The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  At night the boatmen unrolled our futons and hung up mosquito netting. Michael and Jon chose to sleep in the shoulder-high space below decks, while Christopher, Herbert, and I lay down in the airier but more exposed position on top, covered by an awning. From there, we fell asleep to the quiet buzzing of the night jungle.

  Next morning, as soon as dawn broke, we received our first visitor of the day. It was Jekky, a young male orangutan about five years old. He ambled around in slow and deliberate orangutan fashion on his knuckles, hoping to snag some of the bananas he was sure we were hiding. In wonder and delight, we softly came towards him and made our offerings, and soon we had a good relationship going with the young orangutan. His main interest was breakfast, but he was also content to be swung around by his arms or legs. There were many of us willing to oblige on both counts.

  Soon we were also joined by Rosemary, a fully-grown female orangutan, and her two children. When we learned Rosemary’s story, we fell in love. About two years before, Rosemary had become interested in an orphaned orangutan baby being raised by veterinarians at the station. Full of maternal concern, Rosemary had broken in and kidnapped the infant so that she could raise it herself in the wild. When Rosemary’s own infant was later born, she continued to care for her adopted son as if it were her own. She appeared with her two babies, the adopted one about twice the size of her little one, which was now a year old and clinging to its mother’s body for all it was worth. It was hard for Rosemary to walk or climb with the two heavy bodies attached to her, so she often brushed off the older one, making him climb on his own whenever he could. But he never left her side, nor let go of her long orange fur.

  We approached Rosemary and her babies with awe and fed them bananas, which Rosemary chewed first before giving to her infant. She did not object when we stroked the fur of her little ones. A sleek black cat had appeared, a pet of one of the park rangers, and it positioned itself comfortably on a wooden bench nearby. Rosemary spotted the cat and, with her smallest baby positioned like a backpack and her adopted son clinging to one side, slowly ambled over to where the cat was curled up on the bench. The cat watched her approach, apparently unconcerned. The great orange ape stood directly in front of the little puss and inspected it closely for a minute. Then she extended her muscular, hairy arm and gently, so gently, began patting the cat on the back. The older of her two babies got very excited about this and began waving his own arm in the air in a jerky patting motion as if he wanted to do the same.

  Then Rosemary gently took the cat’s short black tail and half-lifted the cat into the air, as if to check whether it was male or female. Unbelievably, the cat submitted patiently, although with glaring eyes, to this uncomfortable inspection. When one of our guides made a threatening noise, Rosemary guiltily dropped the cat and backed away, looking just as I do when I’m caught sneaking Hershey’s Kisses in the middle of the night. Later we learned that Rosemary had quite a reputation for fighting with other grown orangutans, but she clearly had a soft spot in her heart for tiny helpless creatures.

  Rosemary and her babies left, after being convinced that they had depleted our supply of bananas. This enabled little Jekky, who had been warily hanging in the background, to return to the water’s edge. Jekky had shown a particular fondness for Herbert, and now he grabbed his hand, leading Herbert down the boardwalk towards the feeding station a kilometre or two away. But Jekky had not the slightest intention of walking that whole distance. Instead, he boldly shinnied up and settled himself happily on Herbert’s hip, draping his long hairy arms casually around Herbert’s neck.

  Before long, our captain, while flattered at the attention, began remarking on the weight of his solidly built buddy, who was a good thirty kilos. But if he made any motion to put Jekky down, the orangutan clung on with his powerful arms in such a way that it became clear he was not going to be put off very easily. Christopher used to do the very same to me when I was trying to throw him into the water: he called it “barnacling.” Herbert was forced to continue walking through the jungle with his giant hairy barnacle, and the look on his face suggested he wasn’t altogether unhappy with the arrangement.

