a conversation with jodi about leaving time
I started writing leaving time when I was in the process of becoming an empty nester. my daughter sammy was on her way to school. she was thinking a lot about how we humans raise our children to be self-sufficient enough to leave us, and how depressing it was for those left behind. that topic, of what happens to people who are left behind, became what she wanted to write about. So, I was reading something and I learned that in the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay together all their lives until one of them dies. given my frame of mind, I found it much more enjoyable to do things the way elephants do. I began to dig a little deeper into elephants and their reaction to death, and what I discovered became a metaphor for the novel.
for the character of alice, who studies elephant cognition, i first went to see a vassar teacher, abigail baird, who taught me all about the brain and how memory works. We then ventured to Botswana to work with Jeanetta Selier, a Ph.D. researcher studying the herds in the tuli block. she probably already knows a lot about elephants, like the fact that they are the largest land mammals, at 7 to 10 thousand pounds. They are herbivores. they are recognizable by their tusks, hair, voice and ears: elephant ears are as individual as human fingerprints. they live 50 to 70 years in the wild, with adult females living in herds made up of a matriarch, the oldest and largest female elephant, and two to ten females. the babies are suckled, meaning they are cared for by all the females in the pack, and older siblings can practice their parenting skills before they become mothers. male elephants are kicked out of the herd at around 13 years of age by the matriarch, when they first enter musth, a state where they become very aggressive and want to mate. they roam with small groups of males.
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What you may not know about elephants is that they have an incredibly complex brain, capable of communicating, learning, remembering, and experiencing fear, pain, and loss. In Kenya, there are two tribes that frequently interact with elephants. the Masaai use spears to hunt them and wear red. The Kamba are farmers who do not hunt elephants. Scientists have shown that elephants can distinguish between the two groups by smell and sight. the herds showed greater fear when showing red garments, suggesting cognitive ability and long-term memory. even elephants that had no direct experience with Masaai reacted this way, suggesting social learning and communication.
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joyce poole, a famous elephant researcher, has conducted empathy studies on elephants. she recounts how one elephant flinched when another approached an electric fence, even though the fence was inactive. There have been multiple reports of elephants helping to free baby rhinos trapped in a mud hole, although there is no evolutionary advantage to such behaviour. they refuse to leave sick or injured elephants behind, even if the sick animal is not related to them.
the memory of an elephant? Turns out it’s a real thing. At the elephant sanctuary in TN, the elephants reacted so badly to helicopters and planes that they had to institute a no-fly zone overhead. the only helicopters most of these elephants would have ever encountered was 40-50 years ago, during the slaughters when they were captured and brought to the united states.
Elephant relationships last a lifetime. At the elephant sanctuary in tn, an elephant named jenny was living peacefully when a new elephant, shirley, arrived. when shirley entered the barn that night, in the compartment next to jenny, jenny started banging on the bars between them, trying to get to shirley. the caretakers finally opened the door between them and immediately shirley and jenny began to move in tandem, remaining inseparable. When Jenny went to sleep, Shirley would straddle her, like a mother elephant with a calf. It turned out that when Jenny was a kid and Shirley was 30, they had both been in the same circus for a short time. they had been separated for 22 years, but recognized each other. in pilanesberg in s. Africa, there was a reserve for elephants that had been orphaned after culling for population control. But putting together a group of adolescent elephants did not work, and two matriarchs were brought from the United States, where they had been trained and lived. Sixteen years passed, and these two matriarchs managed to whip the adolescent elephants into herd formation, without human contact for 16 years. then one of the elephants, owalla, was bitten by a hippopotamus. for medical reasons she could not be sedated and the investigators knew that she would die if she did not receive treatment. worse yet, if she died, the fragile pack would likely fall apart again. Desperate, they approached Randall Moore, Owalla’s original trainer, who hadn’t seen her in over a decade. he flew to pilanesberg, got out of his vehicle and yelled owalla’s name. As her pack fled in terror, Owalla greeted Randall, following his orders to raise her trunk and stay put so a vet could treat her without anesthesia.
