Pink Boots and a Machete (24 page)

The evening was hot, muggy, and buggy, and I still had a worm in my foot. In my bed a spider awaited me, so apologizing in advance, I killed it. I'm territorial like that. I was already covered in enough bites and bruises. At two in the morning I was awakened by one of the trackers assigned the duty of “elephant watch guard.” He was walking around my tent imper
sonating an owl.

The next morning it took us only two hours to find Bukka's group—we were more persistent than we'd been before. They seemed really agitated by our presence. One of the females with an infant charged us twice, one time nearly jumping over a wall of thickets to get at us. She tried recruiting Bukka to charge us, but he was too stressed from what he perceived as our threatening advances. We held back and gave them some distance. After the gorillas had scampered off, I noticed that Bukka had left a pile of diarrhea where he had been standing. Our close advances had stressed him more than I'd thought. Like Bukka, my producer had nearly pooped his pants when we were charged.

Back with Kingo's group, we spent the most arduous day yet chasing after them through the thickets. Kingo slept a total of only four minutes, which probably explained his grumpy mood and frequent charges. He had a much more intimidating charge than Bukka, and he shot me a look I would not soon forget. But it wouldn't be his worst.

Finally, after 11 grueling hours of observing them, Kingo and the group took off at an incredibly fast pace in the direction of the swamp, but it was too late for us to follow them. I wasn't exactly disappointed.

A half hour into our walk back, we turned a bend and stopped dead in our tracks. An elephant, a male bull with two enormous tusks, was in the center of our path. The trackers quickly motioned us to go back. Andy and I fumbled for the camera. In front of it, pulse elevated, I described what was
happening for TV viewers and walked forward so he could get better shots.

The trackers, one in particular, were hysterically urging us to run in the other direction, but Andy and I insisted on getting closer. When we saw the bull bat his ears, a common threat display, we knew it was time to start running. We took off at full speed, the elephant rapidly gaining on us. We ducked onto another path and hid behind a tree, knowing the elephant was capable of detecting our scent. My adrenaline soared. Fortunately, the elephant passed us and kept going. Eventually, we came out of hiding and continued back to camp drenched in sweat. We later learned that the hysterical tracker had lost his mother when he was three years old. She was killed by an elephant as she protected him.

After my jungle shower, I tended to all my wounds, bites, and the worm. Repeated hot soaks and antibiotic treatments finally banished it. I gave Roberta some medication for a terrible staph infection on her leg. I then gave Andy some Cipro for the diarrhea he'd been experiencing all week. James came by and showed me the awful rash he had all over his back and butt. A bottle of Bactine and some antibiotic ointment later, I had performed my duties as Congo nurse. I was beginning to see this place less as a camp and more as a petri dish.

I was reading John Irving's
Hotel New Hampshire
in my tent with the usual fear of an elephant foot being the last thing I see on Earth. It was an odd book and particularly upsetting when the mother and son die in a plane crash, the worst possible book to read only days before I'd be boarding a com
mercial flight in the Congo. Congolese airlines are not exactly known for their maintenance or high standards.

I had spent considerable time wondering how I'd say goodbye on my last day with the gorillas. After peering into their lives for a month, it seemed so anticlimactic, not to mention rude, to just stop showing up. I would never do that to neighbors. But I soon learned that you don't say goodbye to gorillas…they say goodbye to you.

I imagined that the gorillas would think their maintenance people—we were always trimming vines—had just stopped appearing. They might be perplexed by our absence, or relieved to be able to argue and mate in the privacy of their own forest again. But I should've known everything is on their terms. On the last day, during the last camera take, Kingo said goodbye
his
way.

As I crouched only a few feet from him, Kingo crouched in front of the camera, feeding on vegetation, seemingly undisturbed. I looked at him and then turned to Andy's lens and said, “Clearly, the silverback is the dominant member of the group.” I was about to add, “But females still exert power,” when I felt tension brewing behind me. I turned back to see an angry-looking, canine-baring, 400-pound silverback coming straight at me. I guess he disagreed.

