When Jenny Dunfree, a graduate student in tropical ornithology, is banished to a remote, Panamanian-sponsored birding project near the Columbian border, she is given one directive by her superior: Don't tick anyone off. Almost immediately, Jenny encounters problems with this assignment. The study site where she's sent to observe nesting harpy eagles is located near an indigenous village, and upon arrival she's informed that her attendance is mandatory at many community functions. Jenny finds the native Kuna people to be a prickly lot, quick to take offense; their values, language, and customs incomprehensible to her. Equally confusing is the surrounding rainforest with its myriad of unknown and impossible to identify species. Her bewilderment extends even to the nesting eagles which the project's founder, a prominent raptor authority, insisted were rare harpy eagles but as far as Jenny can tell are a lesser species of no interest to the Republic of Panama or any other national entity. With no option out, Jenny slogs on with the research and her required attendance at weekly town hall meetings in the Kuna village. Jenny's liaison with the native people is Pedro, a man whose early education at a mission school left him fluent in English but cynical and detached from his own culture. As weeks pass, Jenny becomes acquainted with other members of the community: Eulogio, the handsome and charismatic leader; shy Iris who married and then was abandoned by Jenny's predecessor in the harpy eagle project; the racially prejudiced Anselmo; and Ceferino, in whom Jenny discovers a shared passion for the natural world. In this lawless frontera, Jenny also encounters outsiders with their own agendas for the Kunas and the surrounding rainforest. Through her eyes, the reader is drawn into Kuna culture and its struggle to retain a traditional identity in the face of erosion from both outside and within the community.
My mother always claimed that each of the kids she raised (there were eight of us) had his or her own personality from day one. My defining moment came when, at barely a year old, I was found to have climbed twenty feet up the cherry tree in our backyard. Although the monkey-like ability to climb trees was definitely my own creation, some of the blame for this incident does fall on my mother: she was the one who gifted me with Aunt Vir as a godmother.
Aunt Vir was generations ahead of her time. In 1929, she earned a master's degree in -- of all things -- entomology, and while most women were sequestered at home raising families, Aunt Vir established a career for herself in laboratory research. When abruptly widowed in her early fifties, she cashed in her life's savings and hit the road, exploring unknown or forgotten or just plain interesting corners of the globe, traveling on the cheap, returning with stories that painted my world view and nourished my night and day dreams.
With Aunt Vir, every minute was an adventure. A prosaic trip: she stopped to pick me up at college on her way back from some exciting location. She'd planned on two days for us together on the road and we'd be home in plenty of time for the holidays: in the end we got through the door just in time to open presents on Christmas morning. Car trouble somewhere in central Indiana: for anyone else this would have been an inconvenience, for Aunt Vir it was an opportunity. We met locals. We explored caves. We milked cows. We learned just about everything there was to know about manual transmissions in Ford Pintos. We even heard the music of a varied thrush, a bird normally found only in the Pacific Northwest but apparently he -- like us -- was blown off course for a week and decided to make the best of it.
From Aunt Vir, I learned that a story doesn't necessarily have to be set in an exotic local or feature earth-shattering conflict. An eye for detail, an abiding interest in the surrounding countryside, and respect and understanding for other people: if a storyteller can incorporate these elements, an audience will never be lacking.
All seven of my siblings majored in some form of liberal arts when they went to college but -- like Aunt Vir -- I leaned toward the natural sciences and chose to study botany. The evening before the oral exams for my master's degree, my mother called to tell me that Aunt Vir had died. She'd been in Egypt scuba diving in the Red Sea and on her third dive, while she was completely underwater, she'd experienced a fatal heart attack. She was 78 years old.
When I wrote SEDUCING THE SPIRITS, each of the characters was modeled after a person whom I have known. In the narrator, Jenny Dunfree, I tried to capture the adventurous spirit and love of life that I learned from my one and only Aunt Vir.
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