No, I said, actually I didn’t.
“If they ambush your vehicle, you want to run in the direction of fire.”
“Really?” That didn’t seem logical.
“Yes,” Don said. “Get out of the car, and run toward the fire.”
“Why?”
“Because what they do is, they put two guys on one side of the road, who open fire. They put everybody else on the other side of the road, expecting you to get out on the opposite side of the vehicle. So when you get out you’re exposed: that’s when they let you have it.”
I made a mental note to remember that. Run toward the fire.
“Probably won’t come up, but it’s good to know these things,” Don said. “Now, you have your compass?”
No, I said. I was going to have a guide.
“Jesus, never go into the jungle without a compass,” Don said. “And try and get a decent map. It won’t be easy, but try and pick one up in KL.”
Okay, I said. I would do that.
“Now, you know what to do about leeches?”
Don had lots of information. He instructed me long into the night. In no time at all, I felt dashing again. I bought a compass and a map, and I flew to Kuala Lumpur to meet my guide. He was a young Chinese biologist named Dennis Yong. We set off the same day.
Here is how you go to Taman Negara:
In Kuala Lumpur, the modern capital of Malaysia, you get into a Land Cruiser and start driving. For the first three hours, the road is a two-lane paved highway in mountainous jungle. Then it is a one-lane paved road, then a dirt road, then a mud track. After half a day of driving, the mud track stops at a river, at a place called Kuala Tembeling. Kuala means “mouth of the river,” and most villages are at the juncture of rivers.
At Kuala Tembeling, you get into a long, slender boat powered by an outboard motor, and you head up the Tembeling River. The river is incredibly tranquil; you pass small villages interspersed with regions of jungle. As the hours go by, there are fewer villages, more jungle. Finally there are no villages at all. There is only jungle.
After three hours on the river, the boat pulls over at a place called Kuala Tahan. Here I find several plain, concrete buildings—a restaurant pavilion, and four or five guest cottages. This is Taman Negara, formerly the private retreat of the Sultan of Pahang, now donated to the nation as a park.
I have never been in a jungle before. Certainly I have never been so far from civilization. The place is quite comfortable, and Dennis radiates competence. Yet I feel so far from anything I know. I would never admit I am frightened, but I am.
We go at once to the nearest hide, not far from the cottages. Dennis tells me there are tigers, rhinos, and elephants in Taman Negara, but the animals are shy and rarely seen. We must not make any noise or the animals will not come.
On the path through the jungle, Dennis gestures for me to be silent, and we do not speak after that. We climb a flight of wooden steps and sit in the hide: an elevated wooden hut, with narrow windows looking out onto a clearing. In the clearing is a cake of salt, surrounded by the muddy prints of many animals. At the moment, I see no animals.
We wait, not speaking.
It’s comfortable for me not to talk. I have spent years writing, never speaking. Silence doesn’t bother me. We stare out at a clearing of grass with a salt lick, and wait for animals to come.
Pretty soon an English couple arrive. They sit in the hide with us, but they speak. I put my finger to my lips. They whisper, “Oh, sorry,” and don’t say anything for about thirty seconds. Then they begin to whisper. I think it must be something urgent, but it’s not. Just random chatter. I don’t like to be pushy, but I ask them to please be quiet. Dennis explains to them that no animals will come unless the hide is entirely silent. They say irritably that there aren’t any animals out there anyway. They are silent for a couple of minutes. Then one of them drums his fingers on the bench, and the other begins plucking at the thatching of the hide. Then they smoke cigarettes, and pretty soon they are whispering, and then speaking in low voices, and then talking in ordinary tones.
When I catch their eye, they fall silent again, and the cycle begins all over. I realize that these people can’t be quiet. They are incapable of silence. They want to see animals, but they can’t be still long enough to let the animals come. It amazes me to watch them; they seem to have a kind of incontinence. They would be embarrassed not to be toilet-trained, yet they show no embarrassment at their inability to sit silently for more than a few seconds.
