Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  When sago trees are cut, William explained, the trunks are split open and an ironwood stick is used to pry out the pith, which is forced through a fiber screen to separate the fibrous material from the sappy juice. The juice is a sticky blue-gray starchy fluid, about the consistency of library glue, and the Karowai eat it every day of their lives.

  The pith is pounded into a starchy extract that looks like a ball of chalk. It can be baked into a kind of doughy bread. A single sago tree yields about seventy pounds of starch. Karowai villages are located near large stands of sago.

  So—sukun, rattan, bamboo, banana, sago—the forest was no longer a mass of unvariegated green. Naming things allowed me to see them, to differentiate one area of the swamp from another. I found myself confirming my newfound knowledge at every bend in the river. “Banana, banana,” I informed everyone. “Sukun, sago, sago, rattan, sago, bamboo …”

  William, like any good teacher, seemed proud enough of my accomplishment for the first half hour or so, then the process began to wear on him. I was like some five-year-old on a drive in the country, pointing out every cow in the pasture to his weary parents.

  A river lunch: one nice hot sun-baked tin of dogfoodlike corned beef with a rather mournful looking cow on the label, a little of last night’s rice, a couple of pygmy bananas. Mash it all up in a bowl, and watch the egret above, impossibly white against the blue of the sky and the green of the sago.

  When the outboard began to splutter, Conrados stopped abruptly, in midriver, and began to tinker. It was unbearably hot, well over 100 degrees, and I broached the idea of a brief swim. The possible presence of crocodiles was debated. I reminded William that there were hardly any left. He reminded me that we had seen at least one the day before. Stef, standing on the gunwale of the boat, settled the debate with a front flip into the silt-laden brown water, and then, somehow, we were all in the river, splashing each other like children, surely immortal (it couldn’t happen to me), and secure in the knowledge that the resident crocs would take someone else, a fact that would certainly sadden those of us who survived. And besides, it was incredibly hot.

  Sometime later that afternoon, after Conrados cured the Yamaha, we traded a length of fishing line and a dozen hooks for what William assured us was the local culinary treat: two pounds of fat sago beetle larvae wrapped in sago leaves and secured with a thin strip of rattan. The maggoty-looking creatures were white, with brown heads, and about the size of my little finger to the second knuckle. William mimed popping one into his mouth, nodded, made a yummy-yummy sort of face, and sneezed out his good-natured laugh.

  He apparently thought I’d be horrified at the idea of eating bugs. In point of fact, I’d rather eat bugs than that damn beautiful bird we had devoured the night before.

  We passed men standing on rafts of five or six large logs, stripped of the branches and peeled of their bark. The logs were roped together with thick strands of rattan. Further upriver, the rafts were larger: twenty or thirty or even eighty logs. Sometimes there was a small A-frame shelter made of sukun sticks and sago leaves on the rafts.

  The logs, I learned, were floated down to Senggo from here—one man said it would take about four days—where they were purchased by “men from Java” for 5,000 rupes apiece, about $2.50.

  At the next raft, one of the larger ones, William had Conrados turn back, and we picked up one of the loggers, a thin young man named Agus. He was wearing a gray, tattered T-shirt and shorts. He was, William explained, one of his Karowai friends and our local contact.

  The Karowai village, situated on a bend of the river, was a miniature Senggo: just a few houses on stilts facing one another across a raised path, and a flooded-out field of yams where a few men with metal shovels were digging drainage ditches. It occurred to me that cannibals aren’t generally interested in yams. A blackboard in one of the open-sided buildings probably functioned as a community center and school. The men, about a dozen of them, wore shorts, and the women wore knee-length grass skirts. There were no tree houses in evidence. It seemed, all in all, a fairly civilized sort of place here in the hell of the south.

  And the people, once they learned we had tobacco to trade for a place to sleep, welcomed us as brothers. Chris and I were assigned a private room in the men’s house, but I felt like wandering around a bit. I saw Agus chatting urgently with a local man who wore an earring fashioned from the silver pull-tab from a soft-rink can. The pull-tab glittered in the slanting light of the late afternoon sun. The man nodded several times, then dashed off, at a dead run, into the forest. The entire encounter had looked vaguely conspiratorial.

