The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  Those last summers in California were halcyon days in America, but the barometer was dropping fast. In February 1960 four black teenagers sat down at a segregated Woolworth’s counter and refused to move. Three years later—Michael’s last diving for coins—JFK was shot, Birmingham, Alabama, commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor attacked civil rights protesters with fire hoses, Medgar Evers was murdered, two hundred thousand people marched on Washington, and an Alabama church was bombed, killing four young girls, all as American military “advisers” were pouring into Vietnam, the very beginnings of the tides that would propel Bruno into the Alps ten years later.

  After graduating high school, Michael lived in a rented house in Newport Beach with a bunch of other surfers, and in those days it cost little, but real life tugged. Still, he didn’t really want to enroll in college, didn’t know what he wanted to study, had those itchy feet. His mother, who worked for the sheet metal workers union, got him a job in a sheet metal shop in 1964 for the summer. He’d go to college that fall, he figured. On the beaches of Southern California he was only dimly aware of the details of the impending political and cultural storm, yet he felt it, was part of it. It was swelling up within him just as it was in millions of other teenagers of his generation, as it would with Bruno. He was a Southern California surf bum, not a hippie or a Beat; he wasn’t hanging out in college coffeehouses or listening to Dylan (he preferred Motown and Dick and the Del-Tones) . . . but the war was coming, everybody could feel it. He’d been taken with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and its bawdy tales of Paris, whose first official, legal American publication occurred in 1961. He hated authority and, like Bruno, was tired of the straitjacket ways of his old man. He yearned for something more than the working life his parents had strived for, something greater than a nice house and a cabin cruiser for the occasional weekend foray.

  That fall a brief moment of inattention changed his life. At the job his mother found for him, he worked a forming machine, a giant piece of industrial equipment that bent flat pieces of sheet metal into shapes. It was 3 p.m., late in the day, and he was tired, distracted, thinking of Roxanne and Valerie—his two girlfriends—and whether or not the surf was breaking that afternoon, and as he guided the piece of sheet metal into the former, the piece jammed. Just a little, but the smooth flow paused for a brief second, and he pushed harder. The piece shot forward along with Michael’s left hand, both of which went straight into the high-powered rollers. When the metal and Michael’s hand flew out on the other side in a flash, the last inch of his left index finger hung by a flap of skin. He exited the emergency room soon after without the last quarter of his finger. Years later he would say the gods had spoken, and their message was clear: Michael, they said, you are not to work in a factory. In fact, it would be the last real job he would ever hold.

  Michael’s parents were now divorced, his father’s string of muffler shops gone sour. As 1964 came to an end there were twenty-three thousand American advisers in Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Lyndon Johnson unilateral authority to begin bombing North Vietnam, and Michael Palmieri received a $5,000 settlement for the loss of his fingertip. One hot sunny California morning in early 1965 the U.S. Army came calling: Michael was to present himself for a medical to evaluate his fitness as a U.S. soldier. He wasn’t being drafted, not yet, anyway, but it was coming and he was against the war. It was time to go. He threw the letter in the trash, pocketed his five thousand bucks, hugged his mother, and headed south to Mexico. As with Bruno a few years later, it was the Army’s call that finally sent him packing. Bruno accepted his fate and served his time; Michael escaped.

  By the time the FBI knocked on his mother’s door a year later, Michael Palmieri was so long gone, even she didn’t know where he was.

  Now, ten years later, as he headed up the Mahakam, he had little idea of what he was doing, what he was after, his knowledge and understanding of Dayak culture and its nuances not yet honed. This was only his second trip up the river, and on these early journeys he was mostly looking for handmade woven rattan backpacks that were strong and supple and that every Dayak carried. Back in Bali, where he’d moved a year before, the hippies and surfers loved them and he wanted to buy as many as he could, hundreds if possible, to sell back on the island’s beaches. On his first trip a few months before, he’d tried to get above Long Bagun, but the river was too high, the rapids too fierce. At a French logging camp he heard a pilot was coming in on a floatplane and might take him past the rapids. The plane finally appeared, made a low pass to check for debris. But as it came in for a landing the tip of the plane’s wing kissed the water and Michael watched it violently careen upside down. Rescuers in boats reached it quickly, but the pilot had been thrown out of the plane and he was dead. And then, boom, the fuel slick bleeding away from the plane exploded, thwarting Michael’s dream of traveling above the rapids.