  Halfway down the path, Jekky jumped down and went over to take Christopher’s hand. We soon discovered the new game Jekky had in mind. As soon as he had one of Christopher’s hands firmly in his, the orangutan grabbed Christopher’s other wrist and then swiftly clamped on to both of Christopher’s ankles with his feet. In a flash, Christopher found himself bound, hand and foot, to this orangutan, which was about the same size he was. Rolling over onto his back, Jekky pulled Christopher over right on top of him. He wanted to play!

  Christopher, giggling nervously, was a little taken aback by this overture. He didn’t know quite what he was supposed to do. Jekky released Christopher’s hands while keeping his ankles in handcuffs and lay on his back, his long arms outstretched over his head. He seemed to be inviting a tickle, so Christopher obliged. Then the wrestling began in earnest, with Jekky’s incredibly powerful arms pulling Christopher over on top of him until they were rolling around together on the spongy jungle floor. Christopher, to his credit, entered into the spirit of the thing and didn’t panic at being manhandled by a wild ape many times his strength. The orangutan clearly understood that the smaller humans were children like he was, and saw them as potential playmates, albeit spindly and weak ones.

  After Christopher found himself spilled on the jungle floor once too often, he decided he’d had enough. Herbert and I gently disentangled the two wrestling partners. Unlike the mercurial Nyo, Jekky accepted the end of the match with good grace. There can’t be many seven-year-olds in the history of the world who have wrestled with a wild orangutan. Christopher took it all in stride, as if this kind of thing happened to him every day.

  We had become separated from our guide and the rest of the group. We hadn’t gone too much farther before Jekky signalled to us that we were going the wrong way. Just like a little boy at the candy counter, he began tugging insistently on Herbert’s hand, leading us on the correct path towards the orangutan feeding station. Having set us straight, Jekky dropped Herbert’s hand and quietly evaporated into the jungle, leaving us alone among the wild orchids, carnivorous pitcher plants, and vines on the tree-shrouded path.

  Then we noticed another visitor knuckling down the track. This was Toyo, a baby orangutan a little smaller than Christopher. No doubt he and Jekky had compared notes, because Toyo also wanted to play with these special small-sized human visitors, a pretty rare event in these parts. Toyo headed straight for our boys and a brand new and equally unforgettable match of orangutan wrestling began.

  Soon the park rangers arrived, carrying bananas and sweetened milk, and our attention became focused on the orangutans of all shapes and sizes that began emerging out of the trees in response to the rangers’ bellowing calls.

  From far away you could see the treetops ominously sway and bend as large apes weighing fifty to a hundred kilos swung over to the elevated feeding platform. Using hanging vines and bending branches, they catapulted themselves expertly through the forest canopy. A dozen true “Georges of the Jungle” quickly congregated on the raised platform, gorging themselves on bananas and using their hands as cups to drink fortified milk from a bucket.

  We capped off the day with a delicious cool swim in the tea-coloured water, while our boatmen watched out for crocodiles, before falling asleep again to the hum of the jungle.

  Our next day’s objective was a visit to a notorious illegal gold mine. Many of our boatmen had been nervous about taking us there. One of our guides was absolutely against it, but our favourite guide, Andi, assured us that the miners would be welcoming provided we brought gifts of cigarettes, sugar, coffee, and candy. We headed up the river in our narrow wooden boats to visit the mine, which government officials and international environmental groups like Greenpeace had been unsuccessful in closing down. On the way, we stopped at a rickety wooden store on stilts, built to service the nearby
loggers’ camp, and bought our peace offerings.

  The mine was located at the very end of the navigable part of the Sekonyer River, which became increasingly choked by vegetation the farther up we penetrated. Often, branches and fronds of plants brushed against the walls of our little boats and their leaves fell inside the big square lower-deck windows, where the five children played cards while watching the passing scenery, with frequent stops for monkey-spotting.

