The motorboat ride to the mainland took about an hour and a half. I was shirtless and shivering. We landed around 10:00 P.M., to find a crowd awaiting us at the mainland dock, the news of our accident having somehow preceded us. Among that crowd, my attention was instantly drawn to a small elderly woman, possibly a Javan from her appearance. In my life I have never seen such an expression of extreme emotion on the face of anyone, except for actors in movies. She seemed to be overwhelmed by a mixture of grief, horror, and disbelief at something awful that had happened, and by utter exhaustion. The woman came out of the crowd and began questioning us. It turned out that she was the mother of the Javan man who had been in the first sailing canoe that had capsized.
I spent the following day at a small guesthouse, rinsing saltwater out of my suitcases and their contents. While my equipment—my binoculars, tape recorders, altimeters, books, and sleeping bag—was ruined and unsalvageable, I was able to rescue my clothes. Malik lost everything that he had brought with him. Under local conditions, we had no recourse against the canoe crew whose negligent motor operation had caused the accident.
On the following evening I climbed onto the roof of a nearby building around 6:00 P.M. in order to re-experience how rapidly the daylight had faded at sunset. Near the equator, daylight fades much more rapidly than in the temperate zones, because the sun sets vertically rather than at an angle sloping to the horizon. At 6:15 P.M., the time when we had been rescued on the previous day, the sun was just above the horizon, and its light was growing dimmer. Sunset came at 6:30 P.M., and by 6:40 P.M. it was much too dark for someone in another boat to have distinguished us and our capsized canoe even at a distance of only a few hundred yards. We had had a close escape and been rescued just in time.
As I came down from the roof in the dark, I was feeling helpless and still unable to grasp what those reckless crewmen had done to me. I had lost valuable equipment, and I had almost lost my life. My fiancée, my parents, my sister, and my friends had almost lost me. My knees were raw and scarred from being rubbed with each wave against the gunwale as I gripped it. All of that because of the recklessness of three young men who should have known better, drove too fast in high waves, ignored all the water splashing into the canoe, refused to slow down or stop when repeatedly asked to do so, swam off with two of the three life preservers, never apologized, and never showed the slightest regret for the anguish and loss that they had actually inflicted on us, and for how close they had come to killing us. Those bastards!
While wallowing in these thoughts, I came across a man on the ground level of the building onto whose roof I had climbed to view the sunset. I fell into conversation with him and told him why I had gone up onto the roof and what had happened to us on the previous day. He answered that, coincidentally, he had also been on the same island the previous day, and had also wanted to go to the mainland. He had looked at the canoe that we hired, with its big engines, seen the young crewmen and their cocky and laughing behavior, and watched how they gunned the engines and handled the canoe coming in to shore to await passengers. He had had much experience of boats. He had decided that he didn’t want to risk his life with that crew and boat, and had waited for a larger and slower boat to go to the mainland.
That reaction of his jolted me. So, I hadn’t been helpless after all! The cocky crew weren’t the only people who had come close to throwing away my life. I was the one who had stepped into their canoe; no one had forced me to do it. The accident had ultimately been my responsibility. It had been completely within my power to prevent it from happening to me. Instead of asking why the crew had been so stupid, I should have been asking myself why I had been so stupid. The man who had chosen to wait for a larger boat had exercised New Guinea–style constructive paranoia, and he had thereby escaped being traumatized and nearly killed. I should have exercised constructive paranoia myself, and I would now do so for the rest of my life.
Just a stick in the ground
The most recent of the three episodes related in this chapter unfolded many years after my canoe accident had convinced me of the virtues of constructive paranoia. Out of New Guinea’s lowlands rise many separate isolated mountain ranges, which are interesting to biologists because they resemble “islands” of montane habitats surrounded by a “sea” of lowlands, as far as the distributions of species confined to montane habitats are concerned. The higher elevations of most of the isolated mountain ranges are uninhabited by people. There are two possible means to reach those high elevations in order to survey their birds and other animals and plants. One is to be flown directly by helicopter to high elevations, but it is difficult to obtain a helicopter for charter in New Guinea, and even harder to locate a clear area for landing a helicopter on a forest-covered New Guinea mountain. The other method is to find a village close enough to the mountain that one can bring one’s gear to the village by plane, helicopter, or boat, and then walk from the village to climb the mountain. The difficulties of New Guinea terrain are such that it is impractical to carry one’s gear to a mountain camp more distant than about five miles from a village. A further practical problem is that, for many of the isolated peaks, available maps don’t show the location and elevation of the highest peak or the nearest village; one instead has to obtain that geographic information by a survey flight.