Eventually they leave. Dennis and I remain alone in the hide for another hour. No animals come.
* * *
We return to the hide after dinner. The night is dramatic, because the overcast sky glows with silent bursts of heat lightning, casting flickering bluish light on the field before us.
The surrounding jungle is noisy. Crickets make a shrill sound, toads and frogs a low rumble. An owl gives a kind of abrupt, cut-off hoot, which is answered across the valley.
Around ten the sounds begin to die. By midnight it is quiet. No animals come. We go to bed.
I am staying in cottage number 5. Dennis tells me that this was the Sultan’s own cottage, when he was in residence. I think, At least that’s something. I am sleeping in the Sultan’s cottage. At least that.
The next day we hike in the jungle. Paths in the national park are more than ten feet wide. Dennis explains they must be cut wide because the jungle grows back so quickly. We pass flowering red ginger, spiky rattan, and the occasional small orchid, but for the most part the landscape is monotonous green, very dark, and hot.
Dennis has promised I will see gibbons, and we hear them hooting everywhere in the canopy of trees above us, a distinctive “cow-wow” sound. I also hear them crashing through the branches, but I don’t really see them. Finally, with binoculars, I glimpse four black shapes, far off, silhouetted against the sky. They shake the branches and are gone. I have seen my gibbons; I never see them better.
In trying to get a clear look at them, we have wandered a few yards off the trail. I turn and see I am surrounded by ferns and plants as tall as I am. I can only see a few feet in any direction. I am utterly lost.
Dennis laughs and leads me back to the trail.
As we walk, he tells me that the orang asli, the aboriginal tribesmen of the Malay forest, can walk in the jungle for weeks and not get lost. Dennis has gone with aborigenes on long expeditions, several hundred miles of walking, and on the route back, weeks later, the aborigines unerringly return to precisely the same campsites each night.
I ask how they are able to do it. Dennis shakes his head. He doesn’t know. He has spent a lot of time in the jungle, but he can’t fathom it, he says. You must be raised here, he says. It must be your city, the way we grow up in a city. You have to know your way around.
He points out some tiny hazards—a small scorpion in a rotting tree, and leeches wiggling like thin worms along the trail. Dennis himself walks barefooted on the trail. The leeches never bother the first man in a party, he says. They respond to vibration; as the first man passes, the second and the third man get the leeches. I look down, and see one crawling through my boot laces. Dennis tells me not to worry; if it’s still there later, he will show me what to do. I think, If it’s still there later?
The air is hot and humid beneath the trees. I am soaked in sweat. Occasionally on the trail the views open out to a wider vista of the jungle. The trees are all faintly dusted with color—red and yellow and white and pink; a hillside here looks like an autumn hillside in Vermont, but paler, washed out. Dennis explains this is the dry season and the trees are blossoming. That is why they display those dusted colors. I am seeing thousands of tiny blossoms.
We walk for an hour and finally reach the view we have been seeking. I’m out of breath, extremely tired, and glad for a rest. We stop, and I immediately learn a consequence of all the flowering trees.
Bees.
This entire vast jungle is in bloom, and th
ere are thousands and thousands of bees. I have not noticed them while walking, but now that I have stopped they descend upon me. They crawl all over my camera and my hands as I take pictures. Looking down, I see they are on my arms, and crawling over my tee shirt.
Dennis says to be calm, that the bees are only attracted to my salty sweat, and will not sting if I remain calm and move slowly. That’s all I need to hear, and I immediately relax. I am not particularly afraid of bees anyway, nor am I allergic to them. A few bees won’t bother me. It’s kind of an interesting experience.
The bees continue to land.
I feel them crawling over my cheeks and forehead. I feel them in my ears, and hear the hum of their many wings. I see them crawling on the frames of my glasses. I feel them tickling as they walk on my eyelids. I feel them clustered on my lips. I am no longer relaxed.
I want to scream.
