1: the volcano

 There is continual uncertainty as to what is real

     and unreal, what is happiness and what is misery.

—Chogyam Trungpa 

***

          A stinging nettle pierced my right wrist at just the right time.  And immediately, as the itch ensued, I was distracted from the discomfort in my legs and back, and from the rest of the epidermal irritations controlling my consciousness.  I’d been sporting a nasty skin rash around East Africa for about two weeks, several inflamed and itching hives on my arms and torso, a few about the legs; but at that point, I was primarily dealing with the lactic acid intensifying in my thighs, and with the effort to maintain footing in the precariously steep and muddy ascent of the Bisoke Volcano.  I was trying not to bust my ass. 

          The jeep ride from park headquarters to the village at the base of the volcano had seriously jarred my body, and I’d obviously over-exerted myself bracing for impact as we careened across boulders and traversed streams.  So hiking the sharp grade sent sporadic shards of pain down my back each time I caught myself in a slide.  I trailed only Vincent, a park ranger and our guide, and I watched him peripherally and looked for footholds beside the trail, aiming my boots for patches of vegetation on either side of the meter-wide mud path in between.  I was trampling flora to some extent and widening the path, but it seemed like the only recourse.  I tried incorporating the walking stick I’d been given in the village.  I wasn’t used to using one and I’d nearly turned down the offer, but I was beginning to grasp its advantages for leverage and balance, and it looked cool enough, a stained-black wood, carved with zig-zags and intricate patterns along the shaft, and into a tiny replica gorilla head at the top. 

          Vincent stepped aside and turned around, placed his hands atop his walking stick and scanned below.  We’d pulled ahead of the others, so I followed course and dropped my day pack, which I’d obviously over-stuffed with nonessentials.  The gray mist that clung to the volcano had lifted above the fields below and exposed countless acres of farmland that ran right up to the park boundary where we’d entered the forest.  Although it wasn’t that far, it was looking tiny, nearly straight down.  One of the rangers remained there, a rifle slung on his back, and beyond, dozens of people slung tools, tilling and hoeing, some transporting loads they balanced on their heads.  Rwanda is thoroughly cultivated, devoid of idle land.
          I savored the rest, felt my heartbeat easing, and tugged at my rain paints, which were sticking to my legs with the sweat underneath.  We’d been warned about the nettles and I’d worn them for protection, but I wished I hadn’t.  I stripped off a layer up top, a button-up long sleeve shirt, and the cool mist felt awesome on the bare, ravaged skin on my arms.  I cracked a smile and noticed Vincent looking my way and doing the same.

          “It is a steep ascent,” he broke the silence, “but you’ve done trekking before.”

          “I’ve done some,” I said, folding my arms to conceal the rash.  I nodded toward the plains.  “The hard work is going on down there.”  

          Vincent scanned the panorama.  “This is the African way.”  He spoke with the familiar, halting English of East Africa, with the enunciation of each syllable.  “It is a simple life, but nature is pleased with simplicity.”  He let that linger. 

          He was a handsome guy and spoke through a grin.  Sporting his ranger gear and rubber boots, hands atop the stick, with a fancy label or two he could have been modeling for an LL Bean catalogue.   He turned from the vista to me with a look of engaging curiosity.  “You have a big family in the USA?  Several children?”  “Several” came out in three distinct syllables.  

          “None, its just me,” I said, knowing what that meant in East Africa, where bachelorhood is an anomaly.  He would find it odd.  A sense of isolation crept through my perception, lingered momentarily, then dissolved into the mist.

          “A life with many freedoms,” Vincent declared, and caught me by surprise.  He was being considerate, not calling attention to my peculiarity.  It was one of the moral lessons of the gentleman, and a memory flashed, my father articulating the concept—I was young, exposed to a disabled child, told to not make him conscious of his affliction.  For a moment, I mulled the universality of morality.  “Yourself?” I asked.

          “I have a wife and two children, not a big family.”  

          I envisioned his home life.  A ranger in a national park, he had a good job.  He would be a member of the “middle class”, one of the relatively few with that distinction in a place like that.  I met his gaze and tried to look sincere, to give him room to speak.  He sensed it and carried on.  “I grew up working the land, as well.  We grew potatoes primarily.  We had banana trees, goats.  We tended to the essentials.”  He looked earnestly at the expanse below.  “When life is simple, it can also be dignified and open.”  (I wondered fleetingly if he’d put an extra syllable into “dignified”—or was I shorting it?) “It can also be difficult in troubled times.”

