Notes on Alan Rabinowitz's Beyond the Last Village

Conventional wisdom has long insisted that there's nothing new left to discover on the surface of the earth. "The time for discoveries is past," wrote naturalist Louis Agassiz back in 1867. "No student of nature should go out now expecting to find a new world." The fact is, however, that Agassiz was proven wrong by several explorers who came after him (John Wesley Powell, for example, or Roy Chapman Andrews), and his generalization continues to prove flimsy today -- as is evidenced by Alan Rabinowitz's recent adventure travel book, Beyond the Last Village: A Journey of Discovery in Asia's Forbidden Wilderness. "Many people are still convinced that our knowledge of the world's large creatures and cultures is all but complete," Rabinowitz says in his introduction. "They are wrong."

To prove this assertion, Rabinowitz led a series of expeditions into the Himalayan region of northern Myanmar in the late 1990's, to search for an isolated pocket of mountain habitats suspected to harbor unknown Pleistocene-era animal species. Rabinowitz, who works for the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society (and is the protégé of naturalist George Schaller, immortalized in Peter Mathiessen's The Snow Leopard), had reason to think his plan might work. After all, he'd found Pleistocene-era species on an earlier expedition to the Annamite mountains of Laos.

Without giving anything away, it's safe to say that the intrepid scientist does make some fascinating biological discoveries in northern Myanmar -- but the charm of Beyond the Last Village is how Rabinowitz finds his own humanity in the process.

At the beginning of the book, we learn that the author's interest in biology can be traced to the fact that he has always spoken with a severe stutter. The only times he truly feels comfortable have been around animals, foreign cultures, or in solitude. "Until I could physically escape my circumstances," he writes, "I learned to fight my way through my shame, but I found solace only when I was alone. Years later, when I had the opportunity to travel, it was only in the most remote areas overseas that I felt at peace. The lack of a common language was like being alone, and it was a ready excuse for not having to speak. I hid so deeply within myself that when the time came to open my heart to someone I really cared about, I didn't know how to do it. All I had to give were fragments. The whole had broken apart long ago."

In seeking the practical goal of reaching a remote area of Myanmar (and identifying the endangered wildlife there), Rabinowitz is forced into the kind of social interactions --cordial encounters with soldiers, porters, local scientists, hunters and villagers -- he has spent his whole life avoiding. In the process, he discovers animal species -- but he also finds himself bonding emotionally with the people around him: a village orphan who leaves him with a yearning for fatherhood; a curiously affectionate Buddhist monk; a tribal woman willing to give up her illegitimate baby so it can live a better life in Rangoon.

As this happens, he begins to examine his own emotional isolation. "I thought of some of the questions I'd been asking villagers during this trip, trying to pinpoint what made them happy or sad. All the answers had been less than satisfactory, mainly because they had no idea what I was asking. On the surface, these people were like everyone else. They laughed and cried, experienced frustration and pleasure. But the difference, I now realized, was that they didn't dwell on the reasons behind such emotions, nor did they bemoan their lot in life."

Stylistically, Rabinowitz is rather a dry and unadorned prose writer (often unresponsive to the humorous ironies that accompany his journey into strange environs) -- but he's good at capturing the details of this little-known Himalayan region, where salt is more valuable than money and bamboo has played a bigger role in societal development than iron. One of his most intriguing scientific discoveries comes not in the form of an animal, but a dwindling tribe of Asiatic pygmies called the Taron. Tired of living in fear and enslavement (and suffering from the ill-effects of inbreeding), the Taron have consciously decided to intermarry with their larger Htalu neighbors, effectively ending their distinctive culture. Rabinowitz's encounters with a Taron man named Dawi -- the last pure-blooded bachelor of his pygmy tribe -- are particularly poignant.

Through such earnest human interaction, Rabinowitz finds a greater appreciation of the people he's left behind, particularly his Thai-born wife (also a scientist) back in New York. As he prepares to return home, he reflects on how his travels -- and the people he's met along the way -- have helped change the way he sees the world.

"Now, in a little valley nestled in the Himalayas," he writes, "I had started to smile without knowing why, and I had started to dream of the tomorrows that could still be there. Borne on the unburdened laughter of a group of remote Tibetans, the gentle friendship of a confused monk, the unrequited love of a fatherless boy, the purposeful acceptance of a lonely death by the last Taron, and the selfless pain endured by a mother giving up her baby, my heart was lifted up through the darkness and was given back to me. For the very first time in my life, I almost felt whole."