Tales of a Female Nomad

by Rita Golden Gelman

  Oh, my God! He’s speaking English.

  “Hello. I’m Rita. I’m a writer from America, but I’ve just come in from Yogya. Are you part of the government group?”

  “No. I’m a photographer for Tempo (Indonesia’s Time magazine).” A journalist. I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes; I have been saved.

  “You don’t know how happy I am to see you.”

  Abdul and I are nearly inseparable for the next four days.

  We have been moving inland and upriver for two days. This morning, after a torrential rainstorm overnight, the river is brown and swirling and more powerful than our motor. We move to the edge and pull the boat against the current, gripping the vines and branches, moving ourselves upstream, stopping occasionally to rest by holding onto a branch until we catch our breath. A trip that should have taken half a day takes twice as long; and then, long after dark, we are told to get out. Miraculously, deep in the rain forest, in a place that is accessible only by river, a truck is waiting for us.

  We drive for what seems like hours in bright moonlight on a road built by a Korean logging company, a dusty, smooth road that winds its way through fields of stumps as far as the eye can see. I have no idea where we are, but I know I am witnessing the destruction of the rain forest. We ride on and on until finally, in the middle of the night, we arrive in a village that is sound asleep. But not for long. We are important guests that must be honored.

  While the chickens are being killed for our midnight meal, chairs are brought in and placed along the walls of a big room. We are welcomed with speeches, entertained with music, songs, and dancing, and the local brew. The night before, we slept in another village and we were purified and welcomed individually by the touch of a tiny chicken on key places of our bodies, and prayers, and a sip of a brandylike liquor. Then we were invited to dance. This night we are welcomed with speeches; and when the speeches are finished, we are again invited to dance. Finally we are left to sit in chairs lined up against the walls while we wait for our dinner.

  I am overwhelmed, hungry, tired . . . and feeling extraordinarily privileged to be here. I look around the room at the guests; all but three of us are Indonesian citizens; many are native tribespeople of Kalimantan. I have talked to most of them, thanks to Abdul, my journalist-photographer friend and translator. The only people in the room I have not spoken to are Biruté Galdikas and her entourage. I glance over to where she is sitting. There is an empty chair next to her. Abdul notices the empty chair at the same time as I do.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “What can she do to you?”

  He and I and probably many others in the room have been talking about how odd it is that she and I have not exchanged even one word. Indonesians do not understand overt rudeness; whatever the circumstances, the impression of civility must always be maintained.

  I walk over and sit down.

  “Dr. Galdikas,” I say. “I admire your work very much. What you are doing is very important to the worlds of primatology and anthropology. Have you ever considered writing a book for children explaining what you do? It is, after all, the children who will carry on your work some day.”

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “I have written many books for children, both fiction and nonfiction. And I have a master’s degree in anthropology. If you are interested, I would like very much to talk to you about working together on a book. I would do the writing, but I would write in your voice, in the first person, and the author would be you. I can stay here in Kalimantan for as long as it takes us to finish it.”

  She does not smile; nor does she ask me my name . . . or anything else.

  “I will discuss it with you after this trip is over. When you get back to Pangkalan Bun, stay in the Blue Kecubung Hotel. I will send for you when I am ready to talk.”

  And I am dismissed.

  The village where the ceremony is to take place is still getting ready when we arrive, but the air is bursting with celebration. It is clear that preparations for this event have been in process for months. Small wooden houses have been whitewashed. A new footpath has been constructed through the center and out toward the cemetery. And throughout the area of the ceremony, there are small, decorative constructions of fringed bamboo poles wearing hats, flags made of batik fabrics, tall teepeelike structures, and old weathered wood sculptures of taller-than-life humans from another era. There are traditional houses on stilts, tables with fringed skirts filled with cups and glasses and baskets, and mats and gong instruments waiting for players.