  Stef cooked a dinner of fried catfish, along with a healthy portion of sago beetle. The larvae were fried brown in the pan. They were crisp and sort of fishy-tasting on the outside, probably because they had been sautéed in fish oil. Inside, the larvae were the color and consistency of custard. They were unlike anything I’d ever eaten before, and the closest I can come to describing the taste is to say creamy snail.

  The people in this village, I told William after dinner, weren’t the Karowai I had read about in Muller’s book.

  “Change is very quick now,” William reminded me. Two years earlier, just after Muller published his book, the government had instituted a program designed to stop ritual warfare among the Karowai and to get people to stop eating each other. They had summoned all of the Karowai chiefs and provided transportation down to Senggo, where everyone could see the tangible benefits of civilization, like canned corned beef and Batman T-shirts. If the chiefs would agree to end their deadly feuds, the government would help them. It would provide agricultural experts, and it would help the people build grand towns like Senggo. We were, William explained, staying in one such town.

  There were, however, still people who lived in the trees. They built their houses deep in the swampy forest, well away from the river, which meant well away from the government and well away from the missionaries. Tomorrow we’d take a nice little stroll through the swamp and meet them. William said that Agus lived there, in one of the tree houses. When he wasn’t logging.

  “Where?” I asked. “Which way?”

  William pointed off in the direction that the pull-tab man had taken. And it became clear to me that Agus wanted his relatives to know that we were coming. The message was probably something like: “Yo, we got honkies; hide the heads.”

  • • •

  We didn’t actually stroll through the swamp. The forest floor was a mass of knee-high grasses, spongy marsh, and low bushes. The understory hid an uneven surface, full of brackish potholes and unexpected tussocks. The exposed roots of the larger trees humped up out of the ground in a series of ankle-breaking traps. It was much easier, all in all, to simply walk on fallen trees that happened to point off in the right general direction, and it was not easy to walk on the fallen trees at all. The larger ones were slippery with moss and the smaller ones tended to crumble under my weight.

  I thought, As soon as we get through this shit, we’ll be on the trail. About an hour later, it occurred to me that this shit was the trail. Fallen trees were the equivalent of Agats’s wooden walkways.

  William cut me a good walking stick, which was helpful. I liked the stick and thought of it as a scepter, a symbol of dignity: Behold, it is Tripod, Mighty Jungle Walker.

  Prolonged log walking is a bit like riding a bicycle: speed equals stability. And I was, in fact, moving pretty fast on a large mossy log that spanned the narrowest section of a deep foul-smelling scummy black pond when William and Stef and Conrados and Agus all began screaming, “Sago, sago, sago!”

  “I see it,” I called back. The sago tree was at the end of my log, on the bank of the pond, and I leaned out to grab it, because I was going just a little too fast.

  “Tidak!” No!

  The trunk of the sago palm, I discovered to my regret, is the vegetable equivalent of a porcupine. They are thorny sons of bitches, sago palms, extremely uncomfortable to grab for stability on mossy logs
, and I had to listen to William sneeze about this prickly lesson, on and off, for over an hour.

  And, of course, it rained on us. And then we could see the arc of a rainbow through the trees, and then it rained again, and suddenly we were in a large clearing surrounded by tall white barked trees 150 feet high. In the middle of the clearing, fifty feet in the air, was a house with open sides and a thatched roof. The main support, set directly in the middle of the floor, was one of the white-barked giants that had been cut off at the fifty-foot level. The corners of the house were supported by convenient smaller trees and stout bamboo poles. The floor, I could see, was made of crossed sticks of sukun, and the thatch was sago frond.

  There was a bamboo ladder up to about the twenty-five-foot level and that gave way to a thick rounded pole with notches for steps. Agus shouted some words in Karowai. Someone shouted back from above. There seemed to be a bit of negotiation going on. Mosquitoes in thick clouds attacked those of us on the ground. They were very naughty, and probably malarial.

