Adventure Divas (12 page)

In Sumatra, I saw wild orangutans in the tropical rain forest.
Snap! Crash! Crackle!
we’d hear, and look up to see an orange flash in the jungle canopy overhead. Our hearts raced and for a minute we forgot about the oppressive, perpetual damp. But that was before the fires of the late 1990s, a devastation that left many orangutans orphaned, injured, and hungry. The fires were partially caused by global climate change: Traditionally, the farmers and loggers set fire to their land every year, and the fires are extinguished by the monsoons. However, one year, the monsoons never came, and the fires raged uncontrolled through hundreds of thousands of acres of one of the richest forests in the world.

In both Sumatra and Borneo, mechanized logging and palm-oil plantations are destroying orangutan habitat. In addition to land conversion (which fosters fires), poachers shoot the mother orangutans (who eat from the palm trees when faced with diminishing habitats), peel the babies off of the corpses, and sell them into a black market that peddles baby orangs as pets–cum–status symbols. Some live in captivity for years, well into adolescence and adulthood; many die of disease (or some say depression); others make their way to rehab centers with the aid of people who are sensitive to, and informed about, their plight. Sepilok is one such center, a halfway house of sorts. Whatever their respective histories, each orangutan at this center is learning how to be an orangutan, and, it is hoped, will eventually return to the rain forest. The youngest, and those not in captivity long, have the best chance of returning to their native habitat.

The government-run spread consists of a collection of small cinder-block buildings, including a medical facility, and some some ropey jungle-gym-type structures for the animals. On the grounds are a number of roofed edifices under which dozens of small cages are stacked atop one another. The cages are teeming with baby orangutans. Red balls of fire, leaping and squeaking, back and forth, up and down.

The cages send me into a Sally Struthers–style tizzy but I quickly strap on my congenial persona when a man named Melvin introduces himself to show me around the center. As infants, Melvin tells me, orangutans are fed and held and taken care of much like human babies. From three to five years old, they are taught the use of their limbs and how to climb (strangely, orangutans do not know how to do this instinctively).

“After year five, the center works on ‘survival training,’ that is, reducing the orangutans’ dependence on people, teaching them to fend for themselves and to mate,” says Melvin. He hands me a young orangutan to hold while he fixes rope for the animal to play on.

Before I can follow up on that last, evocative bit of information, a warm liquid slowly courses down my belly and continues on down my leg. My charge quietly, and without fanfare, has begun to piss all over me. His hot urine drenches my chest and pants and I feel the strange combination of feelings I have when I pee in my wetsuit: naughty and gleeful and comforted, all at the same time. Nonetheless, I thrust the young orangutan in front of me, trying in vain to avoid his seemingly endless trajectory.

“Sounds as if the organization is
mama,
” I comment to Melvin, sopping up the piss, which has become much less pleasant now that the actual moment of being pissed on is over.

“Yes, and that is a very big job,” confirms Melvin.

Mama. Gives milk, teaches you to use your body, eventually gives you the sex talk, and then boots you off to college with fingers crossed that you do not come back. The process of rehabituation takes years of teaching, nurturing, and patience. Now I understand the cages. These little fellas are here for a long stretch, and they need structure for a while in order to survive.

We walk out to a feeding station where recently rehabituated orangutans can return from the forest for a fix should the dorm food be insufficient or not plentiful enough; a twice-daily supplement of bananas and rice is available to them in case they are having a hard time finding the vegetation they need. Each orangutan in the wild needs 1,200 acres of forest to survive.

A wiry-haired, brownish-orange female orangutan, about three feet tall and two feet wide, with a baby clutched to her side, swings down hand over hand from a tall tree, like a trapeze performer, and gracefully lands on the platform. Some consider this feeding part of the rehabituation process cheating. Biruté Galdikas defends the practice in her book
Reflections of Eden,
writing, “I cannot understand this purism in the face of habitat destruction, slaughter and imminent extinction. Human beings cheated the ex-captives of a normal upbringing by an orangutan mother in the forest canopy. Human beings are also consuming the orangutans’ natural habitat at an alarming rate. At the very least, we owe them some rice and bananas.”

