Part 1: In his early twenties, Jonathan Feakins goes above and beyond for his job as a West Nile virus mosquito technician
Jonathan Feakins is just some nerd who has tried to spend his life wandering strange places, reading obscure books, doing weird science, petting adorable animals, fighting the good fight, and having wonderful friends. He somehow has a species of earthworm named after him, and once got kicked out of an all-you-can-eat restaurant (for eating all he could eat). He first learned the power of a good story from his grandmother, as she regaled him with tales about her childhood pet crocodile (whose name was Baby), or about the time she (accidentally) cleared out a biker bar with a Swazi bible student named Enoch. You can learn more about his questionable life choices at bookwormcity.com.
Part 2: While working as a coral reef biologist in Panama in 1989, Nancy Knowlton and her young daughter are taken into the custody of the Panamanian military when the U.S. invades.
Nancy Knowlton has been a scientist with the Smithsonian since 1984 and is now a scientist emerita, first in Panama and most recently at the National Museum of Natural History in DC. She’s also been a professor at Yale and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she founded the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Her work on coral reefs has taken her literally around the world, and she has spent so much time underwater that she long ago lost count of the hours. She has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the author of Citizens of the Sea, and was the Editor-in-Chief of the Ocean Portal website. Despite the glut of bad news these days, you can find her @seacitizens talking about #OceanOptimism and #EarthOptimism.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Jonathan Feakins
Approximately one lifetime ago, my official job title was West Nile Virus Mosquito technician, which is about as amazing and ridiculous as it sounds. Basically, what this job entailed is grabbing bags of mosquitoes anywhere from DC to Baltimore, from National Mall to Maryland wetland and then choke them either into a deep freezer, where I’ll later sort them by species and I'd test them for the virus, or take a sample of female mosquitoes and dissect their ovaries with extraordinarily tiny needles.
Jonathan Feakins shares his story at Northcenter Town Square in Chicago, IL in September 2021. Phto by Seed Lynn.
And this was an amazing thing to me. I was 23 years old and, up to that point, I'd done a bunch of like science education jobs. I'd been a park ranger. I taught at space camps. I once worked at an anatomy museum where I had to spend my lunch hour searching for a stolen human kidney, but this was like my first big boy science research job. I was super jazzed because mosquitoes come out at night and so do I, so we were ‘simpatico’. You know what I mean? We got along fine.
One of the neat things about this job is that so long as I was able to swap out the traps each day before sundown, I could basically do the lab work whenever I wanted. Mosquitoes, if they’re dead, don't really care when you're dissecting them. So I was able to basically, by about week one or two of this job, wake up about noon and then proceed to go pick up the equipment, swap out all the traps, roll it into the zoo where we were working by sundown, and then just listen to music until like 11:00 p.m. at night. At which point, every night of the week, I would then have to break out of the zoo.
We were working in the zoo in the laboratories. We were not technically zoo employees so we had no keys. Consequentially, every day I would leave work and have to roll up to the gate, scale the fence and then leap out of the zoo, which is an incredibly effective way to terrify dog walkers. Just incredibly effective.
I would do the like Blade superhero landing on the sidewalk, look up and there's some senator's aide with their Shiba Inu like half a block up just staring at me, and then turning on their heel and power-walking the other direction.
And it doesn't help either. You can't yell after them with like, “No, no, no, no. I'm legit. You can't do this. Do you want to know more about disease ecology?” Like I'm just the nerdiest mugger of all time. This is not something that works.
It was all well and good and then I would just stay out until like 2:00, 3:00 in the morning each night and do this whole thing over again the next morning. And this was sweet.
Jonathan Feakins shares his story at Northcenter Town Square in Chicago, IL in September 2021. Phto by Seed Lynn.
Then about two months in, I woke up and I'm like, “All right, time to go to work.” I feel mildly warm. That's weird. But, hey, it's DC in July. That's fine. And I proceed to go out to gather my traps and swap out all the stuff.
And I'm getting there and I'm rolling up to one of my sites. It's this community garden in Anacostia across the river. I'm like, this is feeling uncomfortable. I'm sweating more than I would be expecting to sweat. And also, where are these traps? I'm starting to get a little bit confused and not quite in my right mind.
And these traps are not easy to find. We would use dry ice to bring in the mosquitoes because carbon dioxide is what they're attracted to. But consequentially, we would hide these things. Because there's nothing that DC cops love more than a smoking thermos of dry ice next to the Smithsonian. You know what I mean?
