The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (45 page)

All of us quickly fell asleep, worn out from the long grueling day. I have no idea how much later it was that I became awakened by a soft sound of footsteps and a sense of the ground shaking from someone walking nearby. The sound and motion stopped, evidently because the unknown person was standing near the rear of my tent, near my head. I assumed that one of my 13 companions had just come out of the large tarpaulin shelter to urinate. It did seem strange that he had not gone out of the rear of the tarpaulin away from my tent for privacy, but had instead turned towards my tent, walked along its length, and was now standing at my tent’s rear and near my head. But I was sleepy, attributed no significance
to where he had chosen to urinate, and dozed off. Within a short time I was awakened again, this time by voices from the shelter of the New Guineans who were talking, and by bright light from their fire, which they had stirred up. That wasn’t unusual; New Guineans often do wake up periodically during the night and talk. I called out asking them to be more quiet, and I went back to sleep. And that was the entirety of the apparently meaningless incident at night, as I experienced it.

When I woke up the next morning, I opened the front door flap of my tent and greeted the New Guineans under their tarpaulin a few yards away, starting to cook breakfast. They told me that their voices and their stirring up the fire at night had been caused by several of them being awakened by the presence of a strange man standing at the open front of their tarpaulin. When the stranger realized that he was being watched, he made a gesture, visible in the firelight, of stretching out one arm horizontally and letting its hand droop downwards at the wrist. At that gesture, some of the New Guineans called out in fear (for reasons that I shall mention in a moment). Their calling out was what I had sleepily mistaken as the noise of their talking during the night. At the sound of their calling, others of the New Guineans awoke and sat up. The strange man then ran off into the rainy night. My New Guinea friends pointed out some barefoot footprints in the wet mud where the man had stood. But I don’t recall my friends saying anything that alarmed me.

It was indeed unexpected to me that anyone would come at night in the rain to our camp in the middle of an uninhabited stretch of forest. However, I had become accustomed to the fact that things unexpected to me did often happen in New Guinea, and I had never felt that I was in any personal danger from any New Guinean. After we finished breakfast and folded up our tents, we resumed our journey, now on its third day. Our route climbed out of the awful river bed and followed a broad clear path through beautiful tall forests along the river bank. I felt as if I were walking in awe inside a high Gothic cathedral. I strolled on alone ahead of my New Guinea friends, in order to identify birds that hadn’t already been disturbed by them, and to enjoy in solitude the magical cathedral-like forests. It was only when I finally reached a larger river below the village that was our final destination that I sat down to wait for my friends to catch up. It turned out that I had walked a long distance ahead of them.

Our 10-day stay at the isolated small village was so interesting in its own way that I forgot about the incident of the prowler at night. When it finally became time to return to the large village from which we had set out, the local men among my 13 New Guinea friends proposed that we return by a completely different route, which they said bypassed the awful wading in a river. That new route proved to be a good dry trail going through forests. It took us only two days to get back to the large village, instead of the agonizing three days of our march out. I still have no idea why our local guides had inflicted the route with the grueling wading of the stream on themselves, as well as on the rest of us.

Subsequently, I recounted our adventures to a missionary who had been living in the area for several years, and who had also visited the isolated small village. In the following years I came to know better two of the local men who had been our guides on that trek. From the accounts of the missionary and of the two New Guineans, I learned that the prowler at night was well known in that district—as a crazy, dangerous, powerful sorcerer. He once threatened to kill the missionary with his bow and arrow, and once actually tried to do so with a spear at the same isolated village that I had visited, laughing as he jabbed his spear in earnest. He was reported to have killed numerous local people, including two of his wives, and also his eight-year-old son just because the boy ate a banana without his father’s permission. He behaved like a true paranoid, unable to distinguish reality from his imagination. Sometimes he lived in a village with other people, but at other times he lived alone in the area of forest where we had camped on that night, and where he had killed women who made the mistake of going there.

Despite the man being so obviously crazy and dangerous, local people didn’t dare interfere with him, because they feared him as a great sorcerer. The gesture that he made at night when detected by my New Guinea friends—outstretched arm with drooping wrist—conventionally symbolizes to New Guineans in that area the cassowary, New Guinea’s largest bird, which is believed to be actually a powerful magician who can turn himself into a bird. The cassowary is flightless, a distant relative of ostriches and emus, weighs 50 to 100 pounds, and terrifies New Guineans because it has stout legs with razor-sharp claws that it uses to disembowel dogs or people when attacked. That extended-arm, drooping-wrist gesture
made by the sorcerer at night is believed to work powerful magic, and it mimics the shape of the neck and head of the cassowary held in the position when the bird is about to attack.