Elephants have elaborate mourning rituals, just like humans. if an elephant comes across the bones of another elephant, it will be silent and reverent. the tail and ears will drop. they will pick up the bones and roll them under their hind legs. they only do this with elephant bones, not bones from other animals. they will return to the site of a pack member’s death and pay their respects for years to come. they will often cover a dying elephant with branches and dirt. they have been known to break into research camps to steal a bone a scientist was working on and return it to the place where that elephant died. but the most beautiful story of pain I learned came from the elephant sanctuary. An elephant named Sissy survived the 1981 Gainesville flood and was brought, traumatized, to the sanctuary. he got used to carrying a tire, like a pacifier. After a while, she befriended another elephant named Tina. when tina died, sissy stayed at her grave for a day. Then, she placed her tire on her best friend’s grave, like a flower crown, and left, almost as if she knew that Tina was the one she needed comforting now.
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If you learn so much about elephants, you can’t help but be moved by their plight both in captivity and in the wild. the goal of zoos was to develop breeding programs and, more importantly, encourage the conservation of animals that might not be indigenous to a country. however, the need for this has decreased as the internet has developed. any school child, for example, can learn about elephants in Africa with a click. elephants suffer greatly in captivity. the zoo’s habitat is never big enough to accommodate an elephant. Plus, elephants live in herds, so creating a “fake herd” of two out of three elephants is a lot like throwing a human into a cell with a stranger and assuming they’ll be good friends. 75% of elephants in North American zoos are overweight, 40% have leg or joint problems, and 80% have behavioral tics, such as head shaking or bobbing due to stress. for every elephant born in a zoo, two others die, so even saying that zoos encourage breeding programs is not entirely accurate. ideally, elephants should not be kept in zoos. sanctuaries allow an elephant to live out the rest of its life in a habitat of hundreds of acres and not be on display; in sanctuaries, elephants set their time to come and go.
Of course, elephants in the wild don’t thrive either. In Africa, poachers kill 38,000 elephants each year. The first indication that a population is being poached is a disparity between males and females, because poachers look for the largest tusks. once all the males are gone, poachers go after the matriarchs, but the collateral damage of losing a matriarch is enormous. if a matriarch dies, so does the collective knowledge of that family, and society disintegrates. the herd will not know where the best water wells are, in times of drought. they will not know the safest travel corridors. any nursing baby dies if her mothers are killed. right now the estimate is that in ten years there will be no more African elephants.
But poaching isn’t just a wildlife crisis, it’s a humanitarian concern. The price of an ounce of ivory has skyrocketed from $150 to $1,300, due to demand from the Far East (Southeast Asia and China). Poaching money fuels instability in the Democratic African Republic, and there are rumors that Mr. Joseph Kony’s Resistance Army was funded by profits from illegal ivory from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And lest you think that poaching doesn’t matter here in the United States, each month members of Al Shabaab, a terrorist group in Somalia with clear ties to Al Quaeda, poach 1 to 3 tons of ivory.
So how do we save these magnificent and intelligent animals? we need to keep spreading the word about poaching, as tusk and the clinton global initiative have done. The UN has created a resolution saying that poaching fuels instability in countries, and President Obama has banned the ivory trade in the United States. China even destroyed illegal ivory stores, crushing it, which set a great example. all this is a good start. but in addition, countries where poaching is the worst need to offer their farmers an affordable alternative to what poachers are offering. local governments must see that the cost of losing tourism will far outweigh the immediate cash flow from elephant poaching, and must create penalties for poachers that reflect this. At the same time, those demanding ivory need to be educated about the reality of poaching: many believe that an elephant can regrow a tusk, which is not true; the only way to get an elephant tusk is to kill the elephant. Here in the United States, if you are concerned about elephants, please donate time and money to a reputable anti-poaching organization. and write to your deputies and tell them to support the presidential initiative against poaching. because I promise you: once you read the departure time, you will never think of elephants in the same way again.
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