That Takes Ovaries! (19 page)

Monday through Saturday I studied hornbills (my
official
reason for being at the reserve), but in the evenings I collected data on the gorilla sign that camp members and I had encountered
throughout the day. Each Saturday night I planned a Sunday gorilla outing according to where the most recent sign was found. The next morning, my “day off,” I’d wake at 5:00 A.M. and sit beneath a tree, listening to the incredible sound of insects in the jungle. When the sun rose, the birds started to sing and the insects quieted. That’s when I’d start walking.

Four months of Sunday outings passed, and I still hadn’t found any gorillas.

Then one Sunday, as I walked along the end of the K5 trail, where the dense vegetation covered the path like a tunnel, I saw very fresh gorilla sign. I walked slowly, recording everything on my notepad so I could later mark it on my “Gorilla Map.” Suddenly the vegetation fifteen feet in front of me moved. I froze and slowly raised my binoculars, expecting to see a bush pig or forest antelope. Instead, a male silverback charged out of the thicket and screamed “Rrrraaa, ra, ra!” at me, then quickly dashed back into the brush.

He was all I’d hoped—beautiful, huge, and incredible.

I followed what I’d read in my gorilla books and did not run. I didn’t move an inch. Not because I was frightened (though he could have killed me if he wanted to): I wasn’t scared, I was in heaven and living the dream I’d had since childhood. I stayed still because I wanted the gorilla to stick around. After a couple of seconds, he did reappear, yelled another vibrant “Rrraaaaa!” then disappeared again. From the sound of it, he’d run off for good into the jungle. I tried to take notes, but I was shaking too much from the excitement. I waited for what seemed an eternity:
He might return,
I thought, hoping against hope. Yes, I knew it was dangerous to stay, but I also understood that all I had worked for, all I had hoped for since I was twelve, was finally coming true.

Before I knew it—“Rrraaa! Ra!”—another scream, from the same spot the first had been. It was the silverback again, this time behind the brush right in front of me. I was elated, and confused; I knew I’d already heard a gorilla leave.
So that had to have been
another
gorilla that fled,
I thought. I continued to wait,
totally motionless, as I heard a second gorilla follow the first’s lead and run off into the bush.

That’s it, they’re gone. The silverback, too. Oh, how lucky I am,
two
gorillas in one da—

“Rrrraaaa!” came a new cry. The silverback! He was still there, making his brilliant presence known with nonstop thunderous yells clearly directed at me. I was sure he saw me because, unlike him, I was exposed on the trail. Now I understood. There had been
three,
and it was the silverback that stayed, to protect the others in his group and defend their turf.

After five glorious minutes, in which he yelled and yelled, I finally decided I’d better leave. Slowly, I backed away, taking tiny steps. As soon as I moved, I heard the silverback move, too, in the opposite direction, screaming every few seconds to remind me he was still nearby. Once I was far enough away and felt safe, I knelt on the ground and cried like a baby. I was the happiest person on the planet. My dream had come true.

I am the Amazon Queen. I did not claim that title out of some misled Xena Warrior Princess wannabe angst. I earned the moniker after living ten years on a sixty-three-foot U.S. Navy AVR rescue boat, so named as she anchored offshore from Sausalito, California. I was an anchor-out: I lived a quarter mile from land with a two-hundred-pound weight sunk to the ocean
floor to keep me from drifting away. Fed up with living as a rent slave in the city, I had bought the retired, motorless boat for five grand, got some locals to tow it out for me, and then lived for free with a million-dollar view.

The waterfront community is unique, complete with real-life pirates, Vietnam vets, hermits, drug addicts, verifiable crazies, and a few artist types (like me). This anarchistic host of misfits lives without the creature comforts the rest of society lives for. But I had other comforts very few people ever know. Every morning, seabirds played leapfrog over the waves in their quest for breakfast. Every night, the sea gently rocked me to sleep.

One particularly stormy night, I woke up to a loud crashing noise. I opened my eyes and saw a forty-five-foot fishing boat looming outside my window. It must have been dragging anchor because of the high winds, and now had karmically caught on my anchor chain. There we were, slamming into each other every thirty seconds or so with each rush of a wave. The rain came down in sheets and the wind howled like Madonna on drugs. I jumped out of bed and tried to remember my mantra—
don’t panic
—as I dressed in my rain suit and scrounged around in the predawn darkness for my rain boots. In mere moments, I jumped into my little fourteen-foot wooden skiff, praying the six-horsepower Evinrude motor would start up. Luckily, it did, and I headed out into seventy-five-knot winds and five-foot, white-crested waves. I bailed water and screamed into the wind as I approached my closest neighbor.

“Hey Louie,” I yelled. “You gotta come help me. Someone’s fishing boat broke loose and its line is stuck on my anchor chain.”

No answer.

Rain beat down like ice needles, freezing the freckles right off my face. “Louie! Wake up. I know you can hear me. I need help! It keeps slamming into the
Amazon Queen
and might just break her into tiny bite-size pieces.”

