The Moth (6 page)

And he said, “Their practice did not involve being outside in the sun, like you’re describing, which is, after all, where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again when you’re depressed, and you’re low, and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgment that the depression
is something invasive and external that could actually be cast out of you again.

“Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to get them to leave the country.”

Andrew Solomon
is the author of the
New York Times
best sellers
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
(winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other awards) and
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of fourteen awards, including the 2001 National Book Award. His first novel,
A Stone Boat
, which was a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
First Fiction Award, has recently been reissued. Solomon’s work is published in twenty-two languages. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University and special adviser on LGBT affairs to Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry.

ALAN RABINOWITZ

I
was five years old, standing in the old, great cat house at the Bronx Zoo, staring into the face of an old female jaguar. I remember looking at the bare walls and at the bare ceiling, wondering what the animal had done to get itself there. I leaned in a little towards the cage and started whispering something to the jaguar. But my father came over quickly and asked, “What are you doing?” I turned to him to try to explain, but my mouth froze, as I knew it would, because everything about my young childhood at that time was characterized by the inability to speak.

From the earliest time that I tried to speak, I was handicapped with a severe, severe stutter. Not the normal kind of repetitious “bububub” kind of stutter that many stutterers have or many children go through. But the complete blockage of airflow, where if I tried to push words out, my head would spasm and my body would spasm. Nobody knew what to do with me. At the time there were very few books written about stuttering. There was no computer, no Internet. The reaction of the New York City public school system was to put me in a class for
disturbed children. I remember my parents trying to fight it, telling them, “He’s not disturbed.” But the teachers said, “We’re sorry, whenever he tries to speak, it disrupts everything and everybody.” So I spent my youth wondering why adults couldn’t see into me, why they couldn’t see I was normal, and that all the words were inside of me, but they just wouldn’t come out.

Fortunately, at a very young age I learned what most stutterers learn at some point. You can do two things without stuttering. One of them is sing, and I couldn’t sing. The other is you can talk to animals and not stutter.

So every day I would come home from the special class, which all the other kids called the retarded class, and I’d go straight to a closet in my room. I had a little dark corner of that closet. And I’d go into the closet, and I’d close the door, and I’d bring my pets—New York–style pets (hamster, gerbil, green turtle, a chameleon, occasionally a garter snake), and I would talk to them. I would talk fluently to them, and I’d tell them my hopes and my dreams. I would tell them how people were stupid because they thought I was stupid.

And the animals listened. They felt it. And I realized very early that they felt it because they were like me. The animals, they had feelings too, they were trying to transmit things also. But they had no human voice, so people ignored them, or they misunderstood them, or they hurt them, or sometimes they killed them.

I swore to the animals when I was young that if I could ever find my voice, I would try to be their voice. But I didn’t know if that would happen, because I realized that I lived in two worlds. One world was the world where I was normal, with animals, where I could speak, but the other world was the world of human beings, where I couldn’t.

My parents didn’t know what to do, but they did everything. They tried hypnotherapy, they tried drug therapy, they sent me to many kinds of psychologists, but nothing really worked. I got through grade school, junior high school, high school, and eventually college by learning tricks stutterers learn. Learning when to not speak, learning to avoid situations, learning just to not be around people. When I did have to speak, then I would prove to people that I was not only like them, but I was better than they were. In academics, I excelled. I got straight A’s in everything. In sports, I joined the wrestling team and the boxing team, and I helped take all my teams to the state championships. Everybody always said I was an up-and-coming athlete, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even like it. I was just a very, very frustrated young man who had to find an outlet for his anger.

By the time I was a senior in college, I had never been out on a date, I had never kissed a girl, except for my mother, and I had never spoken a completely fluent sentence out loud to another human being.

About midway through my senior year in college, my parents learned of an experimental new program in Upstate New York, in Geneseo. It was very intense. They had to send me away, and I was essentially locked away for two months. The program was for severe, severe stutters, and it was very expensive. But they would do anything for me. So my father sold something very dear to him in order to send me there.