  In Long Bagun for a second try, he spent three days negotiating for a longboat and crew of three Dayaks, and buying supplies. Diesel fuel. Rice and cooking oil. He’d been living in Indonesia for a year now, had arrived after years in Goa and Kathmandu and Kabul, and his Bahasa Indonesia was getting functional. As roosters crowed and the sun rose, they set out on still water in the twenty-four-foot boat. On and on they powered against the current, the air-cooled long-shafted motor deafening. That afternoon they hit the largest and most dangerous rapids on the river. Engine screaming at full power, they surged against the roiling current of boulders and standing waves. One boatman stood at the bows with a paddle, fending off rocks and directing the line, and another sat in the middle frantically bailing as they wove through raging whitewater. Not much scared Michael, but the rapids spooked him, provoking a bad feeling he couldn’t shake. He thought of the dead pilot. But then the water calmed and they were clear at last. Michael was soaked and rattled but very much alive, and they motored onward, reaching the village of Long Pangai late that afternoon.

  It was a fantastic, otherworldly place of people living in a long handmade wooden structure raised on thin stilts, accessed by notched logs, a dynamic community out there at the far edge of the world, and Michael felt like he’d crossed some gate into a land where everything was the same but everything was different. Inside, as he sat on the bare wooden floors, polished smooth from years of bare feet, as night dropped, the dwelling came to life. He was in a long open room fronted with a row of doors, each leading to the personal sleeping chambers and kitchens of individual families, the door in the center belonging to the kepala adat, the most important man in the community. Michael didn’t understand what he was seeing, not yet, anyway, but it was all a blurry marvel. Beautiful women, pale and delicate-featured, with earlobes dangling bunches of heavy brass rings, some three inches past their shoulders, mostly bare-breasted, and finely muscled men. Skulls blackened from years of smoke hanging in baskets from the rafters. As a man played a four-stringed instrument called a sape, they passed around tuak, a liquor made from rice, tart and milky and smooth, and danced—one man or woman at a time, a slow stepping and turning, with hands clutching fans of black-and-white hornbill feathers. To shrieks and laughter Michael danced too, and he described Los Angeles, his hometown, and told them about American astronauts landing on the moon. At last people drifted off, the longhouse went silent, and Michael curled on the floor to drift off too.

  He woke at 5 a.m. to roosters crowing and dogs barking, children shrieking, pans clattering. His hosts brought out rice, fish, eggs, and paku paku, the fiddleheads of wild ferns, and the wheeling and dealing began. The Dayaks weren’t interested in cash—they had no need of it. That itself was a marvel. But Michael brought out a Buck knife, started cleaning his fingernails with it. Did he want to trade something for it? a man asked. Michael might; what did they have? Baskets appeared. And so it went, as the men and women lost their shyness and it was clear Michael had lots of Buck knives, not to mention gold-colored earrings from Bali and batik cloth from Java, and slowly more
and more bags emerged. A few small carved fetishes, but mostly baskets—that’s what he knew he could sell back in Bali. After an hour of brisk trading, Michael and his crew packed the boat and set off upriver, repeating the process at every village, until they reached Long Apari.

  On October 16, Michael’s work was done; it was his birthday and he was happy—the boat lay heavy with goods and he wanted to head back downriver. Then the skies opened. It poured, as it can pour only along the equator, big heavy buckets of cold water gushing out of the sky in a torrent that obscured everything. The river rose quickly. All Michael could think about was those rapids ahead. The rain slowed and a thick, cold mist enveloped them. Then they heard it, the roar of water ahead. “Pull over to the banks,” Michael pleaded to the boatman. “We’ll unload the cargo and walk it past the rapids, and you guys can take the boat through first.”

