Ivan the Gorilla - Zoo Atlanta

Atlanta, GA USA -

My memories from childhood are a foreign land, a country to which I’m an infrequent visitor. Nothing horrible I remember ever happened there, in fact most of it was pretty damn wonderful – I remember my parents loving each other, I remember grade school fondly, with nice teachers and classmates, my memory is also filled with adventurous vacations into the wilderness of British Columbia Canada, or exotic train rides to the Texas panhandle to visit grandma’s, aunts and uncles and unknown cousins. So in general my childhood is bordered by happiness, not a place I should have fenced with restricted entry. But some memories are, they just are.

The past few days I have been in Atlanta visiting Zoo Atlanta to interview great ape folks there and at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, who’s offices are tucked elusively in behind the gorilla and orang-utan exhibits – while there I accidentally found myself in the memory hinterlands I rarely visit.

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Podcast interviews done, today we fly back to Portland. This morning I left Skye at the café across the street from the Zoo, in the warming spring sun reworking an excel file of our Great Ape Diaries budget, he seemed happy. I took cameras and decided to get a photo of Ivan for a posting here about when Ivan and I first met.

The idea had been on my mind since I arrived four days ago. Then I was unemotional about it because I had switched Ivan and Zoo Atlanta’s famed Willie B. in my memory and since Willie B. had die over a decade ago (to the great sadness of the city – over 8,000 people came to the Zoo to attend his memorial) my thoughts and emotions were living on opposite sides of my memory country.

Ivan and I share a country. I was eight, living just outside Tacoma, Washington when we first met. Tacoma is a coolish temperate city on Puget Sound, as a metropolitan area it had limited redeeming quality in the late 1960’s, so my parents didn’t take me there much. Ivan was a bit younger than me and had been kidnapped in his lush warm, tropical forests of Congo (DRC), bound and shipped off to America. No one knows for certain, but he probably was put in the hull of a ship leaving Limbe, Cameroon. There he was sold and enslaved into the horrific courio-entertainment business, sadly all-to-common at the time. His and his twin sister’s (who died shortly after) sad saga ended 8,500 miles away in Washington, eventually in Tacoma in the exotic animals menagerie of the B&I Circus Store.

My memory of B&I was both large and cluttered, but then again I was small. I don’t remember anything of great importance my parents got there – I think it was just a wierd place people without much money could while-away a Saturday afternoon. The kinda place that now really just exists off some god-forsaken exit in middle-America. Ya know, the kind you suffer through a hundred miles of billboards proclaiming you must stop or your life will thereafter be missing some precious nugget of cultural experience. Ivan’s cage was prominent among the crap of this kind of novelty store in the 60’s. I now know both from old photos and from my own memory back road that he never lived there; he survived there, like a prisoner. I’ve read where folks close to the store say that’s all Ivan knew – “all” isn’t right. Surviving the mental torture that even the Geneva Convention should have outlawed – screaming kids, crying babies, squabbling adults, grumpy employees. Ivan survived, a prisoner in my childhood foreign country. I think I knew it then and I knew it today when I saw him again after 40 years.

As lucky as a Western lowland gorilla could hope to get, trapped in America with no hope of return to his natal forests, Ivan was donated in 1994 (when the store went bankrupt) to the Woodland Park Zoo 50 miles north in Seattle. Woodland Park Zoo immediately, with the blessing of the Gorilla Species Survival Program, sent Ivan to Zoo Atlanta. Ivan finally made the cross-country sojourn to Zoo Atlanta that October. After 27 years Ivan was as close as he could ever come to beginning new memories, of fresh air and blue sky, heat and humidity

When I arrived at the gorilla exhibit this morning, Ivan was out, both in the enclosure and lights-out, sound asleep. He and I share nearly the same number of years on this planet, but for all the happiness in my memory and the youth I still feel in legs and lungs and soul, his body looks tired, worn, and memory exhausted. I hoped he would rise, but did not want to do anything to disturb him. A small stream of visitors drifted by and never noticed him lying in the grass.

