Dead Birds pt 2 (1990)
The next day we meet the Summer Institute of Linguistic Bible translation people, two Germans and their kids, plus an Australian woman--all very pleasant. They say this begging for smokes is fairly recent, since last year when the first backpackers walked through. I dare not ask whether they smoke, themselves. Most Kosarek are serious bush tobacco smokers anyway. Now they’re also nicotine freaks. We visit Walsatek, a small hamlet across the valley on another steep ridgetop, where Tara and Tony take lots of shots and views are breathtaking, literally. The ridge is so narrow that the village is barely one footpath wide, all the huts spilling off down the sides.
In the evening Tara Tara
The next day we walk to Welarek where Tony organizes handsome young men in traditional dress to sit for portraits. There are reflectors and fill in flashes and all manner of interesting gadgets for these people who’ve barely seen cameras before. One man is most beautiful and patient as Tony fusses and tilts him like a bored supermodel.
“Sau wali,” Tony says in local language--Excellent. But after about fifteen minutes he looks at the nearly useless paper notes, plus the set-up Polaroid he’s been handed, figures he’s been cheated and storms off. No smokes.
The next night we’re all asleep when Tony, Tara and Olfiet wake to hear footsteps and noises in the cook room behind the house. They’re all in one room and, in deference to Olfiet who’s a Timorese kid with a gold cross, I’m in another. But they come wake me now and insist I bring my bag in with them. It could be the disgruntled Welarek model, I say, and Tara
In the morning Tara
We walk an hour or more to Nohomas village, and as we come round the final bend in a path hugging the mountainside, we spot a terrifying mob on the ridge above us--forty or more men in full clay-paint and hoops and pig tusk necklaces and nose ornaments, yodeling, jumping up and down with their spears. Ambushed again! They’re wearing tall cassowary feathers and their hoops running from chest to knee, which make them look like militant Michelene men. Someone has sent word that two photographers want to take their picture, and the whole village has dressed in fighting attire, and even made a mumu of sweet potato for us.
When we crest the ridge we see seventy or eighty men and women dancing and whooping in a circle, men in the centre chanting and stomping, running counterclockwise; women on the perimeter, holding their swaying breasts, running clockwise, and chanting at full volume. We’re welcomed by an older man who now lights the mumu fire. Our stash of cut tobacco goes to this man to distribute, even as the kids persist in begging for smokes. The dancing is so impressive and enthusiastic, at one point Tara with his camera lies on the ground in the center of the circle as everyone runs over him. We are all as if balanced on a long narrow ridge top with 360 degree views of surrounding valleys.
As the singsing dies down we can hear faint but harmonious singing across the valley, where men are relaxing after clearing a garden. They’re singing for themselves, without even trying to please us. The dancing stops, and everyone sits in three rows for a group portrait, which is all the more like a school picture when Tara sets a timer and tries unsuccessfully several times to run from camera to front row center, and people keep spilling out in infectious laughter. Finally, the rains come. All these rakish Yali men are frantic for shelter, protecting their attire, and man, woman and child race scatter for the space under the eaves of their circular thatch houses, with kids sliding down the suddenly muddy paths and screaming with silliness. We wait and watch, and a fog slips over the ridge like a sleeve, erasing all the surrounding mountains.
Paulius, a young Yali, joins us for dinner and explains that knowledge, rather than wealth, is what makes a man important here. Nowadays that includes traditional knowledge as well as knowledge of the Indonesian language and bureaucracy. Also, now that things have opened up with pacification in the past ten years, men can seek wives from distant places. If a Yali marries a Dani woman, from the valley surrounding Wamena, he will move down there rather than vice versa. Paulius himself plans to go with another kid to Angguruk, a mission station in the star mountains here, for some aid post training and, if possible, further medical training in Wamena. He hasn’t yet got enough pigs for a wife, even though, he clams, most men marry at 16 here, and girls by 14. Paulius explains that missionaries first brought chits for buying basic goods at their stores some thirty years ago. Today the Yali are firmly locked into the cash economy, if only for a few items: salt, sugar, smokes, rice.
