Adventure Divas (13 page)

Not a single cicada sings.

I am overcome with—not rage, not righteousness, not curiosity—but gut-socked sadness and a dose of guilt. I eat soy. I use chopsticks. I use palm oil and too much toilet paper. I am complicit in this, one of globalization’s dirty little secrets.

I brush seven swollen mosquitoes off my forearm, take one last glance at the void, and turn to leave. Now I understand why activists in the Pacific Northwest try to get politicians up in planes to see the logging carnage in Washington’s Cascades. One can justify or jury-rig the political landscape from behind a hardwood desk, but it is difficult to deny the visceral horror of such ravaged natural landscape.

Manners. Remember your manners,
I think as I sit deep in the rain forest with a family of Penan hunter-gatherers trying to swallow a third glop of wild sago. How I wish the glop were Jell-O salad, or matzoh ball soup, or anything but what it is. The mother twirls more gluey
na’oh
around a stick and hands it to me, and my gag muscle twitches as if contemplating a chunky (and not meant to be chunky) dairy product. Sago is wild palm, which the Penan depend upon for their housing, baskets, and food. It is 90 percent pure carbohydrate, and it used to be mixed with animal blood to form a mineral-rich source of nutrients. But Christian missionaries, reacting to the gore, convinced the Penan to stop eating blood. The nutritionally unbalanced staple that resulted keeps the Penan malnourished. To my Western palate,
na’oh
tastes like warmed Silly Putty. The plenitude of sago determines how long a nomadic Penan family stays in one place (it goes, they go).

At dawn this morning we shoved off in our canoes and traveled several hours to arrive here, deep in a protected forest area in which a group of nomadic Penan are still able to practice their traditional way of life. To keep away from the incessant drizzle, we are huddled under a lean-to made of giant pandanus leaves and branches, built by the mother of the family. Berti, the father, dips the head of a just-sharpened dart into a dark liquid. The poison.

I down the third glop of sago, hyper-aware that I have no choice, as the greatest transgression in Penan culture is
see hun,
or, “failure to share.” The prospect of another meal of sago is motivation enough to succeed in today’s wild boar hunt. Give me the other white meat any day (even if it has a beard).

Having wheedled our way into this boar hunt, a rare “pure” remaining aspect of Penan life, I am feeling more than ever as if we are nefarious culture skaters. We really should not be here. But my time to protest has long since passed. This is television and we have set up “an experience,” and—by god—it is my job to have it.

Only one gringa is allowed per hunt, so Georgie sets me up with the small Canon video camera and shoves a couple of extra tapes in my pocket. “Okay mate, if you get one make sure to get plenty of cutaways. And careful not to let the blood splatter on the lens” is Georgie’s final advice.

Martin translates for the three men whom I will join for the hunt. The leader is Berti, the father of the family who shared their sago with me. As he issues instructions, Martin says, “Berti says to stay close, but never move in front of the group. When they catch one beware of its teeth.”

“Woouh, woouh, woouh,”
goes the high-pitched Penan chant as we trot along, and then quickly turn up the pace a notch to a steady run.

The men are wearing smallish skins that cover their loins. I am wearing thick cross-trainers, long, thin wicking pants with eight pockets (four of which I have yet to find), and a microlight long-sleeve shirt with mesh ventilation under the armpits. I am Ex Officio. My shoes crunch clumsily on the forest floor; the men travel in near silence, as if they are human hovercrafts.

After about five minutes I stop Berti and the guys and ask them to run around me in circles so I can get full frontal footage of them. I fear I will only see their backsides from here on out given their increasing pace. No translator is on site, so “asking them” means me running around in a circle miming the hunt of a wild bearded boar (as if I have some idea what that entails). They laugh at the foolish tall white lady, and gamely comply. Before we take off again I get a close-up of Berti’s feet. They are small and have an intriguing network of roundish muscle landscapes. Given the speed and gallantry with which they deliver him through a forest floor of logs, prickly sticks, and vines, it seems Berti’s feet have a range of talents wholly incomprehensible to the average pampered First World foot.

