackers.

I looked around. I saw thickets, thorn bushes and small, low flying birds that turned out to be outlandishly large insects. I stared into a dark shape inside a bower. I couldn’t make it out. I looked up. Seven feet away a female, juvenile gorilla stood on all fours blinking at me as if I were an optometrist’s eye chart.

We stared at one another for a minute. She padded off out of sight into the thicket. As if on cue, a second female appeared to my left.

She rolled onto her back, raised her arms fetchingly over her head, and sent me a come-hither look fixing me the way the Ancient Mariner fixed his Wedding Guest. This unexpectedly intimate encounter with a creature whose DNA and mine overlapped by 98.7% transfixed me. She was telling me something. Before I could make out what it was, a larger female rolled into view clutching a tiny male to her bosom. The mother had presented herself for grooming and that was what my temptress proceeded to do, leaving me on the forest floor, rejected, like so much vegetable detritus.

 I watched her work her way through the mother's hair. The small motor control of her fingers—that is exactly what they were, fingers—was just like my own. She lifted the mother’s hair with an index finger. Lifted it again, inspected the patch of skin underneath, and, satisfied, moved on. If she found something, she delicately took it between her index finger and her thumb and ate it. She continued down the torso. Soon she was inspecting the mother's genitalia with the same equanimity that she displayed earlier on her belly. Embarrassed, I looked away. I looked back. The groomer made no fastidious distinction among the mother's body parts. I did. This is the legacy of original sin. I look at perfect innocence and judge it by my own morality. Shame on me. But that is the point of original sin, isn't it?

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