The typically dreary, drippy spring weather in Northwest Oregon had ended early this year, firming up the muddy forest trails. Even as a new resident, Blake White knew these conditions were atypical. Warm, sunny weather is never guaranteed here until July. But this morning, Blake slept in, feeling perfectly comfortable in his tent. Early June 2024 brought no shivers, damp clothes, or cold breezes. He wasn’t even hungry, although it was late morning.
Blake finally roused up and made himself a cup of coffee on a little backpack stove outside the unzippered flap of a doorway. No bugs bugged him as he pondered how his life had brought him to this juncture.
He called it a juncture. At seventy-six, Blake used a habitual vocabulary mostly with himself. His life had had many stages, but calling this one a homeless phase would not fit. Most of his life had been what people would call homeless; not living in a house was normal for him. He would not have called the site of his first professional gig a tree house. It was an observation platform with a rain cover, not meant for ongoing day and night habitation, but it had turned out that way as had the intended months turned to years.
He preferred living outside and alone. People say Portland attracts homeless people because of a maritime climate that stays relatively mild throughout the winter. They also complain about the constant rain, but for Blake, no rain in an Oregon January could compare to the Lomami jungle. The so-called mild temperatures were also much colder than any month in the forests of the Congo, where Blake spent much of his early career.
He was too old now to live in the jungle like he had for so long. Blake was twice as old as any American male could have endured in the Congo. But having finally returned to wealthy, first-world America, he used a nylon tent instead of a tree house. Tarps had appeared on so many sidewalks around Portland that the “structured,” as Blake called them, raised increasing voices of complaint. True enough, the homeless camps were not very pretty and tended to accumulate trash. The “structured” thought of the homeless as just more trash. The camps received their share of annoyed people driving by yelling obscenities from the safety of their vehicles.
Not being very sociable, however, Blake sought a spot that would afford a bit of seclusion. Given the number of post-pandemic homeless, you might think he would be lucky to find a place close enough to services. Conveniently, a large forested park bounded the northwest section of town. Funnily enough, (another of Blake’s phrases) it was called Forest Park and featured a long trail called The Wildwood running its length for 30 miles.
Blake found a nice spot at the park’s south end, and being an expert at blending into the forest, he would be undisturbed and the tent unnoticed by passersby. One of his earliest ponderings from his new porch (the area just outside the zippered door) was to compare his new surroundings with the Congo rainforest.
He wrote in his journal:
“The forest is ok. Nothing like the Lomami, of course. How could an equator-straddling tropical African jungle be like a temperate, high-latitude semi-rainforest? But the Wildwood Trail is even more disparate, being tame and harmless. The most dangerous thing about the Wildwood is probably certain humans, mental cases, and stalkers.
“Let’s compare wildlife between Forest Park and the Lomami. They have deer in Portland neighborhoods, so they must be in the park, although I’ve never seen one up there. Elk are around. I’ve seen coyotes. Others have sighted bobcats and, recently, a black bear. I’m sure there are plenty coons, bunnies, squirrels, and skunks, and many bird species, including raptors, such as owls and hawks.
“I have seen bats and heard frogs in the early evening from my tent site.
“The Lomami? Big mammals include the Forest elephant, Lowland Gorilla, Okapi, also called Forest Giraffe, Bonobo, and many other monkey species. Then we had the well-known Congo Peafowl, parrots and other tropical birds, and many frog species.”
Unwritten was the fact that Blake felt more comfortable in the presence of wild animals than people. Not that he was a total hermit. He had a half dozen lifelong friends, still in touch with most, although he had outlived some.
So here he was, sipping coffee and thinking about past phases, which he had already covered off and on in his journal. Wisely, he kept many previously filled notebooks in a safe deposit box. He could have gone digital, but obviously, this would have severe drawbacks for anyone off the grid. And what did he think he was doing, anyway? For whom was he writing? Not one to waste time, Blake had already thought this over. If not for his grown daughter, then maybe for evolutionary biologists or linguists. The journal would also describe his professional work in less scientific jargon. He had numerous professional articles about his life with the Bonobo apes of the Congo. His focus had been on what we could learn about the development of human language by studying our closest still living species.
Blake knew his daughter loved him but preferred a more typical American life. Married, both she and her husband had good jobs, two children, and a home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Blake had tried living near them but found it too dry and foreign. The American Southwest would have been trying even if he had not spent a lifetime in the Congo. Blake was born in Nova Scotia, Canada. His father was a black hockey player, and his mother was an American expatriate. Thus, Blake spoke both French and English and had dual citizenship.
James White had played hockey a decade before the first black player came to the National Hockey League. That fellow was from New Brunswick. The so-called Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes started in Halifax in the previous century. James played all through World War II and a decade afterward. The White family had roots there for a hundred years, having ridden the Underground Railroad to escape America during their Civil War. Since the American Revolutionary War, a black community thrived in Nova Scotia. James received a steady but below-average income from his hockey play.
