From Monks to
Mountain Gorillas
A Family’s Global Adventure
Ed Kaufman
Forked Road Press
Copyright 2011 © Ed Kaufman
Digital edition 2012
ISBN 978-0-9801165-4-0
ISBN 978-0-9801165-3-3
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording by an information recording and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.
Forked Road Press
2373 N. Flower St.
Santa Ana, CA 92706
www.forkedroadpress.com
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Cover design: Stephanie Starr
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Two Green Chairs
2. Passages Through the Grand Canyon
3. Mongo: Adventures in a Country Home
4. Pillow Wrestling
5. A Cautious Family’s First African Adventure
6. Back to Africa
7. A Home by the Sea
8. Feh!
9. Wedding in Saraburi
10. After the Tsunami
11. The Blind Leading the Blind
12. How Adam Coped with a Tibetan Trip at Ten
13. Tibetan Brotherhood
14. On Our Own in Alaska
15. Stirring in Sayulita
16. Eddie Spaghetti
17. Sex in the Galapagos
18. Survival in the Galapagos
19. Catalina Island
20. Himba Happiness
21. Papua Pride
22. To Live and Die in Varanasi
23. Mercy Mursi
24. Touched by a Gorilla
25. Lalibella Liturgy
26. Sundays with Senya
27. My Thai Grandson
28. When Karen Fell Off Her Ass on Her Ass
29. From Purgatory to Puya
30. Burning Man
31. Fiftieth Medical School Reunion
32. An Independent Surfer
33. Ed’s Epiphany
Acknowledgements
Locations for each chapter
To my grandsons: Senya Jacob Rogers-Kaufman and Austin Kaufman, my future grandchildren, and their own inner and outer journeys.
“We had achieved in Morocco, maximum family compression, and could only henceforth disperse. Growing up. Leaving home, watching your parents divorce—all in the decade since, have happened. But on a radiant high platform of the Eiffel Tower I felt us still molded, it seemed, forever together.”
—JOHN UPDIKE, My Father’s Tears
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I AM EXCEEDINGLY GRATEFUL to everyone who shepherded me through the process of transition from an author of psychiatric texts to a creative writer. Since I still have a linear mind, I will list them chronologically. Julie Brickman is not only the author of my introduction, but the first to suggest I embark on my new writing career by obtaining an MFA. Julie has continued to guide and mentor me throughout my struggles and the poetry of her own prose is an inspiration to me.
I owe a great debt to the faculty and students at Antioch University, Los Angeles who touched and supported me. Special thanks to Eloise Klein-Healy, founder, and Steve Heller, director of the program, and my first mentors Brenda Miller and David Ulin for the gentle confrontation I desperately needed my first year. Also to Valerie Boyd, who sensitized me to race and culture, and Sharman Apt Russell who helped me to follow my bliss.
Several extended workshops have been very helpful, particularly Rose-Ellen Brown in Spoleto, Italy, and Kaylie Jones at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Mass. Another continuing invaluable resource is Dime Stories, an organization that sponsors three-minute readings that tell a complete story. This venue has taught me to condense my work to bare truths and eliminate a lot of unnecessary material. Meredith Resnick, founder of Orange County Dime Stories, and current leader Michelle McCormick have both aided me in this process. I am also grateful to Chris Weaver of Laguna Beach Books for his advice and encouragement during the early phase of shaping the manuscript of From Monks to Mountain Gorillas.
I had never heard of writing-critique groups until several years ago, but I have found one to be quite worthwhile. This group, superbly led by Janet Simcic, has been more helpful than I could ever have imagined, especially Dennis J. Phinney, the master of active verbs; Ana Arellano, the voice of youth; Brenda Barrie, ethnic expert; John Gray, for his lyrical essay skills; and Ron Hoefer, prodder.
My family adventures would have been lonely solo journeys without Karen and Adam, who let me drag them all over the world to places we’d never heard of before. I admire Karen so much for her growth as a meditator, photographer, snorkeler, hiker, and donkey rider, and her unique ability to touch and be touched by people all over the world. I am grateful to Adam for the many ways he comes through when it appears he won’t.
Lastly, an encomium of orchids to Allene Symons, who is not only my editor and publisher, but also a true friend in every way the word friend is used.