Tony does a great Sam Chandra imitation, stroking his chin, strutting, tipping his golf hat. Then he tells a story about an old man who accompanied us from Nohomas today, stroking his balls all the way, then bending to inspect a bit of pig dung on the path; apparently, Tony adds, he helped Olfiet make the potato fritters tonight.
Two days later the Nohomas people show up early, all dressed for a photo shoot. Women with white clay dots and red noses, men with spears and cuscus and cassowary and lesser bird of paradise feathers in their hair. Paulius mediates, Tony and Olfiet negotiate, and it’s decided each person will get roughly two dollars for the morning's posing. Olfiet’s a smooth and pretty Timorese boy who wears shockingly short shorts and smokes incessantly. He argues that the potential benefits in tourism call for their coming down to fifty cents a day, but Tara Tara Tara Tara
Tara
It’s the day before I’m supposed to go off on my own to Angguruk and I’m scared of being caught in the rain, cold and miserable. It is now perfectly clear to me that I am not just overdue with my period, but worse. When I confess this to Tony and Tara, we all decide my long walk shall become Mission Miscarriage. Rain will now be an asset, and I can slip footholds and tumble down any number of mountains. The old man wants to be a porter, but Paulius and Judas have told him he’s not needed, and he’s become very huffy. Tara
I say goodbye to Tony and Tara. The MAF plane flies them back to Wamena and the next leg of their photo trip. I’ll miss them both, their stupid hand puppets, lighting farts and burping armpits included. Tony’s brilliant imitations, even the one he’s doing one of me in the cessna as they taxi away. The SIL man comes out with mail for the pilot, waves the two off, and pulls a puckering face when Tara
Olfiet is coming with me to Aggurruk, as is Judas, the unsmiling porter. The old man comes along after all, too. He and his ridiculously long penis gourd and his three legged runt of a dog. What is to me the hardest of all possible treks is a walk in the park for this guy. We reach Sarkasi this first afternoon, on top of the next mountain away. The walk is unbelievably steep and the last leg almost kills me. I stop for a breather every few minutes, sucking oxygen, while the porters ask for a smoke. The old man never smiles. Olfiet organizes camp in a lovely timber home filled with women at the doorway and men in the front room. It’s the Yali pastor’s home. A blue-eyed albino baby gurgles in one woman’s arms. We’re only two hours from Kosarek and I’m nearly dead, already missing Tony and Tara. Kids crowding in on me, in my face, and I’m exhausted trying to entertain them on my own. I’ve given away all my pens. We’re at the highest point in this narrow slanted strip of a village. It’s such a magnificent view on top of this ridge, with two--faintly three--mountain ranges below us, crosscut by layers of dense white cloud. Tall poinsettias and croton bushed surround the house.
Next day we reach Delambela, another beautiful hilltop village. We climb and climb, then descend forever through dense rainforest, hacking at vines or sliding down logs. The main mountain we’ve scaled is Mt. Timike
We’re now squatting on the dirt floor of the church with crowds of people at each door and peeping through the wooden slats around the sides. It’s a far walk to the river, so Olfiet, Paulius and the porters (the original two having mysteriously become four) borrow many pots for water to save trips, and I go down with them for a wash. But then they all stop for a smoke in the men's house, or honai, of a settlement just below, leaving me barefoot and useless outside for an hour. Welcome to the double standard, girl. My leg has seized up and I’m pissed off, so three little girls show me down to the river by shortcut. We all jump in together, laughing, and they lather up with my soap, reaching under our shorts and laplaps. I wish there were a province filled exclusively with New Guinea
By late afternoon everyone’s come back from the gardens and crowded in to see the circus we represent. Thirty people watch as I write the diary note that’s behind this. Olfiet has boiled water to put hot towel compresses around my left calf, which I consider amputating were it not for the mess. Most of the walk today has been in cloud, but for a while we climbed under the forest canopy of one mountainside, which was cool and quiet. It was covered with moss and surface roots, lawyer and liana vines across our path. When we stopped for lunch in a clearing several men out hunting wandered through our party and sat for a smoke. One had some cooked sweet potatoes which we bought off him and shared around. I find the walking so tough that I have to remember to stop and look around to enjoy it, which often irritates my companions. These guys race up killer steep and slippery slopes in the drizzling rain. The scrawny three legged dog pities me, I can tell. We’re pressing ourselves to reach Angguruk by Monday, because an MAF flight comes in Tuesday and can get me to Wamena. Where I shall take a bath.
