Getting closer, but I still need your help and there are only days to go. If you or anyone you know loves exotic travel and wants to go somewhere few others have, here’s an amazing opportunity. Check it out; I’ll take you on a personal trip into one of the remotest and most interesting places on Earth.
Click on the link in the title above to see what National Geographic Traveler’s blog Intelligent Traveler had to say about the project.
I’m halfway through. 50,000 words written. But I need your help to finish, to cross the Ts and dot the Is. I’ve had a researcher in Europe going at it for almost a year. I have hundreds of pages of documents that have to be translated. And I need to go back. Both to Europe and to New Guinea. To go deeper. To re-ask questions in light of information I didn’t have during my first journey and to get more details, because what happened to Michael Rockefeller can only be understood within the context of a complex culture and its sacred world of spirits and ancestors. And that requires time and presence in Asmat itself. But the costs are overwhelming me. To be in Asmat I need a guide, a translator, a boat, fuel - gas alone costs $10 a gallon there.
I’ve launched a fundraising project on Kickstarter. Fifty dollars gets you a signed book; $500 your name in the acknowledgements. Or whatever you can spare; please click here to read more about my book - The Last Warriors of the Spirit World.
Email me if you have any questions.
Thank you!
I’m reading Ian Frazier’s Siberia, and after arriving in Moscow for his very first visit to Russia, he writes: “I was thoroughly stunned. Love, with an assist from novelty, had blindsided me. I had been overcome, lost permanently.”
I feel much the same here in Asmat, though I’m not so sure about the love part. Out of the rivers of Asmat, I’m so stunned I don’t know what to ask. I’m a questioner, curious, and questions come easily to me, but here I sit surrounded by people and we stare at each other in stunned silence, my tongue tied.
Last night I heard the story of how the village of Ocenep became two villages – Ocenep and Pirien. Ocenep was a big village on the Ewta River, about 1,200 souls, some four hours by longboat from the not really very big city of Agats. These days it’s two villages right next to each other, kind of like Manhattan and Brooklyn. You wouldn’t know it was two separate villages, you’d think it was just one long one strung out along two sides of the river. Back in the 1970s it was one village with two Jeu – the big thatched men’s houses that are the center of village and spiritual life in Asmat. There was the Jeu of Ocenep and the Jeu of Pirien, and everyone in one Jeu is united by complex family ties. Think of them as one big family.
Dombai’s Jeu was Pirien and he had three wives. One morning, it was five am, the head of the Ocenep Jeu asked Dombai to go into the jungle and get some sago, while Dombai’s three wives went in a canoe to fish. Dombai was suspicious, so he asked men to follow his wives. Eventually Dombai’s spies saw the women fucking – I’m telling the story using their words – three men from Ocenep Jeu, including the head of the Jeu. When the three women returned to Ocenep, well, there was trouble. The women throw open their skirts and said, yes, we fucked them and many other men from Ocenep, too.The men made a fire and burned their clothes and that was that.
Not a problem, Dombai said. Not a problem.
But Dombai remembered. One year later the men from Pirien Jeu attacked and killed Bifack, Por, Fin and Ajam in retribution, and moved their women and children half a mile down river to a new place and the Jeu of Pirien became the village of Pirien. What happens to one man in the Jeu happens to them all. There is no separation. No individuality. No I. Collective guilt runs deep in a place where men took certain other men as lovers/brothers who also shared each other’s wives, sometimes, and everyone was related and their Bisj Pole carvings are a tangle of men standing on and connected to other men.
There was a lot of crying. The children were sad. The men from Ocenep wanted peace. So they gave a daughter to Pirien and then the men from the two sides drank each other’s urine.
This was 1974.
What do you with a story like that? Murder, adultery, the cannibalistic ritual of drinking each other’s urine, not to mention the unsaid – were their bodies eaten; what became of the skulls? – it cries out for 1,000 more questions that I can’t even begin to ask. This was the stuff of everyday life in Asmat, and the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Just getting them to tell the story has taken days. The bible is here now, they say. We are Catholics. They themselves can’t believe they did these things. Or maybe not; maybe they just know that we outsiders think it’s weird. “Asmat is difficult,” the Bishop of the Catholic archdiocese here told me yesterday, “because not all the values of the culture can be told to people from the outside. Many things are secret. If we ask and ask, finally, they say ‘we cannot tell anyone.’” This from the leader of the religion that has been here since 1952, pounding away at the Asmat.
When I ask my guy about drinking urine, whether it’s common or not, he says. Yes. No. I don’t know. And then falls silent.
