Alan Rabinowitz - The Last Taron

 

 

Thank you. I was on the trip of a lifetime. I was hiking up the rugged, remote regions of northern Myanmar, along the snow-capped mountains of the eastern Himalayan plateau, a place where remote tribal groups lived alongside unseen, rare, endangered Himalayan wildlife. My task at hand at the time was to try to find the most northern range of the Indochinese tiger. And if I could find it in this rugged terrain, possibly even come upon the remote valleys where the tiger might be wandering with the elusive snow leopard. This was a dream come true for me, and I should have been elated. But I wasn't. Any feeling of happiness was overshadowed by feelings of sadness, guilt, and fear, because I had just walked out on my wife, Selisa, five years without knowing if she would be there when I got back.

 

You see, my wife, she wanted to have a child. She said it was now or never, and never wasn't an option. I wanted everything just to be the same. As a child, I had been born with a debilitating stutter. I lived in a world of silence. I hadn't spoken a full, fluent sentence to another adult human being until I was 19 years old. Now, at 45, I was still running. I was still trying to find a world which was away from the world of people who I felt had so mistreated me. No, I was way too broken inside to think I could be a father to a child. At this point in my life, it was about animals. I had to save animals and I had to be their voice. Everything else was a distraction.

 

We were more than four weeks and over 200 miles into the hike. All of us were exhausted. Only a few days from our final destination of the last village in Myanmar in Burma, and then the snowy mountains, we came upon a fork in the trail. The trail, the river we were following north, that was where we had to go. But there was a small tributary going off to the east, down a narrow canyon. That's where I wanted to go. That wasn't on our planned route, but that was on my planned route. It's just that the team didn't know about it yet. 

 

Because right before our trip, I had come upon an old journal from the early 1900s, with a paper written by a British botanist, who had been exploring in this region and found a group of strange pygmoid people down this side canyon. People he described as "primitive simian beings" and "one of nature's unsuccessful experiments." Due to his writings, a Burmese medical expedition had come up into this region and explored this canyon in the 1960s, and come upon a group of people called the Taron, who they documented as the world's only living Mongoloid Pygmies. Nothing had been known of them since, and to my knowledge, I was the first Westerner in there in at least half a century. I had to go find out what was happening with these people. 

 

Well, my team wasn't thrilled when I broke it to them at this point that I wanted to go up this side canyon. But they gave me a few extra days. What I didn't realize is how rugged the hiking would even get up this canyon, more so than it was already. After a couple of days, I was so exhausted I was running on fumes. My left knee had swollen, fluid had gathered in my knee, and I was limping much of the time. We were all running on fumes, all exhausted. I wasn't sleeping at night. Thoughts of my wife, Selisa, haunted me. I was wondering what she was thinking, what she was feeling, if she was even still there. 

 

I would wake up in the morning totally exhausted, and then hike even faster, so I didn't have to think, push myself harder. None of the team wanted to hike with me because of my moodiness and my pace. Finally, everything came to a head a few days into this side canyon. I was so exhausted, so sleep-deprived, I actually started having hallucinations. I literally started seeing vivid images in my mind, playing out like a TV soap opera. I could see my wife. She had met someone else since I'd left. He was taller, better looking than me. 

 

She went out three times with him, twice for lunch, once for dinner. [audience chuckles] He gave her Merlot, her favorite wine. [audience laughter] She knew that she shouldn't be doing this, but he fed into the loneliness that was inside of her. She never talked about me and he never asked. He just told her how he loved her beautiful black silky hair and her Asian features. I came around the bend on the trail and I saw a waterfall up ahead. Okay, okay, I'm still in control here. If I make that waterfall in 15 minutes, then my wife wouldn't have kissed him. 

 

I took off. Limping, but I took off. 20 minutes later, I knew I was too late. Selisa was feeling terribly guilty. [audience laughter] She knew that she should go home now, but she didn't want to go home to an empty apartment, to an empty bed again. I crested the top of the hill. Down below in the valley was the village. At least I thought it was that village. That must be the Taron pygmy village we were seeking. All right. The way that this trail is winding around the mountain and slowly making its way down into the valley, I probably had 30 to 40 minutes until I got to that village. I've got to get in control. If I make that village in 30 minutes, then she wouldn't have spent the night with him. If I don't, then our marriage is over. That's all there is to it.

 

I took off again, limping even more this time. After 10 minutes, I stopped. There's no way I'm making that village in 30 minutes. No way. But I've got to get control. Nobody has ever told me what I can or cannot do. Not since I was a child. That son of a bitch is not going to beat me. I turned and leapt off the trail, off the mountain, started sliding, running, tumbling down the steep slope of the mountain towards the village. The village wasn't what I'd expected, at least not on first glance. The few people who I saw who came out looked of normal stature. They definitely weren't pygmies. Nobody seemed to know or want to tell me anything about these Taron people. I thought it was all a waste. I felt like things were just falling apart on me, inside and outside.

 

I was ready to give up when all of a sudden, I saw a pair of eyes peering from behind a little doorway in one of the huts in the distance. They were not just any eyes. They were eyes set in an old, worn, roomy-looking face. And it was only about four feet off the ground. The person I was speaking to, the village headman, turned and followed my gaze, saw where I was looking. His demeanor changed as he turned back to me. "We're a Talu village," he said now, "but there are some Taron pygmies left, only a few. We protect them." Then he started walking off towards the hut and I followed him. 

 

In the 1960s, when the Burmese medical expedition came and studied these people, they had found over 50 pure Taron pygmies. And despite documenting high rates of cretinism, mental retardation, goiter, and other physical and mental maladies, they felt this was a pretty stable community, that it would last into the future. But that's not what I was seeing. What I was seeing right now were less than 12 pure Taron pygmies left, and they were all in terrible shape. I didn't get it. Nobody would explain to me or could explain to me why this was. 

