Power of Slow

I should like the rest of my life to be narrated by the legendary David Attenborough, his distinguished voice accompanying my days, swinging from adventure to adventure with the love of humanity and Nature nestled squarely in my heart. For now, I’ll settle for a few months of annual travel with my dear life partner, Klaus. Below is an invitation to join me on our most recent journey, delving into the depths of the Sumatran jungle.

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“Let’s go to the Mentawai Islands!” Klaus cheerfully suggested as we packed up our things in Samosir, an island in North Sumatra, Indonesia, in the middle of the world’s largest crater lake (Lake Toba). Somewhat reluctant to leave the comforts of hot showers and German bread (the owner of Tabo Cottages is from Germany), I figured it was time to stretch our comfort zone after five days of Slow Living. We took a car to Medan, flew to Padang the next day, stayed at the Budget Hotel at the Harbour and boarded the ferry to Siberut Island the day after where, after a smooth 6 ½ hour ferry ride, we were greeted by Liki, a smiling 34-year-old guide whose family lives in the jungle. After a quick overnight in his island family home on a thin mat beneath a much-needed mosquito net, we walked to the river’s edge to board a motor boat that ushered us through the most magnificent mangroves we’d ever seen. I never knew palm trees could reach such heights! It all felt rather Amazonian as we motored upstream to the jungle drop-off place 90 minutes later. I felt a wee bit like Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, riding in a boat to mysterious places, all the while trying to ignore the boat navigator’s yellow T-shirt with the word DEATH inscribed on it. Much like the hellish bus ride my best friend Tanja and I had had from Boston to New York last September (in which the driver thought it best to shrink the time spent on the road by 90 minutes, thus catapulting us across several states to Manhattan with a G-force-like will), I decided today was not the day I was going to die.

“Put these on,” Liki advised, tossing us both a pair of mud boots. One look at the sloshy shore told me we’d better obey his command. And I am glad we did because, having grown up on a horse farm in Central Virginia, I thought I knew what mud was. Until now.

Kerrrrr-thwup-ah-chhhhwup. That was the sound our boots made as we inched forward, step by step through shin-deep watery sludge. The smell was a mixture of pig poop and stagnate, brackish water. Logs were placed to navigate the deepest parts of the “trail”, but they were slippery and we nearly fell a few times. At one point, exhausted by the mid-day heat, one of our guides kindly climbed up a palm tree to retrieve a coconut. With skilled hands (and a razor-sharp machete), he offered us coconut water to drink straight from the fruit.

Now, mind you, I am a child of Black & White television, having grown up on Tarzan movies, fantasizing about what it would be like to be Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan while listening to the harkening call of my jungle man’s voice as he swings from vine to vine. But what they don’t show you are all the other things that jungle life brings – the heat, the smells, the tiny ants whose bite is stronger than their tiny bodies would reveal. As I trudged forward at a snail’s pace, I tried hard not to think about those poorly made Sunday afternoon movies about people being swallowed by quick sand, concentrating instead on the love story of Tarzan and Jane.

“We’re going to be fine. We’re going to be…” I could feel the seething heat rise from the angry wet earth. Like little kids, Klaus and I asked our host several times, “Are we almost there?” He patiently grinned, saying “20 minutes” in response every time.

The time did come, after a rather desperate walk into the unknown, when we finally got to Liki’s jungle family home. We were sweating profusely, our beet red faces puffy with effort, slick with a kind of grimy sweat that only 95% humidity can call forth.

We tugged off our muddy boots, then entered the home (which was more like a pavilion with rough-hewn wooden floors placed precariously together and a palm frond-covered roof.) We greeted each family member individually, learning that the shaman and his friend, “Uncle” had come from three hours away in the jungle to be with us. Uncle had just lost his brother, who was Liki’s father, the week before. He gestured to me that he had cried a lot. With tears in my eyes, I comforted him, knowing myself what loss and grief can do.

Like Uncle, the shaman, wearing nothing more than a loincloth and ceremonious bambooed tattoos across his face, chest, legs and arms, sported a handmade banana-leaf tobacco cigarette in his mouth at all times. I noted the irony that he, as a medicine man, would entertain such a habit, but we were in a different place with different rules. In fact, every single man in the room had a cigarette in his hand at all times. I silently thanked the open-air arrangement to prevent asphyxiation.

