by Carl Hoffman
He was growing up in the heart of the unprecedented economic prosperity and population explosion that would soon crack the whole world open. The boom of 1945 to 1973 was the largest in history, known in Europe as Les Trente Glorieuses—the Glorious Thirty. By the time Bruno turned fourteen, in 1968, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane were belting out, “Hey now it’s time for you and me / Got a revolution.” In Warsaw, student demonstrations shut down the university system. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring erupted. In Rome in February of that year, students shut down nineteen of thirty-three universities in the country. And in Paris, hundreds of thousands of students and workers struck and rioted, nearly toppling the French government.
This worldwide movement was seeping into every canton and village on the continent. “It was a wild time, even in Switzerland,” Bruno’s brother Erich said. “People wanted to get away from their parents, get out of their regular life.” As Bruno neared graduation, he carried a stained, dog-eared copy of the writings of Lao Tzu nearly everywhere. He displayed no anger, no urge to burn or topple or destroy, but he wanted freedom. Freedom from the state, freedom from things, and freedom from his family—his father most of all.
“Each of us wants to be ourself,” Bruno wrote in a school paper, “but that is very difficult. I am not yet myself. . . . I hate imitating other people, although I do it. I have numerous ideals from the various protest movements (i.e., hippies, vagabonds, beatniks, provos, yuppies). I will refuse military service—I am against the military. I am also against the police and any manifestation of authority. . . . I would like best to live like a protest movement leader, whose name I have forgotten and who I will try to quote: ‘I have the vision of a rucksack revolution. Young people with rucksacks climb mountains to experience the sunrise. They read books on philosophy and freedom, they paint and write poems, for no particular reason, just because they enjoy doing so. They make children laugh, they make young girls happy and older ones even happier. They cheer up old people thanks to their joie de vivre and they help all those who need help.’”
It was Jack Kerouac, of course, an almost verbatim quote from Dharma Bums.
When he turned eighteen, Bruno’s draft notice arrived. He explained his objections thoughtfully in letters and preliminary hearings, and finally he objected again, one last time, to seven military judges in November 1973. He looked the officers in the eye. “It is the task of every individual to show love through human co-existence and to respect all life,” he told them. “I believe in goodness, love, peace and the power of prayer. Every human being is good at heart,” he said, “and therefore my belief and my mind-set are not compatible with the military.”
The judges were shocked less by his defiance than by his utter conviction and forthrightness. He didn’t shout or yell, didn’t quaver. When he stood in front of people to explain his vision, he became as surefooted as a Swiss mountain goat in the Alps. “He could be so funny and childlike,” said Edmund Grundner, an Austrian antiques trader who was the last westerner to see him alive, “nearly too funny for me sometimes. He told me he was with a friend in a hotel once and the bed was so bouncy they jumped on it until their heads hit the ceiling. But I saw him speak to three hundred people and TV cameras without notes. His voice was strong and powerful and he spoke so calmly and so, I don’t know, safely. He was charismatic. You felt good when he spoke.”
He wasn’t just some hippie who wanted to smoke weed and lie around listening to Jimi Hendrix. In fact, the judges had read in his report that he was already hard at work, had recently begun doing the most Swiss thing a Swiss could do: herding cows in the high Alpine pastures where the grass was sweet and fresh, the necessary ingredient to the Alp cheese that every Swiss savored. Judge Lieutenant Riklin watched Manser standing straight, wearing Gandhi-like glasses, tan and muscled from a long summer of backbreaking work up there in the mountains (everyone who met Bruno in the years ahead would remark on his almost inhuman physical strength and stamina), and took notes.
“At the moment he has not succeeded in loving every human being unconditionally. He is still working on this goal. He wants to accept, understand and love every single person as a fellow human, friend and brother. According to him, you can only defend what you absolutely need to live. To defend luxury is pointless and anti-nature. And the military is not needed to defend the essentials of life. He rejects any defence of anything that does not belong to him, i.e., all the products of civilization, industrial goods, imported items and financial resources that create today’s chaos. For him, material things are not worth defending.”
