by Roman Dial
As expected, they found Borneo’s wildlife in Bako fascinating. A long-nosed proboscis monkey, the size and color of a small deer, picked leaves in the crown of an oak-like mangrove. Below him, a foot-long mudskipper crawled across the muck with a mouthful of water in its bulbous head as a sort of reverse scuba. Literally a fish out of water, the mudskipper pulled itself along using fins as legs, looking like a primitive Permian tetrapod. Back at our hut, an eight-foot serpentine dinosaur of a monitor lizard prowled the premises, its long blue forked tongue tasting the air just steps from the tables and chairs where we played Yahtzee after lunch during afternoon rains.
The kids dutifully recorded these wonders in their journals. Roman had started in Singapore, exclaiming that “Chewing gum is illeagal!” In Kuching, capital of Sarawak, Malaysia, he tasted durian and mangosteen, the king and queen of fruits in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago. He recounted his divergent reactions in tidy print:
I ate a mangosteen and tried something worse than brustle sprouts! The Durien! Yuck! The mangosteen looks like a giant crow berrie. You would have to sqwash it to opan up! It’s the best fruit I ever tasted. It tasted like orange or yellow starburst with a tang.
Besides novel tastes and sights, we caught and handled new fauna and flora. At the edge of a city park lawn, Jazzy spotted a lone draco in a tree. Like the anoles we knew from Puerto Rico, the draco (Latin for “dragon”) is an arboreal lizard that does push-ups and fans its colorful dewlap to challenge territorial rivals. But unlike anoles—and more like dragons—dracos have wings and can glide. Picking up a clod of dirt, I threw it at the brown lizard, knocking it to the park lawn.
I hurried over to pick up the dazed, uninjured animal. The four of us inspected a thin, delicate lizard whose back was the color and pattern of lichen-covered tree bark. He had a short nose and alert eyes that watched us calmly but warily. We gently unfolded his wings that stretched across six ribs on each side, finding bright blue and black patches on their undersides. Used for gliding, the fragile patagia were as wide as the lizard’s body was long, filling the space between his front and hind limbs. We all delighted in holding such an exotic and unlikely creature: a flying lizard.
As an experiment in animal behavior, we decided to watch him glide. I gently tossed the draco ten feet into the air. At the peak of the toss, the lizard opened his patagia and deftly glided to the lawn twenty feet away.
We all looked at each other. “Wow!” both kids called out as they ran over to the lizard waiting in the grass.
Roman picked him up and tossed him again. At apogee, the lizard spread his wings, coasting to the lawn like a paper airplane.
Roman laughed in delight and turned to me. He flashed his teeth in an excited smile: “Cool!”
“Oh, Dad,” Jazzy said, “that’s mean! Let him go.”
“Here, Jazzy, why don’t you let him go. You found him. Just toss him up and toward his tree so he can glide home.”
Jazzy, too, tossed him gently upward, this time toward the tree where she had first found him. The draco curved his glide toward the trunk, then nosed up on his approach and stalled, landing abruptly to scamper around to the backside of the tree where he hid from the human family that had no doubt terrified him.
Later, we would handle harmless ants the size of Jazzy’s thumb and a thrumming cicada the size of her tiny fist, the bug’s proboscis as long as her pinky. We would catch and release fish we had seen before only in freshwater aquaria; feed beetles to nepenthes; feel the pinch of a neon blue-fiddler crab; pull open an ant plant and watch its protectors scurry; taste a dozen new fruits and cuisines from three nations. The discomforts of heat, humidity, and the odd pockets of foul odor were all erased by the hands-on discoveries of new sights, scents, and sounds.
Eager for more, we headed deeper into the heart of Borneo.
Chapter 10
Gunung Palung
Snorkeling, GP, 1996.
Courtesy of the author
We arrived in Kalimantan the day after Peggy convinced me we should push on to GP. Cars were absent, motorbikes few, and bicycles the most common wheeled vehicle. Up to three people at a time rode on a single bike, but most simply walked in flip-flops or bare feet. Traveling as a family, we found that people were eager to please, quick to help, happy to interact. But nobody spoke English in a countryside where houses were little more than palm-thatched roofs over half-walls on stilts.
