"The Impenetrable Forest": The intertwined fates of Uganda and its mountain gorillas

"The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda"

by Thor Hanson

1500 Books, 286 pp., $24.95

When my husband and I spent most of last year in Uganda, we discovered that the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is aptly named. After passing through cultivated farms in southwestern Uganda, you run smack into a wall of green, where fig trees drip thick vines and ferns grow three times the height of a man.

It was with a sense of nostalgia that I read "The Impenetrable Forest," Thor Hanson's narrative of living in that tangle of green for two years, introducing mountain gorillas to humans and vice versa. Hanson, now a resident of San Juan Island, was in Uganda with the Peace Corps beginning in 1993.

His job was to get mountain gorillas to tolerate the presence of people, in hopes that a tourist economy would serve as incentive for local communities to coexist in peace with their 400-plus pound neighbors.

Hanson begins with an accurate and amusing description of life in Uganda. Describing a Ugandan sitting room, with the usual red velour sofas and chairs that sport colorful crocheted doilies, fly-bead curtains covering the doors, and fading posters of the pope on the walls, Hanson puts it in American perspective: "If Elvis and my grandmother had ever conspired to decorate a tree fort, this would have been it."

His story is peppered with a traveler's cheerful anecdotes as he winds his way through an extremely foreign culture. Just as a reader is wondering why he is spending so much time writing about Uganda itself, rather than the gorillas, he explains: "Uganda's mountain gorillas exist as part of the inseparable weave of people and landscape, and there will not be hope for either until there is hope for both."

While he is paving the way for tourists, Hanson has a view of the endangered animals that few will ever get. (The gorillas' smell is like "horse and sweat perfume.") But he is not experiencing it as a tourist, he's smelling it while being charged by a big male gorilla, "his eyes wild and angry and his teeth bared, two rows of sharp white jags in the huge red of his mouth ... "

Interspersed with the gorilla treks are stories of Ugandan friends, wild rides on jammed buses, and, inevitably, the disease that affects nearly every Ugandan family, AIDS.

Throughout his story, Hanson describes the tumultuous history of Uganda that resulted in a modern stability of sorts. This stability enabled him and his local trackers to finally habituate two groups of gorillas.

However, toward the end of Hanson's stay, poachers capture an infant gorilla, killing four others in the process. Speculating that locals were involved in the poaching, Hanson's tone turns serious. Africans, he says, value the current moment, while his program offers benefits of conservation over time.

Though the community would benefit eventually through tourism, the future reward might not ever be seen as outweighing the immediate benefit of such things as selling an infant gorilla, Hanson fears. He leaves with the belief that sustainable management has potential, but with some doubt for its future. And when he returns 12 years later, he seems to come to much the same conclusion.

Hanson's book is a mix of travel story and ecological treatise, and thus the chronology is often hard to follow. He has a great ear for the way Ugandans mix local language and British English, but the occasional use of the vernacular in the text with no context is a bit jarring, and you have to wonder if it interferes with the story for readers not familiar with it.

If the huge mountain gorilla is the star of this book, the country of Uganda has an important supporting role. Readers with an interest in either will enjoy this look into "The Impenetrable Forest."