Bruno Manser’s idealism did not save him from jail, however impressed the military judges might have been by his principled stand. Bruno did not care. When he emerged from prison four months later he gathered a herd of cows and in 1974 headed up into the pristine blue-and-green world of the high Swiss Alps, the beginning of a sojourn that would bring him ten years later to his search for the Penan.
Leaving Mulu that day in June, he followed well-worn trails that quickly petered out, and he spent three days hacking his way up and down muddy, steep thorny underbrush, remarking in his journal that “the energy I have to expend is very high, especially so if the goal isn’t any closer and I make a mistake and have to turn around—and I have to turn around continuously.” Leeches were everywhere; when he paused and gazed at the spongy carpet of rotting leaves underfoot or the shrubs around him, he saw lip-red, inch-long, wiggling forms ever groping for their next host. They covered his legs, magically worked their way into his shoes, under his socks and shirt, grew quickly as they gorged and left his legs streaming with blood when removed. Every once in a while he climbed a tree to get his bearings, but quickly realized he’d underestimated the scale of his map. By nightfall he was exhausted, lucky to have advanced two miles.
After dark tiny biting flies penetrated his mosquito net, a never-ending series of sharp pinpricks that made sleep impossible. He tossed and turned, pulled his sleeping bag over his head, tried to distract himself by playing his harmonica, and finally escaped the onslaught by submerging himself in a nearby stream for the rest of the night.
He had spent the previous month with a British expedition exploring the Mulu caves, among the largest in the world, and suddenly, after three days, “Mulu feet reappeared with all its force.” The floors of the caves were sandstone, and during his days there sharp silica crystals penetrated his shoes. In the constant wetness of the forest the crystals worked their way into his feet, which caused “agony.” “I’m groaning with every step. . . . Even touching fabric when I’m in my sleeping bag or putting on pants.”
At the sunny, open banks of a small river he made camp, put his goggles on, and made “eye contact” with the fish. “What joy to see these scaly animals,” he wrote. “Finger-long fish are glued to rocks in the shallow water and one of them has a long snout and long tail tips and another has funny warts on its nose and upper lip.” He caught a large basslike fish in his net, and ogled huge flocks of butterflies, which he called “players of the air.”
It was a momentary respite. He headed higher, cutting through thorns, the underbrush becoming denser and denser, until it was impenetrable. Moss-covered branches and epiphytes hung. He tried to follow deer and wild boar trails, but “I don’t have the elongated head of these animals,” so he dropped his backpack, cut his way through with his machete, and then returned for the pack. “It’s depressing or maybe joyous if I can cover the distance in twenty minutes with the backpack that it took me four hours to cut through.” He still had some rice, but he saw no streams, and without water in which to cook it, the rice was useless. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He was weak, starving. By any logic, what he was doing was insane. He was in an alien wilderness, had no idea where he was going. Even with food, he might wander for months without seeing another human. Fecund forest though it was, it may as well have been the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, a vast, empty desert. But Bruno didn’t panic. Instead he turned to pitcher
plants that grew abundantly around him. “One swallow of water per bloom and with my lips I filter the residue of the half-digested insects and the twitching larvae. When the victims are mostly ants, the water has a pleasantly sour taste; if it’s greenish it tastes as bitter as gall.”
Bruno had been wandering for eight days when the skies opened in torrents. He collected the luscious water in his tarp and cooked rice and tea, his first meal in forty-eight hours. His progress, however, slowed to a few hundred yards a day. Even he started to admit his folly. “I did not think the way to the indigenous people would be so hard all by myself in this godforsaken area. Breaking a leg would probably mean death, but I don’t have any choice other than to keep going.” He saw no game, nothing but birds. Hungry and exhausted on the saddle of a ridgetop, he climbed into a tree. Undulating green stretched in all directions beneath a vast sky of drifting clouds. And then there it was, tendrils of smoke spiraled into the shimmering tropical heat on the other side of the valley. “What joy! Or is it only a fata morgana?” he wondered. “Light green spots shine from the forest; are these jungle gardens or only fields of fern?”