Textbook instruction to just sit and look submissive when a gorilla charges went quickly out the window. I jumped out of his way, narrowly escaping. As I scrambled away, I heard him at my heels. I thought this might be a brief and painful goodbye. But then he stopped. He grabbed a tree and broke it
in half, as if to show what might have happened to me had I abided by the textbook.

I knew I would never forget the look on Kingo's face, or the speed with which he moved toward me. In that sense, it could not have been a more perfect goodbye. It was on his terms. Calmly and indignantly, Kingo disappeared into the thickets, and that was the last contact I would have with the gorillas.

But it would not be the last time I came close to death on this expedition. For it was on our way back to Brazzaville that our plane went down in the jungle.

We'd retraced our way back from Mondika to Ouésso by truck and pirogue down the Sangha River and spent the night in a hotel. Not one with hot water, alas. The next morning our flight was very late taking off, but finally it did, ascending quickly to 10,000 feet. I soon realized it was descending, however, and before long skimming the jungle treetops.

Almost immediately I heard my mother's voice warning me of the dangers of this work and saying, “I told you so.” More than ever, I hated to think she was right.

As the panicked passengers went into crash mode, my mind flashed to my daughters, my husband, the rest of my family, pets, all the places I'd been, and whether they would call me “a real-life Lara Croft” or “the female Indiana Jones” in press stories about the crash, which no one would even know about for days. I saw a split image of my little girls' faces, and I couldn't bear the thought I would never see their beautiful smiles again. I was also reminded that as an explorer, no insurance company would cover me, and I hated to think of my children growing
up not only motherless but penniless as well.

The plane came in hard, the wings snapping the tops off trees and shattering the landing gear, as the pilots dragged the fuselage to rest in the dusty outskirts of a village way too small to be on maps. Andy and I looked at each other as if to confirm we were alive. There was no commotion, only shock and confusion. It was eerily silent as passengers looked around wondering what to do next. Everyone gathered their belongings, and I checked my legs. They were still attached and so were my pink boots.

We clambered out of the plane, our gear on our backs. Without a single person or building in sight, I wondered how long before we could be rescued. I felt like I was in my very own episode of
Lost
. Andy, a strong mountain of a man, and I hugged and cried and shared a Xanax. We were not allowed to retrieve baggage from the cargo hold, but that was a detail. Eventually, trucks arrived to collect the passengers and crew, and we climbed into the back of one and headed down a dirt road to the village. Our truck stopped at what looked like an unfinished hotel, but no such luck. I soon learned it was a brothel. Normally, I'd be upset at the thought of a bed that had seen everything but actual sleeping, but not this time. I was on the ground, and I was alive. In the morning I awakened with my head on a perfumed hooker pillow, and we're not talking Chanel No. 5.

Wreathed in gear, Andy and I caught lifts on motorbikes to something resembling an airstrip. My bike's owner gave me a funny look as I jumped off; clearly, he was wondering what I
had been doing in the brothel. I spotted a villager in a conservation agent's shirt, pushing a barrel full of endangered crocs. The scene was surreal. But I didn't stop to think much about it; my focus was just on getting home.

Men loitering at the airstrip told us that finding a flight out that day would be impossible, but returning to the brothel on the back of a rice-cooker was not an option I wanted to consider. Just then a tall, uniformed pilot oozing that unmistakable pilot bravado appeared, and my hope was renewed. I asked Andy to hang back and took off my shirt, revealing a tank top that left little to the imagination. For this move I would later be hailed as a hero.

Still smelling of not Chanel No. 5, I sauntered over to him. The tank top caught his attention and without removing his cigarette from his lips he said, “Bonjour.” I thought, Crap, he speaks French, and I barely do. In a combination of franglais and tank top, I proceeded to explain that I had just spent the past few weeks hacking my way through the jungle with a machete, nearly getting my head ripped off by a gorilla, surviving a plane crash, and spending the night in a brothel. (I didn't at this point know about the worm in my eyeball, but mentioning that would have ruined the effect.) Batting my eyelashes, I asked if he had a spare seat to Brazzaville. Not wanting to suggest there was male competition, I would bring Andy's seat up later.