  And then I was clambering up the bamboo ladder and making my careful way up the notched pole. There were nine people sitting on the platform: two infants, two nursing mothers in knee-length grass skirts, two little boys about three and four, one boy about nine, and two naked men, each of whom had a leaf tied tightly around his penis. There was no one who might have been a grandmother or grandfather. Anthropologists who have studied tree dwellers on the nearby Brazza River figure the average life expectancy of these seminomadic hunters and gatherers is about thirty-five years.

  One of the men, Samu, wore a ring of bamboo in his nasal septum and a double ring of rattan through the sides of his nostrils. He was, William said, the chief of this house. Three families lived here, and each of the three men had two wives.

  The tree-house platform was rectangular: about twenty feet by twenty-five. The bones of several small fish hung from the ceiling, secured by rattan strings. I saw no human skulls, but there were dozens of arrows fitted into the ceiling and piled in the corners. There were two fires—a men’s fire and a women’s fire—and both were built on beds of small rocks over a reinforced triple-thick area of flooring. The children sat with the women, around the women’s fire.

  Agus and William continued to negotiate with the Karowai men. We were not the first white people these tree dwellers had ever seen. The year before, William had brought in two European groups, seven people, though no one ever stayed for more than a few hours. We wanted to hang out for a day or so, stay the night, shoot the shit. Which complicated matters.

  In his two previous visits, William had learned precisely what the Karowai require in terms of trade goods. The swamp here does not yield good stone, and in the very near past, the Karowai had had to trade with outside tribes for stone axes. We had steel axes for them (I could see another steel ax set in a corner of the platform, next to an ironwood bow with a rattan pull-string and a set of arrows made from reeds and tipped with sharpened bone).

  Aside from the axes, the Karowai were pleased to accept fishing line, metal hooks, salt, matches, rice, and tobacco. These were acceptable gifts, much admired and appreciated. We were welcomed to stay the night. They didn’t accept credit cards here at the Karowai Hilton.

  Samu, as headman, got first crack at our tobacco. He packed the rough-cut leaf into the end of a narrow bamboo tube, which fit into a wider tube that was etched in geometric red-and-white designs. He put the wide tube to his mouth, placed the narrow end against a hot rock, inhaled, then rocked back onto his heels. His face was beatific.

  One of the women, Pya, reached up into a string bag hanging from the roof of the house, fished around a bit, and came up with a white ball of sago pith, which she dropped onto the embers of her fire. After a short time, I was offered a piece the size of a tennis ball. The food had the consistency of, doughy bread and was very nearly tasteless. The term half-baked kept clattering through my mind, but I smiled and complimented Pya on her culinary skills. I used one of the few words of Karowai that I knew.

  “Manoptroban.” Very good.

  It was the first word I had uttered in the tree house, and as soon as it tumbled out of my mouth, I wanted to call it back, because it was, of course, a lie. The older of the two men, Samu, stared at me. His expression was that of a man whose intelligence had been insulted. Sago? Good? People eat this soggy crap every day. All the time. They do not sit down for regular meals, but eat only when they have to, because there is no pleasure in the taste of sago. They eat it because there is nothing else. Good? It’s not good, you imbecile. It’s sago.

  I felt chastened and reluctant to say anything else, maybe for the rest of my life. It was better to just sit there and pull sago thorns out of my hand with my teeth.

  The Karowai exchanged a few words. There was a failed attempt to remain dispassionate, and then all of them were laughing. The laughter was aimed at Chris and me. This familiar teasing and testing of strangers seems to be a universal human trait, and Chris, in his many travels, has learned to defuse it by laughing right along with everyone else. My strategy exactly. Soon enough the laughter became genuine, and we were all giggling and poking one another in the hilarity of our mutual insecurity.

  There was a nice breeze fifty feet above the ground, and no mosquitoes at all. Chris asked William if the Karowai live in trees to avoid mosquitoes. William transferred the question to Agus, who was learning Indonesian, and Agus—although he knew the answer—respectfully asked Samu. Samu nodded and said a single word in Karowai.

  And the answer came back—Karowai to Indonesian to English: “Yes.”