With a renewed feeling of strength, he plunged into the valley, playing “S’isch mer alles eis Ding,” a classic Swiss folk song often sung by parents to comfort their children, on his harmonica, until he felt something weird in his mouth. A leech. He pried it out, metallic-tasting blood spreading across his tongue, and drove himself on. He bushwhacked through narrow valleys that led to a gorge, tried to follow a stream, was forced to clamber over piles of tree trunks thick with moss, got tangled in “dense prickly palm growth that grabs me with its hooks.” He battled the forest all day, and then he saw them: footprints. Human footprints. And young trees slashed with a blade. At last, “I know I’m on a human track,” he scribbled. But it was late. He was spent. He fashioned a bed from leaves and small branches and lay down for the night, contemplating the “painful last days,” and watched giant brown ants an inch long catch butterflies lured to the light of his headlamp. His mind wandered. “I fly into other rooms and see beloved people at home and I send them my thoughts.”
In the morning he awoke to a sound he’d hadn’t heard in ten days: human voices.
Michael Palmieri during a summer diving for coins on Catalina Island, age twenty, in 1963. (Michael Palmieri)
Two
It was October 4, 1975, and Michael Palmieri perched on the roof of a hundred-foot-long wooden riverboat plowing up the Mahakam River. The sun burned overhead, the light white, washed out, the heat and humidity weighing like a heavy mattress. Below—sitting, lying, pressed against each other—hummed people from throughout the Indonesian archipelago: Muslim Javanese and Bugis traders and animist Dayaks returning to their villages with all their goods, cooking pots and galvanized roofing and fifty-kilo bags of rice. The vessel sat low to the waterline and open at the sides, covered with a flat roof. A waist-high outhouse jutted off the stern; whatever you did there, your head was always visible. Michael was thirty-two years old.
The boat pulled away from the rotting floating docks of Samarinda that morning, headed on a forty-eight-hour run to Long Bagun, two hundred miles upriver, the last navigable village before the Mahakam’s fall line. There the river narrowed into a series of powerful and dangerous rapids (not far, in fact, from where Bruno would live) that shut off major river traffic and beyond which commerce slowed, travel reduced to narrow, shallow-draft longboats, as it flowed out of the central highlands high in the Muller Range near the Sarawak, Malaysian border—that is, when the water level was navigable at all, a narrow line between being too high during the peak of the rainy season and too shallow when rain was scarce. A hundred miles from its source lay the village of Long Apari, which Michael had tried to reach a few months before, without success. Hundreds of rivers fed by thousands of streams flowed into the Mahakam along its route, the branching veins and capillaries that brought life and access to villages and longhouse communities inhabited by dozens of different Dayak tribes, a world of virgin rain forest without roads.
Michael was in heaven up on his perch, watching the river flow by. It was a half mile wide, chocolate brown, placid, as winding as the tail of a pig, twisting sharply left and right, the boat angling for the inside of the bends as it passed islands of floating water hyacinth and logs big enough to stand on, the gateway into a rich and complex intermingling of people and culture. To say that he’d seen a lot of the world was an understatement, yet this felt different from anyplace he’d ever been. He wasn’t just traveling to a remote physical location, but to a metaphysical one, a place that coexisted with another dimension altogether—the rich spiritual world of the Dayaks.
The boat churned upriver past a wall of green and ramshackle villages of wooden houses with rusting corrugated roofs perched atop the muddy riverbanks. Notched tree log stairways led down the banks to floating rafts, each holding a waist-high outhouse similar to the one on Michael’s boat. Around 6:30 p.m. the sun quickly set, a few minutes of grace and warm colors before blackness closed in. Every so often the captain’s bright searchlight flicked on, a cone of white probing into the darkness, picking out logs and upcoming bends, before cutting out, plunging Michael into the darkness again. He lay on his back and shivered slightly in the humid breeze, wrapping himself in a sarong as cockroaches scurried back and forth under a universe of trillions of pinpricks overhead. He noticed a satellite tracking across the sky and marveled at the world that had sent it forth and his life in Southern California that he’d left a decade ago.
