Tales of a Female Nomad (27 page)

I warn the other women that I am seriously out of shape. I dread the thought that I might hold everyone back, but they are not bothered. Two days after we arrive in Wamena, we begin our trek. Oh, God, I think, remembering that other mountain in Mexico, a mite compared to the monsters I was about to tackle. What am I doing here? Why didn’t I train?

I am helpless and irresponsible in the physical fitness department, but I am well prepared in the equipment department. My boots, the ones Pak Sutrisna covets, are the best. I bought them the morning of the day I left Connecticut, after I got a phone call from a friend of a friend. She had just returned from Irian Jaya, where she and her boyfriend had gone trekking. He’d had the kind of boots I had already bought, Gor-tex and suede, guaranteed waterproof. His feet had been wet, blistered, and sore. She, on the other hand, had bought the finest-waterproof-leather-triple-bladdered-two-hundred-fifty-dollar-boots. And her feet had been dry. Two hours before I left for the airport, I rushed out to the nearest Eastern Mountain Sports store, and I bought the best boots they had.

I had already been talked into the best backpack. “Surely you aren’t planning to cut expenses on something so important as your body?” said the salesman. It took us an hour to find the perfect pack for my size.

On the day we begin our trek, my personal porter comes to my hotel room. While I am lacing up my finest-waterproof-leather-triple-bladderedtwo-hundred-fifty-dollar boots, he slings my treasured backpack over one shoulder, and we take off for the mountains. He is barefoot.

Our first day’s trek is only slightly uphill, and most of it is along a dirt road through cleared areas. I am last in line, but pleased that I’m able to stay more or less within sight of the others.

Along the way we meet giggly shy girls, and boys in bunches. Merinus teaches us a greeting and we call out whenever we see someone. The young people speak Indonesian, so I can communicate with the ones who are brave enough to talk to me.

Most of the women and girls we meet are bare breasted. All of them are carrying a
noken,
a bag that they weave from the bark of trees. Some
noken
are three feet long, and they stretch out more than that from side to side. Some women are carrying two or three. We meet women who are carrying yams in their
noken.
And baby pigs. And babies nested on a pile of leaves. The woven handle of the
noken
goes over the forehead, sort of like a headband with a big bag attached. The bag hangs down the back.

We meet men, some in shorts, others wearing only
horim,
penis gourds. The
horim,
hollow gourds that look like long carrots, some more than a foot long, slip over the penis and are attached at the top by one string that ties around the waist, and at the bottom by another string that loops around the scrotum. The men grow the gourds, shaping them as they grow. There are actually fashions in
horim.
Some men like them narrow and long; others prefer a crooked one. And most men have several for various occasions, or perhaps moods. The gourds point straight up in the air like a permanent erection.

We meet more pigs than people. They’re all over, snorting, untethered, and frequently trailed by piglets.

Every once in a while, we come upon someone selling cooked yams or, less often, pineapples. Then we sit and eat and talk and smile as the locals gather around to watch.

Before sundown, we arrive at the village where we are going to sleep. We spread our mats and sleeping bags in the wooden community house while our cook fixes a dinner of rice and vegetables. As we are eating, a group of men waits outside the door, peeking in. When we finish, they take us to a hut where there is a fire in the middle of the room. The men sit on one side of the fire and we sit on the other. They are all a deep chocolate brown color, with curly, dark hair and handsome, chiseled bone structure. They are wearing beads and bones and feathers around their necks. Some of the men are wearing shorts. Others, including the chief, are wearing
horim.

Our two groups sit looking at each other: the men from the village, about ten of them, and the four of us women. Our guides are behind us. No one is speaking.

I am not sure if they all understand Indonesian, but I know that the chief and the school teacher do; they introduced themselves to us when we first entered the village. I decide to make a little speech telling them how honored we are to be here in their village. I tell them our names and where we are from. Then I turn to my Austrian and Namibian companions and ask them if they know any English songs. They do.

“We would like to sing some songs,” I say.

We begin with “You Are My Sunshine” and continue with “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “Home, Home on the Range.” After the final “And the skies are not cloudy all day,” we stop. The hut is now packed with men and women and children. Our voices have drawn a crowd. Everyone is smiling.

I direct my smile at the village chief. “Now,” I say in Indonesian, “it is your turn.”

The men huddle. Then they spread out and begin to sing. First they sing a church song. (The missionaries have been here before us.) Then another hymn. Their voices are strong and beautiful. Then they sing a traditional tribal song with percussive sounds and hisses and huffs and humming. There are voices that echo and voices that sing out a beat behind the music. There is a glow in their faces as they sing.

The tribal song is long. It is coming from the depths of their heritage. I am moved to tears. Here I am in the mountains of Irian Jaya and the local tribesmen are singing to me. And I am singing to them. I ask them to teach us their song.

They laugh to hear us trying to hiss and hum and huff with our voices.

Then we sing “Old MacDonald,” and we all laugh as we make cow and pig and duck noises; and then we teach our silly song to them. For more than an hour, we sing and laugh and learn from each other.

The second day, we enter the jungle, with its massive trees, twisting vines, raging brooks, spectacular orchids, and butterflies in iridescent colors. Squawking cockatoos and strange-looking hornbills fly over us. The earth smell mixes with the smells of green bushes, lush moss, and flowering plants in every color. And the harsh song of the cicadas offers the background buzz to birds and insects competing for the airwaves.

The bad news is that I have to jump from stone to stone across brooks, and traverse log bridges that span rocky wet gullies. I do not jump well; and log bridges, without ropes to hold onto, terrify me. When everyone else has crossed, one of the porters steps onto the log, reaches his hand out for me to hold, and I inch my way across, my knees shaking wildly in direct proportion to the distance and danger level of the fall. If I really did lose my balance, there’s no way that hand could save me. We’d go down together.