  The mine itself was a giant scar on the land, a moonscape completely denuded of trees. The men, women, and children who lived there, in dust, dirt, and squalor on the perimeter of the national park, placed their very lives on the line each day in order to scrabble out a few dollars worth of gold dust from the scorching earth. Under their depredations, the rainforest was turning into an arid wasteland. Once the trees were cut down, the topsoil had quickly been washed away, leaving an ugly, sterile sandpit that might take hundreds of years to grow over again. It was the exact opposite of an oasis, a splotch of desert in the middle of the rainforest.

  Using a giant hose, the miners blasted water at the soil, creating a pool of sandy sludge that was slurped up by a pump then run over a piece of ordinary carpet and down a sluice, where it collected in a pond that eventually drained back into the river. As the men blasted the water into the hillside, the sandy pit in which they were standing sank deeper and deeper. The lower it got, the greater the risk of the wall above them collapsing. When this happened, as it did regularly, anyone unlucky enough to be standing beneath it would be killed instantly. In this mine and a handful of others in the immediate area, on average one person died in such a landslide every month. This means that twelve people out of a workforce of three hundred died each year. And that doesn’t include the unknown number of people who were killed by long-term exposure to the toxic mercury that is used to extract the gold from the mud.

  This particular mine was almost at the end of its life, producing only seven grams of gold a day, for a total income of seventy dollars. Almost half of this amount was remitted to a boss in Kumai, who laid out the capital for hoses, pump, and diesel generator. The thirty-five dollars that remained supported about forty men, women, and children. Of course, the children had no prospect of going to school; they began working in the mine at the age of eight or ten and would continue doing so until they died.

  After bathing the rugs to remove the gold trapped in their fibres, the miners dumped the sandy residue into a water-filled bucket, to which they added half a vial of pure mercury. By running the liquid mercury through their fingers, the miners helped it to bond with the almost invisible grains of gold. The miner we watched seemed to have no idea that by handling the mercury with his bare hands, he was slowly but surely poisoning himself.

  When a small, quivering, silvery blob of gold-mercury remained in the miner’s hand, he dumped the rest of the bucket’s mixture of sand, water, and mercury into the pond, where it ran directly into the river and through the national park. Before this operation opened a few years before, the river had run clear. Now, thanks to run-off from the mine, it had turned an opaque brown, and the aquatic life the river supported was dead or dying. The volunteers at the first station in the park were forced to use this mercury-laden water for bathing and sometimes even for drinking. No one knows what it may be doing to the orangutans and other animals that have no other source of drinking water.

  We watched as the gold was smelted. This was the most hazardous phase of all. Using a foot bellows and a blowtorch, a young woman, who looked to be about six months pregnant, burned off the mercury until there was nothing left but a molten blob of liquid gold. One moment she held a red-hot blob of liquid in her spoon; the next she immersed the spoon in a bowl of water and the blob was magically transformed into a gleaming seven-gram nugget of pure gold. She probably had no idea that the mercury she was burning off was entering the air she breathed, poisoning her and her developing baby. Beside her were her two little children, even more vulnerable than their mother to the effects of the mercury. At another illegal goldmine, a young worker gave birth to a baby badly deformed by mercury poisoning, with its intestines formed outside its body. It died shortly after. God only knew if the same fate awaited this young woman’s unborn child.

  We each reverently held the still-warm nugget, surprisingly heavy for its small size. This alluring little dot of gold, with its new quality of menace, contained an unmistakable symbolism.

  As we left the gold mine and descended back downstream in our blue and white longboat, we passed many other fresh wounds upon the Kalimantan jungle. The scars on the otherwise beautiful face of the rain-forest were not like the ugly exposed pits of the gold mine; these were logging tracks, chains of newly cut trees reaching out in pairs of parallel lines into the jungle, joined together by a series of smaller logs like oversized train tracks. The tracks were to allow huge logs to be slid down to the river from deep within the jungle, where sixty- and eighty-year-old hardwood trees were being felled. We passed a great many log booms, rafts almost half a kilometre long of huge rainforest logs tied together for their trip to the voracious sawmills of Kumai. Each night, while we slept on the river, we would be awakened by more of these log booms passing by, the narrow way lit by powerful torchlights. The long rafts, illegally taken from the jungle, were being secretly brought to market under cover of darkness.

