Forests: RUSSELL MITTERMEIER: Into the Woods

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The women run the place. A mother in her early 30s with bright gold earrings and bright gold teeth talks teasingly with Mittermeier. He asks to take her photograph. She poses, sitting on the steps of her hut. As Mittermeier raises his camera, she gets a saucy look in her eyes, drops her colorful blouse, which was tied at her neck, and shows herself in full, confident power. Everyone laughs, but everyone also gets the picture.

We walk the hot, sun-splashed pathways of the village, past the wooden huts with ornate carved doors--they look like Swiss chalets--and a shrine, a flakapau, which displays blue wooden figures, the size of large chess pawns, that represent ancestors. A medicine man sits in his doorway; he cannot rise to greet us because his right leg is greatly swollen from a snakebite. He has treated his wound successfully. Some children follow us as we go, but most are too self-possessed to become groupies. When approached, they respond to questions politely, but mainly they seem to be studying us.

I watch Mittermeier watching everything. He is wholly comfortable here, and one sees why. There is nothing to be uncomfortable about in the villages, or in the surrounding forest, except some physical inconveniences. One calls this the wilderness, but it hardly seems wild to its residents. Pilgrims to America used to fear places like this; now people fear what has replaced them. I ask Mittermeier how all this affects him personally, apart from his sense of mission.

He tells me, "When you're alone in the forest, you're aware that life is everywhere around you. I feel a part of it. At the same time, I realize that I am just one more form of life in a very complex system. This is as close to a religious experience as I get--which is why, when I see a rain forest being bulldozed to make a few dollars for a logging company, I feel like I'm watching Notre Dame or the Louvre being hit with a wrecking ball. It's strange, but wherever I am in the forest, I feel that I'm home."

When he climbed to the top of the Voltzberg the other day, I, lacking the energy and the equilibrium, did not follow. Instead I sat at the base of the rock and stared into the soft and hazy thicket of the forest. I could not get the panoramic view, but I was able to take in the interior sounds and the overarching silence by which they and I were subsumed. Something momentous was about to happen, or had already happened, 10 million years ago. I could hear the air. Everything became important--the flesh of the leaves, the braided vines, a macaw overhead, the smallest insect. A bug the size of a piece of dust crawled across my hand as I wrote about it crawling across my hand.

After an hour or so, Mittermeier returned from what must have been his hundredth climb up the Voltzberg to gaze at the rain forest. "How was it?" I asked him. "Incredible," he said.