And now at this summit the clouds lift to reveal a brilliant panoramic view, just as the sun sets into deep violet. Our camp is in one cozy corner of a big empty church. After dinner the kids--tens of them--come in and sit down with candles in the floor before them. It’s blackness all around, their little faces bending into a pool of amber light. As a young boy strums a ukelele, they sing a couple of local language songs in perfect harmony, and then the Papua New Guinea
“Olfiet, can you get him to stop?”
“Do you want the guitar?”
We set out from Delambela just after nine this morning while it’s still raining. Olfiet stops someone strolling by with a live chicken, and buys it, then ties feet together and carries it under his arms. My leg hurts very much now that it’s all downhill, and I’m afraid to stop, for fear of not starting again, so by , I’m overjoyed that we’ve hit a flat walk through a valley. But then we climb again and, god bless these guys, they slow down for my sake. This feels like an enormous accomplishment, getting most of the troop to slow down, and now I’m enjoying it so much more. Lovely moments listening to nearby birds of paradise, and stopping to greet people coming down from their gardens. The porters are all predictably forty-five minutes to an hour ahead, so they get long breaks sitting and smoking as they wait for us--- and jump up to begin as we arrive.
At one point we reach a vine bridge crossing a narrow, fast running river and we see on the other side, obscured by the bush, a family camped on the hillside mulching, milking and sedimenting flour from felled sago palms. Making sago flour. It’s a familiar sight in PNG and makes me feel at home for the moment.
Olfiet calculated the day's walk to be four to five hours, and it’s been eight, with only a short pause for a lunch of bananas, peanut butter and cigarettes. Paulius has become disagreeable to Olfiet today, sick of being bossed around by the Indonesian. He occasionally offers a wanky to me though. “Bad man I think,” he shakes his head.
One day, after we’ve probably climbed and descended four mountains, Olfiet spots our destination--the Membaham aid post, up near the summit of the next mountain as we stand in a valley clearing. “Just up there.”
But it’s a cruel illusion that we’re anywhere near. We climb endlessly, and Olfiet stops every ten or fifteen minutes to point to the apparition above. Three hours later and very near tears, I stumble to the aid post door, nearly mad from the pain in my left leg. We camp in the aid post under tattered posters of medical lexicons and in the loving care of a kind woman who apparently is married to the absent aid post worker. The five room building is perched on a small cliffside landing, it’s back to the bush, with a lovely waterfall spilling down only a few paces away. I hobble to the far side of the waterfall to wash before my legs seize up, then return just as Olfiet’s gotten hot compresses and tea ready.
There’s no real pattern to how these places receive tourists. Olfiet’s brought tourists here before, and they’re as kind as can be. Delambela, on the other hand, would be more remote, and they reacted a little coolly when we first arrived. But then, we’re walking through areas where people still fear their neighbors and live on ridge tops for a reason. I have recurrent dreams of falling off a mountainside. The kind of dreams where you’re aware you’re dreaming but you can’t help falling anyway, which is like a juggernaut that gains momentum and yet never ends.
The next day, just before finally descending into Angguruk, we all rest at a precipice with a 270 degree view of the valley below. It’s a windy extreme place to sit, and it doesn’t take much to imagine being blown off. This is where the porters--at Paulius' nod--go on strike. They want a full day’s pay for the first and last days, both half days, and for a fourth man who attached himself to us along the way. I sit silent as Olfiet and Paulius argue in Indonesian and the porters, Judas scowling, all look on. The charming old man now becomes snarly in his claims of having personally helped me over every mountaintop. I tell Olfiet to tell him to stuff it, he wasn’t asked to come in the first place. He’s come along on an errand to Angguruk anyway, I know, and got free meals along the way.