  The local people are dressed in jeans and T-shirts with collars, dark pants, skirts, blouses, dresses. The children are dressed in school uniforms, maroon shorts and crisply ironed white shirts. The attire is not what I had expected in the middle of the Borneo jungle. There are no grass skirts or nose bones. These people could have been my neighbors in Yogya.

  “It is time to go and get the bones,” says the teacher who has attached himself to me. He’s a charming man in his forties who sees to it that I am fed and educated.

  We walk along a newly made footpath that stands about two inches taller than the rest of the road. The new path is edged in timber and filled in with light-colored sandy soil. Just a few hundred yards away from the village center is the cemetery. There is a small roof over a deep hole that has recently been dug. Grandma’s remains are about to be exhumed. I stand near the edge of the pit, thinking I am going to see a wooden coffin. Instead, two men climb into the pit and one emerges carrying a small green Naugahyde suitcase about two feet square. Grandma’s bones are inside.

  The suitcase is much too small to have held a full-grown woman, and too clean to have been buried for thirty years, so I assume that the bones were removed from whatever receptacle originally held them.

  There is a procession to the main area of the village, led by a man carrying the little green suitcase. The place where the ceremony is to take place is elaborately decorated with bamboo poles, spears, colorful flags and fringes. For a while, the main activity is drinking from hollow bamboo cups, glasses, regular cups. Everyone drinks, including the guests, from cups that are passed around with growing enthusiasm. I sip the tuak, the liquor made from palm trees, and pass it on to the person next to me.

  Abdul tells me that we are awaiting the arrival by canoe of a neighboring tribe. Long ago, no one can or will be specific about when, a man from this neighboring tribe was killed whenever this ceremony was performed. Today, the arrival of the canoes symbolizes a new era. Instead of sacrificing a person, the tribe has been invited to join in the festivities, and the victim is a cow.

  Well decorated for the occasion with paper fringes on his legs and tail and ears, the cow waits in the center of a small ring. Soon after the guests arrive, the stabbing begins. One after another, men from the village take their turns stabbing the cow with spears. The animal squeals and shrieks and squirts blood. The killing process takes more than half an hour, the longer the bloodier, until the cow finally falls to the ground, at first twitching and finally dead.

  I stand in the crowd, breathing heavily, trying not to watch, but compelled to look. The violence of the act is repulsive to me. I look around and see that there are others, mostly women, who are grimacing and turning away. Even walking away. And still other women who are gathered at a distance totally avoiding the event. It is yet another instance of the universal bonds that tie women together. We give birth, we nurture, we love. We are creators and not destroyers. These women in the forest of Borneo and I are one.

  There is a feast following the stabbing, with dishes of noodles, rice, sate, and an assortment of chopped vegetables, meats, poultry, fish flavored with soy sauce and garlic and chili peppers. I am guided through the meal by the teacher who has adopted me. When the meal is over, he takes me through the school and talks about his world.

  “Why don’t you stay when the others leave?” he asks. “You can live with my family and I will see that you are well taken care of.”

  I t
ell him that the mayor has ordered me to return with the government group. The teacher tells the representative of the mayor that he will be responsible for my safety; but it is too late. The mayor’s delegates have orders to bring me back.

  The drinking never stops. Tuak is drunk from glasses, from cups, from bamboo, from animal horns, small and large. And finally, in the middle of the night, when everyone is dancing and laughing and passing a bull’s horn, the chief of the village brings out the skull of the last human to have been sacrificed for this ceremony. It was a long time ago, they say, but no one gets specific about when. The skull, looking exactly like what it is, will bring power and spirituality to each of us. It is filled with tuak and passed around the dance floor.

  All day I have been sipping tuak from communal cups, sharing saliva and tipsy smiles and moving my body to the beat of the drums. But now, as I take the skull in my two hands, I am shaking. It is as though I am drinking the brains of a human being, sipping his spirit, gaining his power. I am nearly in a trance, moving, sipping, feeling my lips on the smooth bone, dipping my tongue into this other person’s fluids, absorbing his soul.

