by Carl Hoffman
From Egypt forward, I wanted to plunge into the world, not the normal parts, but the dusty corners and crevices. America felt wrapped in plastic. Controlled. I wanted that drumming and howling, those fires in the Tarzan movies. The fear and loneliness of the long-distance sailor. The passion and pageantry of Thesiger’s and Lawrence’s Bedouin. Sudan. Congo. India. Afghanistan. The Arctic. Siberia. Bangladesh and Mali and Indonesia. I ranged far and wide over two decades. I liked intense flavors. And that meant the intense feelings and emotions of our humanness—love and hate and violence and pain and suffering, emotional and physical. I liked the idea of peeling back the layers of all the things that I imagined civilized us. And as an outsider, I often felt less alienated in those distant places where no one expected me to belong, where it was obvious I didn’t and probably never could.
All of which led me to the idea that traditional tribal societies living in the jungle might show me the root of something. Of who we are. Contemporary anthropologists long ago abandoned the idea that there is some steady, linear march from primitive to civilized and now discount the very notion that modern, technically advanced cultures are any more “civilized” than ones like the Asmat, with all its complexities. Nelson Rockefeller’s museum, in raising the art of illiterate and isolated tribesmen to the equal of anything produced by overeducated Westerners, was a nod to this idea. But boyhood dreams die hard. Primitive, tribal, call it what you want, but I hungered to see a humanity before the Bible, before the Koran, before Christian guilt and shame, before clothes and knives and forks. Indeed, a world like the one described by Kirkpatrick Sale, inhabited by medieval wild savages, men possessed of the secrets of nature, a place where natural desires still reigned. A world where a boy in a wolf suit could dance with creatures who gnashed their terrible teeth and roared their terrible roars.
Along the way I found Tobias Schneebaum’s book about the Asmat. Living in one of the remotest corners of the world, away from everything modern, they held out the possibly naive and idealized hope that in them I might find this raw, unfiltered world. Schneebaum had rolled in the mud with them and traveled in their canoes and slept with their men. I wasn’t gay, but everything else about his experience resonated with me, and it was through Schneebaum that I’d first heard the Michael Rockefeller story.
Now, finally, I was here.
I’D BEEN DELVING deep into Asmat for months, immersed in files from Dutch colonial archives and missionaries. It was a slow process. I’d sat with Father Hubertus von Peij one cold winter’s night in Tilburg, Netherlands, leaning close over his hand-drawn map, and I’d spent hours on the Canary Island of Tenerife listening to Wim van de Waal, a former Dutch patrol officer who’d been stationed in Asmat in 1961 and had been closely involved in the Rockefeller case. Both men had fed me names and dates that my Dutch researcher and I could chase down. This trail of documents had never been made public, and it illustrated a vivid narrative that was surprisingly straightforward. But to understand what had happened to Michael, I had to know Asmat; unraveling his story was also personal.
Getting there had been a different matter. Plenty of websites offered photos and bits and pieces of information, but it was all either out of date or so vague as to be useless. Google Maps showed a big green blank. There was nothing to do but go and figure it out. I had no reservations, no real plan, only one name—a “Mr. Alex,” a man who was said to own a hotel in Agats and speak English and who could facilitate travel.
I’d flown from Washington, DC, to London to Singapore to Jakarta, then overnight on a flight to Jayapura (the former Hollandia, the capital of what had been Dutch New Guinea), where I had to get a permit from the police to travel within Indonesian Papua. Michael had been through Jayapura too, as had most of its colonial administrators, and I imagined communing with their ghosts amid its old colonial buildings. But Indonesia’s strategy for dampening a long-simmering Papuan independence movement was to flood the territory with Indonesians, and Papuans were now a minority in their own land. Jayapura was just another big Indonesian city, crowded with motorcycles and cars and minivans and concrete buildings, and it was hard to spot a single native.