INTRODUCTION
After their second safari to Africa, contemplating what each member of his family had gained, Ed Kaufman writes:
“Adam had [ …] remained calm in the presence of lions, and not backed down from a troop of baboons. He had survived two weeks without peers and not shed a tear. Karen had looked a hyena in the eye, stood ten feet from rhinos, and befriended a medicine woman. She had learned that it was worth braving latrines and cold showers if adventures awaited her. I had survived being thrown about like a rag doll by the turbulent waters of the Zambezi despite a warning from my deceased father. All three of us had sat toe to trunk with a herd of elephants and not flinched [ …].”
Under the surface of every adventure chronicled in this book lies the substratum of themes about freedom and courage, freedom from conforming to the ways of America, the courage to confront the edges where fear lives, fortified by the sheer exhilaration of extraordinary adventures.
In the opening adventures, we see Adam spotting a safari’s first lion, “a flash of tawny pelt moving between the wheat-hued grasses.” We see Karen on a trip down the Colorado River glide to the front of “the bouncy, air-filled rubber pontoon,” whooping and hollering with delight, Ed grasping Adam by the life jacket as the pontoon boat “is hit by an inexpugnable wall as hundreds of gallons of water” pour over them, before they “plunge into a flume of fat air.”
Imperceptibly, later on, the adventures change, expand. Ed’s oldest son Alex gets married in a Buddhist Temple in Thailand where he lives; sixteen months later, when they visit again, they are in the Thailand destroyed by a tsunami. In a father-son expedition to a remote bay in Kodiak Island, Alaska, to visit a writing colleague, Ed and Adam fly on a four-seater floatplane, fish for halibut from a skiff, and sample the professional side of salmon fishing. In Zimbabwe, while Karen, Ed, and Adam are relaxing beside a pool, a herd of elephants, trunks only inches away from their feet, come to drink. In Costa Rica, “the grunting chants of howler monkeys” awakens them just before they kayak solo into a windstorm.
Ed’s descriptions are so thrilling they put us right there in the moment. His insights into the family’s reactions as they master the challenges of progressively more extreme travel chronicle the human side of these intoxicating journeys.
These are extraordinary adventures undertaken by ordinary people, one family’s journey from the near to the far realms of exotic travel. These are also the author’s journeys into a challenge of equal if not greater dimension, the pursuit of the art and craft of writing creative nonfiction. In the spirit of the adventure writers like Redmond O’Hanlon, travel writers like Jonathan Raban, humorous writers like Bill Bryson, though in a voice uniquely his own, Ed guides the reader through transformative journeys of psychic and family life. In this venture too, in these compressed to the marrow pieces, his accomplishments soar into some breathtaking passages.
In the most touching moments of the book, Ed probes his own quest: questions about death and mortality, spirituality and belief. Here, in these passages, when the author records his own truth, a raw honesty emerges that shines a different kind of luminosity on all the adventures. Here at last we come to see the driving thirst to break through the boundaries of material understanding and move toward self-knowledge that is the center of this book and this writer, the restless unwillingness to settle for quotidian answers that propels him, even late in life’s arc, into exotic and sometimes dangerous travel and new realms of achievement. The link between spirituality and writing, lurking in the subtext, becomes visible here, showing itself in the gleaming moments when adventure and significance unite.
—JULIE BRICKMAN Laguna Beach, 2011
What Birds Can Only Whisper
Fiction Faculty, Spalding University
MFA in Writing Program
Locations for Each Chapter
1. Philadelphia, Pa.
2. Grand Canyon, Ariz.
3. Shelter Island, N.Y.
4. Laguna Beach, Calif.
5. Tanzania
6. Botswana, Zimbabwe
7. Laguna Beach, Calif.
8. Philadelphia
9. Bangkok, Thailand
10. Phuket, Thailand
11. Costa Rica
12. Tibet
13. Tibet
14. Kodiak Island, Alaska
15. Sayulita, Mexico
16. Philadelphia
17. Galapagos Islands
18. Galapagos Islands
19. Catalina Island, Calif.
20. Namibia
21. Papua New Guinea
22. Varanasi, India
23. Southern Ethiopia
24. Rwanda
25. Northern Ethiopia
26. Brooklyn, N.Y.
27. Phuket, Thailand
28. Morocco
29. Sulawesi, Indonesia
30. Irvine, Calif.
31. Philadelphia
32. California Beaches
33. The World
Advance praise for From Monks to Mountain Gorillas
“From Monks to Mountain Gorillas takes the reader on the spiritual journey of the Kaufman family, reconstructing and reconsidering itself in the context of the wider world and the consequences of each member’s own actions. Launched by poignant regret of roads not taken and fueled by a passionate desire to explore the universe, Ed Kaufman carries us on an exotic and enlightening pilgrimage of self-discovery.”
