Going Native (29 page)

In the morning it was back to the boat, the teeming deck, crying babies, restless children, engine spew, TV squawk,
kretek
fumes, the sun, the rain, the scenery, the books. "And fast by hanging in a golden chain/This pendant world, in bigness as a star/Of smallest magnitude close by the moon./Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,/ Accursed, and in a cursed hour he hies."

Seven days.

At Long Duling, final stop on the languorous river-taxi route,
Indonesia Today
offered the practical suggestion that the adventuresome traveler seek out the services of one Pa Jutoh Den, combination headman, police official, and tour agent, whose sons were highly recommended as guides on any further jaunts into the wilderness up-country. He could be found in the distinctive small bungalow at the edge of the forest, the one with the carvings on the roof, parodies of Western men in exaggerated handlebar mustaches, Santa Claus beards, big white tombstone-sized grinning teeth. He seemed happy to see Drake and Amanda, greeted his new American visitors as if they'd already met under different circumstances. The interior of the house was cluttered from ceiling to floor with pictures, sculpture, bric-a-brac, of an outrageously Christian nature, the religion embraced with the enthusiastic fervor of a memorabilia collector. He was attired in a neat pressed beige uniform of the U.S. park ranger type. A brass nameplate on his chest read MR.
DEN.
His face was extremely wrinkled, as if it had been folded and refolded countless times over the years. He was cordial, correct, perfectly polite, but unsmiling. He asked to see their papers. Drake presented their passports and the impressively stamped and floridly signed letter of introduction he had obtained before departure from the Ministry of the Interior in Sambir (another handy guidebook tip). Mr. Den studied these documents in silence, glancing up now and then to study the documented. He said nothing. Apprehensions rising, Drake offered the chief his California driver's license and his American Express card. Then, his Pump and Glow health club membership, his Blockbuster Video card.

"I am not a stupid man," said Mr. Den.

"Oh no, I didn't think --"

"I see what you think." Mr. Den gathered up the cards and the letter and handed them back. "I knew you were coming. It's my job to know such things. My son has already agreed to guide you to the Apokayan."

"Thank you," replied Drake. "We certainly appreciate such kind consideration."

"Your English is excellent," observed Amanda.

A trace of a smile emerged from the creases on his face. "I have lived in Medford, Oregon, and San Jose, California, and Sacramento. Ten years. A long time. I left when my wife died. It's a confusing country."

"Tell us," said Drake. "And we're natives."

"Many interesting similarities between our two countries. Size, diversity, political turmoil."

"But you people are so religious," said Amanda. "Your beliefs seem so alive and urgent and meaningful."

"The spirits are with you, too," Mr. Den said. "All around. In the air, in the streets. You see them captured on your television screens."

"Yes," said Drake. "We pray to it daily."

The old man's eyes, dark as wet stones, rested their weight against Drake's pink face. "You don't know anything." He turned then to Amanda. "Why does this foolish man want to take you up this river to where you are not supposed to be?"

"We're trying to find a place we've never been," said Amanda, the cane of her chair squeaking beneath her shifting body.

"American houses are so big," said Mr. Den. "So many rooms. Such big yards, too. Do you have a dog?"

"Cats," said Amanda. "Two cats."

"I take it," said Drake impatiently, "you're not in favor of us proceeding upriver."

"I am not in favor; I am not against. My son will take good care of you. He understands what people like you want."

"And you don't?"

"No. It is you who don't understand."

Mr. Den insisted that they spend the night as his guests. The hot meal of rice and chicken was the best food they'd had since leaving Jakarta. At dinner they talked again about America. They discussed shopping malls, which Mr. Den occasionally missed, and pro football, of which he was particularly fond.

Drake and Amanda slept on rattan mats in the front room beneath the incriminating eyes of a hundred agonized Christs. Here was another reason they'd come so far -- to brush up against an individual of Mr. Den's mismatched parts, dark strokes and slashes and spiky shadows with no discernible bottoms, "a cubist character," pronounced Drake, a man stubbornly unlike the Copelands or their friends. They were good Americans after all, they wanted to lose their entangling selves.