  “Don’t worry, Tuan,” the boatman said. “We’ll be fine!”

  They hit the roiling whitewater fast, Michael’s heart pounding. Waves crashed over them, giant white boulders loomed everywhere he looked, as they careened through the maelstrom. Then it happened. The boat slammed into a rock, swung violently broadside to the roaring water, and capsized. One second Michael was sitting amidships, the next he was under a violent blender of roaring water. He fought, he struggled, he was choking and gulping water, and his head popped to the surface for an instant and then he was under again, upside down, fighting to keep his feet pointing downstream, up and down, drowning, as sure of death as a man can be sure of anything, and then light and air and gasping and more water. He was in the belly of a dragon, the naga of Borneo, the water serpent, or was it Jonah and the whale, and then like Jonah the powerful thing that was eating him spit him out. Calmness. Floating. He was in flat water. Alive. He hauled himself to shore, crawled up the bank. Fifty feet upstream, two of his boatmen emerged from the flowing river, equally bedraggled. But of the boat and all of Michael’s baskets and other tidbits and the third boatman there was no sign. Two days later the river gave him up, his swollen carcass floating to the surface miles downstream. Michael was alive, at least. His goods, a month of traveling and trading, were gone forever. But he would return as soon as he could, he vowed to himself, and he would go deeper. He had tasted something big and delicious and he wanted more.

  Bruno Manser during his ten years as a shepherd in the Alps before traveling to Borneo. (Erich and Aga Manser)

  Three

  Bruno woke, heard those quiet voices. He stood, looked around in the green forest, saw no one. He called out and then saw them—two figures peering out from behind trees. Bruno spoke again. The man stepped closer; he wore long pants and carried a blowpipe. A woman stayed behind a tree. Bruno tried to explain himself in the bits of Malay he’d learned, where he was going, where he was from, but they merely turned and retreated into the forest. Bruno shouldered his pack, stumbled after them like a puppy, up a steep path. Up, up, after an hour of walking he heard dogs barking, and they stepped into a Penan encampment: thirteen people and two three-sided huts raised a few feet off the ground, made of thin branches tied together with rattan. A fire smoldered from the mud hearth of one of the shelters. It was a strange moment. No wild yelling or signs of amazement at this strange person in their midst. The Penan acted as if he wasn’t even really there. He tried to shake hands, but the men and women avoided his gaze, brushed his extended palm with the lightest touch, the barest whisper of human contact. The men’s legs just below their knees were ringed with thin strips of black rattan, other bands circled their arms just above their elbows, their wrists were thick with bracelets. Their hair was cut like mullets—bangs in the front, long below their shoulders in the back. Some wore traditional loincloths, others ragged gym shorts and old slacks from who knew where. The men had thick, powerful legs, the women long black hair. They had almond-shaped eyes and pale skin. The bare feet of both men and women were twice the width of his, with splayed toes from a lifetime of walking shoeless in the slippery forest. He dropped his pack, fished out the last of the rice, offered it to them. Took out his wooden flute, played a song, gave them a Jew’s harp as a present, noticed a man half hidden behind a hut carving arrows, light, soft flakes of wood falling around him. “He smiles when I greet him,” wrote Bruno in his journal.

  “Kumon!” a man said. Eat!

  They gathered in a circle around a soot-blackened pot filled with a brown, gelatinous substance—sago, their primary carbohydrate—which they ate by spinning pronged sticks in the goop, lifting out small blobs that they popped in their mouths. A plastic bowl held tough, blackened meat, and then another pot appeared, this one filled with sago roasted in wild boar fat, which they ate with their right hands. They sat talking, laughing, as if oblivious to Bruno, the men carving arrows and the soft wooden plugs that fill the blowpipe and act like arrow fletching, and the afternoon ticked away. As darkness fell a hunter returned carrying a monkey and a bearcat, which were instantly thrown into the fire to singe off their fur. His hosts ate and ate—seven times that night—giggling and leaning on each other. They were thirty-five hundred feet high in the mountains. As the evening chill descended, the women built fires under the huts to warm the mangy, thin dogs shivering in tight balls against the cool mountain damp. Bruno couldn’t understand the conversation, he didn’t know the names of his hosts, he didn’t know anything. But as fireflies flickered out in the dark forest, which hummed loudly with untold numbers of insect voices, and smoke curled among the heat of the bodies pressed together, he felt whole, complete, as if he’d found his place.