Frenchie quickly pointed out that the plane in front of us was the minister of defense's private plane, and that it would be as difficult for me to get on it as to get on Air Force One.
I continued to flirt long enough to convince him to ask the minister's staff. Eventually, he convinced one of the crew to let me onto the unpaved airstrip to meet the minister himself, who politely listened to my desperate story and motioned to his security to let us on. But I would still have to negotiate our way past the ground crew. Payment would be involved. I was out of Kim Kardashian photos, so I took all the cash we had and handed it over. We ran on board before they could change their minds and breathed a giant sigh of relief as the plane took off.

I looked out the window and smiled as we flew over Brothelville and headed to Brazzaville. I looked forward to being inside four solid walls and a net cocoon.

On July 3, 2009, having just survived a plane crash in Congo, my head rested on a pillow wafting
not
Chanel No. 5. At 3:23 a.m. I stared at the moldy ceiling, listening to the sounds of the enthusiastic customers with their hookers, wondering just how it was that I, an NFL cheerleader turned Ph.D. explorer, could be so happy. The answer was simple: I was alive. I had two little girls waiting for me at home whom more than anything I wanted to see grow up. Only hours before, my worst
nightmare of never holding my daughters again had almost been realized, when a rickety plane descended into the heart of darkness and crash-landed.

Before I went on my first expedition, I envisioned myself surrounded by gorillas and wearing stylish safari outfits and a ponytail, with just the right dirt smudges highlighting my cheekbones. I was sure the natives would see me as a goddess.

I was single and had no children. I didn't think about the “what ifs” in the life of an explorer. I didn't want to die, but the possibility seemed so remote I never thought about it. I thrived on adventure, danger, and the unknown. Single-handedly, I would save critically endangered animals all over the world, perhaps even stop global warming. Why not? With my machete in hand, I would slice through the forest, wrestle pythons, and dodge elephants. I was, in my mind, invincible.

But having a baby took me from superwoman to mere mortal, from the very second I was handed the little bundle of flesh, whose tiny hand clung to my finger and big blue eyes stared into mine. This wrinkly little creature was totally and completely depending on me for love, nurturing, and survival. For the first time in my life, I was afraid to die.

My life on the road, where there were no roads, had not been conducive to relationships or children. More often than not, I dated researchers I met in the field. It was where I spent most of my time. Besides, the jungle can be wildly romantic, and I loved the idea of marrying my very own Tarzan. We would wear matching safari outfits and raise our kids among
chimps in a tree house with a floating garden. It was the perfect dream. Fact is, I was engaged to a couple of Tarzans, and then I married one but not for long; he turned out to be less like Tarzan and more like Cheeta.

A relationship between two people who both seek adventure and yearn for the wilds, and seldom are able to journey together, rarely, if ever, works. My dream was just that—a dream. I wouldn't meet my Tarzan in the remote rain forest. In fact, the love of my life wouldn't be Tarzan–like at all.

The man I would marry literally made me see things in a whole new way. He gave me binoculars.

I was at a bird fair in a small village in England. This is not exactly where you'd expect to meet your future husband, unless, of course, you're a birder. You see, birders, or “twitchers,” are a funny bunch. Twitchers are committed bird-watchers who think nothing of traveling long distances to see a new species to add to their “life list,” their “year list,” or some other twitcher list. They practically have their own language. Don't get me wrong, I love them. Some of my best friends are twitchers. I wish I was able to recognize a bird by a feather barely exposed behind foliage. Nevertheless, it can't be denied that twitchers are a strange breed.

The bird fair took place only a few weeks before I was leaving for my next expedition, and I was in need of a good pair of binoculars. In my opinion, Leica makes the best. So I went to the Leica booth and introduced myself to Roland, the managing director. Little did he know he was meeting his life bird.

Right off the bat, I was struck by the brightness of his blue
eyes. He was tall and handsome with a strong chin and even stronger German accent. We talked for a while about which binoculars would best suit my needs. He offered Leica as a sponsor for my expedition, meaning I'd get the binoculars for free. This was great because Leicas are not cheap. Then he invited me to dinner. Throughout the weekend I kept running into him. It was no accident. I track gorillas and jaguars for a living—I'm a professional stalker. He later admitted that he was trying to bump into me too.

I went off to Madagascar with my new binoculars and sent him a postcard thanking him. After I returned to the States we emailed one another incessantly. Thousands of dollars in phone calls and text messages later, we were in love.

