Jane

I want to be just like you. You make me laugh and cry and want to quit my job and move out into the wilderness and watch animals all day long for a living. You make me feel like a child again. Your sense of wonder at the natural world; your methodical way of recording every action and reaction of the chimpanzees you study so you can later put it all together into a cohesive study and see the patterns fills me with curiosity about how I evolved from one of them into me. I know it took millions of years, and yet from the way they act it seems that if only we could communicate with them they would tell us that they feel exactly the same emotions we do, and that we just have some sort of superiority complex when actually we are not so very far from them at all. They seem about as distant from me as children living in a village in Southeast Asia. I don't understand their culture, but I know we feel similar emotions. The way you write makes me empathize with Chimpanzees. I feel their pain. I can see why they do what they do. Isn't that the same? I know, close but not quite. 

I come alive when I read about you. People in the coffee shop sitting around me look up as I laugh out loud and wonder how I can be so engrossed in a book that I don't even notice they are there. You remind me of me. I have the same wonder, the same fascination, the same desire to study and watch and learn from the world around me. I recently had an ant infestation in my house, and instead of killing them or getting grossed out I peered down close and watched how they followed each other and always walked the same path as the one before and once realized I had been watching them for forty minutes. I just wanted to see what they were doing. I wondered where they had come from and where they were going. I hadn't even read your books yet, but as soon as I did they resonated with me and made me wonder if I could find a way to do just that. I think you're supposed to have scientific degrees and stuff like that to watch animals these days, the world has gotten more and more preoccupied with qualifications and experience and you can't just say that you love something and get a job doing it anymore. Too much competition. I'll have to find some way to do it by myself. Sit in my backyard and watch the birds fly by and see if any of them are nesting in trees nearby and pull out my field guide and try to identify them and do it on a regular basis and see if they have any distinguishing marks so I can tell them apart. Maybe get some binoculars. Draw sketches. Of course birds in my backyard and an entire jungle full of chimpanzees are two very different things. I wont have to deal with nearly the same obstacles. It won't take me weeks of wandering around before I even see one. I won't get stuck in the mud and cut by branches although I might get pelted by rain. I can't ever really duplicate what you did. I just want to. I have so much respect for people who give voices to animals and show the world what they are really all about, and I think you have done that more than anyone. You showed us that they aren't just mindless creatures. They carry their young around when they die and form long-standing relationships and even kill each other over territorial battles much like humans do. I felt like I was there with you and I cried when Humphrey died and you stayed up all night caring for him and I laughed when they played together and I have never felt like a book was more real. You brought me there with you in a way I have never experienced before and I thank you, because even though I can never do what you did I feel like I've been there and done it with you. You're my hero, Jane Goodall.