Our sullen mob now descends into town. We walk to the hospital, which treats people from villages all over the region, with a doctor who is Timorese, like Olfiet. But I dislike him instantly. With a gang of snotty assistants he blithely reports that tomorrow's plane will fly from here to Welarek to pick up passengers, making it full for the leg too Wamena. Too bad, they all shrug. But Friday (four days from now) a tourist charter is expected and I can no doubt charter is back. Olfiet makes noises about my international connection, but this man literally turns his back on him. He is keeper of the radio and can’t be alienated, but it’s also possible for them to get on the radio and consult MAF with a little stroking. Olfiet shakes his head. I ask him to ask them to ask the doctor if he can radio Wamena please. Olfiet smiles nervously at the doctor's refusal and explains to me in English that he’s a “joker.”
What?
“I think he is making a joke.”
And I think I’ll be walking back to Wamena.
“We come back.”
Angguruk is pleasant. The entire town is embraced by steep mountain walls with gardens climbing up to the top; and there are cows grazing on the airstrip. Across the airfield there are neat wooden abandoned mission houses with slightly overgrown gardens behind them. The mission left two years ago, I’m told, but these houses tell a poignant story. We explore one of them which has wormy books in the glass cases and a big cast iron stove that must have been hellish to transport. There are three large bedrooms with adjoining baths. Ghosts everywhere, people who didn’t pack everything when they left. We make our way across the strip to the guest house, which is really a string of bare wooden rooms off a raised walkway, like a motel. We crowd into one and slump to the floor to settle accounts with Paulius and his gang of merry men. Soap, biscuits, instant coffee changes hands. As each man receives his rupiahs from Olfiet, he slithers off to the porch with barely a nod in my direction. In weakness, I hand the old man a cigarette, for which he says nothing and walks away.
At midafternoon we return to the kindly doctor, who appears to be organizing a hugely expensive charter in my behalf. Or, we can walk to Welarek tomorrow and jump the flight from there. Come back tomorrow.
In the yard behind the guest house the schoolteacher, his brother, and their families come to see the photos of PNG they’ve heard about. More people arrive, and soon fifty or more men, women and kids are passing around my stack of snapshots and an Air Niugini in-flight magazine with shots of Papua new Guineans in traditional and western dress. The school teacher raises the photos of heavily decorated highlanders at the Goroka Show and they all ooooo and aahhhh as he explains in local language. Kids jump up and down to see the images, some of them wandering off on their own when they get one to intently study the big head-dresses, the body paint, the faces of these people who are so much like them, but not.
The teacher holds up and extreme close up shot of William, a Huli from Ambua lodge, wearing his traditional hair wig with daisies and yellow face paint. The crowd roars. He turns the page and there’s Willie in Huli dress next to two bikini-clad girls on the beach in Australia
Then the teacher opens to the magazine's central map showing the PNG side of the country with barely an inch of Irian Jaya over the western border. He points to the space not illustrated and indicates where Wamena and Jayapura and Angguruk would be. Everyone stares or exclaims politely, as though they haven’t seen a map before. I wonder how many of these kids, all in penis gourds and grass skirts, go to school. The older people stand for long minutes holding a snapshot near their face, or they open the magazine and stop at the masthead where a small square picture shows a Papua New Guinean in shirtsleeves and tie, the Minister of Civil Aviation. This may be the most awesome of all contrasts between their colonized and undeveloped existence and that of a free PNG.
The next day Olfiet and I get on the MAF Beechcraft back to Wamena. Turns out the doctor was pulling our legs all the time, and our seats have all the while been secure. He tells Olfiet he just wanted to see my face when he mentioned the cost of a charter. Asshole.
I watch this tough little Cessna touch down with delicacy and then drop its full weight to the nosewheel. You can feel it sigh before the engine revs loudly and the plane shudders up the graded grass strip. Such incredible machines, single engine planes. They’re so fluttery and frail moving through these enormous gorges, so hollow and exhausted when they land on isolated hilltops. High altitude single engine flying is as risky as it gets.