That clinic changed my life. It taught me two very important things. One of them was that I was a stutterer, and I was always going to be a stutterer. There was no magic pill, and I was not going to wake up one morning as I had always dreamt and be a fluent speaker. But the other thing it taught me, the more important thing, was that if I did what they were teaching me at this
clinic—which was to mechanically control my mouth, the airflow—if I worked hard, I could be a completely fluent stutterer.

I worked hard, and it was unbelievable. For the first time in twenty years, I could speak. I could speak! In twenty years I had never been able to voice everything inside of me. Now I could. It took a lot of work, because while I was speaking I had to be thinking about hard contacts, airflow, this and that, but it didn’t matter—none of it mattered. I was a fluent speaker now. Life would be different. I would go back to school, and they would accept me.

I returned to finish the last half of my senior year, and things were different—on the outside. I could speak. But nothing had changed on the inside. Too much had happened for that. I was still the stuttering broken child inside.

Throughout my academic years I had focused on science. I loved science because science to me was the study of truths apart from the world of human beings. And when I got to college, I decided to channel that science into medicine, thinking maybe if I became a doctor people would like me, people would accept me. But I never liked working with people. And when I got back from the clinic, I realized I couldn’t be doing this. I hated being in labs, and worse than that, I was tortured feeling the frustration and the pain of the lab animals in the little cages, spinning in those little wheels.

So I applied to graduate school at the University of Tennessee in wildlife biology and zoology. I got accepted. And that first year I was down in Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains studying black bears. When I was in the forest with the animals, I was at home. This was what I was meant to be doing. Being in the forest alone with the animals was my real-world closet. This was what made me feel good. And I came to realize what I’d
always known in my heart but had never been able to put into words, and that’s that the truth of the world, the reality, is not defined by the spoken word. In fact it’s not even speakable. And I knew that this was how I had to live my life, somehow.

Fortunately, right before I got my Ph.D., I met the preeminent wildlife biologist in my field, Dr. George Schaller. He and I spent the day together following bears in the Smoky Mountains, and at the end of the day George said to me, “Alan, how would you like to go to Belize and be the first one to try to study jaguars in the jungle?” The very first thought in my mind, and I remember it so clearly, was
Where the hell is Belize?
But the very first words out of my mouth, not thirty seconds after he had asked me that, were “Of course I’ll go. Of course.”

Within two months I had bought an old Ford pickup truck, packed everything I owned in the back—which didn’t even take up half of it—and driven from New York to Central America. Those last few miles of driving into that jungle, where I would set up base camp for the next two years, were just unbelievable to me. Driving by the Mayan Indians gawking at me, I was entering the jungle to catch jaguars, which nobody knew how to do, and put radio collars on them and get data that nobody had ever gotten before. This was what my life was all about. This was where it had to take me.

For the next year I did just what I had set out to do. I learned from hunters. I learned how to capture jaguars. I captured them. I followed them. Many things almost stopped me from achieving my goal. There was a plane crash where I almost died; one of my men got bitten by a fer-de-lance, a poisonous snake, and unfortunately he died. Those things changed me. I had to really look upon things differently. But this was my life, this was where I knew I could stay forever and be happy and be comfortable.

But I couldn’t. Because I also realized that as fast as I was catching jaguars and gathering information about them, they were being killed in front of me. My jaguars were being killed. The jaguars outside of my study area were being killed; they were all being wiped out. Yes, I could sit in that jungle, but then I wouldn’t be true to myself. And more important, I wouldn’t be true to the promise I had made to the animals in the closet, that I would be their voice. And I had the voice now, if I wanted to use it. So I realized I had to come back into the world of people and try to fight with that world to save the animals, and these jaguars in particular.

But, ironically, I realized that if I was going to save these jaguars, not only did I have to enter the world of people again, but I had to go to the highest levels of government. I had to talk to the prime minister of Belize. Well it took some doing, but within six months I was standing in the capital city, outside the office of the prime minister. He had given me an appointment with the cabinet. They had given me fifteen minutes. They had no idea what I was going to say to them. Frankly I’m sure they gave me the appointment because they just wanted to meet this crazy foreigner who was in the jungle catching jaguars.