Then he tells me we must get a dog’s tooth necklace to give to an important man who’s been helping us, that the necklace is worth one or two million rupiah. This man is in his 60s, he has two wives and he’s a Catechist in the Catholic Church. Wouldn’t he rather have the money? I say; with that he could buy rice and fuel and what can you do with an old dog tooth necklace in the year 2012?
No, my guy says, with the necklace he can buy another wife.
This has been a hard trip. My hardest yet, way more challenging than riding on crummy buses, boats, trains and planes, harder than the Congo or Sudan or Afghanistan. It took me nine days to get to Agats, just the gateway into Asmat. It took me three days to find a boat, a driver, a guide. I have spent days waiting and waiting and waiting – another six in there somewhere as I waited for a new translator to fly in. In a world with little power, no booze, no showers, hot or otherwise, almost no Internet, no streets – nothing but water and mud. I didn’t talk to a native English speaker for 38 days. I learned a lot of Indonesian.
In Asmat itself it was burning hot and wet and I spent hours and hours and hours, days, talking, listening, doling out tobacco and sugar, on bare floors with nary a chair or cushion, the flies thick. The language barrier was huge and wrangling fact and fiction out of 50-year old jungle tales from men who were children when events took place, or heard them from their fathers, in a world where nothing was written down, was untangling a knot in the dark. A 20-minute tale translated in one minute; what didn’t I hear? What wasn’t translated? I went in twice, banged away, pressed for details. Some things they’d seen themselves, some things they’d heard about with incredible detail, as if it was yesterday. Some things they suddenly couldn’t remember, a collective guilt and fear that was palpable. One old man took my hand and wouldn’t let go, looking me hard in the eyes, holding my gaze, telling me everything with out words. Some answers came in the darkness of the night, one at a time, not to me, but through my guys, whispered, and some of those didn’t make sense, and some of them did. I remembered things I meant to ask and never did. I ran out of books to read. Lost weight in the remotest place I’ve ever been. Missed people. Had vivid, strange dreams, remembered sweet memories, daydreamed visions of things turning out good and whole. In reporting, as in life, you push and prod and sniff your way toward some truth, but you’re also powerless. There’s beauty and challenge in that. Anyway, this I can say: A book was growing.
Yesterday I fled, which Michael Rockefeller never had the chance to do. I grabbed three planes in rapid succession, buying tickets on the fly, flew across the archipelago to Bali and just like that I am sitting on the balcony of a friend’s apartment after a night of tuna steaks and cold Bintang beer, fast Wifi and a gushing hot shower that feels almost surreal. How strange: we’re going to a party tonight at the W Hotel.
And then this morning my phone rings, they’re calling from Agats. I’d left instructions, money; there’s more I want and they are eager to get it and can do it better than I. They are Asmat and they’re known, and in a few days I’ll either be coming home or heading back.
I’ve been plunging pretty deep.
We traveled with the tides. At 3:30 one morning, under a full moon that lit the river and bats the size of crows, and a flawless Southern Cross. At six am another and once at noon, down rivers a mile wide and through cuts six feet across under tangles of vines and hanging bromeliads and moss-covered mangroves. Hornbills with blue heads and four inch beaks and sulfur crested cockatoos flitted through the trees and four-foot long black iguanas skittered from the river banks. We passed through curtains of soaking, torrential rains and dried under a searing sun. At the mouth of the Betsj River on the Arafura Sea we were tossed and beaten by strong winds and turbulent waves, and sought refuge down a creek, where we sheltered with fishermen in sago palm huts until the winds died. As the rains pounded down one night, men sat on the veranda and chanted until dawn, old stories of death and loss and necks cut, always death and battle – and then they go to church on Sunday. In a 100-foot longhouse one day men chanted and beat drums for hours and hours, with crowns of cockatoo feathers and mud stripes across their arms and legs, bandoliers of dogs’ teeth across their chests, and black across their eyes.
There was no plumbing, no electricity, not a chair on which to sit. We’d slide up to the banks of villages in silence, under stares. Amates, my translator and guide, would mutter a few words, say, ‘come,’ and we’d walk. “He is my brother. My aunt. My father. My sister.” He was related to someone everywhere, but the words were few, and soon we’d be in someone’s hut or house, a train of men arriving and settling down on the floor. Thirty six I counted one night, with another ten at the windows. Hours and hours would pass, smoking, talking, listening, grunting, sweating in the flickering light of candles. The Asmat forget nothing. They know every bend in the rivers, every creek, the names of every man killed, the history of every village. In Biwar Laut, Amates’s home village, he hadn’t been home in five years. The women looked at him long, and then rushed to him, grabbing, pawing, hugging, and wailing. Screaming, stamping their feet, gushing tears, rubbing their open mouths over his arms and head and face and neck. And then they’d just walk away, screaming and howling.