  I am trembling with the taste of cannibalism.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ORANGUTAN CAMP

  I have been a prisoner at the Blue Kecubung Hotel for three days. I can-not afford the rates (it costs nearly three times as much a night as the dumpier hotel a few blocks away), but I don’t dare defy my orders: “Stay in the Blue Kecubung Hotel. I will send for you when I am ready to talk.”

  The more I think about it, the more excited I become about the chance to stay in the orangutan camp for a couple of months. I’ve always loved studying primates (I’ve written five books starring monkeys and apes, two of them nonfiction). Their habitat, the rain forests of the world, is rapidly disappearing. Maybe a children’s book will help to create a more responsible world population. In any event, it’s my only ticket into Camp Leakey. And I know from my Nicaragua and Galápagos books that both the emotional and intellectual experience of a place greatly intensifies when I am writing about it.

  It is clear that Dr. Galdikas will not be easy to work with. The fact that we just spent five days together in the interior of Borneo and she never once initiated a conversation indicates that she does not want me in her life as a friend. But if I am there to write her book, it’s a different relationship. I’m more than willing to honor her in whatever way she wants. I am not bothered by the fact that Dr. Galdikas seems to be the great white goddess here and I, like everyone else, must pay appropriate obeisance. She’s earned it.

  So I sit in the Blue Kecubung, in my room, in the lobby, or in the restaurant . . . all day and all night, waiting.

  After three days I wonder if Dr. Galdikas has forgotten me. The hotel manager, who is a friend at this point, tells me that Ibu (mother, in Indonesian) Professor Galdikas is still at her home in Pasir Panjang, the village of her Dayak husband’s family, a fifteen-minute ride from the hotel. She has not yet gone back to Camp Leakey, which is a day’s trip up the Sekonyer River. It’s time, I decide, before my money runs out, for me to contact her.

  The taxi driver that the hotel recommends knows who she is and where she lives. This large western woman married to a small Dayak man is very much a local celebrity, my driver tells me as we drive; everyone knows her. Finally we pull up in front of a big wooden house. I ask the driver to wait and I ring the doorbell.

  Galdikas’s graduate student answers the bell. I recognize him from last week’s journey, but we’ve never talked.

  “Is Professor Dr. Galdikas in?” I ask.

  “Just a minute,” he says. “I’ll see.”

  A few minutes later he returns. “She’s busy right now. She will call you when she is ready.” I smile and say thank you, and the door closes. I have been dismissed again.

  I get back in the cab, quietly fuming, but smiling all the while. I am determined to make this happen. The next morning I get a message. Dr. Galdikas will be sending a car for me at eleven.

  The graduate student ushers me into her presence. I smile and nod and say something about what an honor it is to meet her again.

  “How do I know that you really are a writer?” she asks.

  I show her three of my books that I have brought with me to prove the point.

  “But I still don’t know that you are this person, Rita Golden Gelman.” She reads my name from the cover of one of the books.

  I show her my passport.

  “You say you studied anthropology?”

  “With some of the same people that you studied with. My master’s degree is from UCLA. My area was psychological anthropology, but along the way I took two classes in physical anthropology where we studied primates and early humans.”

  I tell her the names of my committee members and we talk about the physical anthropology faculty members. I have studied with people she knows well.

  “Something interesting just happened,” she says. “In today’s mail I received a letter from a publisher in Canada asking me if I would write a children’s book for them. I think the fact that you are here at this moment is a sign that I should do a book.”

  I tell her that I will write the book in her voice, take an “edited by” credit, and that we would split the money, fifty-fifty. She’s fine with that. Then she tells me that I cannot stay in the camp, that I will have to write the book while staying in Pangkalan Bun.

  What? For starters, I’d suggested the book so I could stay in the camp; that is the whole point . . . for me. But even more absurd is the idea that somehow I could write about something I’ve never seen or experienced. I have to live her life in order to write about it. In the end, she agrees to let me stay in the camp, but asks that I pay for room and board. Not quite what I had in mind, but we settle on something I can afford.