It is all I can do to keep from screaming. The bees are now so thick on the lenses of my glasses that I can hardly see Dennis. He has quite a few bees on him, and he is smiling at me.
“They prefer you,” he says. “Nice and salty.”
I am trying to control my breathing, to avoid jagged, short, panicky gasps. I am doing okay, I am holding my own, but, even so, at any moment I may begin to scream.
“Do the bees bother you?” Dennis asks.
A little, I say.
“If you are bothered,” Dennis says, “we can start walking again, and the bees will fly away.” But I am too tired to walk right now. I must endure the bees for a few moments longer. And as they crawl over me, down my shirt and up toward my armpits and around the back of my neck and between my fingers, as I feel them everywhere, I realize that I am waiting to be stung. If I could really believe they wouldn’t sting me, I would be able to relax.
“They won’t sting you,” Dennis says again. “They just want to lick you. They are very gentle.”
It seems inconceivable that they will not sting me. By now I am encrusted with bees; I have so many on me that I feel their added weight on my body.
And I haven’t been stung yet. I look down and see my chest, carpeted with bees, rising and falling. I don’t want to take any more pictures—I can’t see well enough to do it anyway, through all the bees.
Finally Dennis says, “Ready to go back?”
“Yes,” I say.
We start to walk, slowly. The bees slip away, one by one. In a few moments I am free of them, back on the trail.
I was never stung.
That afternoon I meet some orang asli of the Semai tribe. They are short, stocky Negroid men with curly hair, very different in appearance from the Malays and Chinese who constitute the majority of the population. They find me funny because I am so tall.
One man appears to be cooking nails in a pot. I am told he is making poison. The Semai take sap from the Ipoh tree and then boil it with nails and snake heads (although Dennis says the snake heads are a ritual ingredient, not necessary for efficacy). The resulting poison on a blowdart produces convulsions and death in animals as large as monkeys.
Nearby, another man is stir-frying Chinese tobacco with sugar. The Semai prefer to smoke it that way.
The men seem jittery. Dennis says that they are always a little paranoid, because, even well into the twentieth century, the Malays shot them for sport. There are stories of Malay sultans riding on the bonnets of their Bentleys and firing into the jungle at the little forest men.
Dennis tells me aboriginal shamans are highly respected, and often consulted by prominent Malays when they become sick. The Semai call their shamans berhalak, meaning someone who can go into a trance. The Semai believe everyone in their tribe can go into a trance, and therefore everyone is a shaman to some extent, but certain individuals are especially good at trances and therefore become accomplished shamans who combat evil spirits and heal people. A person is generally called to become berhalak by a dream of a tiger, and the most powerful shamans are believed to be were-tigers.
Dreams are important to the Semai, and even the dreams of a young child will be exhaustively discussed, and further dreams directed and encouraged. The Semai believe they can control their dreams.
That night we sleep in a hide a half-mile from Kuala Tahan. The distance from even that much civilization is exciting. I am certain I will see a tiger tonight. I feel it. I stay awake for hours, watching the heat lightning flash over the landscape. I never see a tiger.
In the morning I wake stiff and cold in the hide. Dennis is gone. I look out the window at the salt lick. He is bent low, inspecting hoofprints in the mud.
“Tracks of a wild pig,” he says. “We missed him.”
A wild pig does not sound exciting. Privately I am glad I slept instead of waiting all night to see a pig. “No tigers?”
“Not last night.”
On a boat, we go up rapids to Kuala Trengganu, where we see a monitor lizard near the river edge, and a hornbill flying overhead. Then we see tiger tracks in the wet riverbank. Everyone is enthusiastic about the tiger tracks, but if anything, they make me feel more frustrated: I am seeing the signs of everything, never the thing itself.
From Kuala Trengganu we had planned to go up a smaller stream, but the boatmen tell me that, this late in the dry season, the streams are low and we cannot make it up.
Still frustrated about the tiger, I suggest we try.
They shrug, warn me it will not be possible to get up very far.
I insist we try.