In the morning they were greeted at breakfast (bananas and sago paste, yum) by Mr. Den's eldest son. His name was Henry, a young affable man in his mid-twenties, lean, well buffed, with an interestingly piratical gleam. He was wearing a Garuda airline captain's hat and sucking an unlit corncob pipe. "No problem," he said, "no problem" in response to any doubt, request, concern, or passing observation. His sidekick, Jalong, who apparently understood no English whatsoever, simply grinned -- constantly. The Copelands would get to know his perfect teeth quite well. Henry and Jalong were eager to begin the big trip.

"Right now?" asked Amanda.

"We load the boat, we go," said Henry.

"I like this guy's decisiveness," Drake declared. "Something new in our lives."

Their craft, a blue-painted longboat with a pair of huge sentinel eyes drawn on the bow and a trio of Johnson outboard motors bolted to the stern, was ready to depart in half an hour. As they roared away from the dock, a stolid Mr. Den waved goodbye as if he were in physical pain. The longboat skimmed over the surface of the river with such unaccustomed ease that Drake and Amanda, their exhilarated faces lifted into the cooling wind, grew drunk on the speed. Miles fled beneath them like panicked ghosts.

Thirteen sets of rapids.

The first stretch of white water came upon them with the suddenness of a traffic accident. The river seemed to have come apart before their startled eyes, broken rock protruding like bone from its wounds, gouts of foam spurting into the turbulent air. Henry, at the throttle, powered the boat up through the shifting whirlpools, maneuvering for position; he shouted something at Drake and Amanda that neither understood over the roar, but as he began gunning the outboards, it did seem advisable to secure a good grip on one's seat. Lining the boat up beneath the largest of the rapids, a thick horsetail of cascading current, he paused for a moment, the hull sliding about like a piece of ice on a grill; then, leaning forward like a determined jockey, he plunged ahead into the flood. The boat moved, hesitated, then, amid engine shriek and water thunder, simply stopped, the river running beneath its vibrating frame like the rushing rim of a wheel. For one awful instant they were suspended above disaster, the keel of the boat riding the force of the torrent like a reversed magnet, unloosed, unmoored, out of control, the sharp spray in their faces, Henry shouting out encouragement to the straining motors, grinning Jalong in the bow with a plastic bucket bailing like mad, the bouncing Copelands trying not to glance too often at one another with the blanched appeal of stricken airline passengers, the fragile longboat, as if responding to psychic entreaty, moved forward an inch, another inch, then, in one sweet dizzying lift, rose up and over the crest of the falls onto a slick moving sheet of unruffled stream, and they looked around at themselves and they laughed.

A mile and a half farther on and they did it all over again. It was like working your way back up the world's longest, meanest roller coaster. Even Henry's moves, as honed as any professional speed-boater's, were not always equal to the wiles of the river. Sometimes a penalty had to be exacted before the proper slot could be revealed and the boat, struggling like a trapped fish high in the wild strength of a cataract, would be repelled by the springy web of some invisible force field in their path and down they would go, backward into the torrent, puckered fingers gripping the gunwales, trying to balance yourself on a bucking animal with no saddle, no reins. And Henry would have to reposition the boat for another attempt. Half a dozen times and more. Twice he gave up entirely and the boat had to be unloaded, physically carried to a point above the rapids, and then tediously reassembled. Neither American was permitted to assist. They sat together on a log, catching their breath.

"I feel like a geek," Drake said. "I'm not comfortable being waited on like this."

"You never complain at home," replied Amanda. A winsome smile for her helpmeet.

By dusk, when they arrived at a village of Henry's friends where the motorized longboat would be exchanged for poles and a dugout canoe, the Copelands were so exhausted they lay down on the floor of the first hut they were shown and toppled into an unillumined sleep, the ground continuing to move beneath them, flowing things, the grand stuff of the universe, and so missed dinner and the fine company of authentic indigenous folk, and woke in the dawn in their soiled clothes and congratulated themselves for having stayed the course. One word and the boat would have turned about in midstream. It was their gasoline, their food, their money.

"The worst is past," said Drake. "From now on we lounge about in the canoe, enjoying the views."

"What was so bad about yesterday?" Amanda asked.

He couldn't tell if she was kidding or not, so he pretended she was serious. "It's not every day one goes shooting the rapids."

"I thought it was fun."

"Right. Me, too. Wet, woozy, and ready to whoop. The great outdoors. You can't get this at home, without falling blind drunk into your swimming pool."

"How far are we?"

"I don't know. I lost the map in the drink."