          Vincent was roughly my age, would have been a teenager or a young man during the genocide, and I wondered for a moment whether he was Hutu or Tutsi, but that was a taboo topic in contemporary Rwanda.  I knew better than to ask.  “These farmers will have many hands to perform the work,” he continued in a lighter manner.  “They may take a second or third wife to aid with the necessities of labors.”  He paused in consideration.

          “A second wife,” I echoed, shaking my head.  “Maybe life isn’t that simple, after all.”  That got a laugh out of Vincent.
          The rest of the group began to emerge from the lush entanglement below: three Austrians I’d met that morning, then two Rwandan kids they seemed to be sponsoring, and then my two travel mates, an Aussie named Mark and a Kiwi named Steph.  I’d been en route with them from Nairobi.  Another ranger brought up the rear.  When everyone had piled in close enough and stopped slipping and sliding, Vincent addressed the group.

          “As I have said, we often have difficult conditions.  The Volcano creates its own weather, which can change rapidly,” he scanned us quickly, back and forth, “but it appears we are all prepared with rain gear.  Has everyone (4 syllables) consumed enough water?”  Quiet nods all around.  He picked at some vegetation and said a few things about the diet of a mountain gorilla.  “If there is sunlight after the rainfall, the gorillas may come to rest.”

          The fog thickened above, but cleared even further below, revealing divisions of land to the horizon in the south, and to a mountain range in the east that must have been the Congo.  There was another farm, very active, a cluster of people working closely, all dressed in orange, contrasting with the earth tones.  I noticed Mark was checking it out too, and squinting.  He pointed to it and inquired to Vincent.

          “That is a communal farm.  The workers in orange are genocide prisoners,” Vincent responded matter-of-factly.  That led to silence among everyone and a few exchanged looks.  “Shall we carry on?”  With nods of confirmation, Vincent renewed the charge.  Steph was still staring toward the field of prisoners.  “Shivers,” she said, and then turned to climb.

          With that, we carried on into the mist.  A slight breeze cascaded down the volcano, and the atmosphere darkened a few shades of gray, like someone had turned down the dimmer.  Tiny rain drops fell, the temperature dropped, and for the first time in awhile, I felt comfortable. Vincent called down, “There are ants along the trail, so we do not stop here.”   I glanced up, then down for boot placement, watched ants crossing the great mud divide from one side of the trail to the other.  They were huge ants, looked big enough to eat.  A few more lunging steps and we were swallowed in the mist.  

          This park was the base for Diane Fossey and her primate research.  Made famous on the cover of a Nat Geo magazine, Fossey was then portrayed on the silver screen by Sigourney Weaver in the 1989 film “Gorillas in the Mist”.  Ms Fossey had conducted research, battled poachers, and possibly saved the mountain gorilla from extinction, but her scraps with the poachers eventually got her killed—by machete.  Of that singular determination, she had also been opposed to tourism on the volcano, but the Fossey Institute had changed course since her death and started promoting it.  Tourism was obviously a huge revenue source.  One-day gorilla permits were running $750US at the time, about half of the per capita GDP of the entire country.  

          “Here we will stop.”  Vincent was standing in a slight clearing beside the trail.  “We should put down our packs, walking sticks, anything that might scare a gorilla.”  I made the clearing, dropped my pack and got dizzy straightening up, a momentary horror that passed, while Vincent continued, “I know what everyone is thinking, and the answer is ‘yes, bring your cameras’.  But please disable the flash.”  It didn’t feel like we’d been hiking that long, but I was feeling lighter, relieved of my daypack on that precipitous grade.