After crossing the hundred-mile-wide Kapuas River delta by riverboat, we waited alongside a dirt road for a minivan. Our boy and girl sat patiently on our duffels. By the time the van arrived, fifty people surrounded the kids. Caucasians were rare and their children exceptionally so. At first the two enjoyed the attention, but it got old fast. People simply couldn’t keep their hands off the blond-haired, blue-eyed little children.
Reaching Teluk Melano, we stayed in a guesthouse next to the river. The Anopheles mosquitoes that carry malaria emerge after dark and last until dawn, so at night we covered ourselves in insect repellent and long sleeves, then climbed under our mosquito nets for the next twelve hours. Peggy tracked down and killed every mosquito that made it inside. Taking a weekly dose of antimalarials, I could duck out from under the net if needed. The kids and Peggy didn’t risk the drug’s neurological side effects. Once we reached the wilderness of GP, there’d be little chance of contracting tropical diseases because mosquitoes generally only carry parasites from humans who have them. Rural areas are the most dangerous; wilderness and urban areas less so.
There was no running water in Melano. Instead we took mondis by ladling cool water from a rain barrel to wash the sweat off our sticky bodies. At the equator, the mondi is the most refreshing way to stay comfortable in the oppressive heat.
All the way from Harvard, Tim had arranged our transport to the little village at the edge of the forest, downstream from Cabang Panti. There, in the last settlement before the park boundary, two sinewy men with muscles like knotted hardwood reached to the bottom of the clearwater stream and pulled up a sunken sampan to bail. Peggy looked at me, her eyes wide, her smile gone.
“They keep it underwater to prevent the wood from splitting. The boat will float,” I said reassuringly.
While the boatmen emptied the long, narrow dugout, our kids drew the usual crowd. These villagers, though, shared with us their local red rambutans, a sweet, spiky-skinned fruit Roman and Jazz loved to eat. We loaded our gear into a cargo boat with two more boatmen, got in with our paddlers, and shoved off. The boat was tippy with little freeboard and the seats were hardwood planks. Too afraid to move for fear of dumping ourselves into the water, we sat still for hours as our rears went numb.
At first the river meandered past spiny, palm-looking pandanus plants whose twisted stalks emerged on stilt roots from deep, black water. We weren’t alone here. Gnarly men in loincloths and tattered white shirts poled skinny rafts of logs tied together with rattan.
Logging in Borneo would reach its peak in the late nineties. During our visits over the next fifteen years, the seemingly inexhaustible forests of Borneo would disappear, just as the buffalo of the American West had gone nearly extinct a century before. Instead of watching cattle replace buffalo, we would witness oil palm plantations replace rainforest.
Even GP’s national park status, with its Ivy League research station at Cabang Panti and its exposure in National Geographic magazine, wouldn’t be enough to keep the loggers out. In the 2000s, when most of the big timber outside of Kalimantan’s parklands was gone, Indonesian military leaders financed locals with chain saws to cut and sell GP’s giant dipterocarps. Documentary filmmakers visiting Cabang Panti to record its orangutans were forced to bribe the loggers to silence their chain saws during filming.
But in 1995 the virgin forest was empty of the sounds of motors and chain saws. GP was still an undisturbed Eden. We drank freely from the stream that tumbled cool, clean, and fresh from Gunung Palung, the park’s namesake mountain canyon. The juxtaposition of abru
pt mountains with lowland rainforests and peat swamps made the area exceptionally rich in wildlife, especially Borneo’s endemic proboscis monkeys, gibbons, and orangutans.
HEADING UPSTREAM IN our overloaded sampan, the kids sang songs, much to the delight of the boatmen, who paddled tirelessly with short digging strokes, propelling us against the current. Over lunch, Peggy and Roman complained that it didn’t feel like Borneo. But as the forest canopy closed in over the stream for good, we passed a trio of gibbons in full view, only twenty feet up in a tangle of trees and lianas.