Almost as though the plane knows this, it always seems to catch its own breath before take off. There’s always that hesitation, that pause when the plane squares up at the edge of the runway and turns to go, that second thought, the slight window of opportunity during the final checks, before pulling the throttle and racing down the straightaway in a vibrating defiance of gravity. You’re whole body is thrust back by the force of inevitability, shoulders pinned to the seat, then jolted up in a miraculous lift--when you’re stomach falls and your bowels loosen, and then your heart races with a compressed feeling of ascension. For thirty seconds or so the body is as exalted as the little machine wrapped around you, it’s slicing through turbulence to a calmer space in the sky. The descent into Wamena is beautiful, soaring low over gardens and kunai thatch homes with their feathery plumes of smoke. Streams that oxbow across valley floors, fields of mounded sweet potatoes hung from the sky at eighty five degree angles.
We touch down with a bounce in Wamena, at about nine thirty AM. Just as I’m descending the plane a young Dani boy comes running onto the tarmac with a note in hand.
"Nassisoolivin! Nassisoolivin!"
“Me?”
It’s a note from Tony and Tara. Folded inside is one of Tara's Polaroid’s: of a tall Bokondini man in wide penis gourd, red sash around his waist, cassowary feather head-dress and beard, standing against a blue sailcloth, his eyes closed and head tilted, and his arms are crossed tenderly hugging his neck--the posture of New Guineans who emerge from their huts into the cold morning air. The image is only 2x2” and in its preciousness it makes my heart sink, suddenly missing my friends. The note is in Tara
Querida Nancy,
As you can see we’ve yet to leave the valley. The day we got back from Kosarek we positively decided to push on to Karubaga...We decided to scrap our plans and stay on till the 9th in Wamena to do some more portraits (one example included). This morning as fate would have it, we found ourselves basking In the unseasonably warm sun on the airport tarmac eagerly awaiting the arrival of a MAF plane from Angguruk. My heart would beat like crazy in anticipation of the arrival of a certain passenger I thought (stupidly) I was fated to meet again. Alas, it was not to be...During our wait we photographed the cockpit crew if a Merpati Twin Otter bound for Ewer (Asmat) and ensuing conversation afterwards yielded a surprising reward--a quick (& free) flight to Ewer and back with a brief walkabout--about 25 minutes around the boundaries of the fabled Asmat land. That should make my client happy, plus I got some astounding aerials thanks to the crew. The fact that we were the only two passengers aboard helped too, I think. WHERE WERE YOU NANCY Bali
Abrazos, T
P.S. Any out of the way expenditures incurred are refundable through the Javanese duo.
I'm washed (no small feat), packed and at the Merpati desk in half an hour. When the plane touches down in Jayapura I can see the two standing at the edge of the field. I know my being here is consent to share an adventure with Tara Tara Tara Tara Tara Tara
Tara and I linger in our choice of snake oils, laughing so hard that we both get a stitch and have to walk around for a minute before coming back. We buy something that enhances performance and prevents the conception of Siamese twins. The next day we all go for a boat ride with some airline employee friends of Tony (whose gift has been revealed to be personal friendships everywhere we go), out to the bigger of two airports here. It’s a run down place, but what’s nice is, sitting in a coffee shop outside, we meet yet another friend of Tony's, actually a famous name in expeditions I’m told, Herman Lantang. He’s a founding member of the University of Indonesia Explorer Indonesia Baliem Valley South Baliem
Now we bump into another friend of Tony’s, a pot-smoking chopper pilot sitting in the coffee shop. He works for a timber company and will take Tare and Tony for aerial shots this afternoon. The airline manager comes by and invites us all to a big seafood lunch feast: sates, grilled fish, prawns, watercress and a dry mint of some sort. All the familiarity and kindness, and Tony’s broad social net, makes Indonesia, not to mention Irian Jaya, seem like one village. Everyone’s a school chum, a cousin, in-law or business associate. At night we all get roaring drunk at a cavernous seaside restaurant near the hotel. Me on two beers, Tony and Tara on shots of whiskey; we can’t even finish our food, and end up giggling about the prostitutes swarming around as if I were invisible. Back at the hotel I retch in the toilet bowl, and afterwards, Tara
Suddenly I feel more abandoned than ever before, fully aware that there’s no road forward for Tara and myself. For some time afterward, though, we do stay in touch, and there are scratchy radio-phone calls from Jakarta Hagen Singapore Hong Kong
Three years on, I’m sitting at a big table in a New Jersey Manhattan New Jersey Sandy
“What emergency procedures??”