We ate rice, fish, crab, shrimp and sago. It was raw. Wild. Intense. Hard. I didn’t see a chair, a cushion, a toilet, a bed, in eight days. Flies gathered, unstoppable, going for the eyes, nose, the corners of my mouth. Ants were everywhere, and mud – cool and slick and knee deep. But hardest of all was to never be alone, to be surrounded and watched every minute. Except in the middle of the night, when sometimes I’d rise and pick my way past sleeping bodies, out narrow, slippery wooden logs, to stand under the stars or rain. It was dark. Still. Silent. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so far away.
Give a man water and you give him a highway. For months I’ve been immersed in Asmat, reading wide and deep, but it wasn’t until I climbed in speedboat at the village and airstrip of Ewer and hammered toward the ‘city’ of Agats that I understood. Asmat is swamp and thick sago and mangrove jungle, all oppressive heat and humidity, but it lies along the Arafura Sea and is cut with thousands of rivers. They are a mile wide and the width of an alley. They swirl and bend; they’re silver and brown, and what seems the worst kind of place is also the best.
Where there is water there is wind and light and escape, and we bounced and jolted under a huge sky thick with heavy clouds toward the ocean. The river grew wider and the water rougher; where big rivers or bays pour into the sea there is always turbulence, and easily 20 knots were blowing in against the outpouring river. There were standing waves and three-foot rollers and longboats coming in toward us waved at us in warning.
Water and spray poured in, the boat slammed and shimmied, and at that moment I saw Michael Rockefeller, crossing the mouth of a similar river just to the south, worse off, for he was in an overloaded catamaran. A flat craft and in waters like this he’d have a single course, running with the wind and waves behind him, otherwise he’d be flipped and swamped, which he was. It must have been hairy and wet.
Agats is 2,000 people, Asmats and Javanese and Torajans and Indonesians from throughout the archipelago, a city of rotting, moss covered boardwalks and wooden houses on flimsy looking stilts over black mud. When the tide is out, it’s a feted carpet of plastic water bottles and garbage; when the tide is in, it’s rushing dark water. Rain comes suddenly, huge monsoon gushes of it so hard a mist infiltrates my windowless room and oil drums fill up in an hour. Lightning and thunder and wind. Narrow alleyways of blue plastic sheeting and roosters underfoot and barefoot children racing across the boards.
That’s all the good news. The bad is that the fixer/translator who was supposed to be here isn’t, and I’m scrambling to find someone to travel with and help organize things. For my task I need a fluent English speaker, and so far I’ve met only one, a teacher named Rudy, who may be able to go out for a week. Otherwise I’m going to have to fly someone in. But it’ll come.
The boring secret of what I do is wait, and I think it’s the secret of narrative non-fiction writing. I wait and wait and wait. I wait in bars and I wait in airports and I wait in hotel rooms, and it takes as long as it takes. None of that comes out in the narrative, which is as it should be.
And I can also see that there will be no Internet or cell service when I head out.
“What time is it and where am I? It is nighttime with the crickets going berserk all around me and I’m back in Hollandia. I arrived exhausted today… and am now surrounded by my little reality for the next ten weeks: a chaos of cameras and recording equipment cluttering up everything including my mind….”
Michael Rockefeller wrote those words 50 years ago after flying in from New York, two months before he disappeared. I, too, have just arrived in Hollandia, though it’s now called Jayapura and I haven’t heard a cricket yet; time has not been kind to what is now the largest city in Indonesian Papua. There is, in fact, no trace of the former capitol of Dutch New Guinea. Not a colonial building stands; rising from a perfect blue sea dotted with freighters and small islands into steep green hills, Jayapura is all concrete and frantic motorcycles in sweltering heat, another city full of hustling Javanese and a smattering of Papuans, the eastern end of Sukarno’s dream. It is still far away, though, and I arrived as exhausted as Rockefeller – it took me 48 hours of travel through seven airports to get here, and I fell asleep at two pm and didn’t wake until six am, a long afternoon and night of strange dreams of past loves and mixed up worlds.
Like Rockefeller’s journey here, this is but a necessary way stop before flying across the mountains to the southern coast and the land of the Asmat. And my mind isn’t much different from Rockefeller’s. As he wrote, “At this point I really have no idea exactly what out trip will be like or how successful it will be. The reports about the areas we are going to and the extent of acculturation are so conflicting that one really has no idea what to expect.”
