Jane Goodall and the Panhandler
In Glorious Apparel
Essay Posted March 25, 2008 by James E. Nelson
You’ve probably heard the old joke about the pastor doing a children’s sermon on Easter morning: One of the children conflated the Easter story with groundhog day and left Jesus in the tomb for six weeks. This year the joke is more apropos than ever because the Orthodox celebration of Pascha, on April 27, is five weeks later than the Western celebration of Easter. We might speculate that while Palm Sunday was a cloudy and dreary day at the Vatican and in Geneva, that same weekend the sun was shining brightly in Byzantium, where Jesus saw his shadow—six more weeks of Lent for the Orthodox! (And I ask forgiveness of my impudence.)
So, for my Western readers, Christ is risen! For me and my essays, the topic du jour is a bit more mundane.
Saturday night we went to Omaha to hear a lecture by Jane Goodall. We had signed up as soon as it was announced because it was held at the Thomas Mangelsen art gallery called Images of Nature. We often stop into Images of Nature to browse the beautiful photography, so we knew how small the lecture space was. Following the lecture a half dozen out-of-print Mangelsen proofs were auctioned off with the proceeds going to Goodall’s Jane Goodall Institute and Mangelsen’s Cougar Fund.
The content of Goodall’s lecture was pretty much what anyone who has read her books would expect. She’s a naturalist and an environmentalist and she’s using her celebrity to try to save the planet. I couldn’t tell her chimpanzee stories with her gentle humor nor could I convey her environmental concern with her passion. For that I will point you to her books.
What was most strikingly unexpected was how she and Tom Mangelsen got acquainted. Mangelsen is originally from Omaha, but years ago he moved to Colorado, and when that got overcrowded, moved north to Jackson Hole, where he makes his home now. Several years ago Goodall came to Wyoming for a lecture in Jackson Hole. Her secondary agenda was to see Yellowstone Park and Mangelsen was her tour guide for that trip.
She had never seen a bear or moose. Elk and bison were also outside of her experience. She was going to Yellowstone to see the great mammals of North America. In her own words, she was enthralled by the grandeur of it all. And this new friendship with Mangelsen led to the fulfilling of another of her dreams.
Tom Mangelsen inherited his father’s cabin that is in the midst of the Sandhill Crane migratory territory on the Platte River. By way of Mangelsen’s hospitality, she now comes to the Platte nearly every March to witness the migration of the cranes. Her interest in cranes has also resulted in a deep interest in Nebraska and she is an outspoken critic of modern irrigation methods and is an equally outspoken voice warning about the potential water disaster associated with the declining water levels in the Ogallala aquifer.
Goodall’s life with the chimpanzees seems strange and wonderful to me (and no doubt to most people on this end of the globe). Along with chimps, elephants and gorillas, giraffe, and gazelles are a part of her life and normal experience. But to her, black bear, moose, and a heard of bison were exotic, and she wanted to see them. She has witnessed the migration of the wildebeest (one of the seven natural wonders of the animal world, by her account) and watched lions stalk antelope while sitting beneath a baobab tree. And yet she returns to central Nebraska as often as she can to witness the migration of the sandhill cranes (another of those natural wonders by her calculation).
I immediately identified with her wonder of it all. I’ve never seen the crane migration at the Platte River, but I have witnessed it along the banks of the Tanana River in Alaska. It is one of the most awe-inspiring events I have ever seen (but I’ve never seen a wildebeest migration, so don’t take my word for it, I’ll leave it to Dr. Goodall to identify it as one of the seven wonders of the animal kingdom). One day I was driving back from south and east of town with a load of fire wood on the pickup when I heard this sound over the roar of the engine and the wind blowing through the open windows. I pulled off the road and turned off the truck to figure out what it was. Standing there listening to this other roar drowning out the silence of the woods, I realized the Tanana River was at most 200 yards beyond a stand of aspen and spruce. Even though no bird was in sight, I was listening to the call of thousands of cranes sitting along the river bank, resting before their final flight to the arctic breeding grounds.