I had fifteen minutes. I couldn’t stutter. I couldn’t stutter. I couldn’t distract them from the point of trying to save jaguars. I had to use everything I had learned and be a completely fluent speaker and convince one of the poorest countries in Central America—no protected areas in the entire country at that time, a place where tourism wasn’t even of economic benefit, ecotourism wasn’t even a term at the time—that they had to save jaguars.

An hour and a half later I came out of there, amidst laughter, backslaps. The prime minister and the cabinet had voted to set up the world’s first and only jaguar preserve. And I promised
them I would make it work. I promised them I could show them it would be of economic benefit.

A month later, I was in the jungle following my jaguars. You never see jaguars. If they can be seen, they’ll be killed, so the most prominent evidence of jaguars is their tracks. I knew all my jaguars in the study area from their tracks. But this one day when I was in there, trying to see where they were all going and what they were all doing, I crossed a completely new track. It was the biggest male jaguar I had ever seen in my life, the biggest track. I knew I had to follow him, hoping I could catch a glimpse, but at least find out what he was doing in here, whether he had come in from the outside. Was he passing through? I followed him for hours, glued on those tracks, until I realized it was getting dark, and I didn’t want to be caught in the jungle at night without a flashlight. So I turned around to go back to camp.

As soon as I turned around, there he was, not fifteen feet behind me. That jaguar, which I had been following, had circled around and was following me as I was following him. He could have killed me at any time. I didn’t even hear him.

I knew I should feel frightened, but I didn’t. Instinctively I just squatted down, and the jaguar sat. And I looked into this jaguar’s eyes, and I was so clearly reminded of the little boy looking into the face of that sad old jaguar at the Bronx Zoo. But this animal wasn’t sad. In this animal’s eyes there was strength. And power. And sureness of purpose. I also realized, as I was looking into his eyes, that what I was seeing was a reflection of the way I was feeling too. That little broken boy and that old broken jaguar were now this. Hah.

Suddenly I felt scared. I knew I should be scared. And I stood up and took a step back. The jaguar stood up too, turned, and started to walk off into the forest. After about ten feet, it
stopped, and turned to look back at me. I looked at the jaguar. And I leaned a little towards it, the way I had at the Bronx Zoo so many years before, and I whispered to it: “It’s OK now. It’s all going to be OK.”

And the jaguar turned and was gone. Thank you.

Dr. Alan Rabinowitz
is the CEO of Panthera, a non-profit dedicated to saving the world’s wild cat species. Dr. Rabinowitz is one of the world’s leading big cat experts and has been called the “Indiana Jones of Wildlife Conservation” by
TIME
. He has authored over one hundred scientific and popular articles and six books, including
Jaguar: One Man’s Struggle to Establish the First Jaguar Preserve; Chasing the Dragon’s Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand’s Wild Cats; Beyond the Last Village: A Journey of Discovery in Asia’s Forbidden Wilderness;
and, most recently,
Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight to Save Tigers in a Land of Guns, Gold, and Greed
. He has been profiled in
The New York Times, Scientific American, Audubon, Men’s Journal, Newsweek, Outside, Explorer, The Jerusalem Report
, and
National Geographic Adventure Magazine
, and has been featured in numerous documentaries, including BBC’s
Lost Land of the Tiger
and
National Geographic’s In Search of the Jaguar;
and on TV shows including
The Colbert Report, 60 Minutes,
and CNN. Dr. Rabinowitz has dedicated his life to surveying the world’s last wild places, with the goal of preserving wild habitats and securing homes, on a large scale, for some of the world’s most endangered mammals. His focus on cats is based on conserving top predators, which affect entire ecosystems. His most recent endeavors include creating and securing biological and genetic corridors for jaguars across their entire range, from Mexico to Argentina, and for tigers in the Indo-Himalayan region of Asia. To learn more, please visit www.panthera.org.