Missing the (Bornean) Forest

Ever since I left the (Bornean) Forest in 2010 to return permanently to the states, I have missed living in it. Although I love living so close to the wonderfully wild Rock Creek Park forest that makes me happy mostly due to its old beautiful trees and lack of biting insects, I do often miss living with wild apes and other amazing creatures in a remote jungle, far from modern civilization. I don't miss the fire ants or centipedes or infectious diseases, but I miss waking up with the rest of the forest while waiting at a nest for an orangutan to wake up and start its day. I would say that I miss waking up to the sound of wild gibbons singing on my day off, but I do get to see them every day at work and on my days off sometimes wake up to the sound of them singing since I live next door to the Zoo.

As much as I missed having some form of connection to the world outside of the forest while I was living in it, missing this made me enjoy email and phones every several months when I left the forest and had a chance to catch up on emails from home and call the states. Now I find that I spend so much time just barely keeping up with work emails, I rarely even have an opportunity to check personal email and I am tired of spending so much of my life staring at a computer. People don't live inside computers and I think that people in the last few years have forgotten that. While I have no problem using computers and phones as mechanisms for communication especially when that is the only means possible of communication for long stretches of time with loved ones, I miss spending more quality time with people in ways that are not dependent on technology. And I miss the culture of snail mail--there is something about hand-written letters that just can't be replaced for me by email or the internet. So much communication now comes in the form of brief sound bites that are soon forgotten. And phone conversations, which I still have with a handful of people, but now so rarely. But I digress…

A friend of mine sucked me into watching "Naked and Afraid" in its first season and I haven't been able to stop watching ever since. While I have no urge to live in a forest naked for 21 days with a stranger and would certainly not be afraid if I were to participate in the show having lived for so many years in a forest, whenever I watch the show I am mentally transported back to the forest of Borneo and get homesick for it. Then a few days ago my first supervisor from my last job and another friend from their conservation department visited while in DC on business. They brought me the big orangutan conservation graphic that had once hung in one of my primate buildings and now lives in my office - makes me smile to remember but also makes me miss the forest every time I walk into my office!

Adult Coloring Therapy

A little over a year ago I went through a very difficult time. I resorted to several different types of therapy, at least one of which somewhat ironically made the situation even worse. Since that time I moved back home to DC, started a new job, left my presence on all social media (except Pinterest, everyone needs a harmless addiction to indulge in from time to time), and found healing through hiking, Geocaching, and gourmet paper/cloth mache. But my newest discovered form of relaxation was one that really caught me by surprise - Coloring for adults.

I had no idea that there were coloring books for adults until one Saturday morning when I was driving past the White House on my way home from visiting my parents over the Potomac in Virginia, listening to the same Elliott in the Morning radio show on DC101 that I listened to back in High School (DC101 oddly hasn't changed at all since the early 90s, playing exactly the same music as it did then). Elliott was talking about two books that were wildly popular, jealous that the author had made a huge amount of money very quickly. This piqued my interest and I was shocked when I realized that Elliott was talking about two adult coloring books that had sold out in the States, British author Johanna Basford's "Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book" and "Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest & Coloring Book".

I pre-ordered Basford's second book, Enchanted Forest, though it isn't scheduled to be available for several months. In the meantime I ordered another adult coloring book, "Balance: Angie's Extreme Stress Menders Volume 1" by Angie Grace. Using various combinations of Babel and Fanasia colored pencils and Staedtler and Pentel markers, here are a few of the mandalas I have colored so far:

A Check off my Bucket List

In the winter of 1986 one of the people who I most hoped to meet one day, Dian Fossey, had just been murdered in Rwanda. About a week or two later I interviewed Lisa Stevens, the woman who for over 30 years held the curator position I now hold at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in DC. Then a decade later in 1996 I first met Jane Goodall at a garden party in Georgetown. She wrote "Follow your dreams!" in my original 1960s copy of her book In the Shadow of Man and I went on to do exactly that, spending over 7 years working in Borneo with wild orangutans after a field season working with gibbons in Thailand. Over time I became increasingly allergic to a family of trees frequently nested in and eaten by wild orangutans, so I ended up working in the zoo field and came full circle when I moved back to DC to work as the Zoo's primate curator.

I got to check off an item on my bucket list this morning - have another opportunity to talk to Jane Goodall, only this time have time for a real discussion. Not only did this happen after she gave a talk to a group of children at the Think Tank, she asked to meet and talk with my staff and I got to take her on a behind-the-scenes of the Great Ape House. As we were leaving the first building for the second, 3 of our orangutans crossed the O-line, causing Jane Goodall to get out of our golf cart and watch them cross over the public path, much to the delight of several zoo visitors.