—STEVE HELLER, author of What We Choose to Remember Professor & Chair, MFA in Creative Writing Program, Antioch University, Los Angeles
“Like the packed flipsides of large format postcards, Kaufman’s unpretentious prose will lull you into dangers men half his age wouldn’t trade the recliner for. Friend of the world, this not-so-accidental tourist dives into globe trots with a new wife who, as the circumstances demand, calmly sleeps with hyenas or shows her breasts to Ethiopian tribeswomen, and his fearless new son who eats crocodile, calls in elephants and dances with Thai girls who know the “F” word. From Monks to Mountain Gorillas will have you wishing you were dancing the twist in Papua New Guinea.”
—WAYNE K. SHELDRAKE, author of Instant Karma: The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum
“Kaufman’s book bounces readers across the globe to coveted adventure travel sites. Between trips with his intrepid second family, he shares glimpses of their emotional development and family dramas, including his own reckoning with the inevitable.”
—DEIRDRE SINNOTT, writer, author, and literary critic
“An exciting read about travels in unexpected places. Dr. Kaufman takes you into the heart of the culture in Tibet, Africa, Borneo and other out-of-the-way places … always with the personal stories that have affected their family. The amazing ability of their son, Adam, to connect with people from entirely different cultures is both humorous and touching. Ed’s wife, Karen, is shown as an adventurous woman able to overcome personal and physical trauma to make these travel stories come alive for everyone who reads the book. She is a brilliant photographer. It is with pleasure that I recommend this book to those who love to travel and move away from a comfort zone.”
—JANET S. SIMCIC, author of The Man at the Caffe Farnese and An American Chick’s Guide to Italy
“From Monks to Mountain Gorillas takes readers to adventure travel destinations with the author, his wife, and young son. Seeking peak experiences without the danger once involved with such experiences, this suburban California family rafts the Colorado, gets close to mega fauna in Tanzania, and mingles with the locals in Papua New Guinea, Namibia, and Indonesia, among other locales. Against this exotic backdrop, ordinary life goes on as Kaufman’s son grows up and his own mortality approaches.”
—TOBY SULLIVAN, fisherman, poet, journalist, and teacher of creative writing
1
TWO GREEN CHAIRS
Philadelphia, May 1960
WHEN I WAS MID-WAY through medical school, my mother was given two tufted, green leatherette chairs with gold buttons. She said, “These chairs are for your waiting room when you practice medicine—in our home.”
The chairs were finer than any we had in our house and we placed them by the front window where I tried to relax and read.
I lived at home through college and medical school, moving from one row house Philadelphia neighborhood to another, whenever a family of color moved in nearby. My father said we had to act quickly before property values dropped. I tried to move away from home several times but always backed down when Mom’s arthritis caused her a great deal of pain or when she accused me, with good reason, of wanting to sleep with “those sexy nurses.”
My intention was to marry a few days after graduation from medical school, two events that should have helped me leave home. Still, my mother needed me to intern close by and couldn’t stand the idea of my leaving to live with my new wife. Mom found her too tall, too thin, too nervous, and too much of a hippy. Besides, no one was perfect enough for her Eddie.
I confided in a favorite professor that my mother was acting as if it would devastate her if I were to move.
“I know I need to leave,” I said, “but I don’t want to hurt her. What can I do?”
“I struggled when my sons left,” he replied. “I knew they had to go away to school. One even went to Canada. They had to separate. So do you.”
The results of the intern match arrived on a balmy spring day. My first choices were two local hospitals I knew wouldn’t accept me. I blamed a computerized program for the assignment to Los Angeles County General, as far away as I could get.
Dad stood in the background, scowled and said, “If you go there it will kill your mother.” My seventeen-year-old sister, about to attend a local nursing school, cowered in a remote corner. Mom saw through my subterfuge and trembled. I watched her reflection in the worn gilded mirror as she pounded her arthritically gnarled fists.
“Go! Just go!” she shrieked. She paused for a moment, then whimpered,” You can’t have those chairs for your waiting room now!”