So we’re drinking vanilla sundaes and eating sloppy tuna fish sandwiches, remembering all this, when Sandy New York New Guinea Tara
“ Tara
“Maybe. Do you know him? Could be something like that.”
“ Tara Tara New York New Guinea
“Oh, Nance, I think he’s gone. Sorry about that. ”
But it’s enough to be reminded. The angst over my flight instructor, over my leaving the little cabin in the woods and the temporary comfort of the States gradually dissolves. A weightlessness comes over me: Tara
It’s four years before I get back to Irian Jaya. I’m living in PNG and have been hired to guide an American tour group through the Baliem Valley Brisbane
In the morning, Paul’s there at the airport waiting to catch his twin-prop flight before mine. It’s raining and a lot of people are milling about, making the linoleum floors wet and muddy, as the plane touches down and a handful of passengers disembark. The pilot dashes into the back of the terminal and waits. And we all wait and wait in the driving rain now. He comes out to run his preflight checks, then dashes back inside and waits. A ticket counter commotion erupts, and the flight is announced. People file up to board, and I wave sincere good luck to Paul and his Vanimo mate. The plane takes off without hitch, and only then does the sun begin to break out.
An Australian sits on the bench near me and begins a monologue about his rough and ready life with Ok Tedi mine in Tabubil, Western Province Borneo Papua New Guinea New Guinea Babo Borneo
The group is an interesting mix. There are Katie and Lil, a cheerful middle aged lesbian couple from Minneapolis Colorado Boston
In Wamena we’re joined by Pini, our Torajaland guide, and check into the Baliem Palace Hotel. This is what the frontier town of Wamena
Still, these are Americans. Ron is the first to be upset to find Pini giving cigarettes to young kids. He’s on a quest for the real thing, the genuine article, first-contact experience where naked is not staged; and he shopped for this from a brochure. But there is nothing really tourist-tableau about Irian Jaya, even as it’s experienced thousands of mainly Dutch trekkers thus far. Americans find it hardest to believe their presence doesn’t corrupt the natives, or inspire traumatic envy. For one thing, tourism is so small an industry here that none of the villages are dedicated to it. Our first trek is a day-trip around Wamena, and at the end of it, I press Pini to take us to Sioroba, to see the mountain wall of Peter Matthiessen’s book. Maureen is raveling with a copy of it. We walk through a drizzle into the village, across log bridges and tracks of mud beneath pandanas trees, where Pungkau, tenderly holding Maureen’s hand, demonstrates the Dayak headhunting call. And when we come upon the guest cottages for Sioroba, we see a clutch of Dutch tourists we saw earlier in Jayapura. Then we follow a path familiar to me, to enter the central compound where I’ve seen Pue kill, singe and cook pigs for his guests a number of times. A young girl walks past and I stop to ask her, Pini translating, Where’s Pue? She looks up and they both ask, You know Pue? Yes, of course, I say. The girl says nothing. Pini says he died last year. Ohmygod. Was it a fight? Oh no, not a fight. He died of shortness of breath, some respiratory infection they suppose. How could that be? The little girl says something, and Pini agrees, without translating. But as we exit the compound, from behind, Pini says, “He was an old man anyway I think. He died of old age.” Pue was 37. My age.
We set off in buses to Sugokmo the next morning, with sixteen Dani attendants in little more than penis gourds piled on the mound of our gear in a dump truck. From Sugokmo we assemble day packs and hand out heavy gear to these handsome and friendly young men, some wearing those familiar red Bokondini sashes. It’s great to be back. Great to see the place has so little changed in ways that count. We cross a rope bridge, this one secured by steel cable and hanging next to the poured cement pylons of its replacement under construction. Pini tells me how a Japanese tourist and his guide were swept away from this bridge the year before, and he points to a concrete marker with Japanese inscriptions on the shore. I look down to the rough clip of whitewater below us. “Forgodsake Pini, don’t tell the tourists.”