 

Finally, the village headman took me to the last hut, the most remote hut, at the very edge of the village. As I walked in, two Taron women, disheveled, vacant-eyed, scurried around trying to make us tea. There was a fire in the middle of the hut. Sitting by the fire was a little impish Taron man. His back turned towards me. His name was Dawi, I was told. And Dawi was 39. And at 39, he was the youngest of the living Taron. He and his two sisters in this hut were the last pure Taron family left. When I had first walked into the hut, I had caught Dawi's eye, as he glanced up at me. There was a look in his eye, a look of intelligence, unlike what I'd seen in the other Taron. But now, he wouldn't face me. 

 

I sat down opposite him around the fire, staring at the back of his head, until finally he turned and our eyes met and our eyes held. There was more than intelligence in this man's eyes. There was a look of anger, a look of challenge, as if Dawi was daring me to mock him or to question his existence. Boy, I knew that look. That was a familiar look to me. That look was the look [chuckles] of a little stuttering boy who lived in a world shut out by other adult humans. That was my face. That was a face I'd see every day in the mirror of my childhood. 

 

I was staring so intently at Dawi that I didn't notice how close I was to the fire until I started smelling the burning rubber and feeling the heat in my foot. My boot had caught on fire. I jumped up, started dancing, stomping on the flames, trying to put out the fire in my foot. All of a sudden, I heard the most bizarre cackling sound. I turned, and Dawi is standing, facing me, almost bent over double with laughter. It was the strangest sight, but I didn't realize at the time that this would be the only time I would ever see Dawi laugh or smile. But clearly, I had broken the ice between us. 

 

For the rest of the evening, we sat around that fire. And with the help of a translator, we talked. I told him how my mission in life now was saving animals, was to find the last great wild places and to be the voice for some of these great species that were being lost quickly to the world. Dawi just looked at me, quietly. Then I asked Dawi something nobody else seemed to want to answer. "Dawi, where are the other Taron? What happened to them? Have they gone? Where is your family? Where's your wife? Where's your children?" Dawi looked at me for a few seconds. "There are no more Taron," Dawi said. "Taron babies have small heads and small bodies. They're no good. There's too much pain. There's no more Taron." 

 

I didn't know what Dawi was saying to me. I turned to the translator and said, "Please make sure that you're translating Dawi's words exactly as he's saying them, because I'm not quite understanding." I think Dawi saw that. He went on, "When I was a child," Dawi said, "my father told me, this is all the family you will ever have. You will have no wife. You will have no children. The Taron people must not marry with other Taron. There can be no more Taron babies." He said that his father, Dawi's grandfather, had gotten together with the village elders and determined that Taron children were born too misshapen, for reasons they didn't understand. 

 

They were no good, life was too hard, other people had to help them, and they just had to stop existing. I stared at Dawi, trying to comprehend the idea of a race of people voluntarily taking themselves to extinction. Dawi broke through my thoughts. "Why don't you have a family?" Dawi said. "I do have a family, Dawi." I could picture my wife's face, hoping she was still there. "My wife Selisa, but she's very, very far away." "You don't have any children. Why don't you have any children?" Dawi said. I didn't answer Dawi. I didn't tell him I didn't have any children. "Your eyes are sad," Dawi said. "Too sad. You have a hole here," he said, touching me in the heart. "I know. Me too," he said, patting himself on the chest.

 

The next day Dawi asked me if I would accompany him up the nearby mountain into the snow. No one else, just me and Dawi. We went up all day, and we talked without ever talking. We communicated through gestures, through touching, through miming. It felt so great. It felt so natural to me. It felt like everything I had wanted as a child, all my childhood, I wanted a friend who I could communicate without having it be just the spoken word. And now, I had found that person in one of the most remote areas in the world, and soon I'd be leaving him. I'd be running again. 

 

As it was getting late up on the mountain, I motioned to Dawi that we had to get down. I didn't want to be hiking down in the dark. Dawi gestured for me to wait for a little while and to please sit down by a rock. I sat down on the rock as Dawi took off the little pack he had brought up for the day. Then, Dawi took out things from the pack, making sure I was watching. He took out a little cloth, took out a few belongings. He put the belongings in the cloth and started very deliberately wrapping the ends up, almost gently, until it was a tight little bundle, and then held it to his chest. I motioned, "What are you doing, Dawi? I don't know what you're doing." 

 

Dawi walked over to me. He pushed the bundle into my stomach. I said, "I don't want anything, Dawi." He pushed the bundle into my stomach again until I had to cradle the bundle in my arms. Once I had it cradled, he took his hands and grabbed me by the elbows and he started rocking my elbows, my arms, back and forth, and then he touched me on the heart again. 

 

I turned away from Dawi, not wanting him to see the tears welling up in my eyes. You and I are so much alike, Dawi. Born into broken bodies, trapped inside our own heads, misunderstood by the outside world who didn't even care to look deeper. But we're not alike, are we, Dawi? That's what you're telling me. I've got choices. I can fix what ails me. You can't. You have no choices. It would do no good for me to ask Dawi what he thought of his future. He was the last of the Taron. He was dying alone. 

 

A little more than a year later, I took a little photograph of my newborn son, Alex, and I wrapped it up carefully in an envelope and I mailed it to my friend in Myanmar with careful instructions on what to do with it. It took almost another year until I got a letter back from my friend. In the letter he wrote, "Dawi looked a long time at the photograph. Then, he rubbed his fingers over the face. Then, he smiled and then he laughed." Thank you.