They would fly southeast to northwest along the Tanana River basin toward the bug-infested tundra and I could look up into the sky and watch a line of cranes literally as far as the eye could see. Walking from the house to town I might clearly hear their call, but have to wait several minutes before a long line of birds actually came into sight.
While nowhere as magnificent, if only measured by the grandeur, another equally bedazzling sight was the first time I saw snow geese migrating north in the dead of night illumined only by the full moon. The softly lit line of birds undulated across the sky and their wings sparkled like jewels in the darkness while their haunting cry floated to the earth. Over time I’ve learned to distinguish between the overhead calls of Canada geese, snow geese, and sandhill cranes. The sandhill’s is the most reedy while the snow goose call is the most haunting, especially on a cold, moonlit night.
And as I thought about the geese and cranes (especially this time of year, when hearing their calls is a daily experience), I realized that there is nothing normal about it. Even the mundane Canada goose remains exotic when it’s thousands of feet overhead, flying in formation with hundreds of other geese, following that mysterious urge to migrate farther north to the breeding grounds.
It should have come as no surprise, but Dr. Goodall has that same sense of wonder about the sights and sounds of our planet that she has not yet heard. Just because she’s familiar with something that is utterly exotic to me (Gombe and the Serengeti), does not mean that all of nature is old hat to her. I suspect that everywhere she goes, her untamed curiosity makes her thirst for something new. And more significant, her childlike wonder makes her thirst to hear and see that which she’s experienced a dozen times before.
I received an email from my sister last week. It was about their newly repaired bird feeder. The finches, grosbeaks and songbirds they have at their north central Arkansas home are glorious. So is the persistence of the local racoons and squirrels that are always interested in eating from the bird feeder. But for that matter, even a lawn full of robins and blackbirds eating grubs and mating in the early morning shafts of sun causes me to stop at my own picture window and just watch for a while.
Rabbits and squirrels are nothing like chimpanzees and wildebeest, but when one rabbit feints and thrusts, and the other rabbit jumps high in the air, while the first rabbit runs underneath him, is, in its own manner, every bit as glorious as watching two young chimps wrestle. Watching a squirrel chase another squirrel across the lawn and across the tree tops, acrobatically leaping from branch tip to branch tip is every bit as wonderful as watching an old mother chimp come to the defense of her young son when he is being ganged up on by two other chimps.
No, I could not tell Jane Goodall’s stories very well and I’ll leave that to her. But what was most striking to me last Saturday night was to be reminded of just how exotic and curiously wonderful our world is, if we just stop and see what is really there.
And this brings me back to the season. Isn’t paying attention in awe and wonder one of the points of Lent? God is present. He, in all his glorious apparel, never went anywhere. But in the routine of our everyday lives, we forget to look up, to stop and listen for God right here. Oh, if we could take a trip to the Holy Land (where God walked and got the sand between his toes), that would transform our lives. If we could volunteer in Louisiana or Mississippi, helping rebuild homes after the hurricane, or go to Haiti and build schools and wells for fresh water, our hearts would be strengthened to follow God.
But it takes someone from the far end of the globe to remind us that the local cranes (and geese, for that matter) are every bit as exotic as wildebeest. God’s apparel is every bit as glorious when thrown over the shoulders of the panhandler on the corner of 11th and Howard in the Old Market as it is when wrapped around a hungry Haitian child (and I confess, that I brushed the panhandler off and gave him nothing, because I was hurrying to get a good seat to hear Jane Goodall—God forgive me). We serve an exotic and wonderful God. Ought we not stop, listen, and see what is all around us?
There ought to be nothing ordinary about our lives, because there is nothing ordinary about the world in which our lives are lived. Likewise, there ought to be nothing ordinary about our hearts, because there’s nothing ordinary about the God who made this world. Do we take him for granted? Or do we stop and see his exotic presence, even in our seemingly mundane activities and places?
Copyright © 2008 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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