Having greeted everyone properly, Liki made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Make yourselves feel at home!” He grinned. “Kitchen here. Lunch soon. Toilet? Anywhere you like.” I surveyed the compound with its raised chicken coop, main house, guesthouse attached by several rickety log bridges and another house about 200 meters away. Where on God’s green (and right now quite muddy) earth was I supposed to go when Nature called? “Oh, and take a stick with you if you have to go,” Liki added. “To ward off the pigs.” In that cinematic moment, I heard a series of grunting, as if the herd had, well, heard him. And I realized they had six or seven pigs in various stages of growth roaming about the area, sloshing this way and that, squealing with delight or some kind of expostulation that we strangers had arrived. I sensed an energy shift in the area. Trying to be a champ, I figured I would find a quiet place to do my business when the time came.

A Jungle Walkabout

Walking through the jungle mud is an all-day affair. We spent the next morning deciding what we wanted to do. Intermittently, the women would call out to us with their newly defined terms of endearment for us both.

“Mama? Kopi?”

“Papa? Kopi?”

Sumatran kopi (coffee) is divine so we would gratefully take the java jolt as we thought about our plans for the day.

Klaus opted for a photo shoot with the shaman and Uncle who reminded me so much of our now deceased friend Perry Robinson, a talented clarinetist from New York. I videoed Klaus as he did his thing, both of us sweating profusely at the mere effort of movement, making sure I didn’t accidentally step on a nearby machete with my flip-flopped feet.

Exhausted after just an hour, we retreated to our “jungle cinema” for an episode of “Bloodline” on Netflix, which Klaus had wisely downloaded in Germany. It, along with a few packages of salty crackers, was the only creature comfort we thought to bring. Our iPad attracted interest from several of the men, which meant I couldn’t escape their chain-smoking for long. At some point we made it clear to the cinema-goer happily puffing next to me that he should move next to Klaus lest he be banned from the experience. A young guy with a wide smile, he understood.

After lunch (rice with watery vegetables and a fried egg), we waited for the rain to settle before taking a walk around the compound. Barely an acre wide, it took us an entire hour, with a respite in between at a nearby building, to make our way full-circle. It was at this point, red-faced and breathing heavily, that Klaus admitted it was a first for him to live under such conditions. All the talk of Papua New Guinea and West Papua back in 2009 felt exaggerated. No mud, no sludge back then! The path in those places had been as smooth as to which I am now referring our “jungle lite” tour to see the orangutans in Bukit Lawang. And so, resting against one of my walking sticks, still panting from our exertion, I laughed and laughed, finding no other words than “Well then, I am so grateful to be with you on our first journey through the muddy jungle!”

The afternoon highlight was donning a banana leaf cum skirt to join two of the women on their fishing expedition. I looked like an utter clown, white-bellied with a black bikini top next to a woman in the same outfit, fit as a fiddle and obviously amused at my peculiarity. Nonetheless, they softly called me “Mama” and Klaus “Papa” and I felt like a part of this family in a strange, if not fleeting, way. We high-fived and laughed, and although we did not speak the same language, we seemed to understand one another nonetheless.

During the day, family members would come and go, bringing palm tree stumps that they called sagu for the pigs and chickens to eat, beetle nuts for the women to shell (with their trusty machetes, of course) so finding a place to do my business with all the comings and goings wasn’t as easy as I thought. A walk to the river involved navigating slippery walkways covered with rain-slick logs and mud so as of Day 2, I pled for a bucket to pee freely in the privacy of our own four walls (which we shared with various sentient beings including spiders, a gecko and at one point, nearly a Gibbon monkey, but Liki shied him away in the middle of the night). The gecko had remarkable panache. During one of our jungle cinema sessions in the evening, we witnessed him creep along the edge between the wall and the roof, snapping up a beetle three times the size of his face. It takes courage and resourcefulness to live in the jungle.

Lord of the Flies

The herd of pigs was omnipresent. At night they would convene at a place that felt like it was right next to my pillow, a thin wooden plank our only partition. At one point in the night, Klaus remarked, half-asleep, “That noise? It’s only the pigs,” he reassured me, resuming his snoring and I had to laugh a second time that day. Nestled between human and porcine grunting, it was indeed a hilarious moment to be alive.

One of the larger pigs in particular had taken a shining to me right away. I could see it in his face. Peering out from his red-headed self, he would look me squarely in the eye over the course of the four days. His yellow eyes searching mine, Klaus noticed his fascination. “Oh, that’s certainly Jackson, seeking you out through this guy here so he can see you well.” I can feel my dear son’s presence always and I could only image how amused he was about our excursion into such a foreign existence.

On our final full day, it rained until the afternoon. This made us sad on several levels: 1) It massively reduced mobility. 2) It hindered the number of jungle-based pictures Klaus could capture. 3) I state the obvious, but pooping in the rain is not an option. 4) The solar panel upon which the family relies for all electricity is unable to charge the batteries, thereby reducing our iPad-charging capacity (and I realize how bratty that sounds). As with everything in the jungle, we had to be measured in our movements and decisions.