Indeed, it should have been no surprise to anyone who knew Michael back in Los Angeles that the young man who spent three summers diving for coins tossed from the decks of the incoming steamer from Los Angeles on Catalina Island was now perched on a Mahakam riverboat. Growing up, Michael might have been a character from some Beach Blanket Bingo movie, as quintessentially Southern Californian as you could find. He’d actually been born in New York City, but his parents had lit out for the California dream while he was still an infant and left him in the care of his Greek grandmother, who worked in the garment industry as a furrier’s seamstress. He learned Greek before English, which perhaps accounted for his later ease with languages—he would eventually speak French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Bahasa Indonesia. (Bruno was equally adept, speaking French, German, English, Penan, and Bahasa Indonesia.) When his parents packed Michael and his sister into the car for the drive west when he was three, Michael saw his first swimming pool at a roadside motel and fell in love with the water, a love that would stay true and that made him feel at home on the rivers of Borneo.
He always had a certain flare: at five he liked to dress like a cowboy—hat and chaps and boots and vest, six-shooter cap pistol at his side, his hair in a classic 1940s flattop. He exuded a rambunctious energy, was always in motion. At ten he’d jump out of bed at 4 a.m. to meet his stack of freshly deposited copies of the Los Angeles Times, which he rolled with rubber bands and delivered on his bicycle. Like Bruno, he relished the early morning, the breaking dawn and the long skinny shadows the rising sun made on the palm trees, the sense of adventure of sneaking out of the house before anyone was up and riding the streets in solitude.
Michael loved going to school. Not the academics so much, but the people to talk to. The girls. Sports. He never cut class, even as he was kicked out of one school after another. His parents tried a parochial school for a bit, and it was Michael who was always dragged to the front of the class, forced to hold his hands out, palms up, for the stinging smack of the nun’s ruler. But he couldn’t help himself; before the ruler came down he’d laugh and whip his hands away, a move that infuriated them. Which then meant the inevitable visit to the principal’s office, where he’d have to hold his ankles as the priest struck him with a wooden paddle. But he was incorrigible; the mirror on his shoe he used to look up girls’ skirts got him the boot back to public school.
The classic extrovert, Michael took energy from people and the worl
d. He read Kipling and Hemingway and roamed California’s beaches searching for waves in a 1939 Packard hearse with tufted velvet and a mattress covering the coffin rollers in the back. When James Michener’s Adventures in Paradise television show appeared in 1959, when he was sixteen, he made sure he was plunked down in front of the TV for every episode. Gardner McKay, the show’s hero, was Michael’s perfect role model: a six-foot-four Korean War vet who sailed the Pacific on his ninety-eight-foot schooner Tiki, moving cargo, dodging pirates, running before the wind. McKay made women swoon; around his neck dangled a small wooden idol not so different from the gold vajra thunderbolt Michael would wear fifty years later, and no place and no woman could hold him long: the sea and the wind and the palm trees called. Watching the show made Michael’s heart race; it spoke to him like religion—and surfing on California’s breaks and diving for coins on Catalina was but one step away from the Tiki life.
Michael’s third high school was 80 percent Chicano, and he was thrust into the world of the White Fence and Toonerville gangs in his blue jeans and two-toned saddle shoes, a walking punching bag. On the first day of his new school the young toughs spit on his two-tones and bumped him hard in the shoulder, but Michael soon had a Latina girlfriend whose brother was a gang captain, who offered him a certain kind of protection—he had to fight, yes, every week, but the captain kept it one-on-one, man-to-man, and there’d be forty or fifty guys there watching but the brother would yell, “No jumping in, no jumping in,” and Michael would attack, boom, hard and fast. One Saturday night he and five buddies stopped at a gas station in Newport Beach en route to La Jolla, with five surfboards stacked on the roof of the hearse. A bunch of gangbangers yelled at the surfer boys and screeched into the gas station and aimed for Michael. He was the magnet, the pretty boy who looked like he couldn’t defend himself. But it was a strange thing—little scared Michael, and he looked at the guy closest to him and in the fluorescent glare of the Californian night he said “Fuck you!” and dropped him to the pavement. A clean knockout. Michael had, even back then as a teenager, what he thought of as a third eye, an extrasensory organ that could see behind him, to the side of him, and even more important, that could feel, intuit people’s intentions and situations. It was like he knew, felt, smelled, saw in a wider arc than most people, and it always—well, almost always—kept him safe.