I sat and watched his sleeping hulk, partially prone, but twisted on his side, his breathing slow and deliberate, like an old man. The sheen of his hair was long gone. It was thinned and disheveled, bit of grass and debris no longer fell from it naturally like the younger gorillas playing next door, instead stems lodged lending an even more unkempt look.

After twenty minutes he woke and worked to lift his old body – it was like watching someone on the last days of life, every motion sapping energy, robbing minutes from tomorrows.

Ivan was 40 meters away, but I could almost hear the joints ache and the muscles complain; he finally settled legs crossed, right arm folded across his belly and the left bent straight up with his giant left hand resting on his balding forehead and sagittal crest.

He looked left for a minute then turned and looked directly my way. My camera was already up, and at first I was photographing an animal like I have done ten thousand times. I had positioned for the best background I could, avoiding wires and other wreckage of his captivity, and was looking for his eyes – and then I saw his eyes.

I took six frames and then stopped. I saw his eyes and couldn’t photograph anymore. My memory country had been invaded. Bombs began falling in my peaceful childhood and I had nowhere to run. I just stared through the lens into his eyes and he stared back. Forty-five years disappeared and I was again ten years old sitting cross-legged on the floor in  that retched rat-trap of a store in Tacoma, Washington, staring into his eyes.

Ivan doesn’t know me, I’m not that prone to anthropomorphism. I know my memory is my own. If that little boy of ten had somehow had the means to cut those old bars and carry him in an instant back into the wilds of Cameroon or Cross-River where he might have been torn horrifically from his mother and family, maybe then we would share a country, but at ten I had no super power to change memories. Right then I realized I still don’t.

I dropped the camera, I could no longer see his eyes, mine had glassed over – his were just tired.

I think Ivan has spent the last half of his years around people that love him as much as people can love a captive wild creature. I know that, I met one of them yesterday, gorilla keeper Jodi Carrigan.  Her caring and passion for gorillas is palpable. But Ivan is still a prisoner in other people’s memories, a foreigner in a foreign land, including mine.

"Ivan" @50 years old, Western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) at Zoo Atlanta, Atlanta, GA

Clare Richardson CEO Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Atlanta, GA USA -

Spent a wonderful day reconnecting to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in their office on the grounds of  Zoo Atlanta (Georgia.) I had a chance to spend time and do a podcast interview with both Dr. Tara Stoinski, VP and chief scientist for the Fossey Fund, and with Clare Richardson, President and CEO. It was 1988 when I first traveled to KArisoke and began working on mountain gorillas and much of that early work was in support of the Fossey Fund, then called the Digit Fund, so it was wonderful to re-establish ties.

I would like to say a huge thanks to both Clare and Tara for taking time out of their packed schedules to sit down and spend time with me to discuss both the Fossey Fund and the conservation and survival of mountain gorillas in the wild.

The podcast interviews are part of a new series I have decided to launch in mid-June here on the GAD website. I will let everyone know about the start date through tweets, Google+ and Facebook postings as well as here on the website.

One ting that stuck with me from my conversation with Clare Richardson was “commitment and passion” – that’s so clearly what it takes to lead an organization like the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund – especially through the incredibly turbulent years she has been at the helm – she took over immediately on the heals of the genocide in Rwanda – DFGF was the first non-human relief NGO back in the country and showing their commitment – Clare showed her’s as well!

Ultimately that is what it takes if great apes are to survive in the wild beyond the end of this decade.

Portland, OR. USA -

I don’t know how long something has to spin around in my coconut before it either spins out of my orbit or it locks in and becomes part of my needed reality. Podcast has now fallen into the latter – podcasting host is now on my résumé.

DEEP BREATH…

I’m launching into a new facet of GAD, podcasting. I’m both excited and honestly I have got a few butterflies. It will be interesting transitioning between photos and audio files – trying to bring a texture and color to the world of sound as I have tried to do with light.

