Vanessa's Journal

 

Feb. 21, 2010

On humility

 

I think it is fair to say that the last week or so has thrown me for a loop. I had no idea what to expect when my panda trapping crew and I hiked down the mountain from our field station to celebrate the ever-festive Chinese New Year holiday. Even though this is my third time experiencing this exciting, and yet also exhausting holiday, I was completely unprepared for what was in store.

This year was different than past years because we didn’t actually close our panda traps. We decided to keep them open and resigned ourselves to the fact that in the event that a trap closed, we would simply strap on our boots and make the day-long trek up the mountain to check it. After all, in the first three weeks of this trapping season, we only had four trap closures. We were sure we could handle it. We thought we had the perfect plan in place to allow us to keep working but also celebrate the holidays with our extended families. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it seems that the animals all saw us hike down the mountain with smiles on our faces, eagerly anticipating the chance to take a break and spend precious time with loved ones, and they all conspired to set a mischievous plan in motion that would teach us the difficult lesson that we are not the ones in charge. To make a long story short, in the last 10 days in between the family dinners and fireworks, we have had an astounding six trap closures. Three of those occurred one after another and squarely on Chinese New Year’s Eve and Chinese New Year’s Day. And despite the most optimistic of thoughts, none of those trap closures occurred as a result of giant pandas.

I cannot fully describe what it was like to reach the trap in question on New Year’s Day and see that a squirrel had tripped our trap. I woke up in the wee hours of the morning to check the signals, threw on my hiking boots, and hiked for seven hours on what was one of the coldest days of the year. All for a squirrel. I had eaten stale cookies for lunch and didn’t even stop to eat that because it was so cold that my hands were purple. And I was picking icicles out of my hair and collecting bruises from endless slipping and sliding in the snow. And I had done the same thing the day before … and I would do the same thing a few days later. And the result would be the same –– a tripped trap, an escaped animal, a sense of failure. And I return to one of my field partners’ homes to see the faces of their families staring back at me as they finished the meal that we were supposed to be a part of, wondering what was so important that I had to steal away their precious family member on such an important day. And I had no words to justify it all.

We thought that Chinese New Year might bring us good luck. But I think if we didn’t know it before, we now know without a doubt that I have really bad luck. This holiday is meant to usher in the year of the Tiger in China, but for us, it feels like the year of squirrels, ferrets, and red pandas. Is anyone still keeping track of how many red pandas we have caught? I myself may have lost count, but I think we are now somewhere around seven. There have been quite a number even since the last time I checked in here to journal. Unbelievably, we actually caught two red pandas in one day last week! I didn’t even know that was possible.

One of the most recent incidents was especially noteworthy because we had caught a red panda in a trap that was particularly tightly constructed, such that we couldn’t see the animal that was inside. When one of my field partners tapped his hiking stick against the side of the trap, the animal inside let out an enormous barking sound. It was so loud that I was convinced it was a giant panda. And I looked over at my field partner and he was just beaming from ear to ear. He thought the same thing. But it was not to be. Who would have thought that a little red panda would pack such a punch with its voice box? So there you have it –– red pandas are much louder than you think.

I know that there are people out there who might want to hear stories about me frolicking around in the bamboo with the giant pandas and all of their cuteness all day. And as much as I would like to be able to share such stories, that is just not my reality. My panda stories involve things like walking until my feet feel like they are on fire but my hands are so cold that they hurt, tripping over thorny bushes and earthquake rubble while getting lost in the woods, watching people you care about continually giving up things that are important to them in order to help you try to get a graduate degree, and ultimately failing day after day after day. It isn’t exactly pretty, but at least it is real.

I often wondered before I started this project about why it was that more people didn’t do this type of research. And now I can tell you that I know why. Research on wild giant pandas is not for the faint of heart. There is great humility to be gained from it. It tests you, it stumps you, it tears you up, and most of all, it humbles you. So why do people like me keep coming back? Why do I keep signing up for this?

I think the answer lies in another type of story that I can tell you about what my reality is like here. These stories don’t often get told. They don’t get published in scientific papers. They don’t get coverage on the news. They are stories about moments I share with the community of people that happen to live in the same places that giant pandas do.

They are the moments when I get to hold hands with the beautiful women of my field partner’s family as we perform joyful Tibetan dances together around a campfire in the moonlight on Chinese New Year’s Eve. And we spin around and around and all I can see is the smiles on their faces and their skirts shimmering under the light of the fire crackling before us. They are the moments when I get to witness the early planning stages of the wedding of the granddaughter of another one of my field partners, a girl I have watched grow up to be a strong and capable woman. They are the moments when I get to pose for photographs taken by the 9-year-old grandson of one of my field partners, as he carefully instructs me as to the exact position in which I need to stand in order to capture the shapes and lighting behind me. I find myself wrapped up in his excitement and I forget that he happens to be legally blind.

They are the moments when I am absorbed in deep discussion over dinner with the neighbors of another field partner about world politics and culture and I can see the light bulb moment when he realizes that even though we come from such distant places, we are really not so different after all.

And these people all invite me into their homes and into their lives as if I was one of them. They cook for me, they give me a bed to sleep in, they keep me company, and they lift up my spirits when I am knee deep in the feeling of defeat. They are a big reason why I keep coming back. And I wish I could give them more in return for their friendship and warmth. I wish I could lift them out of the cold, flimsy, temporary houses they still live in almost two years after the deadly earthquake that destroyed everything they had. I wish I could heal all of their scars. When I live with them as intimately as I have this last week, I feel their struggles with keeping the roof over their heads and food on the table even more so than usual. And this humbles me even more than the fact that I keep failing in my panda capturing mission.

So here I am in my cocoon of an office down in town, contemplating another early alarm tomorrow morning to get up and go see if yet another animal has decided to enter one of our traps and watch us hike for hours on end to let it out. I’m contemplating having to go knock on my field partners’ doors again to make them get up out of the safe havens of their beds, say goodbye to their families, and strap on their hiking boots once again for a trek into the woods. I’m staring at my trap tally sheet lying next to me. It has rows of boxes for each of the traps that contain check marks and circles for every day of the month to indicate whether a trap has closed. There is a vast space of empty white boxes for dates that are coming up. It seems like it will take forever to get through all of those dates, but in reality, I know it will go by so fast. And for all of the struggles and frustration, I will find myself sitting in my apartment in the U.S. months from now wishing I could go back and have just one more dance with my Tibetan friends who clutch my hands so tightly as we spin round and round, one more meal where I can see all of their faces smiling back at me as we laugh through mouthfuls of delicious food, or one more chance to connect and to learn from each other.

Through it all, the big question at the end of the day still is, which of those boxes sitting on my trap sheet for the dates on the horizon will be trap closures? Will any of those boxes contain a big circle that signifies that we have caught a giant panda? Only time will tell.