Routine

After over two months of our new life in Uganda, we seem to have fallen into a comfortable routine.  I still miss pieces of my life back home all the time, and moments of panic over the pressures of this job occasionally overwhelm us both.  Still, most of our days are filled with a sort of comfort that a simple kind of life like this can offer two people that were seemingly meant for living outdoors.

Six days per week we search for chimpanzees.  Our week begins on Monday mornings, when we rise an hour before the sun.  The air is always especially cool and crisp at this hour, and it stings arms and face even more after so many weeks of adjusting to this hot, dry climate. We can all hear one another rising, one by one, from our adjacent tents.  The first sound to ring out is the creaking of the rotting wood on Moses’s platform followed by the zip of his tent door and the gravel crunching under his sandals.  He scurries to the kitchen to begin boiling the water and kneading the chapatti dough just as my alarm rings from my tent.  I peal back my mosquito net to reach for every warm layer that I can find.  Once I am bundled up, there is the sound of our tent zipper and then the gravel crunching under my own gumboots.  I brew our coffee and fill my camelback with lukewarm water while Moses scrambles my eggs so that I can slather them with hot sauce.  Adam follows; and then eventually the rangers and the trail-slashers rise as well.  Adam and I scarf down our breakfasts while we stare down at our smart phones.  Field research is an amazing thing with smart phone technology.  We are able to pay a very small fee each month for semi-reliable Internet access on our phones to allow us to use Facebook and email.  As soon as the sun rises over the escarpment, we are slinging our heavy packs over our backs and reaching for our walking sticks and binoculars.  With that we begin our march down over the hill and into the dark, damp forest, our ranger close on our heels with an AK-47 slung over his back and heavy gumboot steps that match our own. 

Most days we travel anywhere from 6 to 10 miles along forest, savanna, and swamp trails.  We climb up and down escarpments, slash through bush thickets, and wade through rivers.  These hikes have left me with extreme heat exhaustion, mysterious bites and bruises, and one very scary rash that covered my face, neck, arms, chest, and hands.  At the end of every day I am caked with mud and salty sweat, my hair is a tangle of tiny branches and leaves coated in sticky spider webs, and my feet ache and throb from endless hours of hiking in gumboots.  On the very best days we are rewarded for it all with a few precious, fleeting hours of captivating chimpanzee observations.  Two weeks ago we met a group of chimpanzees just as they were leaving their nests in the morning.  I recognized one adult male immediately.  When I was here two years ago I spent hours watching and following Jacko with his flat, boxy head, his dark, long gorilla-like nose, and those strangely undescended testicles.  He crawled out of his nest with one great stretch, swung his arms to follow the tight grip of his long dark fingers on each branch, and came to rest in a large thicket of Saba floridia fruits.  Jacko gave me one unconcerned, fleeting glance that confirmed he was still quite well habituated.  Then he turned his back to me, shifted his rear into a comfortable crook in the tree, and began lazily reaching for fruits.  Saba fruits look like giant green oranges.  In the center is a sticky, melon-like flesh that all of the forest primates love to indulge themselves in.  Jacko grabbed fruit after fruit, reaching a bit farther after twenty minutes to yank a large fruit-covered vine closer to his tree-nook, grabbing more and more Saba.  He shoved each fruit into his mouth, biting through the thick green skin with his great, white incisors and spitting it to the ground in a fury until he reached the juicy orange flesh, letting the white, sticky juice run down the scruff of his gray beard until his whole face was covered in white Saba juice.   I think I could have watched Jacko eat fruit for a whole week, but I knew every second of such clear, easy observation was a gift that would not last for many more moments.  I scribbled and stared, tried to take pictures of the whole scene with my mind, memorizing his face, his hands, his feet, the way he handled and processed the fruit and analyzing every direction that he cast his glances toward.  When you study semi-habituated animals you cherish every moment that other primatologists take for granted.

Eventually Jacko left us for an estrous female.  She was barely old enough to be considered a sub-adult, and I was certain this was her first menstrual cycle.  Her bottom was a giant, inflated balloon that made her look silly and awkward, as sexual swellings always do on female chimpanzees.  The poor young female looked incredibly distressed over the whole situation – us watching, the balloon on her rear, the hormones pulsing through her bloodstream, this large adult male hanging around – I could tell it was all too much for her to handle.  She refused to let her gaze leave my direction for more than a split second.  Her bulging, fearful eyes kept darting to me, then to Adam, then back to Jacko as she swung nervously from branch to branch, grabbing a Saba before quickly moving to a more private patch of vines.  After a long while, Jacko left his tree-nook to join her.  As I jumped up and tried as best as I could to scramble after him and maintain visual contact, I knew the moment was over.  He moved into a private thicket that I could not reach, and then I heard a few copulation calls before he moved away even faster.  I looked down at my watch – he’d given us three solid hours of observation.  Once all of the chimps were gone we pushed our way into the bush to search for any dung that they left behind.  Those days are wonderful, but they are rare.  I grab on to them and soak them up as best I can.  I always know that I will need them to carry me through weeks like this one.  I need those precious hours to keep me hiking day after day after day with no dung, no nests, no chimpanzees.  On those days I try to focus on the comfort of our simple life here. 