The long-armed, short-bodied little apes were so close we didn’t need binoculars to watch their nimble antics. Arboreal gymnasts, they swung rapidly through the low canopy, hanging loosely by their oversized fingers, legs dangling like those of hyperkinetic kids on a schoolyard jungle gym. Roman and Jazz were convinced they did somersaults.
Hours later, the creek narrowed to four or five feet. “Does this feel like Borneo now?” I asked.
“Yes!” Peggy and Roman answered as we passed through a dark forest where tree roots dragged in the water like dirty mopheads and long ferns twisted down from overhanging limbs. Sometimes fallen trees crossed low to the water, forcing us to get out and carry cargo while the boatmen slid the boat beneath sweepers. “These trees are so big and old, they look wise,” observed young Roman as he clambered through a forest that had never seen an ax or a saw.
After eight hours, we reached Cabang Panti. Jumping out of the boat, Roman immediately found a shiny black millipede. A foot long, it looked like it had crawled out of the Carboniferous Age, three hundred million years ago.
“Dad, is it safe to pick up?”
I had asked Tim the same question the year before, so gave Roman Tim’s answer: “Yes, it is. He’s harmless.”
As the enormous bug crawled over Roman’s arms, its hundreds of legs swarmed in a miraculous wave that tickled and delighted him. Squinting closely, he said, “Look, you can see two pairs of legs on each segment!”
The camp compound was fifteen minutes away from the dock. No trees had been removed to build it, so the humidity was near 100 percent, twenty-four hours a day. The constant warmth, wetness, and shade left mold on anything not aired in the sun at least a few minutes each day or sealed up against the moisture. Immediately after waking, we put our bedding into dry bags—the kind used on whitewater river trips—to keep our sheets and clothes dry, comfortable for the next sleep.
The first night, Peggy recoiled at our accommodation. We arrived at a creekside hut just before dark to find mildewed mattresses and rotten floors. The conditions distressed her and Jazzy, but the inch-long giant ants, palm-sized hunting spiders, and other bugs that had taken over the squalid shelter excited Roman. We moved to a cleaner, drier hut the next day and Peggy soon forgot the previous night’s discomforts.
On our first day hike in GP, Roman spotted an orangutan mother and baby feeding on figs high in a tree. We passed binoculars around for an hour, until she “kiss-called” at us in warning and we backed away and left. Returning to camp, we watched a yard-long giant squirrel as it bounded through a tree crown. Farther on, a hunchbacked lesser mouse deer darted across the path. The tiny deer’s size, stature, and movements brought to mind a cottontail rabbit. We looked at its tracks in the trail’s mud: cloven hoofprints the size of my thumbnail.
Later, Roman climbed inside a one-hundred-foot-tall strangler fig. The host tree had died and rotted away long ago to leave the fig as a natural, cylindrical ladder. Eight feet up the fig ladder, Roman found a tree frog. As he reached to catch the reddish-backed frog, it jumped, then glided away with toes spread wide, revealing oversized webbed feet as wings. It even circled back to land below him.
“Whoa!” he chuckled in surprise. “Dad! Was that a flying frog?”
“Yep! Good find, Rome! I’ve never seen one of those before!”
On one trip to a nearby waterfall, Roman found another unique frog called a rock skipper. A Bornean specialty, this frog clings to slimy overhangs after skipping across moving water like a flat stone thrown across a quiet pond. Somehow the boy caught one. With excitement in his eyes, he showed me the rock skipper’s emerald green skin and azure blue toe pads. Afterward Roman scrambled down to a lower plunge pool and I followed.
Above a short waterfall, he moved deliberately across slick rocks. I knew his exhilaration, but also feared for his safety. A fall could break a limb or lead to scrapes, cuts, and a nasty tropical infection. I wanted to call out and warn him, “Be careful!” Instead I praised him for his good rock-climbing moves. Every parent knows this vacillation between apprehension and pride as a child reaches for independence.
Six-year-old Jazzy showed herself a natural athlete with common sense about risk. A joy to behold, this tiny towheaded girl would spring gracefully from boulder to boulder. If we offered help, she’d say, “I don’t really need it, but just in case,” and put her little hand in ours for slimy crossings above steep, rooted drops.