What was that sorcerer intending to do when he came into our camp that night? While your guess is as good as mine, his aims were probably not friendly. He knew or could infer that the green pup-tent would have a European inside it. As for why he came to the back rather than to the front door of my tent, I guess that that was either because he wanted not to be detected by the New Guineans in their shelter facing my tent’s front door as he tried to get into my tent, or because he was confused by my tent’s structure and mistook the back (with its small window flap zipped closed) for the front with its large door. If I had had the experience of New Guinea then that I do now, I would have practised constructive paranoia and screamed to my nearby New Guinea friends as soon as I heard and felt footsteps near the rear of my tent. I certainly wouldn’t have walked alone, far ahead of my New Guinea friends, on the next day. In retrospect, my behavior was stupid and put me in danger. But I didn’t know enough then to read the warning signs and to exercise constructive paranoia.

In the second incident, my New Guinea friend Malik and I were on an island off Indonesian New Guinea and wanted to get ourselves and our gear to the New Guinea mainland, separated from the island by a strait a dozen miles wide. Around 4:00
P.M
. on a clear afternoon, slightly more than two hours before sunset, we joined four other passengers in a wooden canoe about 30 feet long, driven by two outboard motors mounted on the stern and with a crew of three young men. The four other passengers were not New Guineans: instead, they were a Chinese fisherman working on the New Guinea mainland, plus three men from the Indonesian islands of Ambon, Ceram, and Java respectively. The canoe’s cargo and passenger space was covered by a plastic awning about four feet high, stretched over a framework, loosely attached to each side of the canoe, and extending from about 4 feet in front of the stern forward to 10 feet behind the canoe’s prow. The three crew sat in the stern at the motors, and Malik and I sat
just in front of them, facing the rear. With the awning over us and at our sides, there was little outside that we could see. The four other passengers sat at our backs, towards the canoe’s prow.

The canoe set off, and the crew soon had the engines up to full speed, through waves several feet high. A little water splashed into the canoe under the awning, then a little more, and the other passengers began groaning good-naturedly. As some more large quantities of water splashed in, one of the crew began bailing water immediately in front of me out the loose sides of the awning. More large quantities of water came in, soaking the luggage stored towards the front of the canoe. I put my binoculars for protection inside the small yellow knapsack that I was holding in my lap, and that contained my passport, money, and all of my field notes wrapped inside a plastic bag. Over the roar of the engines and the crashing of the waves, Malik and the other passengers began to shout loudly, now no longer good-naturedly, at the driver, telling him to slow down or turn back. (This and all the rest of the conversations during this whole incident were in the Indonesian language, the official language and the lingua franca of Indonesian New Guinea.) But he didn’t slow down, and more water splashed in. The accumulated weight of water was now causing the canoe to ride so low that water began pouring in over the sides.

The next few seconds, as the canoe settled lower into the ocean, were a blur that I can’t reconstruct in detail. I was now scared that I would be trapped under the canoe’s plastic awning as it sank. Somehow, I and everyone else managed to get out of the canoe into the ocean; I don’t know whether some of us towards the rear jumped out of the open rear space not covered by the awning, or whether we instead crawled out under the awning’s sides, and whether the passengers in front of us crawled out under the awning or scrambled to the open space in front or to the rear of the awning. Malik told me afterwards that the crew got out of the canoe first, then I got out, then Malik.

The next minute was even more of a panicked blur for me. I was wearing heavy hiking boots, a long-sleeved shirt, and shorts, and found myself in the water several yards from the canoe, which had capsized and was now bottom up. The weight of my hiking boots was dragging me underwater. My initial thought was a vivid, frightened “what is there that I can hold on to to keep myself afloat?” Near me, someone was clinging to a
yellow life preserver, which I tried to grab in my panic, but the other person pushed me away. From my position now floating in the water, the waves seemed high. I had swallowed some water. While I can swim for short distances in a calm swimming pool, I wouldn’t have been able to swim or float for many minutes through waves. I felt overwhelmed by fear that there was nothing to keep me afloat: our luggage and the canoe’s gas tank floating nearby weren’t buoyant enough to support my weight, the inverted canoe hull was now low in the water, and I feared that even it would sink. The island from which we had set out appeared to be several miles distant, another island seemed equally distant, and no other boat was in sight.