Jane Goodall talking to a group of kids for a private JGI event held in the Think Tank. I certainly hope I look this good when I am 81 years old. I think she is aging in reverse... 

With Jane Goodall, Mr. H, and several of my keepers, researchers, and volunteers

Jane Goodall was extremely gracious and delightful to talk to in this situation where she was not overly rushed and could really talk with the staff and meet our apes.

Although chimpanzees are not among the ape species we have at the National Zoo, we do have a little sculpture garden across from the Think Tank with several sculptures of (for some reason all male) chimpanzees. This morning when we went over to wipe off the sculptures in anticipation of Jane Goodall's visit, we found that each of the sculptures had been given what appeared to be large offerings of bamboo:

Favorite Apartment Artwork

I was looking around my apartment today and realized that I get to enjoy some pretty great art. Here are three of my favorite pieces of artwork in my apartment:

Painting of "Pongo" (an orangutan at the Center for Great Apes) by artist Garry Kravit that I won in the  silent auction at the 2013 Orangutan SSP Workshop in Los Angeles, CA

Cardboard orangutan by artist Michael Bartalos that I won in the silent auction at the 2011 Orangutan SSP Workshop in Waco, TX

Here is my cardboard orangutan in an alcove just off the kitchen

"For My Darwin", an original painting by my friend JSB

Lazy Morning at the Great Ape House

A few photos I took of a few of our 6 orangutans from inside the Great Ape House this morning. We are so accustomed to seeing one another from behind the scenes, at least the 4 females (Batang, Bonnie, Iris and Lucy) typically come immediately over to me and press their faces against the exhibit glass when I visit them from the public space:

Lucy 

Bonnie

And then there is Kiko, one of our two male orangutans, who was just waking up when I stopped by and in typical form, unlike the females, didn't move more than his eyelids: 

Musings from an old Fallout Shelter

While getting some things from my storage unit the other day, I realized that this area of my apartment complex, actually in one of the 3 adjacent apartments associated with my building, would probably be the perfect place to stage a horror film. From the look of this very old sign on the far wall, it would seem that this area may have once served as a fallout shelter:

I have one of these storage units, which is just perfect to hold my bike and other belongings that would otherwise have trouble fitting into my modest sized apartment:

…and then while standing in this somewhat creepy hallway, my mind started to wander in a way that perhaps only my mind does. Although I do not tend to be a conspiracy theorist, there are a few things that I have found odd since returning to Washington...

After writing a post the other day, I deleted it a few days later when I noticed that the SiteMeter I put on my webpage indicated that a single visitor from a location I will not name was viewing my website with enough frequency and to the exclusion of other visitors (including a friend who I asked to view the site just to prove that her visit was not being recorded since my own visits are purposefully excluded from any stats) that I started to get suspicious. The post I ended up deleting had to do with a theory I have concerning some people in my apartment complex based on a comment made by a neighbor I had just met. And I described a time over a decade ago when a friend of mine in the secret service tried to recruit me to join the service. I grew up just outside of DC and now live in it, so knowing what all Washingtonians at least suspect about some of their neighbors working for certain agencies that shall not be named, I jumped to certain conclusions. Then my friend came up with a scary big brother-ish theory for the data being returned by my blog data  counter. Before convincing myself that the counter simply isn't working properly and resolving myself to the fact that I will only be able to tell how many site hits my blog receives, I had deleted my post, wondering for at least a moment if the State Department may really have infiltrated my blog stats and was watching me. Then my friend texted me: "All I know about any of this I have gleaned from the X-files" and I had to laugh at my own paranoia.

HOWEVER, I will say I am still convinced that Russian espionage may still be alive and well in sections of a certain DC forest I frequent rather than being only a relic of the 80s preserved on film by such series as Scarecrow & Mrs. King and The Americans. I say this only because on far too many occasions to count I have been in the forest and heard Russian being clearly spoken. Now especially here in NW Washington it is not uncommon to hear more of various foreign languages including Russian than English when overhearing the conversations of passersby. Nevertheless, it strikes me as odd that only in this forest within which espionage took place a few decades ago, do I so often not only hear Russian being spoken, the people speaking it immediately start talking in English when they notice my presence. When I was young I was tested and it turns out that I have extraordinarily good hearing. While this is a great asset to have when collecting fieldwork data with wild apes, which can often be cryptic and at least in my experience can be better heard than seen, my ability to hear things before others also results in startling people. So now when I hear Russian being spoken in the forest, I often hear quite a lot before the people having a conversation have any idea I am within a reasonably close proximity of them. I guess for the sake of my potential big brother (in the George Orwell 1984 sense--I am actually an only child) it is a good thing that the only foreign language I speak well is Indonesian and the only other languages I more/less still understand are German and Spanish!