“The Penan are so profoundly different,” wrote Canadian linguist Ian Mackenzie. “They have no writing so their total vocabulary at any one time is the knowledge of the best storyteller. There is one word for he, she, and it, but six for we. There are at least eight words for sago, because it is the plant that allows them to survive. Sharing is an obligation, so there is no word for ‘thank you.’ They can name hundreds of trees but there is no word for ‘forest.’ Their universe is divided between the land of shade, the land of abundance, and the land that has been destroyed.”

The hunt begins in earnest. Berti and the two other men are ripping through the dense tangles of vines, trees, and kooky jungle growth at high speed with six-foot-long blowpipes and spears in their hands. The speed and agility with which they traverse the terrain is uncanny and I wonder if they are doing
mal cun uk
(“follow our feelings”), a Penan way to navigate an unknown part of the jungle. I put the camera on autofocus, lock it on record, and pull out every last one of my stops in order to keep up.
I will not fail, goddammit,
I think as I flail with gusto through the dense underbrush, willing my bad ankle not to snap.

Last year CNN put me through their war-zone training for journalists in the swamps of Georgia, where I learned that camera operators have a misguided sense of security. That is, the irrational belief that they are invincible, that somehow looking through a lens protects your body as bullets fly by, grenades are lobbed, or, in the current case, as you hurl yourself through lethal jungle, full speed and sans peripheral vision, on the tail of Penan warriors who are wielding poison blow darts in hopes of skewering a wild, bearded boar. The adrenaline is pumping.
I am keeping up!
I can see the nutgrab now:
HE BLEW THE POISON DART WITH THE ACUMEN OF A THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY, AND DOWNED THE SQUEALING SWINE IN A SINGLE SHOT.

Ah-ha! The story is mine!

Just as I am about to delude myself that I am both a journalist and a hunter, I go ass over tit into a felled log and a sticky, prongy vine becomes the new look in choker collars. My head is thrust back into a giant mossy divot in a hundred-million-year-old tree; another scratchy vine has bound my torso and I am firmly lodged in some twisted B-movie S-and-M jungle position. I look up at the thick canopy above, pant, and think of Peg the nurse’s final admonition and wonder if anything is
broken, torn,
or
severely punctured,
or if the term “air-evac” has ever even crossed the lips of a human being within a thousand-mile radius.

The Penan’s hunting chants fade into the distance.

I am instantly miserable.

My head itches. I hurt. My wrists are sweating. In the back of my mind anxiety simmers because I know this is the exact kind of moment I will be required to write about or describe to camera, and I think,
Can’t I just have the fucking experience?
I enter a moment of schizophrenic self-pitying delirium: What would others write?

ERNEST
H
EMINGWAY:
 I am hot. I will just shoot the pig.

A
NNE
L
AMOTT:
 I’m feeling hot and my Birks were not the best choice but what I really want is to have a stiff drink but Sam wouldn’t like it because he doesn’t have a father. Screw Sam. It’s all about me anyway.

P
AUL
T
HEROUX
:
 I’m very hot. I feel as if I’m in the furnace of an old 1926 steam engine.

As I try to untangle myself, the punishing humidity fuels a steady stream of sweat into my eyes, which makes the wall of electric-green foliage that incarcerates me jitter like the preamble to an acid trip.

The spongy, fetid jungle floor is alive, a constant microorganismic frenzy. It is sending out an endless, deafening, gurgly hum that tells me that billions and billions of small creatures are surrounding me and are very hard at work and I am just lying there like a dead animal, soon to be decomposed.

Mosquitoes (malarial, I’m sure) swarm mercilessly. I become convinced that a slimy overwhelming power is morphing me into something else, and I will end up a moth—and not in that comforting reincarnation way.

I would just be a moth.

It’s when I hear myself nearly whimper that I ask myself what a diva would do.
Take action.
I scramble to my feet and turn the camera on myself in a desperate
Blair Witch
moment. This is as good a time as any to deliver some “top tips” and “emotional diary entries,” both of which were mandated by the series producer, who is currently sitting in a posh office back in London’s Notting Hill.

“Whenever you’re hunting for wild boar in the jungles of Borneo, wear a long-sleeve shirt,” I say to camera and pan down my arm, which is dripping blood from the hostile vine. Of course, only one in a million viewers will ever hunt wild boar in this godforsaken hell.