At one village I come pulling up the rear, and pass the open door of a teacher’s house on the hillside, through which I see Maureen and Pungkau, who’s been kindly helping her, sitting with the teacher, having a chat. I descend to the school, meet up with Ron, Pini and the rest, and we walk on. Not much later I’ve already forgotten about Maureen and Pungkau when we pull uphill and away from the valley village. I look back and they’re nowhere to be seen, so I send Pini back to the teacher’s house. But Pini runs back saying he can’t find either of them, they’re nowhere. The Bernsteins are way ahead of us now, across the river and cresting the next ridge top, were I assume they’ll join Katie and Lil. This time I send a porter back, and we trudge forward toward Kurima, where we plan to stop for lunch. Waiting there, as the porters and I organize noodles and cheese sandwiches for lunch, patience ebbs away and this Maureen and Pungkau disappearance takes on the proportions of an emergency. Ron is getting stroppy. What if she’s fallen off a ledge? What if they’re lost and wandering off somewhere? Unlike PNG, where rascal gangs are a worry in the bush, this is a Police State with virtually no crime against trekkers. Hot water is ready, here’s the peanut butter and crackers, Pini helping me now with more natural hospitality than I will ever muster. The Bernsteins offer to walk back after lunch. And finally Pungkau and Maureen saunter in, having never seen Pini or the porter sent to muster them. They’ve had a really wonderful time with the schoolteacher and been shown around the entire village. Pungkau apologizes. Maureen stands above me now, slathered in sunscreen, hat tied at the chin, leaning on a walking stick and looking more refreshed than any of us.
“Really, you shouldn’t be such a worrywort, I can handle myself.”
That night we camp in the high and lovely village of Ibouroma
The porters all sit with us in Ibouroma and tell their stories, first explaining their names, ages and marital status. All so young--between 17 and 20—they agree that, yes, they have girlfriends, but are otherwise endearingly shy. One has a name meaning blanket, because he was the new blanket his mother received at his birth. I try to tell them this is a lover’s nickname in PNG, but it’s too hard to explain. Then they sing nonsense and love songs, in beautiful harmonies, beating their chests and thumping their thighs; one kid really gets rocking with his head shaking and hands beating in double-time. I take a picture of this moment that always reminds me of everything I love about Irian Jaya.
Ibouroma throws us a pig kill and mock-battle the next day, which are more fun than I’d have imagined. Curious about one albino boy whose skin is scabbed and red, Arnie and Polly Bernstein and I approach and send this lad into fits of terror, while no one else around seems bothered. In the afternoon, we head off to Tangma--the hardest leg of the trek. I’ve been dreading the sight P and I faced when he descended this mountain face years ago---of a near-ninety degree wall with narrow, barely perceptible, footpaths snaking down the ledge for 500 feet or more. This time, thankfully, the ledge is covered in brush and the view is slightly less vertiginous. I find myself able to clutch grass clumps as I pretty much slide down in a hunched position. Low-lying cloud fills the valley basin below us, one great cotton pillow thrown down a depression, and near the bottom I turn back to cheer everyone else on, just as Arnie’s coaching Polly not to fall. One by one, we make the bottom, hearts pounding and throats aching from thirst. Like an idiot, I chose this time to inform them they’ll be returning the same route tomorrow, which prompts the group to collectively slump to the ground. Then Ron realizes climbing is never as bad as descending. This seems to raise morale slightly, until a troop of barefoot six-year-olds comes running down the path behind us, light as air. “Rub it in,” says Lil.
We’re good walkers, though, none of us real complainers. When one of the porters straddles a pig-fence to help Katie over, nothing but a penis gourd and a smile as he lifts her up, she turns back to the rest of us, deadpan.
“I’ve seen more scrotum on this trip than I have my entire adult life.”