The hazards of nature—bears in the woods, tree fall in jungles, avalanches in snow country, rapids in whitewater—worry all parents who share the outdoors with their children. We were no exception. On one hike, we witnessed a huge tree limb fall from high above and strike the ground with a crash. The sight, sound, and damage were terrifying. We inspected the one-foot-diameter branch covered in orchids and ferns. It seemed best to wait out future downpours next to big buttressed tree trunks, the way we’d each crouch beneath a doorjamb in an earthquake.
Rainfall dictated our routine. Back in camp following our mornings of sweaty exploration, we would change into dry clothes. If it rained all afternoon, we would read while the kids wrote in their journals and sharpened their arithmetic playing Yahtzee. If it was sunny, we would spend the hottest part of the day at the creek. The kids dug holding ponds in the warm sand to more closely observe the fish they called needle-nose—caught on the surface—and “toe-nibblers”—caught on the bottom—in small hand nets.
“Daddy!” Jazz shrieked in joy, “come see the fish! The water’s not that deep, only up to here!” Roman snorkeled around his “obstacle course” of sunken logs and sandbars. Beneath the backdrop of wild diversity, Peggy and I watched our kids at play in sunny, cool water. It felt like paradise.
At night, we holed up in our bug nets. While we were safe from malaria and dengue in the wilderness, the diversity of biting bugs equaled that of every other kind of creature and plant. Most nights we enjoyed meeting our “dinner guests”: strange, wonderful, and often giant bugs that would fly at night into the dinner hut, attracted by its single electric light. Roman found a moth that looked like a scorpion when threatened, recording in his journal:
I saw a moth during a huge rain storm. When I bothered him he would open his wings and lift up his abdomen, pretending it was a stinger. Cones on his head would bulge out. Fur on his legs would stick out. He was cool!
Once, I brought a glow-in-the-dark bracket fungus to Peggy and the kids to entice them into the night. We turned off our headlamps, closed our eyes, and let our pupils expand. Eyes ready, we opened them to see phosphorescent fungi glowing green in the dark. I recorded Roman’s poetic description in my journal: “They look like puddles of water reflecting the night sky, except you can pick the puddle up, then turn on your light and see you’re holding a rotting leaf with a little mushroom growing on it.”
Cabang Panti’s main building served as the pantry, kitchen, dining hall, and gathering place. A half-dozen shelves held a moderate-sized library of reference books, field guides, and Xeroxed scientific papers in binders. As in all the huts, the library was open to the humid forest air, without air-conditioning, walls, or even screening. Book pages felt damp, soft, and moldy. At night a bewildering variety of colorful cockroaches swarmed across book bindings. Some of the thicker volumes had been tunneled by termites. I pored over the mildewed texts undeterred and scribed notes in my journal to share what I learned with Peggy and the kids. It was exciting and rewarding to see su
ch a wonderful and novel place firsthand while learning from books and articles on site.
Each day we’d walk the network of trails that crisscrossed the research area to explore the peat swamps and granite creeks. One day, we climbed to the top of Batu Tinggi: GP’s summit of giant boulders covered in bright green sphagnum, serpentine nepenthes, and violet-colored flowers. The cloud forest, dripping in soggy moss and lichen, was strangely silent of birdsong and surprisingly chilly. Unfortunately, it was still full of the ubiquitous leeches eager to suck our blood.
Past Batu Tinggi, I went on to recover a compass left by a GP researcher. Peggy and the kids descended without me. When I caught up with them in a pounding rain, Roman was leading. We were excited to be reunited, even if separated for only an hour or so. “Roman’s been doing a great job. He’s so brave, breaking all the spider webs for me and keeping a good pace. Sometimes the trail’s been pretty faint, but he’s kept us on track,” Peggy reported.
Roman, then eight years old, continued to lead for another hour in the rain. He only occasionally lost the trail when a fallen tree crossed it. I asked him what he liked best, what he thought was neatest about the jungle.
“The neatest thing? The neatest thing is everything!” Roman expressed the strong, innate interest in nature that nearly all young children seem to have. “I like how the jungle is never quiet. There’s always some living thing making noise.”