One particular mountain range interested me because, although it was reported to be not especially high, it was isolated. Hence at the end of one of my trips to New Guinea, while I was starting to plan the next year’s trip, I chartered a small plane to fly a survey along the entire length of that mountain range, and I identified its highest peak. There was no village within at least 25 miles of the peak in any direction, and no garden clearing or any other signs of human presence nearby. That ruled out reaching the peak from the village and required instead a helicopter-based operation, which in turn required finding a natural clearing at which to land a helicopter. (Some helicopters can hover over the forest canopy while passengers and cargo are being lowered by winch through the canopy to the ground, but that requires special helicopters and training.) While one’s first impression of New Guinea forests is of an unbroken expanse of green trees, one does encounter occasional natural clearings at landslides where an earthquake has shaken down a patch of forest, or at a marsh, a dried-up pond, the bank of a river or pond, or a dry mud volcano. On this survey flight I was delighted to spot a huge landslide clearing, about two and a half miles from the peak and several thousand feet lower in elevation. By New Guinea standards, that’s much too far to establish a camp at the landslide and to be able to walk daily to the peak to observe birds. Instead, it would be necessary to fly our gear by helicopter into a first camp at the landslide, then to clear a trail and carry the gear ourselves to a second campsite in forest close to the peak: hard work, but nevertheless feasible.
With that problem of finding a helicopter landing site potentially solved, the other problem involved obtaining permission and help from local New Guinean land-owners. But how was I to do that, when there were no signs of humans anywhere near the peak? Whom should I contact? I knew from personal experience that there were nomads moving around at low elevation in the eastern part of the range. There were reports, but there was no definite information, that related nomads might range further west near the peak, but I hadn’t spotted any signs of their presence from the plane. I also knew from experience that nomads living in isolated mountain ranges remain mostly or entirely at low elevation, where their staple food of sago palm grows. At high elevation there isn’t enough food to support a resident human population. At most, nomads might make occasional hunting trips to higher elevations above the altitudinal ceiling for sago palms, but I had been in several mountain ranges where the nomads don’t even do that, and where animals living at high elevation are tame because they have never seen humans and never been hunted.
My failure to locate any signs of nomads near my intended peak had two consequences. First, it meant that I hadn’t found
any New Guineans who would claim to own the mountain, and from whom to ask permission. Second, in my New Guinea fieldwork I need local people to make and run a camp, clear trails, and help me find and identify birds, but here there were no local people available. That second problem was one that I could solve just by bringing New Guineans whom I already knew from another part of New Guinea. The potential huge problem was the first one of permission.
In New Guinea, every bit of land is claimed by some group, even if they never visit the land. An absolute no-no in New Guinea is to trespass on someone’s land without permission. The consequences of being caught trespassing include being robbed, murdered, and/or raped. I have been in several unpleasant situations when I did ask permission from the most nearby people, who did claim to own the area that I wanted to visit and who gave me their permission, only for me to find on going there that some other group claimed to own the area and was outraged to find me there without their permission. Compounding the danger was that, in this case, I would not just be coming myself, but would also be bringing several New Guineans from another part of New Guinea. That would be considered even more infuriating to local land-owners: New Guineans, unlike me, might be there to steal women and pigs and to settle land.
What would I do if, after I was dropped by helicopter at this landslide, and after the helicopter flew off and left me for three weeks, I did encounter nomads? My helicopter would have to make several shuttle flights to bring my supplies and my co-workers to the landslide, thereby advertising my presence. If there were any nomads at all within miles, they would hear and see the helicopter, figure out that it was landing there, and come track us down. Making things even worse in this situation: the nomads in this area, if there were any, might be “uncontacted,” i.e., might never have seen a white man or missionary or government official. First contact with previously uncontacted tribal peoples is terrifying. Neither side knows what the other side wants or will do. It is difficult or impossible to communicate peaceful intent by sign language to previously uncontacted people whose language one does not know, even if they wait long enough to let you try to communicate. The risk is that they won’t wait; they may be terrified or furious, panic, and immediately start shooting with bows and arrows. What would I do if I were found by nomads?
After that survey flight, I went back to the U.S. to plan a helicopter-based expedition to that landslide and that summit the following year. Practically every night of that intervening year, while drifting off to sleep, I ran through my head scenarios imagining what I might do if I did encounter nomads there in the forest. In one scenario, I would sit down and hold out my hands to show that I had no weapon and was non-threatening, force a smile, reach into my knapsack to pull out a chocolate bar and eat a piece myself to show that it was non-poisonous and edible, and offer them the rest of the bar. But—they might get angry immediately, or they might panic when they saw me fumbling in my knapsack, as if to take out a gun. Or, in another scenario, I would start imitating calls of local New Guinea birds, to show that I was there just to study birds. That’s often a good ice-breaker with New Guineans. But they might just think that I was crazy, or trying to work bird-related sorcery on them. Or, if I was with the New Guineans whom I had flown in, and together we encountered a single nomad, perhaps we could somehow induce him to stay at our camp, we’d make friends with him, I’d start to learn his language, and we’d induce him not to go off and bring back some of his fellow nomads before we got picked up and left in our helicopter several weeks later. But—how would we induce one terrified nomad to stay in our camp for several weeks, with these other New Guinean trespassers?