I went back to England.

I was sick as a dog when I got there. He took care of me. While he went to a regular office job, I stayed behind in his loft and wrote grant proposals and scientific papers. Throughout the day, I would stumble on love notes he'd left for me. My colleagues and I would talk about science and adventure, and then Roland would come home and we'd talk about the nonevents of our day. He brought me flowers. I made him dinner. It was the most normal relationship I had ever been in. It felt strange.

I began to wonder if this routine would get boring. I was used to living out of a suitcase and venturing into the unknown for months at a time. Where was the adventure in weekends in Notting Hill and Chelsea? Could Roland handle the swamps? Would he want to? I was flooded with doubt.

Then I asked myself the most important question of all:
Does it matter?

I really loved this man. I even loved being domestic. We didn't both have to want an adventurous life for this to work. The security of being with someone who loved me unconditionally and wanted to take the most important journey—life—with me outweighed my fears. He was supportive of my dreams, even if they were not his. That's what mattered.

In my newly evolved domestic bliss, one small detail went unnoticed. I'd missed my period.

By the time I noticed, Roland was in Germany for business meetings. I went to the store and bought half a dozen pregnancy tests. They were all positive, so I bought some more. Maybe I was harboring a large parasitic worm from my last expedition, producing false positive results. I peed on the last stick and hoped for a large worm. It, too, was positive.
Fuck
. How could this have happened? Well that's
exactly
how this happened, but I digress.

I knew exactly how and when.

I sat on the bed and stared at the pee stick. Then I grabbed the phone and called Roland on his mobile. He was in an important meeting but picked up the phone.

I said, “You need to come home.”

“I can't, I'm in a meeting. In Germany.”

“I'm pregnant.”

“I'll be right there.”

I cried my eyes out. I had only been with this man for a few weeks. I barely knew him. Sure, just five minutes ago I considered him my best friend and soul mate, but it was differ
ent now. I began listing his flaws. First on the list: He snored. Not loudly, but still. Next on the list: He was organized. His closet looked like the after picture of my before picture. Who wants such an organized man? Was he going to expect me to label all of
my
shoeboxes? And he was
German
. There, I said it. He was German. I was Cuban. It could never work.

But the flaw that probably scared me the most: Roland had a big nose. Our kid would be a genetic freak.

In mere hours, my organized, big-nosed German was home. He drew me into his arms and smiled. He kissed my forehead and pulled me in closer. Then he said, “I am so happy. This is great news.”

That was the last straw.

Great news? What was so great about it? We were strangers. I didn't want to live in England, my career would be over now that I wouldn't be able to explore remote corners of the world,
and
I was going to get fat. This was the furthest from great news I could possibly imagine.

But Roland remained calm and in his confident and tender way said, “It will all be OK.” Something about the way he said it made me believe him. I told my subconscious to stop trying to fuck up a good thing.

Roland selflessly offered to quit his job and move to the States so I could be closer to my family when the baby came. Back in Miami, I took a teaching job and prepared a nursery. We happily looked at cribs and baby clothes.

With a heavy heart, I packed my field gear and clothing away in trunks. I resigned myself to the fact that I was embark
ing on a new life: I was going to be a mother.

The months went quickly, and before I knew it, I had gained almost 60 pounds. I couldn't see my ankles and longed to get this huge, ten-pound nose out of me.

As fate would have it, that year I was nominated for two Emmy Awards for my documentaries “Into the Lost World” in South America, and “Girl Power,” my film about sex in the animal kingdom, featuring lesbian monkeys. But I couldn't attend the awards ceremony because I was too far into my pregnancy to fly to New York. Plus, I really didn't want to be seen on the red carpet looking like Kirstie Alley. In the end, I didn't win, but I would still get an “Emmy.” We were naming our little one Emma.

When the moment came, I wasn't sure I was in labor; I just knew I was in terrible pain. It was either contractions or the Mexican food I'd eaten. It had to be the nachos—wasn't water supposed to gush out of me? Nope, I was in labor. Already, all the books I had read were wrong. Roland grabbed the overnight bag he'd meticulously organized, and off to the hospital we went.