So we would try to find these things and sometimes, especially that day, I'm like, “Where are these things again?” And I spend hours getting progressively just sweaty and wretched and confused, which, again, also doesn't help when you stumble out of the bushes at a community garden and startle, again, some poor grandmother just trying to harvest a rutabaga. And you're like, “I'm just looking for the mosquitoes,” and then stumbling back into the forest again. This is not great PR.
Eventually, as time goes on. I am ready to call it. I'm ready to say that I am in a terrible state and I need to go probably to a hospital as soon as I get some sleep. So I take the L and I get in the car and I go back to the zoo which, again, not great to do when you're feverish. I've never gotten back to the zoo that late and everything is closed.
I'm circling the zoo, trying to find an entrance, and it's only when I see an entrance that might be open and I take a left do I feel the cars wheels ramp up onto the sidewalk. Because, no, I am not thinking clearly whatsoever. I do recall a biker gently screaming at me about what in God's name I was doing.
And, no, I was not doing well. I don't know what I did with the car. I can't remember that part. But I went to bed somehow, got up the next morning, went in to work and I say, “Hello. I feel like death, slightly warmed over. And, oh, yeah, by the way…” and I hike up my leg and there is now, on my upper thigh, a dinner plate sized rash that has basically blossomed.
Because one of the things about this job too is a lot of the places we were going also had ticks. There was no monopoly on bloodsuckers that we had, right? And we had this guy in the lab who asked us to collect ticks, because we were in a lot of the same places that they were.
They all looked at this and they all kind of socked in their teeth and they said, “That is 100% Lyme disease. That is 100% an acute case of Lyme disease and you need to go to the hospital now.”
So I call the hospital and I say, “Hello. How are you? My name is Jonathan. I absolutely have Lyme disease. I need medication as soon as humanly possible.”
I don't know if you ever called up to a hospital and self-diagnosed with a catastrophic illness and demanded medication. Not something they take kindly to, honestly.
They say, “No, no. You can’t— you got to come in first and we get tested and then you get the test results back. There's a whole process.”
And I say, “That's amazing. I totally get where you're coming from. I'm going to hand you off to this lanky PhD fellow by the name of Ryan who's done the past seven years of his life on Lyme disease who's presently staring at my thigh.”
Thankfully, Ryan is able to vouch for me and say, “Oh, yeah, maybe he should definitely get some antibiotics before sundown.”
So I roll up to the hospital. And again, this is one of those things. You're kind of in a critical juncture. Acute Lyme is terrible. Chronic Lyme is worse. If you don't get treated, it gets into your body. It causes, over the years, arthritis and brain fog and chronic fatigue. It's a catastrophic situation.
And I roll in to this doctor's room and there's two guys there. I drop trou and both their faces just light up with joy. They say, “That is the most beautiful textbook case of Lyme disease that we have ever seen in our lives. Would you please be so kind as to wait a couple of seconds while we get the camera and the interns?”
I'm like, “Yeah, man. The science.” And I'm just slowly dying on the inside.
They bring in everybody on the floor and they basically are quizzing them on my half‑naked body. They're like, “Hey, what's that?”
They're like, “Lyme disease.”
They're like, “Yeah. It's amazing.” High fives.
After 20 minutes of that, finally, we are done and they give me, literally, over-the-counter doxycycline for $20.
That's how, 15 years later, I hopefully don't have white spots in my brain.
Part 2: Nancy Knowlton
So in 1984, before most of you were born, I suspect, my husband and I gave up our jobs at Johns Hopkins and Yale to move to Panama to work for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute called STRI for short. At the time, our friends and family thought we were actually pretty crazy to give up fairly prestigious jobs in U.S. academia and moved to the jungle, which is what they considered Panama, although even Panama City really looks more like Miami City than the jungle.
But we did it anyway because, for two coral reef biologists, these were great jobs with coral reefs right next door. And plus there were two jobs in one place, which is what we really wanted so we could have a family. We didn't waste any time. Our daughter Rebecca was born about a year exactly after we got there.
It was Panama, however, so we had to learn a new language and a new culture. And we get home from work and our heads were sort of throbbing from all the novelty. And it was also a country that was run by General Manuel Noriega.
Now, he was a not-so-benign dictator and he was known for throwing people he didn't like out of helicopters. For that reason, we talked softly in restaurants because you never know who's going to be sitting at the next table.
I learned to drive to work through big phalanxes of tanks with the guns pointing at my little car. And actually, once after an attempted coup, which was pretty violent on the streets, we were all given classes on what to do if your way is blocked by a burning car. Turns out what you do is you just smash right into the front of it or the back of it and it turns around, in theory. I've never practiced it myself.