I had to recognize that none of these happy-ending scenarios that I imagined was even remotely plausible. That realization didn’t make me abandon the whole project. It still seemed most likely that we simply wouldn’t encounter any nomads, because we hadn’t seen any signs of any huts from the air, and because my previous experience was that lowland nomads usually don’t visit summits of mountains. But when I finally did go back to New Guinea a year later to carry out the planned exploration of the summit, I still didn’t have a plan that I was convinced would work if we did encounter nomads.
Finally came the day, a year later, when the project was ready to begin. I assembled four New Guinea friends from mountains several hundred miles away, and half a ton of supplies, to fly in a chartered small airplane to the closest available airstrip, a small dirt strip at a village 37 miles south of the peak that was our target. As we flew along the foothills of the mountain range, we spotted eight huts scattered along rivers at the base of the hills in the eastern part of the range, but the last hut was still 23 miles east of our peak. On the following day our chartered small helicopter arrived at the airstrip to shuttle us in four runs into the big landslide clearing that we had seen on our previous trip. The first flight took two of the New Guineans, plus a tent and axes and some food to sustain them in case of an accident such that the helicopter could not return for a while. After just an hour, the helicopter came back to our airstrip with a note from them reporting exciting news. In flying around the peak, they had discovered a campsite location much better than the big landslide: a little landslide only two-thirds of a mile from the peak, and at higher elevations than the bigger landslide. That meant that we would be able to travel back and forth between our camp and the peak within a few hours, without any need to carry our gear from the big landslide and establish a closer camp. Two more helicopter flights brought the other two New Guineans and more supplies from the airstrip to the selected campsite.
The last helicopter flight carried me and the rest of our supplies to the campsite. During the flight I looked down carefully from the helicopter for any signs of people. About 10 miles north of the airstrip and still 27 miles south of the peak was another village on a small river. Soon after that village, I spotted two isolated huts, presumably belonging to nomads, still lying in the flat lowlands before we reached the first of a series of ridges leading up to the mountain range. Once we reached the ridges, there were no further signs of humans whatsoever: no huts, no gardens, no anything else. In New Guinea a distance of 27 miles from our campsite over rough terrain might as well be on the other side of the ocean, as far as our risks of unwanted visitors were concerned. Perhaps we were in luck, and perhaps these mountains really were uninhabited and unvisited!
The helicopter circled our planned campsite, where I could see the four New Guineans waving below. The clearing proved to be a small steep-sided gully whose slopes had apparently collapsed in a landslide (probably triggered by one of the frequent earthquakes in that region), such that the floor of the gully was dirt bare of vegetation, perfect for landing a helicopter. Apart from that small landslide and the big distant landslide that had been our original target, everything else within sight was covered by forests. The pilot and I landed and unloaded our last cargo, then I went up in the helicopter again and asked the pilot to head for the nearby peak so that we could plan where to make a trail. From the head of our gully, we could see a ridge leading straight to the peak, but not so steeply as to present problems. The peak itself was very steep for its top 200 vertical feet and might be a difficult scramble to climb. But there were still absolutely no signs of people or huts or gardens. The helicopter then dropped me at our campsite and flew off, agreeing to pick us up again 19 days later.
That was an act of faith on our part: from what we saw of the terrain, it would have been utterly impossible to walk back to the airstrip 37 miles distant. While I had brought along a small radio, in that hilly terrain my radio could not receive or transmit messages from or to the helicopter base 150 miles away. Instead, as a precaution in case of an accident or illness requiring an emergency evacuation, I arranged for a small airplane whose scheduled flight path took it not too far from our campsite to deviate from its path and circle our camp every five days. We could try to talk with the pilot by radio to confirm that we were OK, and we agreed that we would place a bright red
air mattress on the landslide if we did have an emergency.
We spent all of the second day constructing our camp. Our happiest discovery was that there were still no signs of people: if nomads had been alerted by our helicopter to try to track us down, it wasn’t happening yet. Large birds were flying in and out of the gully, undisturbed by our presence a few dozen yards away. That suggested that the birds were unafraid of people, and provided further evidence that nomads didn’t visit this area.
On the third day I was at last ready to climb to the peak, following my New Guinea friends Gumini and Paia, who were cutting trail. Initially, we climbed 500 feet up out of our landslide gully onto the ridge, which bore a small patch of grass and shrubs with low trees, I assumed because of an older landslide that was now becoming overgrown. Climbing along the ridge, we soon entered closed forest and worked our way upwards in an easy climb. Bird-watching was now exciting, as I began to see and hear montane species, including a couple of uncommon and little-known ones such as the Perplexing Scrub-Wren and the Obscure Honeyeater. When we finally reached the summit pyramid, it was indeed very steep, as it had appeared from the air. But we were able to pull ourselves up it by holding on to tree roots. On its top I spotted a White-breasted Fruit-Dove and a Hooded Pitohui, two montane species that were absent below. Apparently this peak was just high enough to support a few individuals of each species. But I hadn’t met some other montane species that are common and noisy at this elevation elsewhere in New Guinea: perhaps they really were absent because the area of this mountain was too small to support a viable population of them. I sent Paia back to camp, while Gumini and I walked slowly down our trail, birding as we went.