“Save them for me, Mom. I’ll be back in a year.”
“I don’t care if you ever come back!” she shouted.
I did come back east to New York, not Philly, a year later for my psychiatry residency. I visited my mother, though not often. When I did, I sat in my inescapable chair, unable to leave the house to visit my friends. I set up my first practice in New York, and moved the green chairs, by now a bit tattered, to the office where I sat with my patients. A few years later, Mom took a rare trip to New York City. Her tour left no time to visit, but she asked if she could call.
“No, Mother. I’ll be with my patients.” I droned in my psychiatric voice.
She importuned, “What would be so bad if you just said, ‘Hello, Mom,’ in front of your patient?”
I explained to her about professional anonymity, but she couldn’t accept the concept, particularly if it meant we couldn’t speak when she was visiting my city.
A year later she was stricken with rapidly progressive gall bladder cancer, her immunity weakened by years of steroids for arthritis. My father stopped me before I entered her hospital room.
“We can’t tell your mother she has cancer. It’s just too depressing for her to hear that dreaded word. She thinks she has a gallstone.” The word cancer was unspeakable then. We did not have a medical term as frightening until AIDS struck twenty years later.
Mom was surrounded by her siblings and tended to by my sister, dressed in a nursing uniform she hadn’t worn in years because she had left the profession to become an academic researcher. I hoped mother didn’t see my shock when I first caught sight of her cancer-ridden body. After everyone else left the room, I tried to figure out if she were willing to talk about her illness because it was important to me that we finally have a dialogue not based on denial.
“Mom, I hear the Doc has you on antidepressants.”
“Yeah, I just cry all the time and I don’t eat.”
“Weight loss can be caused by depression, but I don’t think that’s the reason now.”
“I’m losing weight because of the nausea caused by the gall stone.”
She wasn’t ready to tell me she knew, if indeed she did know, that she was suffering from an incurable disease. She died a few months later at fifty-three, acting all the while as if she didn’t know she was dying.
After her death, I struggled back to full-time practice. I often stared at the chairs and regretted that I hadn’t spoken to her the day she came to New York, even that I hadn’t sat with her one last time. I hunkered into one of the chairs and saw my mom in the other, as she was when I was seven, before her joints became swollen and misshapen—when she taught me to love books and could still paint pictures that I proudly took to school every holiday. Yet the memory of her shriveled yellowed body lying in that bed pretending she didn’t have cancer replaced the vibrant image of her youth.
The following year I submitted my research for publication for the first time. I completed psychoanalytic training and accepted a coveted academic position. The time had arrived. I replaced the green leatherette seats with a teak and black leather analytic couch and matching office chairs. The new furniture was sleek and modern, without gold buttons.
Forty years later, I still regret that we didn’t sit together the last time she visited New York. I missed my chance to tell her about my life as a father of my own children and the world I was beginning to explore. My adventure travels would have scared her half to death, and if she were alive I might not have been able to go on many of them. Today, I invite her and my readers to sit with me in two elegant green chairs and listen to the family adventures that I experienced after her death.
2
PASSAGES THROUGH THE GRAND CANYON
Colorado, Summer 2003
KAREN CAUTIOUSLY MOVES UP from her safe seat on the ice chest at the back of the raft to the front of the bouncy, air-filled rubber pontoon.
It is the last full day of our family’s Colorado River trip through the Grand Canyon. The trip was once so frightening to Karen that the night before we were to leave, she begged Adam, now nine, and me, to not go. Now she is sitting on the front of the pontoons, the most dangerous and exhilarating spot on the boat. We are approaching Lava, a Class 10 rapid with a drop of thirteen feet.
It has been two hours since we left our lunch site at Havasu Creek. Karen, riding the perilous pontoon through three moderate rapids, whoops and hollers with delight. We pass Vulcan’s Anvil, a large volcanic rock jutting out of the water, which means that we are only one mile from Lava. Bruce, our guide, shouts “Down and in!” The eleven passengers all hop off the pontoons and crouch on the bottom of the boat. We hold fast to the ropes on either side of us. My left hand grasps Adam tightly by his life jacket while I dig my right foot hard and fast into the crease of the pontoon. A 20-foot wall of water comes at us like a tidal wave. The boat dips down into the wave and is hit by an inexpungable liquid wall as hundreds of gallons of water pour over us. We plunge into a flume of fat air and when I open my eyes I gape into a huge black hole formed by Lava’s double wave. Everyone on the boat is screaming, but I can’t make out a word.