I flew on to Timika, a mad little city of heat and dust, where I hoped to find a boat to Agats. Except there was no boat. There was not even a river—the “port” was thirty miles away. I drove there anyway, with a taxi driver named Ainum, an Indonesian from Makassar, and we found wooden cargo vessels with indeterminate schedules and a ship that left once every two weeks. There was a plane, Ainum said, that left on Thursdays and Saturdays, but there was only one place to get tickets—at the terminal. Timika is home to the Grasberg Mine, the largest copper mine in the world and the third-largest gold mine, owned and operated by a subsidiary of an American company, Freeport-McMoRan. Timika’s airport terminal was brand-new, modern and shiny and sweet-smelling, bold testaments to Freeport’s environmental stewardship lining every wall, clocks showing the time in Jakarta, London, New Orleans. The domestic terminal on the other side of the parking lot was a shed, its concrete floor covered in blazing orange betel nut spit, cigarette butts, plastic straws, empty yogurt containers, ripped plastic bags. Liquid overflowed from the bathroom—but here, at last, were Papuans. Short black men and women in tattered T-shirts, with calloused bare feet, reeking of body odor.
The plane for Thursday was sold out. “Don’t worry,” Ainum said. “I have a friend at the airport, and I can get you a ticket.” Which he did, arriving at my hotel to hand me a ticket under someone else’s name. I paid him double its face value.
Back in the terminal four days later, there was the same chaos, the same crowds. It was a hundred degrees. Two red-and-green parrots chained to each other perched on a bench. The women had small tattoos of a black dot on their cheeks, the men had beards, though none of them were Asmat, I would later realize. No one had any idea where the plane was, much less when it would leave. We sat. I felt weak, a fever coming on, my stomach cramping. After three hours, the plane appeared. We filed out, squeezed in, and forty minutes later I was in Asmat.
This was the village of Ewer, though, the only place in thousands of square miles with enough dry ground to land a plane. I shouldered my bag and followed the other passengers along a rickety boardwalk toward a river, past a few wooden houses. I spotted a huge, long jeu, an Asmat men’s house. Men lounging on its veranda. I couldn’t process it; it all might have been pictures in a book. At the end of a crumbling concrete pier with rebar sticking out helter-skelter were tied brightly colored red and yellow and green fiberglass speedboats. I handed my bag to an Indonesian man and jumped in the tiny vessel, and we sped off with three other people, all Indonesian.
I had little idea where I was going or how long it would take to get there. We barreled down a river a quarter-mile wide, thick jungle on either side, the other speedboats racing with us. The river opened—we were close to the sea, the Arafura wide and big before us—and a longboat coming from the other direction swept close, its passengers waving their hands in a frantic up-and-down motion, pointing. Their message was soon obvious to me as we hit the mouth—a wild roiling and boiling of waves and whirlpools and currents. The captain throttled back, but still water sprayed over us. He navigated his way to the opposite bank through the turbulence, and we turned left, up the Asawets River. Fifteen minutes later, we motored into Agats.
It felt like the end of the known world. A mile of rickety docks and shacks on stilts hanging over floating plastic water bottles and empty ramen wrappers and packs of clove cigarettes. Dozens of shiny, naked children jumping into the brown, frothy river. A broken boardwalk slanted into the water. A barefoot man grabbed my bag, I followed blindly, and a few minutes later we were at the Pada Elo Hotel. Four windowless rooms of plywood over the river around a courtyard of oil barrels filled with water, laundry on a clothesline. A young woman in blue jeans showed me my room—two single beds, a hole over the river for a bathroom. No running water. No electricity. A cockatoo paced around the rim of
a barrel, gazing at me with a black, liquid eye.
“I’m looking for Mr. Alex,” I said.
She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t speak English.
Then the skies opened up, and I collapsed. Rain thundered down, more than I ever thought possible, and my fever raged. The room was dark and suffocatingly hot. A parade of ants crawled up and down my bedposts, and water dripped through the roof, gathering into a small river flowing across the floor. For two days the rain drummed on the corrugated roof and I tossed and turned. What was I doing here? What was I chasing? How was I to pierce this place when I couldn’t even speak the language?