I read a lot about Dr. Galdikas because she was on our original diva list. She arrived in the jungles of Borneo thirty years ago from Lithuania, via UCLA. Twenty-five and driven, she tackled leeches, disease, and poachers to eventually earn the respect of the local Indonesian community and the trust of hundreds of orangutans.

I also read in her book that orangutans do not, instinctually, know how to build nests like birds do. Adolescents practice and learn from their mothers and eventually get the hang of it. And even when they do make a nest, they move and rebuild every few days. Wild orangutans, especially the adult males, are nomadic. Although we as humans are separated from the orangutan by fourteen million years of evolution, I find myself relating to the often-solitary, on-the-move life of the orangutan, who has no instinct for nesting. Transitory nesting. I figure a long-term nest can get really stinky unless you’re committed to frequent cleaning. Duffle bags and hotel rooms, that’s the answer.

Melvin asks me to help him with a tiny infant orang named Cha whose mother, Luwa, was killed by a poacher. We do her weekly weigh-in (2.2 kilos). “She has gained weight,” Melvin says, pleased, and scribbles down some numbers.

He leaves me with Cha, knowing that these babies crave and need loving attention, especially from mammals with mammaries. Cha attaches to me, with vigor, immediately, proving Galdikas’s point: “Wild orangutan infants spend all their time with their mother. The mother-infant relationship is extremely intense. Only the mother orangutan carries the infant. The mother is the infant’s primary playmate. . . . Infant orangutans are genetically programmed to cling to their mothers.”

Cha gently touches my cheek with the pink, supple skin on the palms of her baby hands. Goofy orange puffs of hair sprout out of her precious bald head and tickle my chin. Her very warm chest huddles to my breast, arms around my neck now; her dewy chocolate eyes are full of need and love. A strange, deep, almost instinctual wave begins in my gut and spreads upward, over my heart, and a thought washes over me:

God . . . what a
sycophant.

Having a kid, even one that knows how to clutch on during the skip from nest to nest, must really slow you down. (Okay, I know my mom and plenty of other women managed kids and active careers, but I’m afraid I didn’t inherit that spunky martyr gene.)

I put down the boiling hot, clingy critter, suddenly glad I didn’t touch those fertility heads at the longhouse.

My own maternal shortcomings aside, it is true that the orangutan population is in dire straits, and that the ladies are good with the primates. I mean, there
is
something about chicks and chimps: Jane Goodall and her African chimpanzees; Dian Fossey and her mountain gorillas; and Biruté Galdikas, who created the Orangutan Foundation International and has been a leader in the fight to protect orangutans and their habitats for the past thirty years.

What do these three pioneering scientists have in common? A man: Louis Leakey. Seems the late Anglo-Kenyan paleontologist felt that women were better suited for research because they tend to be more observant, less aggressive, and more empathetic toward the animals than do their male counterparts. Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas were often called “Leakey’s Angels,” but in fact, it was Leakey who was the angel as he spearheaded financial support for the vital work of these three divas of primatology.

For decades, Galdikas was a hero in the worlds of conservation and primate research. But alas, heroism is a tricky thing. In the late 1990s, she was ousted from her Garden of Eden by a barrage of objections to her methods of acquiring and caring for orangutans, among other accusations. Writer Linda Spalding went looking for her hero, and, 269 pages later, she had charted and solidified Galdikas’s alleged downfall in her book
A Dark Place in the Jungle,
published in 1999. If Galdikas had died early, like Dian Fossey, who was murdered in 1985 and became a martyr to environmentalists, she might have gone down as an environmental revolutionary. But she lived long enough to see her reputation tumble. What happens when good divas go bad? For now, I only had to face the question theoretically.

As we walk out of the rehabilitation center, livid, deep, miserable shrieks charge across the compound and stop me dead. I look across the grounds and see a huge adult orangutan, yanking at the bars, violently heaving his body against the cage. “We didn’t get him in time,” Melvin says quietly. His spirit defiled, this orangutan can only be caged for the rest of his days. Or else die.

What happens when free-range instincts are squashed by forces greater than the individual? This consumes me as we leave the sanctuary and set off for the heart of Mulu National Park for a look into the lives of the Penan, the only true nomads in Sarawak.