After tossing around several formats I think I’m happiest, at least initially, with a program concept of 30 minutes, hopefully once a week, with folks who are leading meaningful efforts in the effort to ensure great apes survive in the wild through and beyond the end of this decade. I really hope to keep these as informal conversations, with intelligence and insight, the kind of conversation one has over a cuppa tea or a pint of beer, mixed with a bit of RadioLab. These are all people, know and unknown, who I am curious to have a conversation with – and there is where the butterflies show up – I hope others find the conversation equally interesting/captivating.

Off to Atlanta tonight to begin a couple days of interviews at Zoo Atlanta. Plan to meet with ape expert Tara Stoinski and a few of the keepers there, also the Zoo hosts the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, or simply the Fossey Fund, so I’ll be talking with CEO Clare Richardson – she has been through more mountain gorilla ups and downs in the Virungas over the past 20 years than anyone. And just by chance Dr. Jan Ramer, vet from Indianapolis Zoo, and most recently the visiting vet in residency for Gorilla Doctors in the Virungas. I had hoped to catch up with her in Rwanda late last year, but timing didn’t work out – hope to catch her thoughts on new and old issues there while they are still fresh in her memory.

Trying to understand war, in any context, is something I cannot wrap my head around. Yet here I find myself trying to write the outline of a chapter focused on the idiocy of violence that has no home in me.

“The Wedge of War”

That’s the working title for the chapter of Great Ape Diaries on war’s impact on great apes. My research led me to Virunga NP Director Emmanuel De Merode’s TED talk from Oct. 2011:

“This war… a war that is now considered to be the greatest tragedy, the greatest cause of human suffering since the second world war.” 

“Will great apes survive in the wild by the end of this decade?”

To answer that central question, Great Ape Diaries has begun to film interviews with 100 key figures deeply invested in Great Apes conservation. These interviews will be posted on a concept wall of the Great Ape Diaries homepage.

We are asking you for help – do you know someone whom absolutely should be interviewed? Someone who is championing the survival of great apes in the wild (either through quiet advocacy or by in-your-face activism)? If so, please email Gerry Ellis with their name, role or involvement with great apes, and contact information.

Mountain gorillas "Digit" grave marker, Karisoke, Virunga NP

“Fortunately the gorilla dies as easily as a man; a shot in the breast, if fairly delivered, is sure to bring him down. He falls forward on his face, his long, muscular arms outstretched, and utters with his last breath a hideous death-cry, half roar, half shriek, which, while it announces to the hunter his safety, yet tingles in his ears with a dreadful note of human agony. It is a lurking reminiscence of humanity,”

I have always thought of my journal books like tumbleweeds, my diary entries like the terrestrial flotsam – the scatter random and planned bits of life that creates their character. It’s trickier digital.

I came back from the surgeon’s office today (final check up, knee surgery a success, can return to cycling and travel) and all the way home this quartet of words – “lurking reminiscence of humanity” – was a piece of flotsam that kept tumbling over and over in my head trying to find a place to stick. Those four words are du Chaillu’s not mine. Paul du Chaillu ‘invented’ gorillas for the world. He used the tried and true method of his time, track the legend, shoot it, share it with a few prominent museums to establish credibility, and then write your own legend; it became the Gorilla–the  flotsam that stuck to our collective cultural tumbleweed.

Paul du Chaillu wrote about his four-year account in mostly Equatorial West Africa in a remarkable book titled Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, an amazing 19th Century ethnography written with remarkable accounts of his journey, especially his encounter with gorillas, the legend he came to Africa most determined to discover in the flesh.  ”lurking reminiscence of humanity” stays with me because despite it du Chaillu pulled the trigger. Standing over the lifeless corps there was in the end no difference between him and any modern day poacher; less noble perhaps because all he was feeding was his ego.

I’m confused on what it takes to not pull the trigger,… not cut the rainforest, not burn the land, not to drill for oil,… not to destroy.

I read and read – “The Last Great Ape”, “A Land On Fire”, “Our Vanishing Relative”, “Gorilla Guerilla” – they stack upon my desk, pages of flotsam, journeys of fact gathering, the tumbleweed gets more complex. No one answers how not to destroy.

“Will great apes survive in the wild by the end of this decade?” Maybe what I am searching for is a ”lurking reminiscence of humanity”