A Balance of Commonness and a Deep, Deep Hole

This is a story told by Alan Rabinowitz. Rabinowitz is a world renowned zoologist, wildlife conservationist, and co-founder of Panthera – the only organization in the world exclusively committed to preserving the world’s endangered wild cats.

A severe stutterer as a child, Rabinowitz was rendered almost speechless in the presence of others. Despite being very intelligent, he was considered “slow” and put into classes for children who, at the time, were labeled retarded. Because he was uncomfortable around people, he developed a special kinship with his pets and an empathy for the animals in the zoo that he believed were mistreated. As a senior in college he finally sought the services to a speech clinic and learned to control his stutter and speak fluently. Although this opened up his life considerably, he realized by this time that he was more interested in animals than humans. Because of his love of science, Rabinowitz applied to graduate schools in biology and pursued the chance “to escape to places where language wasn’t that important.”

But this is not a story about an explorer’s discovery of new or exotic flora or an encounter with wild fauna that had become the characters in the environments where he sought refuge and felt most at home. It is not about his documentation of a remote region’s biodiversity or new information about little known species.

Rather it is a story about an encounter with another human being that radically changed his life. It is a story about the power of presence and pathos, and the inherent and ineffable communion between human persons that is stronger than glaring differences and deeper and more mysterious than the normal means of human communication can express.

A partner in a marriage already strained by his regular, long absences for research trips, he set out once again in 1997 on what was as much personal escape as scientific expedition. His destination was a largely unknown area of northern Burma (today Myanmar) he had read about in an article written by an early British botanist. After several successive flights on smaller and smaller planes he arrived at the last settlement accessible by air.

While in a Burmese bookstore, Rabinowitz found a book that mentioned a “pure-blood” tribe of Mongoloid pygmies called the Taron reported to live in an almost inaccessible region far north of Myanmar. He remembered reading about their discovery in a journal article in the 1960’s. Unknown to the outside world, they were the only Mongoloid pygmies in the world. At the time the article was published there were about one hundred still living. Nothing had been heard or known of them since. In the bookstore he stared at a photo in the book of a hand drawn map showing the Taron village high up in a Himalayan valley.

No one in the settlement knew the route to the wilderness where Rabinowitz hoped to search for the Taron. But he happened to meet a Tibetan who had just taken nearly a month to come down the mountain and convinced him to take him and his companions, including translators, back up the mountain to the obscure and dense territory where the Taron were last seen. Three weeks they hiked up into the snowy mountains near the Tibetan border in the lower Himalayas and over into China.

It was here that he would find or rather be found by the Taron. Rabinowitz explains:

By the time I got to them – in fact, I didn’t even know when I got to them because the few that were left hid from me. They all ran and hid. And it was only when the other tribal group asked them to come out that they would come out and meet me. And there were only 12 of them left.

It was here that he would have what he later called “almost a defining moment of my life because it was a time when I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to have children, whether my marriage would really work out, where my life was actually going as I figured things out.” It was here he would meet Dawi, the leader of the Taron, who would reveal Rabinowitz to himself.

Not only did Dawi not speak the American’s language, he didn’t even speak Burmese. I’ll let Rabinowitz tell the rest of his story.

If I really wanted to talk to them I had to go through three different translators. But I didn’t spend much time talking to him. He and I went off by ourselves up into the snowy mountains for a couple of days, and we were alone together. And this was exactly everything I had looked for to figure out how you get to the heart of the human spirit without speaking, without an actual human voice. And we were able to do that . . .

We couldn’t be more different. Here’s this little guy who’s under five feet tall, four feet-something. And from this remote area in northern Myanmar, untouched by the outside world. Here I am, a New York Jewish kid that grew up stuttering and couldn’t deal with the world of people that was all around me. And we actually seemed to just fall into a balance of commonness that we would sit around the fire at night and smile at one another and touch one another and know . . . what the other needed.

And then he started making gestures. He started making gestures about young children, which I didn’t quite understand at first. And only when we got back was I able to confirm what he was trying to say to me.

Generations of inbreeding had produced Tarons who suffered from physical deformities, mental retardation, and insanity. Dawi, the youngest of the Taron, and his two sisters were the last of the pure Taron family. Long ago, the Taron had decided never again to have babies with each other. They decided to breed only with the Htalu, but many Htalu did not want to marry Tarons. So, sadly the Tarons were on the verge of going extinct and Dawi bore the deep sorrow of that self-imposed decision and not having a child.

Dawi wanted to know why I didn’t have any children. I asked him through these translators, “Why do you assume I have no children?”

And he said, “Because you act like a man who still has this deep, deep hole inside of him. And I know that hole, and I can’t have any children because nobody will mate with me. Nobody will be my partner.”

After my time with Dawi I returned to the United States and I looked upon my marriage in a completely different way. And I decided to have children as well, which has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.♦

Alan Rabinowitz wrote about this experience in his book Beyond the Last Village. I heard him tell this story in an interview with Krista Tippet on On Being which you can listen to here. This version of the story is a composite from the book and the interview.