Seems Berti and the others are long gone, and rightly so. My stealthless presence made their chances of sticking a boar about as likely as my chances of finding my way out of this jungle unaided.

I just hope they’ll come back for me.

I hang my sweaty overshirt (now ripped for additional ventilation) on a branch of a tree that I notice has been
molong
ed. The Penan tradition of
molong
ing trees consists of marking the trunk with a machete to signify it as a fruiting tree, rather than a lumber tree. If a tree has been
molong
ed, other Penan will not cut it down, but only pick fruit from it. This example of ecological stewardship stands in ironic contrast to the mowing for profit I witnessed last night.

I wander about twenty yards and position myself in what passes for a clearing. Like any good Chicagoan, I try to face the virtual door so that when a threatening mobster character comes in to take me out, I will be prepared. Unfortunately, the jungle is all doors. Pity the editor who has to go through the footage I burn during the next ten minutes as I deliver my “diary moments,” which rumble closer to a pitch of pure panic with each minute that the Penan hunters do not come back for me.

“Excuse me, but I do
not
think Julia Roberts was put through this when she did a show in Borneo. Please, they just wheeled her out of the trailer, stuck baby orangutans on her ample breast, and rolled film.” And finally . . .

“My brother gets my record collection; my sister the dog; sign the 100k death-and-dismemberment insurance over to Adventure Divas.”

Does wretchedly slow decomposition count as dismemberment? I turn off the camera and watch the blood weep down my leg from the latest leech incursion. I sop the ooze from another ulcer, an older bite. Leeches have three jaws, each of which contains a hundred teeth. They use one end of their body for attaching to their host while the other end feeds. Their saliva contains an anti-coagulating agent and a mild anesthetic, so that they can suck you dry, unnoticed. In a half hour a leech can consume up to five times its body weight—that is, half a shot glass of blood. They can balloon from two centimeters to two inches fat, depending how much blood they suck. I flick off a small leech that is beginning to dig in at my ankle.

And then it becomes painfully clear that one tampon was not enough for today’s excursion.

The army of jungle bugs turns up the volume a notch in unison. At this moment, in the belly of the beast, Borneo’s tropical rain forest seems endless and all-consuming. Hard to conceive that it could all be destroyed. Yet, if all systems remain go—that is, the logging continues 24/7 under floodlights, and the Penan who are staging protests do not prevail—it will be gone in five to ten years. Forever. Poof. Like the film crew that tried to record it happening. But my compassion for the rain forest atrophies with each moment the environment keeps me trapped and fearful. No Stockholm Syndrome for this panicking pig hunter.

I slide into what my friend Kate calls the “secret happy place.” That is, the place where you go in your mind when your heaving face has been planted over the toilet in a third-class Indian train for six hours straight; that place you go when your sister has had one too many cocktails at Christmas dinner and you can see her wind up to chuck a hardball at the dysfunctional house of mirrors that tenuously holds the gathering together; that place you go when you have intestinal parasites and shit your pants on a Guatemalan Bluebird bus (and that place you go after you clean yourself up and it happens again five minutes later); and finally, that place you go when you’ve been abandoned by Penan tribesmen in the jungles of Borneo and find yourself seeping from five different holes—some natural, some not.

My secret happy place is under a piece of heavy oak furniture where I mouth to myself, “You’re all alone in this world and the sooner you realize that the better; you’re all alone in this world and the sooner you realize it the better.” My decades-old ritual response to pain (secret, but come to think of it, not very happy) has adapted, in this case to: “You’re all alone in this world
—except for the goddamn crew, who’d better come find me—
and the sooner you realize that
—one dumb gringa life is nothing compared to the genocide—
the better
—I’ll miss the broadcast of the Cuba show! I’ll never know if the project comes to fruition.
You’re all alone—
calm down calm down . . . oh god. Jesus. I’m not cut out for this nomad life—
and
the sooner you realize it . . .”

To calm myself, I try to buy into the Penan belief in the interconnectedness of all things material and spiritual, a belief that puts a more palatable spin on death. After all, when you’re in the tropics with very limited access to medical facilities, death can strike at any moment and, in the cosmos of the local people, fate can never be avoided. Without a conceptual distinction between this life and the hereafter, one cultivates an easy acceptance of death. This, in turn, it is said, leads people to live joyously.