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Heart of darkness | page 1, 2
Orangutans live in this state of meditation, watching the object of desire, approaching hand over hand, when the moment is ripe. The moment itself is silently teaching the infant who rides on the mother's hip, and the other, the youngster who bounces ahead or follows behind. But it's the mother who teaches them how to touch, how to sniff, how to break through the skin. It's the mother who hands down this "culture." Spalding is also a fervid and attentive traveler. I love the way she describes her first sight of Camp Leakey: "An hour or so from the old floating hut where we had docked, the tip of a wooden fire tower appeared, and I knew one of those rare moments that make traveling in a straight line feel like traveling in a circle. I'd seen this landmark on a slide while I sat in the classroom in Long Beach, California, trying to imagine myself doing this. And here I was, complete with two daughters and a Dayak guide." What traveler hasn't felt this surreal, life-rounding conjunction of the imagined and the real?
She understands the contradictions of contemporary eco-travelers who venture into the world's remote regions: "We are not trying to sell the virtues of our regions but to warn against the ruin we have brought to them. We carry Bic lighters and messages of caution, but our machine-made clothes, our health and the apparent control we exercise over our fates give us away. Instead of being eyed warily, we are envied." And she is laudably alive to the traces we leave as travelers wherever we go: "Is it possible to touch a place and leave it unmarked?" she writes late in the book. "We must leave cells, thoughts, moods behind. We must leave shapeless pieces of frustration and joy and ambivalence." These same sensitivities distinguish her descriptions of and meditations on the relationships between orangutans and humans, and between humans and humans, and her increasingly murky exploration of Galdikas' controversial and, it turns out, no longer officially sanctioned work. By the end of Spalding's follow, we are left with a dense and multi-layered portrait of a do-gooder who seems to have veered off onto a dark path of her own, and of a system that seems designed to frustrate the efforts of anyone who tries to place the preservation of orangutans before the purse strings of government and industry officials. And so, as with Galdikas' own career, what began as an idealistic research effort becomes a journey into a place infinitely more confounding, entangled, disturbing and frustrating, a thousand shades of green. It is greatly to Spalding's credit -- and to the reader's enrichment -- that within these overlapping shadows and shades, Spalding is able to bring into poignant focus the jungle's moments of ripeness.
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