In any case, that's what things were like when we got there. I was sort of like the proverbial frog in a slowly warming pot of water.
Nancy Knowlton shares her story with our audience in Washington DC at Bier Baron Tavern in June 2018. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.
But there was the science, which is of course why we went there. And once a month, I would go to the San Blas Islands off the Caribbean coast, work a little field station there. In the day we'd go out and study snapping shrimp and corals, the organisms that I've— both of which I love.
And in the evening we'd come home and write up our notes. This was just a few little bamboo huts on a sand island. No running water, kerosene lamps for light, and it was very, very simple and primitive but you could do great science. There were also wonderful sunsets and sunrises. The stars were spectacular and the thunderstorms were pretty awesome as well.
So as science goes, it was a pretty romantic inspirational place and, for that reason, after Rebecca was born, I used to bring her with me. That's in fact what we were planning on doing in the middle of December 1989 just after her fourth birthday because my husband was heading off to France, as he likes to do, to do something or other. And so we were going to be on our own so we decided to go to the San Blas.
By then Panama got even a little bit weirder. Manuel Noriega used to be on the payroll of the CIA, but because of his drug trafficking and money laundering, they eventually fired him. By then, in fact, we were being paid in wads of hundred-dollar bills which we put in our bureaus because it was illegal for the U.S. government to do any business with Panamanian banks. Still, I didn't really worry too much about going to the San Blas because nothing special was likely to happen. It was just kind of chronically weird rather than acutely weird.
So I went off with Rebecca and her Panamanian nanny Agapita. However, on the 19th of December, the U.S. invaded Panama. Some of you may remember that, at least in your history books. But we were in the San Blas. We had no way of knowing that this was going on.
Except for that on the morning of the 20th, two members of our team headed off to the local airport and thinking they were heading back to Venezuela for the Christmas holidays, but they came back within about 15 minutes with a fairly ominous tale of canceled flights. No flights and fighting between U.S. troops and Panamanian troops in Panama City.
Panicked, we radioed STRI and said what should we do. Of course they had no idea what we should do. They were dealing with a lot worse than we were. We were just on some isolated island. They had bombs dropping and people shooting. And in any case, the options pretty soon narrowed quite quickly as a big boat full of armed soldiers arrived and said that we, all 11 of us on the island, were going with them.
So I grabbed Rebecca her favorite stuffed animal and of course my data, I am a scientist, and got in the boat. So we headed to the mainland where there was a small airstrip carved out of the forest and they said, “Get out of the boat and walk to the end of the runway.”
This didn't seem very promising because there was no airplane at the end of the runway. In fact, as I walked down the airstrip holding Rebecca's hand and talking to this really grouchy, mean guy who was in charge of this operation saying, “You can't do this to us. We have international mission status. We're like the UN,” in my best diplomatic Spanish but he didn't seem impressed at all.
And actually, honestly in about 15 or 20 seconds, I began to realize that we were likely to wind up as a pile of bodies at the end of the runway, decomposing in a sweltering tropical sun. But of course that didn't happen, otherwise I wouldn't be telling you this story.
So we got to the end of the runway and they said turn left into the forest. So we went left into the forest and walked for a couple of paces and sat down to wait and wait in basically terrified silence. Eventually, we were told to start walking again and head up the mountain. And this turned out to be a very long walk, 21 kilometers in total, and made somewhat longer by the fact that although I'd remembered my data, I'd forgotten to bring my daughter's shoes, so she had to be carried.
Nancy Knowlton shares her story with our audience in Washington DC at Bier Baron Tavern in June 2018. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.
Fortunately, everyone was strong and they were all very enthusiastic about carrying her. Actually in retrospect, at least for us, it was actually pretty nice to have her with us because, first of all, she sort of ensured that the adults kept it together. There's no point us kind of going into hysterics if their four-year-old was calm, although we certainly had every reason to.
And then also, Panamanians, even Panamanian soldiers really love children. And so this little blue‑eyed, blond-haired, Panamanian passport-carrying girl who spoke perfect street Spanish made us seem a lot more human to our captors.
So we walked and we walked and we walked and eventually, around midnight, we came to the top of a hill and a clearing. Now, they told us to cut our flashlight so no one could spot us from above and we walked to this house, which was bizarrely surrounded by 200 pairs of boots.