  There was a very long silence.

  Samu finally added that it was also safer in the tree, by which he meant, I think, that in this boggy flatland the tree house had the military significance of being high ground. A single man with a bow and a sufficient supply of arrows could hold the fort against any number of similarly equipped attackers. There were even strategic holes in the floor, places where a skilled archer could pick off anyone foolish enough to try to hack down the columns that support the house.

  “So there’s still war?” I asked.

  Samu’s reaction might have been a case study for Psychology 101: Here, students, is a man about to tell a lie. The chief shifted his gaze, he stared at the ground, he coughed lightly and occupied himself for some time bringing up a great gob of phlegmy spit that he lofted off into the forest below.

  “No,” he said finally. No more war.

  William took a hit of tobacco from Samu’s pipe and attempted to defuse the situation with what he took to be an innocuous question. Where did Samu get his penis leaves? There was a string bag full of them hanging from the roof.

  Samu fidgeted uncomfortably, stared at the ground, coughed again, spat again, and finally allowed that he didn’t actually recall where he got the leaves.

  I thought: God knows, Samu, your secret would be safe with us. The pure hard fact of the matter was that Samu would likely lose his leaves to one of the massive timbering operations now just cranking up in the Asmat. Indeed, only three years earlier Agus had lived in this very tree house. Now he had given up his penis leaf for shorts and a T-shirt that read PIECE. It was a simple, sad irony: Agus, having encountered civilization in the person of William two years ago, was now cutting down the forest that had fed him and his people for centuries.

  Agus used the money he made to buy steel axes. Generally, the Karowai move every two years, after they have exhausted the local sago. It takes about a month to build a new tree house. With a steel ax, the process takes only two weeks.

  The Karowai didn’t like coffee or tea, but they craved tobacco. Traditionally, they had smoked dried bark.

  And rice! When William fixed Agus his first bowl of rice, the Karowai had burst into tears, it was so good. It was William who had brought him all these things, awakened him to the world as it existed beyond his village: showed him steel axes and rice and matches and canned corned beef. And though Agus and William were about t
he same age, Agus called his benefactor Father. He was a sweet man, Agus, ambitious and bewildered at the same time. He wept every time William had to go away.

  “I get the leaves,” Samu said by way of accommodation to the question that had been asked some time ago, “from the trees.” He nodded out toward the forest.

  And then there was another long silence. Several hours’ worth of it. The Karowai seemed perfectly comfortable just sitting around, smoking, enjoying their company in a haze of tobacco smoke and self-contained neolithic composure. I, on the other hand, felt constrained to fill up the fleeting hours with productive activity. To that end, I spent a good deal of time scribbling in my notebook:

  I. Karowai culture

  Inappropriate comments Eat me.

  Sago is good.

  Inappropriate questions Been in any wars lately?

  Where you guys get them dick leaves?

  Inappropriate subject matter Cannibal jokes

  Appropriate behavior Sitting in a hunkering squat

  Smoking

  Spitting

  Being silent

  Keeping the fire going

  Tending to the fussy child or infant

  Smiling dreamily for no particular reason

  About midafternoon, unable to sit still any longer, Chris and William and I took a walk through the swamp to visit one of Samu’s neighbors. It was another hour or so to a second clearing, where there was another tree house, which was probably only thirty-five or forty feet high. Our host was named Romas, and he had a pair of what appeared to be red toothpicks sticking out of the top of his nose. The toothpicks were, in fact, bones from the wing of a flying fox, colored reddish-brown in the smoke from the fire.

  There were fish bones hanging from the ceiling, as in the first Karowai house, along with a turtle shell and a number of pig jaws hanging from a rattan rope. We had a long conversation about these trophies, which seemed a little anemic to me. The fish looked like ten-inchers, little guys, but the Karowai-to-English translation suggested that they were, in fact, the remnants of memorable meals. When Samu came to visit, Romas said, his neighbor always noticed a new set of bones. And the needlelike bones, going dark red in the smoke from the fires, became an occasion to engage in hunting stories. They were, these pathetic remains, conversation pieces. Interior decorating.