They shrug and smile, and we start up the river. Almost immediately, we strike a dry rapid. The boat must be ported upstream past it. We get out, the boat is dragged, we climb back in, scrape along the rocky bottom, manage another hundred yards, until the next dry rapid. Again we get out and carry the boat. We do this three more times, until I suggest there is no point in continuing, the river is too low.
They shrug and smile, and we head back. Nobody says anything.
On the way back, I find myself newly interested in the tiger tracks and want to stop to inspect them. But the wake of our passing boat has washed the shore clean. The tracks are gone.
That night after dinner I am walking back in the darkness toward my cottage with Dennis. He shines his light around the woods and says, “Mat is here.”
“Mat?” A pair of gleaming eyes, a heavy, dark shape on the ground.
“Yes. And one of her children.”
I see a second pair of eyes.
Dennis sets out, and I follow. Pretty soon I see that Mat is a pregnant deer, sitting calmly on the ground. As we approach, Mat stands. She is six feet high, and beautiful, and she remains calm even when we come close.
Dennis explains that “Mat” is the Malay word for “Friday,” which is the day, many years ago, that this deer wandered out of the jungle and into the settlement. The villagers fed her, she stayed, and when she had offspring some of them came into the settlement, too.
“Mat is why they don’t have goats here,” Dennis says. “In every village, the Malay people like to raise goats and eat them, but once Mat arrived here, they found she did not like the goats and would kick them to death.”
“So what did the villagers do?”
“They didn’t keep goats any more.”
“But if they are so fond of goats …”
“I know. But Mat came, so they didn’t have goats any more.”
In the end, the story of Mat and the villagers came to symbolize the trip to me. The village people had encountered a deer, and the deer stayed, and so they didn’t eat their favorite food any more. That’s all.
I could think of a dozen alternatives. I would have built an enclosure for goats. I would have tried to train Mat to tolerate goats. I would have raised goats at a nearby village and brought them here at the last minute. I would have gotten a freezer and kept frozen goat meat. Maybe I would have discouraged Mat from coming any more.
In short, where I would have struggled, the villagers simply accepted the situation and went on with their lives.
r /> I began to realize how many times the trip had repeated that lesson for me.
The bees—I didn’t like them, but I had to tolerate them, there was nothing I could do.
The low water on the river—I wanted to go upstream, but there was nothing I could do.
The absent animals—I didn’t like not seeing them, but there was nothing I could do.
I couldn’t make it rain; I couldn’t fill up the rivers, or stop the jungle from flowering, or make wild animals appear. These things were beyond my control, and I was forced to accept that. Just as I was forced to accept the couple that wouldn’t stop talking.
In fact, I began to realize that, although they couldn’t stop talking, I had a much greater problem. I couldn’t stop trying to control everything around me—including the couple. I couldn’t leave things alone. I was an urban, technological man accustomed to making things happen. I had been taught countless times that you were supposed to make things happen, that anything less implied shameful passivity. I lived all my life in cities, struggling shoulder to shoulder with other struggling people. We all were struggling to make something happen: a marriage, a job, a raise, an acceptance, a child, a new car, new life, new status, the next thing.
I’d lived in that frantic, active way for more than thirty years, and when I finally began to crack, when I tried to control everything about my life and my work and the people around me, I somehow ended up in the Malaysian jungle and experienced a solid week of events over which I had absolutely no control. And never would. Events that reminded me that I had my limits—rather severe limits, in the greater scheme of things—and I had no business trying to control as much as I did, even if I could.
When I went home, I noticed I felt much better. Not rested, the way a certain kind of vacation rests you, but literally better. I couldn’t figure out why for a long time.
Back in Los Angeles, nobody even knew where Malaysia was, and people asked why I had gone there. I kept telling them about the deer named Mat and how the villagers stopped eating goat. This wasn’t a very dramatic story, nobody responded to it, and I wondered why I kept repeating it. “What is it about that deer and the villagers?” I wondered. And then one day I got it.