We walked in the house and this nice man greeted us and he said, “Come into this room.” So we went into the room, but this, as you can imagine, we were a little bit shell-shocked by then. And came into the room and he presented us with a book. It was the register, guest register to sign. This was not the Hilton, of course, but it was the Nusigandi Field Station and he wanted a record of our visit, which I thought was really sweet. He was also the person who ensured that the soldiers took off their boots so they wouldn't ruin the beautiful wood floors.
By then we were really, really tired and I was totally out of adrenaline. But fortunately, Agapita had enough adrenaline left to realize that it would not be a good idea for us to sleep in a room with 30 young male Panamanian soldiers. So she ensured that we slept safely that night by ourselves.
The next morning, we woke up and it was pretty clear that we were going to be much more trouble than we were worth because the U.S. government was definitely not going to be trading us for Noriega. So we had to be fed, et cetera.
Also, a much nicer person, older person was suddenly there and he was apparently the person in charge of the whole operation. I think what was going on was that he was realizing that his future in Panama might be a lot better if we survived this escapade and made it back to Panama City.
So he even at one point got me a box of tampons. My body was not cooperating during this whole ordeal. And eventually brought us to the house of a rural teacher.
Now, this teacher brought all his food together and cooked us the first meal we'd had in quite a while. And then we watched on TV, his little TV hooked up with a coat hanger, and saw President George H.W. Bush announce that he thought the Smithsonian hostages had been rescued.
Now, of course we hadn't been rescued, but we were getting closer. In fact, one of the team members, who was a lot more astute than I was, had managed to smuggle a radio. And so we used that radio to call STRI headquarters and let them know where we were and say, “Please, pick us up.”
The next day, we, in fact, were greeted by two enormous helicopters. One of them had stayed up in the air with two really large guns to make sure no one would bother with the other helicopter which was closer to the ground. And I'll never forget picking up Rebecca and passing her to this giant guy in the doorway and then scrambling in to a space that felt as large as a living room. It was huge.
Then we skimmed over the trees of the forest on our way to Panama City. For a while, I actually thought we might all die in a helicopter crash because we were only about a foot-and-a-half above the trees, but it turns out that if you're in a hostile territory, it makes sense to fly really low because then it's much harder with the helicopter zooming by to actually shoot it down. I learned all sorts of things about warfare.
So we got to the air force base, which was, in its way, also incredibly surreal and crazy, as you can imagine. In fact, for two days, I couldn't place any phone calls at all. Finally, two days later, I reached my husband who, needless to say, was glad to hear from me, and having enjoyed a very nice time in France.
And he passed on a very useful piece of information, which was that Good Morning America wanted to know why I was still in Panama. He suggested that I bring that piece of information to someone in charge.
So I tried to find someone in charge, pass on that information and, sure enough, four hours later I was in a plane heading back to the United States. It's amazing what the threat of the press will do.
So we landed about 2:00 in the morning on Christmas morning in the snow and we drove to D.C. I had an amazingly emotional call with my family. My father went to church every Sunday after that for the rest of his life to thank to God for my making it back.
And then we had dinner not far from here in the Willard Hotel. The waiter was told who we were and so he found a quiet place for us. And when Rebecca started to fade, he made a little bed out of tablecloths.
About a month later, we went back to Panama and we actually wound up staying there for eight years. I have to say this experience actually made me feel much warmer about Panama and its people. After all, other than that first really crabby guy, people were really pretty nice to us, especially considering it was our military forces which had invaded their country. In fact, the Panamanians in the group, about half of them were Panamanian, had been offered the chance to leave. They refused to leave us and they stayed with us through the whole ordeal. So it was really a pretty powerful statement of what the people of Panama are like.
Now, of course I was a little bit shell-shocked by the whole thing. I spent a year building a dollhouse as therapy for my daughter I think because I couldn't believe I'd almost gotten her killed for the sake of a few data points. And then also I have to say I remain existentially terrified of guns.
But apart from that, I've survived pretty well. I don't often tell this story. It's a little emotional and draining to tell. It's not the sort of thing you say, “Oh, let me tell you the story about being kidnapped in Panama.”
Rebecca sometimes tells it. In fact, once, when we were back in the United States, we got a call from her Spanish teacher saying, “What's this story about your daughter's telling about being taken hostage in Panama? Is she making this all up?”
“Oh, no, no. She's not making that up.”
And of course it made for a great college application essay.
Finally, I'm 69 years old. And when you're as old as I am, things start coming around full circle. Last December, almost exactly 28 years ago to the day of our ordeal, Rebecca got married. And her former nanny and once hostage mate Agapita, now a dear friend, came with her family and joined us in the celebration. I guess the moral of this story is all's well that ends well. Thank you.