I have just enough time to take a deep breath before we are struck by a tsunami-like burst of water. Adam screams, “We’re going to die.” In a minute, which feels like an eternity, we pass through safely and Adam cries out, “So cool, soooo cool!”
Karen shrieks, “It is fantastic.”
I grin smugly, which means I knew she’d love it if she let herself go. We breathe a sigh of relief as we jump back on top of the pontoons and are hit by the second ridge of Lava. This part of the rapid has only half the slam-intensity, so Adam, Karen, and I are able to keep our eyes open throughout the full impact of its strike. We enjoy being rocked through the wavy froth as we watch the waves roll over and around us.
Karen and I have hiked the Grand Canyon many times. We’ve wanted to raft the Colorado ever since the first time cool contented rafters waved to us when we made our way down the hot canyon to the welcome respite of the river on a sticky summer day. We researched the possibility of navigating the river with Adam and were assured it was perfectly safe to take him on a five-day motorized pontoon boat trip.
In August of Adam’s ninth summer, Karen, Adam, and I drove from our home in Laguna Beach, California, to Marble Canyon, Arizona, to start our 182-mile raft trip. We arrived in plenty of time for the orientation meeting, which was held in a cramped room at the side of a rustic gas station. Most of the tour group had their flights delayed by lightning storms and were irritable, grumpy, and preoccupied with the discomfort and fear they had experienced on their turbulent trip. Adam, always sociable, told the hassled travelers about the fires he saw on our way and the thundershowers that evaporated before the water hit the ground. They looked through him without a response. I hoped they wouldn’t stay this crabby for the rest of the trip.
The restaurant at the launch point displayed large photographs of boats capsizing and smashing into rocks with wood splintering in every direction and passengers flying through the air. Books for sale had titles like Death on the Colorado. Karen looked at the photos and her shoulders shrank in a resolute shrug, meaning she may not come along with us.
She wagged her finger and said, “Did you see those boats smashing on the river we’re planning to raft tomorrow?”
Although formerly a competitive swimmer in high school, Karen avoids choppy water because she is sensitive to motion sickness, another reason not to go on the river.
Our boatman, Bruce, increased her fears by telling Karen that he’d only rafted the Colorado three times. Karen, usually quite aware, was unable to take in his teasing grin; her fear had paralyzed her perceptions. Bruce, tall, tan, and angular, introduced us to his assistant, Quentin, an experienced boatman who was quite new to this part of the river, another fact that caused Karen to quiver. Quentin was chubby for a river guide and had a full, scruffy beard. He was the company’s main guide on the upper Colorado through Cataract Canyon, a trip we would take with him as our guide the following year.
Bruce announced, “There are no portable showers on this trip. The Colorado River temperature is 45 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air will reach at least 115 degrees.”
Karen, now annoyed as well as frightened, whispered, “Five days of heat, dirt, and port-a-potties. My idea of a vacation is a peaceful state of mind. You and Adam go, and I’ll meet you back here in five days—or maybe none of us should go.” Adam and I looked at each other and exchanged a glance that conveyed we knew Karen meant business. There was a good chance the trip might not take place for us unless we could be very persuasive.
“Mom, we need you,” he pleaded. “We’ve planned this for a year.”
Raising my voice, I begged her to reconsider. “Karen, you wanted to cancel the Inca Trail the night before and it was one of our greatest life experiences. This will be too.”
Karen’s brow furrowed, reflecting images of boats splintering on rocks and the critical admonitions of her friends, but she hesitatingly agreed to go with the unspoken acknowledgment that if anything went wrong, it would be “Ed’s fault.”
The next morning we were in our life jackets and on our pontoon boats by 8:30 in order to start our trip from Lee’s Ferry. The boatmen skillfully loaded the boat and lowered it into the chilly water. The canyon wall, made of three types of stone, is only 470 feet high at this point.
Bruce had guided over eighty trips down the Colorado River, and recently returned from kayaking it from one end to the other. He knew every turn and pebble. Karen’s brow finally softened.
As we passed under the Navajo Bridge at mile five, an attractive young woman waved to us and dropped a capsule that Bruce retrieved. He read the note inside and a mischievous smile broadened his face.