The Penan hunter-gatherers
inhabit the deep jungles of the central and northern parts of the state. An estimated three hundred Penan hunt, gather, run, roam, live, and die under the jungle canopy of the park; another seven thousand or so Penan have been jettisoned from their lands by the logging industry and put into “settlements” with promises of health care and education—promises that have largely gone unkept.

We travel by river out to one of these government-induced settlements, which is a line of clapboard dwellings accented with the odd bit of cloth swinging in the wet wind to dry. I sense depression. Unlike the upriver longhouse, which felt emboldened by tradition, pride, and humor—not at odds with modernity, but rather choosing what they would incorporate—this settlement reeks of defeat.

Whatever its hardships, the nomadic lifestyle holds some romance for me, a newly professional wanderer. Forced settlement of nomadic people seems particularly cruel, as it cuts them off from their way of life, cultures, and traditions. Just as exile (forced movement) was a theme that hovered over our Cuba trip, the notion of mandatory settlement (forced
non-
movement) haunts me now.

Moments after we arrive, a downpour begins, and we run for one of the shelters and sit among some wet hay to drink tea, and wait for the heavy rain to subside. “The Malaysian government backs the logging industry and the Penan, to put it bluntly, have been in the way,” Vanessa confirms.

When the rain stops, we gather near the water’s edge. A middle-aged woman plays a nose flute that sounds to me full of sadness and hope and maybe epic tales. The men work on their hunting implements. The ancient and inspiring parts of the Penan culture begin to shine through the trappings of the settlement as the rain stops and daily activity resumes.

The Penan hunt and trap gibbons, macaws, civet cats, squirrels, and reptiles. I’m shown the poison-dart blowpipe, which has a 150-foot range and is used for killing small game, including monkeys. A Penan hunter blows a dart (whose tip has been dipped in poison) through the barrel of the blowpipe using strong breath from the chest and stomach, rather than the mouth. The blowpipe is lighter than a gun, makes no sound, and can be shot with deadly precision. The poison, the blowpipe, and the darts, essential items of the Penan existence, are all handmade with materials found in the rain forest.

“Tomorrow you’ll be going on a hunt for wild bearded boar,” Vanessa tells me. “So brush up on your blowpipe skills,” she says with a mischievous smile. (Producers secretly love to torture talent.)

Day folds into night and we camp near the settlement. Artificial light plunges up into the sky in the east, the direction in which we have heard the din of chain saws all day. I lobby to go, to film the devastation that is destroying the Penan way of life. “It’s part of the story,” I say, trying to convince myself, and Rik, that Westerners with cameras can become part of the solution, not the problem.

“I heard a film crew was here last year and said they were doing a cultural story. Instead they went in and filmed the logging. The crew went missing,” says Rik. Gone. Poof. Never to be found. Yet another rule of the jungle.

“You must only do what you are permitted to do,” reinforces the humorless middle-aged fixer who we hired to help us set up this story. I concede the battle but decide to sneak off from camp that evening to have a look.

For years the Penan have been fighting for the preservation of their native territories, which have been defiled by logging companies that (in addition to logging) dump oil and chemicals into the water, causing acute stomach pain and skin diseases among the Penan people. The Penan staged an uprising in 1987 in which they blockaded bulldozers and logging areas. As the plight of the Penan became world famous, Penan rain-forest preservation became a hip celebrity cause and gained popular attention in the early nineties. Support eventually began to wane, however, amid sharp criticism from the Malaysian government. For a time, Mulu National Park was a global environmental battlefield, with the East telling the West to mind its own business and address the issues of its own destructive policies and stolen indigenous homelands. The Penan continue to fight for their right to the land that they have lived on for centuries, but the crisis of rain-forest destruction is more acute than ever.

Just after dusk I lace up my hiking boots and head for the floodlights, which look to be about half a mile away. I get to the perimeter of the action and stand in the shadows, looking into a void that is being created. A vast swatch of the dense, dark, mysterious forest has been exterminated and replaced with bright, artificial nothingness. A few giant arboreal corpses lie around, waiting to be hauled off. This Armageddon-like scene feels downright pornographic. It reminds me of the opening scene in
Terminator,
in which huge machines are steamrollering life out of existence. Helmeted men with chain saws quickly fillet the kill. The smell and sound of the thick, fecund forest is replaced by the stink of wet, flat death.