Malik swam over to me, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and pulled me back to the canoe. For the next half-hour he stood on the submerged upside-down engine and clung to the canoe’s stern, while I clung nearby to the rear of the canoe’s left side, with Malik keeping a grip on my neck. I stretched my arms out over the hull’s round smooth underside, merely to steady myself, because the hull offered nothing for my hands to grasp. Occasionally I reached out my right hand to grip a submerged part of the engine, but that kept my head low above the water, which splashed into my face. Instead, for most of the time, my only grip holding me to the canoe was with my feet, which were somehow inserted in or hooked onto the left side’s sunken gunwale. Now that the canoe was upside down and my feet were on the gunwale, the gunwale’s depth below the water was such that my head was not far above the surface of the water, and occasionally a wave washed over me. Some piece of wood or awning was loose on the gunwale and rubbed and hurt my knee with each wave. I asked Malik to hold me while I untied my boot laces with one hand and then took off and threw away the heavy boots that were dragging me down.

From time to time I turned around to look at the waves coming towards me, and to brace myself for especially big waves. Often, one of my legs lost its grip on the gunwale, leaving me to rotate helplessly on the other leg that was still on the gunwale. Several times I lost my grip with both legs, was swept loose, paddled back or was pulled back by Malik, and in panic tried to regain my leg grip on the gunwales. During the entire time since the capsizing, the struggle to survive from one wave to the next had been all-consuming. I had the sense that there was no pause in the struggle.
Each wave threatened to shake me loose. Each time that I did get shaken loose, there was a panicked struggle to get back to the canoe and to get a grip again. I was often gasping from water in my face.

Because Malik’s stance on the engine seemed more secure than my foot grip on the gunwales, I eventually moved from the canoe’s side to its stern and stood with one leg on the submerged engine next to Malik, leaning forward and resting my arms on the round hull. Then I found and grabbed with my right hand some wooden bars attached to the hull, probably a partially broken piece of gunwale. This was the first good handhold that I had had since the canoe capsized. Standing on the engine and leaning forwards over the hull had the advantage that it kept my head higher above the waves than when I had been standing on the more deeply submerged gunwale, but it had the disadvantage that it placed more strain on my leg and was more tiring.

We didn’t seem to be drifting any closer to the two islands visible in the distance. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay afloat for more than a minute if the canoe, already floating low in the water, sank. I asked Malik if the canoe was just being held up by trapped air under the hull and was at risk of sinking if that air somehow came out, but he answered that the canoe timbers themselves would float. There was nothing that I could do except to hold on, react to each wave, wait (for what?), and watch. I kept asking Malik whether he was OK—probably just to assure myself that I was OK.

Luggage floated out from underneath the canoe. Some of it had been lashed to the canoe and stayed floating near the prow, including my own three suitcases. But other luggage was loose and drifted away, including my red rucksack, my green duffel bags, and Malik’s luggage. It flashed through my mind that the most important thing was to save my life, and that what happened to my luggage was trivial by comparison. I nevertheless found myself slipping into my usual what-if mode of mulling over how I would deal with problems that arise in the course of travel. If I lost my passport, I thought, I could always get another one, though it would be a big mess to have to go to the nearest American embassy in Indonesia’s capital 1,600 miles away. If I lost all my money and traveler’s checks, I wasn’t sure if I had a separate record of my traveler’s check numbers, and that record would be in my drifting or floating luggage anyway. If we did
get rescued, I would have to borrow a lot of money in order to fly to Indonesia’s capital and get a new passport: how and from whom could I borrow money? My most important possessions—that passport, money, and traveler’s checks, plus my bird notes from the whole trip—were in my yellow knapsack, which I had been holding in my lap in the canoe and didn’t see now. If I didn’t succeed in retrieving my knapsack, perhaps I could at least reconstruct from memory the bird lists for the main sites that I had visited. Then I realized that it was absurd to be thinking about my passport, money, and bird lists, when I didn’t know if I was going be alive an hour from now anyway.