After the rough-and-tumble of the rapids the serenity of the upper Kutai was a marvelous surprise -- a gondola ride into the forest primeval, engine howl replaced by the delicate plash of dipping paddles, the increasingly lush landscape slipping past at a leisurely, civilized pace. Comfortably propped against the soft cushioning of his pack, Drake, binoculars in hand, scanned the bank for random signs of animal life. Drenched in sun block, a large straw hat shielding her face, Amanda entertained her husband with a running commentary on the passing scene in the unmistakable voice of Katharine Hepburn. Henry and Jalong, rowing steadily, effortlessly, at either end of the boat, shouted out to one another over their heads, bemusement rich as moisture in the air. They were talking about them, but Drake and Amanda didn't care. In a spell of rare pleasure they were temporarily immune from critical regard.

The river twisted and turned, a lazy looping and unlooping back to the source, narrowing as it went, rank vegetation on either shore pressing down to water's edge and beyond, leaning reckless over the slow still tide, spidery branches reaching out to touch, link arms, sealing the world into one long wound tunnel through which drifted this odd little boat, its odder passengers, like a dead stick dropped by accident and flowing the wrong way up an undulating carpet of pollen and leaves and broken twigs where dragonflies cavorted in metals of acid green and blue. The light was muted here, of an aquarium clarity, and sounds were sharper, the air an intimate stew of sweat and rot, the collective scent of a million discarded tennis shoes. There could be no doubt, this was the jungle for sure, and they were inside it.

Ancient trunks and knotted vines, giant ferns and stippled foliage, the languid monotone of botanical patterning interrupted, at precisely the proper moment, by a sudden caesura in the greenery, bright orchids dazzling as summer clouds, flavored cups of epiphytic ice protruding from their beds of root growth thick as pubic hair up in the crotches of the stilted mangrove trees, or the swoop of incandescent plumage as a blue-throated flycatcher sailed out into the open river space and vanished, the eye barely registering its passage.

The whispers, the whistles, the shrieks, the calls of the forest life unseen.

Around a bend and the dappled air was alive with a soft cascading of pink and white, petals falling, floating, fluttering down like gentle shavings from improvements being made in heaven, a gift of beauty freely given in abundance whether there were minds to record and admire or not. Steeped to the nostrils in the rich fragrance of this flowery confetti, Drake and Amanda looked at each other in mutual astonishment, and for a moment every discomfort, every ache, every embarrassment was forgiven. Yes, this was a voyage into paradise. And, yes, it had been worth the expense and the exertion.

Midday they stopped at a clearing and shared a lunch of cold sticky rice and a can of oily sardines. It was near here, Henry informed them, that only a couple of months ago a previous boat was attacked by a king cobra who, swimming with amazing speed, caught up to the vessel and attempted to board. The snake was repelled by a brave Swiss tourist with a handy umbrella. Quite unusual. No one could explain it. Amanda stopped eating and directed her attention to the surrounding rocks. "Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum," sang Drake, waving his fingers about melodramatically.
"Fangs,"
he said. "Just when you thought it was safe to paddle the rivers of Borneo."

In the afternoon they spotted their first mammal, a startled muntjac or barking deer who had come down to the water for a drink, fixed the intruders with a frozen stare, emitted a weird coughing sound, and bounded away. "There goes dinner," laughed Henry. They passed a gray monitor lizard lounging inconspicuously in the gray dry mud of the bank. "Very good also," said Henry. Amanda didn't know whether to believe him or not. Drake's guidebook-based attempts at bird identification were routinely corrected. "A picture is not a thing," Henry scoffed. Out of sight the shier species announced themselves in a cacophony of harsh inanimate noises -- police whistles, stuttering car engines, ricocheting bullets, nightsticks on concrete -- a regular
Naked City
soundtrack. Up ahead the river appeared to simply stop, running headlong into an impenetrable wall of woven jungle that shifted magically at their approach, a sorcerer's spirited veil, to disclose the widening cleft through which they might pass, marveling upward at the massed riot of vegetation balanced so delicately above their craning necks. They squeezed down aisles dark and tight as a sewer pipe, they wandered through high caverns of monumental dimensions boldly scooped out of forest stuff, they glided across heroic-landscape paintings in the grand style of the nineteenth century. Lengths of fraying liana dangled all around like abandoned theatrical cable from a long-since-vanished show. In the ear of his imagination Drake could hear the beat of muffled drums.