A moment later he screamed back in full bravado, “Screw you. Ain’t my boat. Ain’t my problem.”

So much for being neighborly. So much for chivalry. So much for the damn golden rule.

I zoomed off to another anchor-out’s domain, ready to kill. By the time I arrived, Big Bill was already out on deck. I pulled up alongside his fifty-six-footer. I just knew he would be my salvation. I groveled a few
thank you’s
as he attached a big knife to his belt.

“Yeah, I saw you were in a little trouble there, Queenie.”

Big Bill was a 280-pound pirate. Nobody crossed him. He was never one for sympathy, so I was surprised to find him ready to help. “Hey,” he said, as he jumped into my skiff, “You have garlic for dinner?” Pirates aren’t much for pleasantries or manners either.

With Big Bill on board, my little boat sank deeper than what I knew to be safe. Throwing caution literally to the wind, I steered against the waves as water surged in and around our tiny vessel. Blood pounded in my heart like a metronome gone crazy while I watched the two huge boats ahead of us slam into one another. Even though fear had all but taken over my entire system, I was more alive than I’ve ever been in my life. I felt exhilarated as we flew through the waves in spine-tingling winds.

The plan was to zoom past the intruding vessel’s port side and then cut back just as we reached the stern. After that, we’d slowly approach the bow. Big Bill had one chance to reach up and cut the fishing boat’s line. But then what? If he missed the line, the twenty-ton fishing boat would slam down on top of us, breaking my skiff into tiny pieces. We’d be fish food. If he cut the line, there was still a chance we’d get trapped between the two boats and smashed to bits. With death closer than it’d ever been, I summoned up the spirit of my Amazon warrior ancestors and headed toward the boat’s port side.

The first part of the plan went well. I cut the 360-degree turn without dumping us in the bay and deftly maneuvered us under the bow of the huge forty-five-footer as it slammed ten feet in and out of the water. Big Bill stood precariously in the skiff’s bow, reaching up toward the stormy skies as we rose on the
apex of a wave. It took every ovary I possessed to hold the skiff steady as the monster boat came down on us. Just as the knife made contact, our skiff surged ahead and we slammed into the side of my Navy houseboat with a thud. We were now between my sixty-three-foot boat and the intruding forty-five-footer. They came perilously close to squishing us like bugs on a windshield, and then, just in the nick of time, floated apart like violent lovers transcending fatal peril.

I took a breath of air, and then another. I was still alive and well. We had played a dangerous game and won the right to go on living. In a fit of ceremonial triumph, I screamed louder than all the elements put together,
“I am the Amazon Queen and I can do anything!”

Inevitably there will be times when we will face obstacles of the human variety: a dominant authority figure, another person’s hurtful attitude, or a community’s prejudicial assumption about what a girl can or can’t do. Hard to ignore, these obstacles goad us. They get in the way of daily living. And their presence forces us to a crossroad: We must decide,
Will I move on—just let this one go? Or will I stand up for my beliefs?

The women and girls in this chapter face that crossroad, and they choose to take a stand.

They believe in their ideals. They refuse to let their principles slide. They are dedicated to a vision—whether it be that the world should be rape-free or accessible to wheelchair users—and they are letting the people around them know it. By definition, rebels go against the status quo, so those in power may try to block a rebelgirl’s efforts. These stories tell of females who are undeterred by the opposition they face. They challenge conditions they find oppressive and do what, to them, is the right thing—even if they meet with resistance.

If a voice goes against commonly accepted assumptions, then speaking out, in and of itself, is courageous. What is remarkable about the women and girls in this chapter is that they go beyond speaking out. They act. Most engage in risky physical activity that further commits them to their rebellion. They take a stand not just with their minds and mouths, but with their bodies.

A woman who stands up for her beliefs is often simply standing up for
herself
as an individual. If she is unaware there are others facing similar situations and, like her, taking the Action Hero route, she may feel alone. Though she may keep-on-keeping-on and use injustice as a springboard for social change (
Pow!
“Take that, supervillain!”), she may not realize until years later that her individual response was part of a greater movement of resistance and transformation.

On the other hand, rebelling can be an exhilarating awakening. An “ah-ha” moment. Maybe a woman sees for the first time how her single act fits into a larger social picture: an
ah-ha
moment of understanding the political context of her personal experience. Yup, rebelling can be a life-changing event that politicizes a girl.

Regardless of whether the women in these stories see how they fit into the bigger picture, their acts of courage have a ripple effect. When a woman wins a battle for herself, she often wins it for the girl next door, too. Though she does something on her own, her act reverberates and ultimately has wider repercussions. (That was a hint; see the chapter after this one for the ripples!)

I have no legs.

One night, six years ago, I fell asleep an active, able-bodied young woman. Months later I woke up, my arms, belly, and back covered in burn scars. The legs that had carried me for years were missing, amputated above the knees as a result of my burns. The last few years have been a continual process of
learning how to move and understand myself in this new, and yet old, body.