  He had, in a sense, been preparing for this moment ever since he left prison.

  When Bruno emerged from jail he briefly enrolled in the Plantahof Agricultural School, and in June 1974 climbed into the mountains near Nufenen, Switzerland, with a herd of thirty-three cows, joined by his brother Erich, two years his senior. Their destination was a simple wooden hut with no running water or electricity above the tree line, owned by the farmer whose cows he’d been hired to tend, for a life that seemed simple enough. Graze and milk the cows and make Alp cheese and butter every day.

  “The hippies all had this idea that it would be beautiful and romantic,” said Aga Manser, Erich’s wife, who joined the brothers sometimes, “all just lying in the sun in the mountains. The farmers in the villages,” she said, “they were very conservative and they called us ‘spinners,’ crazy people no good in the head. We were exotic! It was a happening, all these people from the city like Bruno and Erich, some with long hair to their waists, coming to the Alps, and they didn’t know what we wanted, a confrontation between the old culture and the new generation who wanted to find a new kind of life.”

  “It was Bruno’s idea first, of course,” said Erich. “He wanted to survive with nothing. He wanted to make his own leather shorts, to hunt and to fish and to live with animals, away from the system.”

  In reality, the life was brutal. When a friend joined the brothers the following summer, he lasted a week. “It was too hard for him,” Erich said. “You have to be outside every day. Sometimes it was raining. Cold. Sometimes it snowed and you couldn’t run away.”

  The brothers rose every morning at four, seven days a week. They skimmed the cream off the milk gathered the evening before to produce butter, built a fire, poured the milk into a huge copper vat. The cows had to be rounded up and brought back to the stable, then milked. “Sometimes we felt like we couldn’t lift our arms afterwards!” said Erich. The milk had to be weighed, the amount recorded for the farmers, and then rennet added—curdled milk from the stomach of an unweaned calf. “You could buy the rennet,” said Erich, “but Bruno refused to—he said we had to do it like the old ways—and that meant it had to come from the stomach of calves, and that was crazy; it was so much work.” As they waited for the fat to rise they’d eat breakfast: bread, butter, jam, eggs, corn, and lots and lots of milk, “three or four liters right then, still warm, and it gave us power!” Next they’d divide the work: o
ne would make cheese and butter, and the other would put the cows out and clean the barn and the milk utensils, and feed the pigs with the whey. Toward the afternoon they’d take the still soft cheese out, place it in salt water for twenty-four hours, then store it in a cave. They’d have to milk the cows again, then turn them out into the pasture for the night. “By 8 p.m. we were exhausted,” said Erich. “Sometimes Bruno played guitar, but mostly we just went right to sleep, so we could get up at four again the next morning.” They kept chickens and ten pigs, planted a garden of radishes and herbs and lettuce. “It was beautiful working with the animals, and since we were from the city, it was such a new experience for us.”

  As the days passed, Bruno took ever more dangerous hikes and climbs, always free-climbing without rope or harness. One day he and Erich were in the middle of their work when Bruno was seized by a sudden urge to scramble up Piz Ela, a nearly eleven-thousand-foot peak nearby. Erich pleaded no, they had work to do, but Bruno insisted and walked off the job, said he’d be back by 4 p.m. When he finally stumbled in the next morning, he was bloody and missing his backpack, with a typical Bruno story. Free-climbing a rock face, he’d pulled himself onto a ledge from which he could move neither up, sideways, or even down. After trying through the long night, he’d finally somehow secured his backpack to the ledge and lowered himself down by it far enough to find a foothold and descend.