Then I woke to a cacophony of roosters and intense brightness coming through the cracks in my door, my walls, my roof. I doused myself with cold water from a bucket and stepped out. Steam rose from mossy, broken boardwalks over an omnipresent muddy carpet of those empty plastic water bottles, thousands and thousands of them. There were boats everywhere—dugout canoes and sixty-foot longboats and colorful little speedboats—crowding the creeks and streams. Agats was a city of seven thousand, but there wasn’t a single street, not a single car. Along the waterfront, open shops lined the boardwalk, crowded with Javans and Bugis and Torajans and Indonesian traders and opportunists from throughout the archipelago. The town square and soccer field was made of wooden planks raised over the muck. This was the frontier of the growing republic, the Indian country of Indonesia, Manifest Destiny as powerful here as it had been in America a hundred years ago. When Michael Rockefeller had arrived in Agats, it was a Dutch administrative center with a handful of Dutch priests and nuns and colonial officers next to the Asmat village of Sjuru, and he had been hosted by the Dutch government. Now there wasn’t another Westerner to be seen, and Agats was growing by the day as Jakarta pumped money into the region and paid civil servants six times what they’d make back on Java.
The market teemed with Asmat, though. Dark black, broad-chested men and bony, short-haired women sold clams and crabs wrapped in palm leaves, strings of two-foot-long shark, skates, and catfish gasping for air, strange-looking lumps of white—the pith of the sago palm, which was Asmat’s most important food. I was getting closer; the pure world of Asmat was out there.
After an hour of rambling, I discovered another hotel. It had rooms with toilets and sheets and windows opening onto a courtyard of black mud and, best of all, a desk clerk who spoke a bit of English. When I asked about a guide, he whipped out his cell phone, made a call, and a few minutes later in walked Harun.
He was Asmat, inscrutable, quiet. He spoke in a whisper, his eyes downcast, his left arm in a dirty, unraveling plaster cast. “I am a guide,” he said. “Many tourists come to Asmat.”
“How many?” I said.
“Maybe four this year,” he said.
I wanted to get a boat and explore the rivers and villages, I said, not mentioning Rockefeller, though I had a plan: to make a general reconnaissance journey and work my way south through the villages that Michael had visited and that had figured prominently in the story, and then end up in Omadesep and Otsjanep.
I brought out a map of Michael’s route during his two trips and showed it to Harun. “A week, two weeks, I’m not sure,” I said. “I just want to explore.”
Harun nodded. “I can take you anywhere.”
We threw around some prices. His arm hurt, he said—he had fallen off one of the boardwalks in the darkness one night. He was going to the hospital, and he said he’d come back in a few hours.
Which he did, this time with two other men, Amates and Wilem. “The doctor said I cannot go with my arm, but my friends will take you.”
Amates looked tense, tightly wound. He was dripping with sweat, his body lost in baggy pleated slacks, his mouth an ugly dark cave. He had a suppurating carbuncle on his neck that he couldn’t stop touching. And there was that half a finger, the stub still swollen. Wilem was his opposite. Round for an Asmat, in flip-flops and gym shorts and a red-and-white-striped soccer jersey, and there was something haughty about him. Amates’s English was slow, labored. “I am from Biwar Laut,” he said. “I have been to university. I teach English. This is Wilem, he is the boat driver.”
We haggled over prices some more, settled on a number, and it was done. They would provide food, fuel, everything.
WE PULLED AWAY from the dock just after six the next morning in a narrow, thirty-foot longboat powered by a fifteen-horsepower Johnson outboard. The air was still, the Asawets River a half-mile wide. There were five of us in the boat: Amates and Wilem and me, plus Manu, Wilem’s assistant, and Filo, Amates’s brother. We carried two hundred liters of fuel and a pile of rice and ramen and water and enough loose-leaf tobacco and clove cigarettes to give the whole of Asmat cancer—hundreds of dollars’ worth. We hugged the left bank, passed Sjuru, the original Asmat village next to which Agats had been built (now all trash and shacks and billowing smoke), and turned left, into the Famborep River.
One second there were boats and big coastal traders and the smell and clamor of Agats and Sjuru, the next silence and water and green. The Famborep was barely twenty feet wide, a drowned world of hanging vines and epiphytes and moss-covered mangroves. The dark water mirrored the trees and sky above it as shafts of sunlight streamed through the overgrowth, the river flooding the land as far inland as I could see. Birds called. It was beautiful and ethereal, removed. There was no trash, nothing man-made—it looked the same as it had at the dawn of time.