According to her parents, Blake’s mother, Lucinda, had a wild streak. It would have been less shocking for her to have run off and married a black man in the sixties. But during the war, when she could have been unconventional enough as a Rosie the Riveter or something, Lucinda wanted to escape Boston and expectations that she go to one of The Seven Sisters, especially Mount Holyoke. She jumped ship to Halifax and became a typist for a Canadian Government agency.
They saw something in her, she said, years later. She was only eighteen, without Canadian citizenship or a college degree, but the agency snapped her up. Canada was already cooperating with the British and their European war effort, while the States she had left were still trying to avoid it. Lucinda did not know that her agency worked closely with the British Secret Service. They not only aided the British cause but also worked to monitor the Canadian Atlantic coastline and especially to surveil for incursions of German spies.
Lucinda didn’t remain a typist for long, as her supervisor quickly noticed her aptitude for numbers and problem-solving. They shortly facilitated her gaining Canadian citizenship and moved her into the more sensitive efforts of the agency.
In those days, attending church was the best way to settle into a new community. Social contact and friendship may not seem like a particularly pious motive but served as the invariable reason young people came to church. The White family had been members for generations, and the church Lucinda chose happened to be primarily black. Not only did she not turn away from it, but she was attracted to one well-built and handsome fellow named James.
They married in 1943, and her government position increased their combined income significantly. Not that Canada didn’t have the same prejudices as America, but their primarily black church served a lower-income area of Halifax. The White couple bought a house within five years. They already had two daughters by then, and after moving in, they had a son, Blake, in 1948.
James and Lucinda both died by the turn of the 21st century. Blake was glad they had missed the infamous 911. Although he rarely visited them in Nova Scotia, he kept in touch as long as they lived. His sisters picked up the elder care as needed.
Blake was never a rebellious teenager. By the time he was ready for college, you might have thought any wildness inherited from his mother would have revealed itself, but that would not become apparent until later. A family contact on the White side introduced young Blake to his first adult phase: Columbia University in New York City. The year was 1966, long before the university would establish a school that would have best suited Blake: Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, established only after the new millennium. Blake’s work would contribute to the formation of the Primate Cognition Lab.
He was interested in primates and their social societies. The family contact was a black professor at Columbia, Dr. William Gray, in the Biology Department. Of course, Dr. Gray could not simply wave his hand, and Columbia would admit Blake. But the young man had done well in high school. Coincidently, he happened to be interested in the field of Dr. Gray’s primary research interest. Dr. Gray pushed for Blake’s admittance, intending to employ him at a Congolese research station even as an undergraduate. It helped that Blake was both black and French-speaking. In the mid-sixties, Columbia wanted to be a vanguard for diversifying college student attendance rolls.
That was ancient history—Blake’s ancient history—just getting started. But today, sitting with his coffee in Forest Park, his mind drifted back to those times. The Vietnam War protests on campus had hardly begun at that time. The famous riot at Columbia didn’t happen until 1968 when Blake was in the Congo. The student protests occurred in April, the same month as the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis.
Blake attended classes from 1966 through 1967, but the plan with Dr. Gray had been for him to join a graduate student on a mission to the Lomami River rainforest the following spring. That first trip was a short reconnaissance mission to find a suitable observation post in the jungle and one not too far from a village large enough to provide minimal logistical support. Blake recalled that he was only vaguely aware of the Student Afro-American Society formed a few years earlier. And he knew nothing of the Harlem community around the campus.
More than fifty-five years later, in Portland, Oregon, Blake reflected on the progress in civil rights. On one hand, Dr. King might have been very gratified at positive changes. On the other hand, he would have hung his head, wondering how people still discriminate by mere skin color. Yet, the new millennium had given the United States even deeper issues than civil rights.
Blake knew about these issues. As a scientist, he could evaluate probabilities and take stock of evidence for or against hypotheses. He understood the human tendency to prejudge conclusions. But the American experiment had lately gone adrift of its moorings. People did not merely disagree about the impact of current events on society; they could not agree on what had even occurred. The ability to discern truth had eroded, but a more insidious, deeper rot also ate into the society; esteem for truth itself was slipping away. Ordinary people had lost faith that getting an accurate picture of their reality was possible.
Blake was too old and disengaged to let all this get to him. Yet, the situation contributed to his feeling a closer kinship to wild animals and the rhythms of Nature. He was not prone to depression, loneliness, boredom, or thoughts of death. Of that list, thinking about death was more on his mind lately. Nature does not abhor death but flows with it. Death is not unexpected or dreaded but takes its place in the cycle of life. Blake knew he was closer to the end than most people. He hoped he wouldn’t get some horrible disease and end up dying in a hospital. His choice would be to let Nature take him when it was ready.
Blake would not take his own life but would not begrudge Nature for stepping in at a time of its choosing. He might let himself get rain-soaked on a cold, windy day and go the hypothermia route. He might sit with his back to a large dead Douglas Fir tree in Forest Park that could fall over at any minute, letting gravity do the trick. Another option would be to swim naked in the cold Pacific off an Oregon beach and not fight the strong undertow.
Like wildlife, Blake tended to live entirely in the present. Despite journalling about past phases, he was, for the moment, content to continue living and see how things went.