When The Red Phones Rings
Harvard graduates are known to excel in their fields. Some become President of the United States or president of a major news network. Wade Davis ’75 also excels in his field. He is National Geographic’s Explorer-In-Residence. What, exactly, does that entail? FM called him up to talk about the job.
FM: How do you decide which places you will visit?
WD: Generally what I’m trying to do is find stories that will allow for deeper stories that reveal the unique manifestation of the human heart. We’re all brothers and sisters. All human populations share the same raw intellectual capacity.
FM: How do you mentally prepare for your trips?
WD: A lot of it is research, and that gets me excited. Even though I’m often seen as an explorer of the world, some of my greatest explorations are in libraries.
FM: What is the first thing you do upon arriving at your destination?
WD: First impressions are always important. What keeps you from being welcomed is the inability to embrace humanity in another. Food is also symbolically important. There have been many times when I’ve been offered a plate of food in which I was sure that if I ate it, I would get some kind of severe disease. But I always accept it and eat the food anyway. You can always treat a disease, but you can never rebuild that trust again.
FM: Did Wes Craven personally contact you when Universal decided to make a motion picture out of your book, “Serpent and the Rainbow”?
WD: What happened was my agent sold the book to a producer who brought the project to Universal. Wes Craven, who ended up directing it, is a very thoughtful man. But he just made another horror film. It was very discouraging.
Something that you should really ask me is how does one get here. Students are fed this lie that life is linear and that you have to go through all the letters in order to get to the end of the alphabet. Life is totally serendipitous. It’s made up of wonderful moments when crossroads meet in front of you and you have to find a way to follow your own heart. You get to junior year and everyone’s worrying about what they’re going to do in life—med school, law school, simply because it’s easy. But these things can be a real lost opportunity for others. If you can stay true to yourself when you hit these crossroads then you control the decisions [you make] and years later you know you’ve done the right thing.
FM: What did you do for fun as a Harvard undergrad?
WD: I’m not sure if fun was the word. I think I lived the undergraduate experience rather intensely. My life is divided into two periods: the Pre-[Richard Evans] Schultes period and the period after. Schultes put me under a spell—he totally turned me on to what I wanted to do. I took my first bio class junior year, and I remember I was reading about photosynthesis and they asked me to leave the Science Center library for making too much noise. I felt like a blind person who had finally come to see, and I screamed with joy when I [found out] how this all works. If you have the right teacher, every day is a revelation.