  We leave the next day.

  The Sekonyer River is a black mirror that reflects a world of such extraordinary beauty that it is almost a cliché. Directly in the water ahead are white clouds, a sky as blue as the one above, a hot orange sun, and giant tropical trees and twisted vines that have parted the forest to let the river through. I am so overwhelmed by the perfection of this environment that I can barely talk.

  The river narrows and widens; sometimes it is filled with grasses; other times it is as clear as polished glass. About four hours into our trip, I am sitting in the sun in the front of the boat, staring straight ahead, when I see a wall of gray, several hundred yards away. It’s a rainstorm that looks as though it has been created for a movie. Literally a gray wall that stretches across the set from one side to the other. We move toward each other, the boat and the storm, two distinct entities. Then almost ghostlike but a good deal wetter, we pass through each other, intersect briefly, and move on. And our boat is in the sun once again.

  Twice during the final two hours of our trip, we see crocodiles sunning themselves on the riverbank. Looking like ancient amphibians soaking up the sun, they are at least six feet long with gray bumpy skin and an ominous presence. They become even more ominous when one of the young Dayaks on our boat tells me that this is the river I am going to bathe in during my stay at Camp Leakey. Then, not confident of my Indonesian, he shows me in vivid charades, how crocodiles attack and eat little monkeys. And he laughs.

  Late in the afternoon the same young man points to some trees. Sitting on the leafy branches, fifty feet up, is a troop of proboscis monkeys, with their long pendulous noses, peering down at us. They are the noses of comical Halloween masks, banana-shaped blobs hanging down in the middle of monkey faces. The brown, white, and gray monkeys, about two feet tall, with long white tails, nestle into their sleep trees along the river at dusk every night.

  I am overwhelmed by the river trip. I feel as though I am motoring through the pages of a National Geographic magazine. It is another piece of a dream come true.

  We arrive at the camp and tie up next to a two-hundred-foot wooden walkway in time for the orangutans’ dinner. P
ak Achyar, a Dayak man, is standing on the walkway next to mounds of rice and bananas and sugar cane stalks, calling the orangutans by name, calling into distant trees.

  “Siswoyo, Mellie, Pola, Tutut, Hani, Kusai.” The sound of their names alerts the orangutans that dinner is ready. More than ten orangutans are in sight, large and small, some already squatting next to the rice, feeding themselves and their babies, some ambling down the boardwalk. Others are swinging out of nearby trees, responding to Pak Achyar’s call.

  A few young orangutans greet our boat, climbing all over Dr. Galdikas and the supplies. She greets them by name, sweetly, lovingly; they are her babies. I swing myself up onto the dock and slip my arms into the straps of my backpack. I am wearing an Indonesian army hat and sunglasses, and my hands are swinging loosely at my sides . . . until a furry orange youth takes my left hand and another hops on my shoulders, takes off my hat and glasses, and puts them both on his head.

  These orangutans, the ones that are responding to Pak Achyar’s call, and the ones that are climbing on me, are not wild. They are ex-captives that have been confiscated and brought to Dr. Galdikas. In Indonesia it is illegal to keep an orangutan as a pet, but until Dr. Galdikas set up camp, there was nowhere to bring a confiscated pet; they can’t just be released into the forest. Many of the pets were babies still clinging when poachers shot their mothers. Others lost their canopy home when loggers cut down the trees. Most of the orangutans who were taken into homes as babies have never been with other orangutans. They have grown up in human homes and learned human ways. They have no idea what orangutans do.

  Orangutans are great mimics. Some of the ex-captives can smoke. One can wash clothes. But they don’t know how to climb trees, pick fruit, or interact with others of their species. So now, in Camp Leakey, they are learning.

  In the beginning, the ex-captives learned from Dr. Galdikas, who first arrived in 1971. She climbed trees and picked fruit to show them how it was done. Today, many of the babies learn from the older ex-captives who adopt them.