As the rain lifted, our host Liki exclaimed, “It’s time for poison!” The shaman and Uncle were to demonstrate how they gathered material from the jungle to concoct a poisonous potion to be brushed on the tips of their one-time arrows for hunting. Klaus accompanied them as they gathered the deadly ingredients, photographing them all the while. Klaus returned with an unidentifiable charcoal mark under his left eye like a quarterback ready to punt. His face was aglow and I could nearly hear the tingle of his solar plexus, fueled by inspiration from the pictures he had just taken.

As the men settled in to make the poison, I counted heads, seeing that all of the full-time house members were gathered around the kitchen fire. I thought it my chance to embrace Nature’s Big Call for the first time since we arrived.

Correct-sized mud boots (because in such a communitarian society, people grab whichever ones are available)? Check.

Dry (but skanky) socks? Check.

Stick to ward off poop-eating pigs? Check.

Toilet paper in back pocket? Check.

No rain? Check.

Hopeful, I settled into a spot within sight of the house. I had barely released some pent-up air when I saw a figure wearing a yellow shirt “Seven hours of DEATH” with a tiger’s face on it. A young foraging woman. Damn. I lost my chance and my nerve. And what was it with all the death messages anyway? I was starting to sense a theme…

Thankfully, we would be back in what I would now call civilization the next afternoon (I regretted having even thought that the dirt floor washroom with its standing toilet manufactured by American Standard, pool of water with a solitary fish that acted as a shower too and a lone, unplugged washing machine in our host’s village home was short of civilized. I enviously thought of the door with its rudimentary lock and shivered with anticipation to return there).

But back to the poison.

Snow White fell into a deep, numbed slumber after eating the poisoned apple. Adam got into trouble with Eve for something similar. And that afternoon I watched with jangled nerves as my dear life partner Klaus danced barefoot around poisoned arrowheads and machetes as he photographed the shaman and Uncle as they prepared their jungle armor for hunting monkey, deer and birds. Camera to his eye, I became his worldly one, offering gentle guidance not to step to the left or right for fear of poisoning himself – one pinch is a lethal dosage for animals and humans alike.

Our visit to the jungle fed a battery of people, not to mention the goodies Klaus brought for them (soap, toothbrushes, candy and cigarettes). As it should be. The food we bought was always enough, no matter who showed up, the portions adjusted to the number of mouths to be fed. Two chickens were sacrificed during our visit. The eldest brother said a prayer of gratitude to the animal before ending its life. I have never seen a whole chicken being cooked over an open fire, feathers and all. It was quite an experience.

One Love

Random swatting and scratching are a part of the program whilst in the jungle. Parades of ants marching triumphantly across our Hello Kitty mat in the middle of the night, nipping an inordinate amount of my skin relative to their microscopic size, were too. All the while a waft of pig shit lifting in the wind, an occasional slap out of our Netflix-induced reverie. By the end of our visit, the soles of our feet had taken on, shall we say, a jungle hue. Klaus, not one to mind a bit of dirt, refused to ceremoniously slap them, which we mutually find occasion to do when the mood strikes. I considered whether Tarzan would have batted Jane’s feet. I image the vines from which he swung had given his palms a helpful coating of callouses.

On the morning of our departure, I attempted one more Nature sitting, this time at the river’s edge. The red-headed stalker pig raced to be with me. Drats! I had forgotten my stick. Another chance gone to feel relief! I shooed the pig away, not without a huge tinge of guilt, but it was a hopeless cause. I had learned patience being in the jungle. All good things in good time. This I knew to be true.

As we said our goodbyes, giving ample hugs to our lovely hosts, Klaus and I nimbly flitted (well, okay, walked without falling) through the mud, knowing now when to tread on the logs and when not to. We made it back to the boat in record time. Two sticks, not one. Walking on immersed logs to glide more smoothly forward, rather than getting stuck in the mud. No quicksand in sight. No Tarzan either. But in some fashion, we had managed to become one with Nature – and the people living there – in a very short time.

It is safe to say I will never forget this humbling experience, realizing how little we need to live a beautiful life. I am grateful for the comforts of my world, but I also see how community can feed the soul. The way this family lives may not be my lifestyle of choice, but I learned an important lesson there. We are all capable of connection, even if we don’t speak the same language. No, in fact we do. And that language, my dear friends, is love. Love of family. Love of Nature. Love of home.

May love fill your hearts and your days for nothing is more everlasting than the power it brings to us all.