Monkey Dancing

A suddenly single father--and nationally known environmental reporter--takes his children on a world tour of some of the world's rare and endangered life forms while reckoning with loss, change, and the challenges of parenting in this frank, funny, moving memoir. After the death of his brother and the sudden end of his marriage, and after his ex-wife moved to another state leaving him alone with their two young children, Dan Click embarked on single fatherhood in an unusual way: he took his kids on a journey around the world. The idea was to go see some of the world's rare life forms before they disappeared from the planet, and to do it before the kids themselves would grow up and chart their own paths. In the summer of 2001 Dan, Zoe, and Kolya took off from Colorado for a six-month journey on which they would see the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the orangutans of Borneo, Javan Rhinos in Vietnam, the tigers of Nepal, and more. Meeting countless challenges--emotional, logistical and physical--the threesome shared experiences they could not have imagined and would not soon forget. Glick weaves accounts of their encounters with the natural world--and each other--with intimate reflections on his own reckoning with loss, change, and fatherhood, illuminating the commonalities between our relationships with each other, and our relationship with the earth we inhabit. For anyone who dreams of travelling to the world's most exotic places, for anyone already navigating that wild journey called parenting. Monkey Dancing is by turns fascinating, funny, and wise. In the middle of the night, after my daughter Zoe woke me up for the third time because she was afraid of the snakes, I wondered, notfor the first time, whether this trip had really been such an inspired idea. Earlier. Zoe had been complaining about leeches, and before that about mosquitoes, and it dawned on me that unless you were raised in the rainforest, accustomed to strangler figs and spiders the size of gerbils, Borneo was a pretty forbidding environment. For a nine-year old girl reared in suburban Colorado, this place was downright menacing. My thirteen-year old son Kolya didn't help things when he authoritatively informed his sister that, as the smallest mammal among us, any predator would obviously eat her first. I shot Kolya a venomous look that temporarily shut him up, and reassured Zoe that it was unlikely that snakes could board the fifty-five-foot houseboat (called a klotok) where we were sleeping, moored on the banks of the Sekonyer River in southern Kalimantan. She wasn't assuaged. Zoe knew the serpents were lurking. Heading upriver earlier that afternoon, past suffocating green jungle crawling from riverbanks and Proboscis monkeys hanging from trees like misshapen, mischievous fruit, a sudden movement in the water had caught our eyes. Peering ahead, we were certain it was a crocodile. We were wrong. The animal's head, although almost as big as a crocodile's, belonged to a twenty-foot long python, with a body circumference only slightly smaller than my thigh. We gaped with disbelief as the python disappeared into the murky water. leaving a deceptively minor ripple. This was what it was all about for me, heading upriver into Heart of Darkness territory with my two children, exciting and adventurous--a voyage to the headwaters of grief. loss and--who knows?--possibly even the source of healing and graceafter such momentous transitions in our lives. Zoe occupied her own Heart of Darkness territory, portentous and terrifying. For her, the trip was an odyssey to the archetypes of fear, of a mother-less and of poisonous snakes and voracious jungle animals that make little girls disappear without a burp.

Author: Daniel Glick

Publisher:  Puplic Affairs

Released Date: 2002

ISBN: 9781586481544