A profile of conservationist and adventurer J. Michael Fay.

J. Michael Fay (Story)
U.S. News & World Report, 08/20/2001-08/27/2001

Highlight: He walked clear across Africa's wild heart
Section: Special Issue Heroes
Subsection: Cover Package; Extreme Explorers

Full Text: There are few places left in the world where elephants aren't afraid of humans, or even aware that they exist. Should you ever find yourself in one--say, 30 miles from the nearest settlement in the heart of the Congo--keep a few things in mind. "They'll bluff charge you--walk right up to you and make it clear you don't belong," says conservationist Michael Fay. "You can't run, because they'll run after you."

So when a 3-ton, 8-foot-tall bull elephant steps out of the thick jungle foliage yards away, what is a human being to do? Start screaming. "If you stand your ground, you can make them back down," the slightly built Fay explains as he plays a (very shaky) video recording he made of an elephant encounter. As Fay yells in the background, the elephant looks confused, then abruptly turns and crashes back through the jungle.

Elephants were the least of Fay's problems during his recent 15-month trek through equatorial Africa. On Sept. 20, 1999, the veteran Africa hand set out to walk 1,200 miles across most of the Republic of the Congo and Gabon, through jungles no human had ever crossed. His goal was simple: to witness one of the last pristine ecosystems on Earth--and come back with information that would guide efforts to save it from population growth, logging, and a host of other threats. "The objective was to go as deep and far from human species as possible," Fay says. His adventure may secure his place as one of the modern era's boldest adventurers.

"He risked everything in order to find out how the world works and how to preserve it," says Bill Allen, editor of National Geographic magazine, which co-sponsored the trek with the Wildlife Conservation Society. By the time Fay emerged on a Gabonese beach 460 days after he stepped into the jungle, the 44-year-old American had walked through two pairs of river sandals and 12 rolls of duct tape (he used it as "plastic skin" when river sand and sharp thorns wore his feet raw) and lost 30 pounds. He had crossed paths with elephants at least 100 times and trespassed upon the Ebola virus's home ground. And he had filled 39 yellow waterproof notebooks with data on everything from gorilla and crocodile sightings to tree species and campfires.

Fay's passion for wild places is rooted in childhood hikes into the San Gabriel mountains, which rise above the brown smog of his hometown, Los Angeles. The same passion led him to Africa with the Peace Corps and to a doctorate on the western lowland gorilla. His walk across Africa, like Lewis and Clark's trek across North America, was a scientific survey as well as an adventure. What Fay envisioned was a colossal version of an ecological transect--a standard means of sampling an ecosystem, in which a scientist tallies plants and animals along a straight path. He called it the Megatransect.

To plan the trek, Fay logged hundreds of hours in a rebuilt Cessna--a CIA castoff, complete with bullet holes--combed maps, and talked to conservationists working in the area. He was looking for the most remote patches of forest that could be traversed in a single, continuous walk, for maximum efficiency and publicity value. Once he had chosen the route, crews airdropped supplies along the way or arranged to meet the team in remote villages."This was planned out like the Gulf War. We had a huge spreadsheet of everything we needed, from eating to batteries to tents and sleeping bags," he says.

But the planning could not remove his worries that some member of his team--a shifting group of about a dozen locals and researchers--would die along the way. The team faced "malaria, raging rivers, insects, snakes that can bite you--it was improbable I was going to get across the forest without losing anybody," Fay recalls. There were two cases of hepatitis on the trail and one emotional collapse. At a particularly low point the entire team caught pneumonia.

But no one died, and Fay faced down fear in himself and others. "To be productive in different environments the fear of death can't be part of it," he says. Nor can an obsession with the hardships. The typical day began with a cup of coffee and a granola bar, followed by long hours hacking through dense foliage or slogging through swamps, and a handful of rice and some smoked fish at night. "At first you lose lots of weight and get lots of infections, and then after five or six months all of a sudden all that goes away. Your body weight stabilizes, you get strong and really fit," he says. "All there is is beautiful nature."

It wasn't just the showpiece animals--the elephants and gorillas--although there were plenty of those. "There's an amazing chorus of bird song that happens for six to 10 minutes at every dawn," he recalls. "It's as highly organized as any piece of classical music." To record it all, the Megatransect team carried global positioning system devices, digital video cameras, digital audio recorders, laptops, and a satellite phone. Even from the middle of isolated forests, Fay posted updates to National Geographic's Web site. "We recorded all sightings of animals and animal behavior, every species of tree for 10 meters on either side, and every single dung pile we saw," says Fay, who counted more than 40,000 piles on the trek. "By the time you're done, you feel like you know that jungle really well."

Today, Fay is back in the United States, turning knowledge about the jungle into tools for preserving it. "As conservationists we can't afford to sit on data for a year. We can't afford to sit on it for a week," he says. With a team of volunteers, he is transforming notes and GPS data from the Megatransect into dynamic maps, which let researchers pinpoint trouble spots and run onscreen experiments on the effects of human settlement on rain forest species. On one map, a ring of dots marks villages on the outskirts of a jungle; in the center, white blossoms represent concentrations of elephants, larger when they are farther from people.

Fay's efforts are already persuading African governments and international organizations to expand existing preserves. His next project is establishing a park in Langoue, a million-acre area in Gabon that he crossed in the Megatransect. Largely untouched by humans, it is home to elephants and bands of gorillas that have never learned to fear people. He is now trying to raise the estimated $3.5 million needed to buy rights to the land from logging companies through donations to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Fay worries that if his efforts fail, his own notes and recordings will one day be the only mementos of these pristine ecosystems. "It's unbelievable how intense and abundant life becomes when you reduce human impact down to zero," he says. Fear of losing nature's intensity only adds to his own.