Rockefeller was being a little disingenuous. He’d already spent two weeks there a few months earlier and he knew that the Dutch government and a handful of Catholic missionaries had only begun to stamp out head hunting; the villages to which Rockefeller traveled were, in fact, fairly pure, and inter-village warfare, including cannibalism, was still endemic. Only three years before, 124 men in 12 canoes from the villages of Omadesep and Otsjanep had set out to visit the village of Wagin on the Digul river, and but 12 men returned, the rest slaughtered. That’s long gone now, but what I’ll find beneath the tattered gym shorts and T-shirts of the villages remains, as Rockefeller wrote, conflicting. In this cranking city it’s hard to imagine that people still live naked in tree houses just a few hundred miles away, but they do, and New Guinea has always been like that. It wasn’t until 1938, after all, that Richard Archbold happened to fly over the Great Baliem Valley nestled between the island’s jagged mountain ranges that rise to 15,000 feet, and discovered the last great uncontacted civilization – 50,000 Dani living in a world of immaculate gardens and fenced family compounds – who had never known the outside world.
I was offered dog today to eat. I would have, but it looked disgusting, even to me, and that’s saying a lot. Think a pile of coal black chunks. Maybe it was just a black Lab, but I passed.
Sunday morning I fly to Timika, there to catch a boat south along the coast to Agats, a city of 2,000 built on stilts, and gateway to Asmat. Rockefeller was after art, I’m after his story, but it’s all the same, for every ornately carved Bisj pole he collected told a story about people no longer living. “The Asmat is a land of jungle, winding rivers, and mud,” Rockefeller wrote. “You wouldn’t believe it but there are no hills and no stones in the entire region….” And surrounding me is my little chaos of cameras and notebooks and pens, cluttering everything, including my mind.
It’s time to go.
This time in pursuit of a mystery: On November 17, 1961, Michael Rockefeller was crossing the mouth of the Eilanden River in what was then Dutch New Guinea on a two-month search for primitive art. A strong tidal surge swamped his boat and the two local boys with him swam for help. None came. After drifting for a night, Rockefeller strapped on two empty gasoline cans, stripped to his underwear and swam for shore, leaving Dutch anthropologist Rene Wassing drifting at sea.
The boys reached shore and rescuers plucked Wassing from the water the next day.
Rockefeller was never seen again.
So I’m off, this time for two months to the southern coast of what’s now Indonesian Papua, to the land of the Asmat. It’s 10,000 square miles of swamp, river, jungle and mud, home to former head hunters and cannibals who thrived into the early 1960s without stone, without pottery, without writing, yet were artists of such beauty their carvings fill museums around the world.
Though I’m in pursuit of a mystery, it’s also a story that runs wide and deep and that’s about much more than a lost American son. It’s the story of a turning point between two eras. It’s about the end of colonialism. About the 600-year clash between the primitive and modern worlds. About the nature of good and evil. And about a place, one of the world’s most remote and most rugged as it undergoes profound change.
I’ll be traveling into the heart of the Asmat, along rivers and into villages, and into the highlands of the Great Baliem Valley. I’m not sure what I’ll find or what to expect and I’m nervous about leaving for two months – it’s always hard to break the gravitational pull of home. I don’t even know how much Internet service I’ll have, but I’ll post as often as I can.
Please come with me. Follow me here, on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. It should be a good adventure. And please, don’t be shy. Question. Comment. Critique. I’d love to hear from you.
***
Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,
does there still stand, abandoned, like
a ruined city, gates sealed with grisly nails,
the luckless garden?
Is sultry day still followed there
by sultry dusk, sultry night,
where on the branches sallow and purple
the fruit hangs rotting?
Is there still, underground,
spreading like lace among the rocks
a network of unexploited lodes,
onyx and gold?
Through the lush greenery
their wash echoing afar
do there still flow the four glassy streams
of which no mortal drinks?
Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,
does there still stand, like a city in ruins,
forsaken, doomed to slow decay,
the failed garden?
- Ina Rousseau
Author of The Lunatic Express, Hunting Warbirds and Somewhere in Eden (2013). Contributing Editor at National Geographic Traveler, Wired and Popular Mechanics.
"...a wise and clever book, funny, warm and filled with astonishing characters. But it also represents an important exercise, casting an Argus-eye on a largely invisible but un-ignorable world. It is thus a book that deserves to be read widely." --The Wall Street Journal