We return to the camp when the sun gets too hot for the primates to move and the forest settles into its afternoon nap.  Moses makes us lunch at 2:00 every day.  Baluku, Wisely, and Hapson return just before us after a long morning of slashing and maintaining our trails.  They drop their pangas, slip of their gumboots, and slump into plastic chairs in the kitchen.  Moses brings us all bowls of beans, potatoes, and plantains and plastic cups of freshly made passion fruit juice.  He sets out large plates of diced avocados and pineapples.  We all dive into lunch like Jacko feasts on a patch of Saba, exchanging stories of the forest, talking about who saw elephants where, wondering where the chimps are and making bets about tomorrow’s lucky spot to check.

In the afternoons, if there is enough solar power to charge my laptop, I put on my headphones and work on writing grant proposals and entering data.  If I have dung samples I transfer them to their permanent tubes of drying silica beads.  Just as the sun crosses back over the escarpment and begins to touch the savanna I settle into my plastic chair on my tent platform.  I sling my feet over the railing, pour some boxed red wine into my plastic cup, and dive into reading my latest book.  Adam sits next to me in his wicker chair with fallen wood from the forest and small pocket knives and carves all sorts of things, sipping his warm beer and taking breaks to read his book. 

When Moses puts dinner on the table at 8:00 he always clangs a fork on the metal pole in the kitchen to call us all back to the picnic tables.  All of us – the rangers, the slashers, Moses, Adam and I – we sit around one picnic table with our elbows brushing and eat from a giant plate of Kallo.  It is a doughy, starchy Ugandan staple food made from cassava flour, millet, and water.  We reach in with food-covered fingers and pull off chunks, forming the kallo into little bowls with our thumbs then diving it into our bowls of bean stew and scooping the whole steamy mess into our mouths before reaching back.  Languages, stories, and deep, hearty laughs roll around the table faster than any outsider could possibly follow.  The air is always cool, and I am always bundled up the most. Everyone speaks Lukonzo, Luganda, Ltorro, English, and Kiswahili all at once.  Moses always tells the best stories that last the longest and make the least sense.  “Then, just as I saw the elephant, I reached forward and yanked his tail right off!” He swings his arms out over the table and pulls them into his chest with a giant grin to illustrate his brave forest tale.  Wisely lives to laugh at these stories, and Baluku just listens and smiles sheepishly.  I always shake my head and giggle.

And so our days go, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.  Everyone waits impatiently for Saturdays, when I pull out my laptop, plug in my little speakers from a shop in Fort Portal, and play a movie for the whole staff.  Most weeks I try to make sweets, sometimes no-bake cookies, and yesterday caramel pop corn.  I try to explain complicated plot lines to them.  Moses sometimes translates.  Then the guys occasionally make their own dialogue in Lukonzo.  Indiana Jones is their absolute favorite, but they applaud profusely at the end of every single movie.  They always shout “Thank you!” while Hapson, who speaks the least amount of English, occasionally gets confused and yells, “You’re welcome!” 

On Sundays we sleep in until seven.  Moses leaves the chapatti pan greased and waiting for me on the stove, and I make pancakes for Adam and I.  Wesley, Baluku, and Hapson carry basins of our dirty clothes on their heads down the hill and into the forest to wash them in the river.

Every now and then I stop and look around at this simple, complicated, adventurous life of ours, and I think about how different this is from the life that we had in the U.S.  I chuckle at the idea of how boring life after marriage is supposed to get, and I think about how we will explain this all to our future children one day.  I wonder how I will tell them about the day that their father and I ran from elephants in the forest, the time I almost stepped on a cobra, the evenings that we crowded around a laptop screen with our Ugandan staff and tried to explain to them who the Nazis being portrayed in the movies were.  I wonder how I will return to our life in the U.S. again one day.  Will cake really taste as good as I remember it being?  Will daily hot showers be that satisfying?  Or will I spend each morning missing the zip of Moses’s tent and the crunch of his feet over the gravel, will I miss our nights of heavy sleep under the safety of our mosquito-net cocoon, the roar of the colobus monkeys at dawn?  Whatever our life beyond this comfortable, simple world of elephants and buffalo and chimpanzees brings, I know that all of this will never leave our memories.