The other part of mountain climbing that I do not like is the climbing. I am not trudging up this vertical monster because “it’s there.” I am doing it because this is the only way I can meet the people who live in these mountains. I am not a happy climber. I’m always miles behind everyone else, sweating, panting, and hurting. Ursula has volunteered to walk with me. She is a phys. ed. teacher in Austria and very patient. One of the things she does is teach high school students how to climb mountains.

There are near-vertical inclines made of pebbles and rocks, the kind that slide out from under my boots.

“Slowly, slowly,” Ursula repeats hundreds of times. “Go very slowly. Watch where you put your foot. Every step you must watch.”

“Oh, my God!” I groan, looking up at the incline.

“Don’t look up,” says Ursula.

I keep apologizing. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “If I climb slowly, it gives me more time to look around.”

“Don’t stop. Take short steps. Walk slowly, slowly.”

The slope goes straight up.

“There’s no hurry. That’s great. You’re doing great. Good. Good.”

“Very, very small steps. Like an escargot. Don’t stop. Don’t look up.”

After about two hours, I hate her.

When we reach the steepest slope of the day, she says, “Don’t look up. You’re doing wonderful. When we get to the top, I’m going to give you some Swiss chocolate.”

How could I hate her?

On the third day every muscle of my body is aching. I’m in agony just getting in and out of my sleeping bag. And this is the day of the stiles, things I thought existed only in nursery rhymes (the crooked man who found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile). Stiles separate property and make it easier for people to climb over fences. You have to climb up crooked posts, throw a leg over the top, and then climb or jump down. In the best of times I don’t climb or jump very well. And now, every move hurts. How I wish that I were not wearing my fabulous-two-hundred-fifty-dollar-very-heavy boots (Ursula and Teresia are in sneakers). Though I’m just as sure that if I weren’t wearing them, I’d have a twisted ankle.

For the entire six days of our trek, the evening entertainment is the same. We have no choice. Each time we arrive in a village for the night, advance notice of our singing has preceded us. There must be couriers running through the mountains calling out the news of our traveling minstrel show.

Our act gets better and funnier. As we discover other songs we have in common, like “Eentsy Weentsy Spider” and “I’m a Little Teapot,” we add to our repertoire. Each evening, soon after I drag myself into a new village, ready to collapse, wanting never to move again, a new crowd assembles, and once again, the four white women from the world beyond the clouds blend our voices, our laughter, our joy, with our gentle dark-skinned hosts of the highlands. And somewhere, wrapped in the music, we become one.

When we get back to Wamena, I still have two weeks before I have to meet Michael for our tour of the south. I ask Merinus to take me, alone, to a small, interesting village, by public transportation. I want to stay in one place for at least four days, long enough to learn some names and play with the kids.

Before we leave, Merinus and I load up on food: a dozen cans of sardines, five packages of crackers, rice, carrots, cabbage, green leaves, string beans, garlic, noodles, soy sauce, tangerines, coffee, condensed milk. And bottles of water. We buy enough food to feed a family for a week. Merinus carries it.

The ride from Wamena at six in the morning is spectacular. Whichever way I look, there are mountain peaks with white fluffy sashes around their middles. I must admit that viewing the landscape out of a van window where I can focus on the scenery instead of on my feet is spiritually and physically very satisfying.

The village consists of four wooden houses, seventeen round thatched huts called
honai,
and a church. The head of the church, whom I call Bapak, which means father and mister, is wearing khaki pants and a blue T-shirt. A local man, not a missionary, he welcomes us and offers us a choice: we can sleep in his wooden house or in a
honai
. I tell him that I would like to know what it is like to sleep in a
honai.

He offers us a cup of coffee, and I open a package of crackers and a can of sardines to share. Pita, his eight-year-old daughter, comes in carrying her two-and-a-half-year-old sister. The girls are bright-eyed, with loving smiles and runny noses. Mom is sitting outside on a tree stump with her head down.

“Is your mother sick?” I ask Pita.

“Yes,” she answers. “Malaria.”

A few minutes later, Bapak invites me to go for a walk, just the two of us. The path is level, the giant roots and massive boulders, minimal. I am moving along well until I step into a muddy hole . . . and begin to sink. My weighted feet will not pull out. Soon I am up to my knees in mud. I have visions of sinking deeper and deeper until the tips of my waving fingers go under, but Bapak saves me. He hands me one end of a branch and pulls me out.

Just before the path begins a steep descent, Bapak suggests we sit and talk.

“I was a fighter in the OPM,” he begins. Organisasi Papua Merdeka is the organization formed to fight for the freedom of the Papuans, against the Indonesians.

The native people of Irian Jaya call themselves Papuans, like their brothers on the eastern half of the island. Through a complex series of political decisions, this western half of the island of New Guinea was officially given to Indonesia by the United Nations in 1962. Part of the deal was that by 1969, Indonesia had to give the natives a chance to determine if they wanted independence. In a vote that is generally considered to have been a joke, a handpicked group of “elders” unanimously decided to become part of Indonesia.

The OPM fought for independence; they wanted nothing to do with Indonesia. The worst of the battles were in the mid-seventies. Bapak was one of the leaders.

“When we knew we were going to lose, many of my friends ran across the border to Papua New Guinea. But I was afraid that if I ran, the Indonesians would kill my family. We hid in the forest for many months, hunting for our food and frightened for our lives. Today, the retaliation is over, but the Indonesians treat us like animals. We have nothing in common with ‘those people with straight hair.’ My people want to be a part of Papua New Guinea, not Indonesia. Someday we will fight for and win our freedom.”