Wearing one of those humiliating and unflattering hospital gowns that expose your ass, I practiced my breathing. Roland had relaxing music playing in the background and scented candles throughout the room. Everything was under control.

Then the real pain started, and all thoughts of natural childbirth went out the window.

Yes, I was a hard-core explorer who withstood severe stings, bites, and even stitching up my own wounds without an anesthetic, but that wasn't by choice. Now I was not in a
mud hut but in a building with drugs in every cabinet, on every floor, and in everyone's pocket. And I can say that a snakebite is nowhere near as painful as the pressure of a head the size of a melon pushing against an opening the size of a grape.

“Nuuuuuurse! I need drugs! A lot of them!”

“It may be too late for that. Let me take a look.”

“Too late?! But there's no baby yet. I promise I won't let her come out. Just get me drugs.”

As the nurse lifted the covers off my freezing toes, her eyes grew wide and she summoned the doctor. Why the startled look? Was the nose already out?

“Is everything OK?” I asked.

“Yes. Everything's fine. You're crowning. The baby is coming right now.”

I tried to stay calm but began sobbing. I was more frightened in that moment than at any other in my entire life.

The nurse asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Terrified.”

“Well, if you're scared now, just wait until she's 16 and asks you for the car keys.”

I laughed but then worried about that. I made up my mind then and there that I wouldn't let her drive until she was 30.

The doctor came in, and with my two mothers (my aunt and my mom) watching and Roland holding my hand, I pushed. The pain was unbearable. Throughout the contractions, I thought, how do women survive this? And why would anyone knowingly do it more than once? I pushed again, this time tearing into Roland's hand.

“I can see a lot of hair!” said the doctor. “Push again!”

A lot of hair? Could she see the nose yet? I pushed.

Three contractions later, our baby girl took her first breath.

Eagerly waiting to meet my daughter, I watched as they cleaned her off and weighed her. Within a few minutes, she was in my arms. She had a full head of dark hair, enormous blue eyes, and—much to my surprise and relief—a wonderful little button nose. She was the most perfect, beautiful, wrinkled little monkey I had ever seen.

As a primatologist, I had watched monkeys and apes take care of their babies. I saw the way the infants clung to their moms and suckled their breasts. I witnessed how protective the mothers became when outsiders approached and how they would fight to the death to protect their babies. In some species, the mothers mourn the loss of their young, often carrying a dead baby around for days. I saw the monkey mothers groom and care for their own little bundles and had no doubt they loved their babies the way we human primate mothers do. As I stared into the eyes of the innocent soul I had just brought into the world, it occurred to me: All I knew about motherhood and babies, I had learned from monkeys.

What kind of a freaking mother learns from monkeys?

Motherhood was tough, tougher than I could have imagined, especially those first few weeks. The baby did nothing but sleep, cry, eat, and poop. My sore breasts were her pacifier. I was more exhausted than ever, but I was also happier than ever. I was adapting to being a new mother, and I hadn't
even dropped her once.

I knew the meaning of true, unrelenting love for the first time and, like a gorilla mother, that I would fight for her to the death. As I nursed her, bathed her, comforted her, and obsessively watched her breathe throughout the night, it hit me: Those monkey moms had taught me well.

Watching Roland hold and play with our little angel made me love him and our new life even more. Barefoot, with our infant in tow, we got married to the sound of crashing waves on a beach in Key West. It was intimate and perfect. I loved being a mother and a wife more than anything else. But there was something missing, and I knew it.

I missed the jungle.

Emma was nine months old when I started planning a trip to Madagascar. Though Roland agreed to come along to help, we were apprehensive about taking our baby into the rain forest, and into a malaria-prevalent area. But I felt there was no choice: I really needed to return to the wild, and I didn't want to give up breast-feeding. I also wanted to share with my daughter the precious animals I had worked so hard to protect.

As soon as we arrived in Madagascar, we realized we'd been rash in coming. Several of my guides had malaria, and there was a typhoid outbreak.

In the rain forest, I was careful to keep Emma's arms and legs covered at dawn and dusk, when mosquitoes are most active; at night she slept under a net. I worried about her constantly. But then the moment I had dreamed of actually happened. My daughter saw her first wild lemur.