Searching for gorillas, not gravel roads

I have a friend who I cycle with regularly. His life is working successfully at being paid a handsome sum for a large international tech firm and avoiding anything that resembles work - this is his own admission not my summation - and et in as much cycling as skipping work will allow. On weekends when we make longer cycling days of it, a hundred miles or so, and more climbing than mountain goats do, we invariably end up on a road he thinks is 'good', invariably it is gravel. So we end up on our expensive carbon road bikes pedaling over gravel. Stupid. Why? Making life hard invites disaster - survive disaster it's adventure (which they then make into some cheesy reality show) - which he needs and has none of in the rest of his life. I think he looks at my career and wishes for a bit of that adventure cum disaster and hardship.

Years ago I was doing research for my first trip to document mountain gorillas in the highlands of the Central African Rift, the Virunga Mountains, where Rwanda, Uganda and then Zaire shared a steep, wet, green relationship. I was reading big mammal biologist George Schaller's The Year of the Gorilla in which he writes,

"Adventure implies hardships and accidents, which are usually the result of poor planning... Our expedition accomplished...what we set out to do without much trouble and,...without great effort."

I found myself reading that over and then over out loud. That made sense. Schaller got a heap of work done, work that eventually every mountain gorilla researcher and conservationist since, including Diane Fossey, has relied. The Virungas have enough gravel roads, neither Schaller nor I needed to look for them. In fact, we got over or around them as efficiently as possible, that left more time for discovering gorillas.

Over the years I have been asked repeatedly about the "struggle" and the sacrifice in becoming a photographer (now with success.) I know what they want to hear. They want an edge of horror, of pain, of suffering, something like what I recently read about Pablo Neruda:

At the age of 19, he set out to publish his first book. His family disapproved of his writing, so he chose a pen name: Pablo Neruda. He struggled to find a publisher. Eventually the Chilean Students' Federation agreed to publish the manuscript, but Neruda had to pay all the expenses. He said: "I had setbacks and successes every day, trying to pay for the first printing. I sold the few pieces of furniture I owned. The watch which my father had solemnly given me, on which he had had two little flags enameled, soon went off the pawnbroker's. My black poet's suit followed the watch. The printer was adamant and, in the end, when the edition was all ready and the covers had been pasted on, he said to me, with an evil look: 'No. You are not taking a single copy until you pay me for the whole lot.'"*

Heck, my first book came with a $15K advance, another $10K in corporate support, free airfares and four amazing years living in Australia and Papua New Guinea.

"without much trouble and,...without great effort." That's what I want to tell them. The plan wasn't super detailed, it allowed for adaptation and evolution, years following a twisting road through university bio classes taught me that. But it didn't include gravel roads. Struggle is stupid. Disaster is stupid. They waste time and time is precious if life is successful.

Recently I have begun to reconsider the struggle again, as I return my attention to mountain gorillas. One doesn't struggle traveling if you love traveling. One doesn't struggle writing if you love writing. One doesn't struggle learning a new language if you love learning and languages. Sure everything has a gravel patch, but you don't go looking for gravel roads.

*(His second book, published a year later, was a book of love poems: Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1974). This book made the 20-year-old poet famous.)