Pungkau teaches us the Dayak war cry, which scares no one but gives us great pleasure when one of us occasionally breaks into it. During one never-ending climb, we have to double over every few feet to keep from cramping. My lungs are wheezing and my calves ache. I’m with the last stragglers, bringing up the rear. The porters scramble ahead, and I’m ready to puke from exhaustion, one leg trembling now as I plant it uphill. Out of nowhere a porter scrambled back down to me and hands me a cool can of Coke. I look up to see Bambang waving at the top. He’s held this can in a freezer bag for days, just for such an occasion. The man is amazing.
“I asked for a Sprite.” The porter smiles anyway.
Once I’ve reached the top, I find the entire crew’s been enjoying a break and a long smoke, and even Ron is relaxed, wanting to push off now. “Waaaiiiiiit!” I gasp. “Who’s missing?” First Katie crests the ridge, her head inching itself over the crest step by step, until we find it arrives with a big smile. We applaud. Then ten long minutes later we see the top of Lil’s head appear, then her full head, and two porter’s heads on either side. They’ve got hold of her elbows, and she’s shaking her head. “You have no idea what trouble I’ve had getting these kids up here.”
Wanem is an administrative center, well landscaped and pretty, but also cramped, two rows of clapboard houses and a tall post with a speaker continuously playing one radio station. The village men are congregating in the school, which is the only public building and, as such, the place we hope to bed down tonight. So for now, we hang about outside watching the Dani listen obediently to a government appointed official from Wamena, whom everyone calls ‘chief.’ They’re planning the opening of a new aid post, we learn, which will involve donations of sweet potato and one pig from every family. Is this a health tax? Or just an honorarium? All the Dani squat on their haunches and share hand-rolled smokes, looking submissive to this young well-dressed Irian official who takes everyone’s name down on a list. There is no dissent or correction we can make out. It’s hard to know whether this official is Dani, or coastal, an actual ‘chief’ or an outsider. But its an interesting scene, not unlike a few I’ve seen n PNG, including elderly villagers paying absolute respect to some educated youth, maybe an Uncle Tom, maybe the next Independence leader. I can’t find the back story, which is what makes it so interesting. Is this the Wanem representative? Why so much ‘in kind’ contributions for an aid post? Will they have a feast? All these questions are left unanswered, reflecting so many veils dropped by language and familiarity that I might somehow raise, were we across the border.
Hours later we take possession of the building ourselves. This is our last night in the bush, tomorrow we’ll descend from here back to Wamena. So I must count out tips and pay for everyone. When the porters drift in to collect, Pini, perhaps flush with the officialdom of the day, establishes a forum with the young men for all of us to ask them questions. Once again, the Dani sit cross-legged on the floor, while the rest of us have plastic chairs, and a kerosene lamp keeps a descending darkness at bay. It’s a remarkably officious stage direction for what becomes a relaxed and good humored conversation. But it begins stiffly, with some of us asking meaningless questions, or questions mean nothing to these young men--Do they think about tourists as intruders? Do they feel humiliated by showing off their simple lives to us? No. And no. Ron isn’t buying this and mutters something about predictable responses. Polly just wants to know what it is about us that always makes them laugh? But this loses its punch in translation and just makes us laugh, which thereby reduces everyone to giggles. Ron turns to Polly and says if she’ll just calm down for a minute he can get his question across. But in the end we learn that most of the young men don’t speak Indonesian anyway, and it’s Pini who’s been formulating their answers.
Maureen and I turn into our bedrolls in the main room, while all the others get deluxe closets, Katie and Lil providing soundtrack. Maureen wakes at for extended ablutions, and my nose wakes me to the earthy cookfire smells of every highlands village. Muscle by strained muscle I start to revive, obliquely watching Maureen, sitting at the end of her sleeping bag, studying a hand mirror. Don’t be a worry wort. I can handle myself. She evenly applies a liquid base coat, holding the mirror deftly enough to catch intruding daylight. Then the finer details of her eyes and lips. She mimics the concentration of singsing performers in PNG, backstage, as they finish the fussy lines of ochre and charcoal face paintings with orchid vine brushes. When the sun rises we assemble for a parting photo, everyone standing to the side of the school building on a ridgeline. What the photo doesn’t show is the scene behind, and below, where a cluster of round huts are emitting cookfire smoke and one enormous long pigsty appears to house all the children, women and swine together, most of them waving at us.