Amates pointed to a Seussian fan of leaves. “A tree of sago!” he said. “One day I slept here. I was coming back to school in Agats from Biwar.” He was thirty-two, had six kids, had been smart enough to be shipped off to Catholic boarding school in Agats and then university in Bali. He had no job, though, no money, and even with Biwar Laut just a few hours downriver by powered longboat, he hadn’t been home in five years. It was just too far and expensive.
We passed into the Banduw River. “This is a crocodile place.” We zigged and zagged, hit the Jet River, and turned north. The waterway widened, and it began to make sense—why there were people here, and why the few Westerners who’d made it this far had been so infatuated with it. Asmat was otherworldly. Compelling. A strange and fecund universe utterly removed from the grip of the world. The jungle was thick, but the rivers were highways, and they kept it from feeling cloying, oppressive. It was a drowned Eden, full of birds and fish and freshwater and a giant sky that was always in motion. We passed villages you could smell before you got to them, smoke and laughing children’s voices and canoes drawn up on muddy banks. Dugouts lined with standing men paddled by, smoke rising from the coals in the stern.
After four hours, we came to Atsj, one of the largest and most developed villages outside of Agats. Under way, there was always a breeze, but as soon as we stopped the sun bore down on us as we tied up at some rickety poles and climbed to an unpainted wooden house belonging to Amates’s sister. The front porch was crowded with men and women in T-shirts and gym shorts. Its boards were shiny and polished smooth from years of bare feet. A thin woman with short hair rushed out. “Oh, oh, oh!” she cried. “Oooh,” she moaned, clasping Amates by the elbow, the arm, hugging and clutching him, rocking back and forth, sobbing, rubbing her tear-covered face over his arms and cheeks, a dramatic outpouring of emotion that ended as quickly as it began, when she simply turned and walked away. This was my first glimpse into the Asmat way—a place of intense emotional extremes and the very consciousness and sense of self that had been inextricably bound with cannibalism—though it would take me a long time to understand it.
The house had four rooms, bare plank walls, and two red velour sofas. A pig’s jaw hung over the door. A seven-foot-long bow and a thick bunch of bamboo arrows dangled from a nail in the corner. Plastic tubs of rainwater lined the back porch. A handwoven fishing net hung on the wall. And beyond, more rooms, dark, windowless, and smoky, one with a mud hearth full of glowing coals and blackened pots. Uncles, cousins, nephews—Amates identifi
ed each as “my brother,” one of them albino—were everywhere, lying, sitting, squatting on the bare floor. By the fire, a woman took handfuls of pinkish-white sago, pressed it into a mold, covered it with a banana leaf, then lay the mold on the fire. After a few minutes, she lifted it out and shook the rectangular cakes onto a tin plate. The sago tasted warm, nutty, but dry, like eating sand; it was hard to imagine surviving off it. Even though they lived here in Atsj, Amates’s family was from Biwar Laut, and so, Amates said, “this sago comes from the jungle of Biwar Laut. Not Atsj. If we go to the Atsj jungle for sago, there will be boxing, fighting. It will be very bad.”
As the hours ticked by and hardly anyone moved, I felt an unsettling dislocation of time and place. Atsj had a hotel, stores, and little restaurants run by Indonesian traders, a big concrete dock, mosques, and we were sitting in a house with a corrugated metal roof and those incongruous velour sofas. A TV rested in a corner, reverently covered by clear plastic. But the principal food was still sago cooked on an open fire, and it still came from a source that couldn’t be deviated from. I had traveled all over the world, and I’d always felt more than welcome—I’m usually an object of attention, people are curious and fascinated by where I’m from and why I’m in their midst, me a little doorway to the mythical America. But here no one asked any questions. I felt like a ghost, a feeling that would only grow the deeper I went. No one spoke English except for Amates, and there was nothing to do but sit and listen and watch other people sitting and sweating and smoking and talking. I felt a wall that had another side I couldn’t get to, couldn’t see, except for a few tantalizing clues, and I wasn’t even sure what that wall was or what lay behind it. This wasn’t the Asmat that Michael Rockefeller had seen. Layers had been added, layers of Christianity and Indonesia, but how much had changed and who they really were, what they were thinking, I couldn’t tell. At least not yet.