          I noticed others moving forward, upward, and I followed until given the ‘halt’ sign by one of the Austrians.  Steph was next up the hill, her hands raised like she was in line at the airport about to get frisked.  I looked down, and a little black fur ball walked right past her, brushed her leg, and disappeared into the verdant frills to the right.  I looked back at Steph, and she had a humongous smile on her face.  I didn’t know what to do until I saw everyone else moving, so I followed them further up the volcano, and then off the trail into an area that looked tread upon, but not cleared.  It was awfully green, and the black fur of the mountain gorillas contrasted intensely, revealing a whole family of them, resting on the hillside.
          Two little ones scuttled about the diminutive underbrush while the adults sat still.  Another ranger, camouflaged head scarf, navy blue rain jacket, swung a machete slowly to and fro, clearing bits of space where he directed foot traffic among us humans.  When he got close to a gorilla, he grunted at them, mimicking their sound.  He was announcing his presence, and it was very clear they were comfortable around him.  He must have been the tracker.  The rangers had to have someone on the volcano shadowing the gorillas at all times, calling positions with a handheld radio.

          A silverback sat in the middle of the group, the distinct streak of white hair across his back, covering a wall of muscle.  The rangers called him “Charles”, I’d learned that morning.  He was thought to be 23 years old and I’m sure there was extensive research available, although the park was shut down and abandoned for most of the 90’s during civil war.  There was another silverback, slightly smaller, lower on the volcano and in proximity of a couple of females and one of the young.

        I saw that Vincent was talking, so I snapped a few pictures and moved down to where I could hear, keeping an eye on the lead silverback, who ignored me.  If the gorillas were concerned in any way by our arrival, they didn’t show it.  “What we know about the gorillas comes from observation,” Vincent was saying.  “The fossil record of the area is particularly poor, so the evolutionary history is not clear.”

          I took a seat on the hillside, within a few feet of a gorilla.  We were much closer than the 7 meter-recommended distance I’d read about, although in that type of jungle entanglement, you wouldn’t be able to see anything 7 meters away, unless you were looking off the volcano and into space, toward the farm world below, which alternately appeared and disappeared at the whimsy of visibility.  I was very conscious of the silverback and kept him in the corner of my eye. A couple of times he looked my way, and I turned my head not to meet his gaze.  I’d heard that advice—not to look him in the eye, which he might perceive as a challenge.  He stared off into the void while I checked him out, and I wondered what he could see.  Would the lack of circumstance for sharp vision have registered him near-sighted, my evolutionary cousin?
          Then suddenly sunlight filled space, the fog turned phosphorescent, and all the gorillas stretched and yawned and yanked at themselves before settling into rest.  Charles rolled over, exposing his silver back against the lush, bronzed tapestry.  Only the two little ones escaped rest, fidgeting while their mothers cuddled them and tried to nap.  They would momentarily nod off, then poke their heads up and check us out.  Vincent spoke softly, “The silverbacks have been known to fight amongst themselves, but as you can see, they are gentle creatures.  They are not territorial, so they will defend their group rather than any spot on the volcano.”

          And so we spent an hour with the ‘Umabano’ group, their one daily hour of exposure to humans, who snap photos, gawk, and seem generally impressed by the encounter.  And it appeared to be a well-regulated process.  There were 12 gorilla groups in the park, but only 8 had been acclimated toward human contact.  So in groups of 8 people, there would have been a maximum of 64 tourists present at any time, spread out among five considerable volcanoes.  Another ranger appeared from above, a machete in hand and rifle on his back. Charles perked up and craned his neck to look up the mountain.  The ranger stopped in his tracks, drawing comments from the others.  Charles turned his head downhill, and settled his gaze in my direction.  I instinctively averted eye contact but kept my line of site nearby.  I could sense him looking at me.  The ranger above moved, and Charles swung slightly to again observe the recent arrival.  He did it twice more, then seemed to lose interest.  He stared off into space, folded his arms across his chest.   

          In the next moment, everything darkened, and a light mist dusted the hillside.  Vincent made an announcement that our time with the gorillas would soon come to a close.  As I watched fog creeping its way up the volcano, I got the sense again that I was being watched.  It was a feeling devoid of fear, but still an awareness—I knew that Charles was looking at me.  He must have shared some of the same curiosities, (if not neuroses and skin rashes), participated in lots of the same urges.  How different were we?  Slowly, I turned my gaze to meet his.  We looked right at each other, and in that moment, there was the conundrum of Africa, the despair with all the joy, the discomfort and the grace.  The swirling clouds captured chunks of the volcano, released others, and I waved ‘goodbye’ to the gorillas in the mist.