Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
“A person can be a tourist in his own country. You can live somewhere and travel and be a tour-
ist.”
Médard had just returned from registering our pirogue with the naval authority, and our engines
fired up. Sally was using her cell phone to speak to the Kinshasa office, and Landrine had come
back from the market with vegetables. We pulled out, leaving the tourist officer on the smoking,
littered shore. Men loaded boats, veins bulging in their arms, their lined, sun-weathered faces ex-
pressionless, their naked torsos cut by hunger and years of incessant labor.
By nightfall, clouds gathered on the horizon. The stars vanished, the river so dark that we came
into each curve tentatively. Wind began to gust, flapping our tarp. Michael had told me how sudden
storms could be, but tonight's rain came sporadically, tapping the tarps, brushing the water. I dozed
and when I woke, the boat was silent, motors off, everyone asleep, even the boatmen. I crawled
from beneath my mosquito net, between the barrels, then shone my headlamp over the edge. We had
run aground on a sandbar, the shallowest yet, and with no light from the stars or moon, the others
must have agreed to wait, dawn being only a few hours away.
I swung my legs down and walked out into the empty dark, the river wide, the sky a perfect
black, distance falling away with each step I took. The sandbar went on for another forty feet, and
finally I stopped and stood, watching mist gather from the surface and lift in tendrils. A few banks
of reeds broke the surface between me and an island. We must have chosen to pass to the left of
it and run aground. It seemed as if I could cross all the way to it, the water at times to my knees,
almost to my thighs. But I didn't. I was already far enough from the boat.
In
Voyage au Congo
, when asked what he would be looking for in Africa, André Gide replied,
“I am waiting to be there in order to know.” There are details we have to feel: what it means to
work in a place where the yellow lines of highways on maps denote mud paths that break axles;
where white people have left a legacy of disempowerment and the Congolese blame their problems
on outsiders; where a simple task requires a deep knowledge of tradition, and every tribal chief
and official wants to be respected with a meeting and a gift. Though navigating this society can be
challenging for a foreigner, the social protocols are evidence of the people's cultural stability. Their
formalized relationships manage the territory and resources, and reveal that there is a foundation
upon which conservation can be built, and from which outsiders like myself can learn, with a little
patience.
And yet I hadn't foreseen the gravity of the conflicts. Over the last few weeks, I'd caught myself
wishing that the path forward for conservation were less complicated. Before I'd come here, it was
hard to feel the urgency of the problems and how long change takes, the constant attention to detail
it requires, the endurance and patience.
I reached up and turned off my headlamp. The night was so dark I might as well have been
standing on the bottom of the ocean. I became aware of the hum of frogs and insects, the water
rushing loudly past my ankles. My eyes refused to adjust. I flicked my headlamp back on, and as I
turned, its beam swept over a stretch of reeds. Two blue eyes shone at me from the river. I moved
the lamp again over the same space, but this time there was nothing, just misty dark. I walked to
the boat, scanning the river. The eyes did not reappear, and I sat on the hewn wood and turned the
lamp off. Wind splashed the water against the side of the pirogue. I slipped back inside, under my
mosquito net, and went to sleep.
Our last day, we couldn't make Michael's Saturday flight, so we took our time. We stopped at a
stretch of white sunbaked sand where cormorants held their wings out, as if in flight, to dry them.
