A Personal Journey With the Woman Who Changed the World
Most people meet their heroes on the page. I met mine at the Sacramento airport.
It was 1970 or ’71, and I was a young marine-biology/pre‐med student at Sierra College, still wandering toward the path I would eventually follow. Because I happened to be dating the vice-president’s daughter at the time, the administration building was familiar territory. One afternoon someone asked if I might be available to pick up a visiting speaker—Jane Goodall—for an evening lecture on chimpanzees.
I had read about her work in National Geographic, but I didn’t yet grasp the magnitude of the woman I was being entrusted to escort. At that moment, I probably would have been more star-struck by Jacques Cousteau. But I agreed, unaware that I was about to cross paths with a person who would shape the rest of my life.
I met her at the airport, drove her to the hotel, and ended up perched awkwardly on the edge of her bed while she phoned R. Allen and Beatrix Gardner—the pioneering scientists who had taught the chimpanzee Washoe to use sign language. Jane, fascinated by their work, invited them to join her talk. They drove that evening across the Sierra Nevadas from Reno to the college campus in Rocklin, California. I sat with them in the front row as Jane stepped onstage and spoke with that quiet authority that would become her global hallmark—about the Gombe chimpanzees, their social lives, their emotions, the tender and complex ways they navigated their world.
I didn’t know it yet, but that evening stitched threads that would later become part of my own tapestry: Jane would become my “academic aunt,” the Gardners my academic grandparents, and I would enter the forest of Tanjung Puting at roughly the same age she had entered Gombe.