  The loggers were not only destroying valuable rainforest, they were actually pushing right inside the national park, a protected area and the jewel of Indonesia’s park system. This destruction of one of the world’s most precious parks was happening right before our eyes.

  The logging was also directly contributing to the death of the orangutan in one of its last refuges in the world. Once, hundreds of thousands of orangutans ranged throughout southeast Asia. But human kind, one of the orangutan’s closest relatives, is also its most vicious enemy. As people claimed ownership over the vast forests, logging and clearing them for cultivation, the orangutan’s few remaining places of refuge dwindled away. Some scientists predict that the species will be extinct in the wild in only ten years more. The orangutan is in critical danger, and logging is its principal enemy.

  Our guide, Andi, was a Dayak tribesman who had grown up deep in the jungle, a six-hour walk from the nearest village. Over the previous three days, we had found Andi to be not only an intelligent, deep thinking, even intellectual, man, but also remarkably well informed. Over his working life (Andi was in his late thirties), he had been a fisherman, gold miner, logger, bricklayer, and now tourist guide. While he had the heart of a conservationist and was actively involved in working for the protection of animals, which endeared him to us, Andi also had strong ties to people on the other side of the fence. This made him the perfect guide, since he had inexhaustible knowledge of just about everything we could think to ask him.

  It was Andi who agreed, against the objections of the other boatmen, to take us to the gold mine, and now it was Andi who asked whether we were interested in visiting the illegal loggers in one of their camps.

  We stopped at a ramshackle collection of houses tottering on tall stilts at the river’s edge. This was a logging camp, where a team of half a dozen loggers and their families lived while exploiting the timber in the immediate area. The houses were just outside the park, across the narrow river, but each day the men crossed the river to steal logs from inside the park. These particular homes had been there for two years. Young children wearing fake designer watches smiled at us from rickety boards that joined the crudely built houses. Small dugout canoes served to link the miserable collection of raised huts, and to transport the men across the river.

  We sat outside one of these homes and passed around candies while Andi translated our questions to the loggers and their families. They refused Andi’s request that we go to where the loggers were actually felling trees inside the park, but they were friendly enough and willing to talk.

  Later, we visited a second group of loggers, and with the gift o
f sugar, coffee, and cigarettes, we convinced them to let us go with them into the park. We watched as they hauled a gigantic illegally felled tree all the way to the river. As we watched, a powerful boat filled with armed policemen, whose job it was to prevent just this activity, sped by. Our loggers were not dismayed, however. The police, we were told, had come not to arrest anyone, but to collect their bribes.

  Gradually, our eyes began opening with horror to what we had been seeing over the past week. Before, we had admired the hustle and bustle of the Kumai riverfront, where dozens of muscular wooden barges fifteen metres wide and three times as long were being loaded with huge red logs. But now it slowly dawned on us that everything we had seen was based on the theft of trees from the national park. And it was being done right in the open, under the very noses of authorities whose job it was to protect the park.

  We asked Andi what proportion of the logs we had seen in Kumai came from the illegal logging within the park. Andi looked at me quizzically, as if I had asked a stupid question.

  “They are all illegal,” he replied.

  “You mean to say that everything we see in Kumai is illegal logs coming from inside the park?”

  “All the legal trees outside the park have already been cut. At least 95 per cent of the logs you see come from inside the park,” he answered.

  When we’d heard enough, we climbed back into our longboats, waved goodbye to the loggers, and continued down the river. My head was spinning. On our right, on the non-park side of the river, we could see old logging tracks, no longer in use because all the valuable timber had long since been removed. On our left, fresh logging tracks led right into the park, and we could see long rafts of illegal logs waiting to be pulled down the river to Kumai, where sawmills and log barges eagerly awaited them.