Adventure Divas Read online

The hunt begins in earnest. Berti and the two other men are ripping through the dense tangles of vines, trees, and kooky jungle growth at high speed with six-foot-long blowpipes and spears in their hands. The speed and agility with which they traverse the terrain is uncanny and I wonder if they are doing mal cun uk (“follow our feelings”), a Penan way to navigate an unknown part of the jungle. I put the camera on autofocus, lock it on record, and pull out every last one of my stops in order to keep up. I will not fail, goddammit, I think as I flail with gusto through the dense underbrush, willing my bad ankle not to snap.

  Last year CNN put me through their war-zone training for journalists in the swamps of Georgia, where I learned that camera operators have a misguided sense of security. That is, the irrational belief that they are invincible, that somehow looking through a lens protects your body as bullets fly by, grenades are lobbed, or, in the current case, as you hurl yourself through lethal jungle, full speed and sans peripheral vision, on the tail of Penan warriors who are wielding poison blow darts in hopes of skewering a wild, bearded boar. The adrenaline is pumping. I am keeping up! I can see the nutgrab now: HE BLEW THE POISON DART WITH THE ACUMEN OF A THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY, AND DOWNED THE SQUEALING SWINE IN A SINGLE SHOT.

  Ah-ha! The story is mine!

  Just as I am about to delude myself that I am both a journalist and a hunter, I go ass over tit into a felled log and a sticky, prongy vine becomes the new look in choker collars. My head is thrust back into a giant mossy divot in a hundred-million-year-old tree; another scratchy vine has bound my torso and I am firmly lodged in some twisted B-movie S-and-M jungle position. I look up at the thick canopy above, pant, and think of Peg the nurse’s final admonition and wonder if anything is broken, torn, or severely punctured, or if the term “air-evac” has ever even crossed the lips of a human being within a thousand-mile radius.

  The Penan’s hunting chants fade into the distance.

  I am instantly miserable.

  My head itches. I hurt. My wrists are sweating. In the back of my mind anxiety simmers because I know this is the exact kind of moment I will be required to write about or describe to camera, and I think, Can’t I just have the fucking experience? I enter a moment of schizophrenic self-pitying delirium: What would others write?

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY: I am hot. I will just shoot the pig.

  ANNE LAMOTT: I’m feeling hot and my Birks were not the best choice but what I really want is to have a stiff drink but Sam wouldn’t like it because he doesn’t have a father. Screw Sam. It’s all about me anyway.

  PAUL THEROUX: I’m very hot. I feel as if I’m in the furnace of an old 1926 steam engine.

  As I try to untangle myself, the punishing humidity fuels a steady stream of sweat into my eyes, which makes the wall of electric-green foliage that incarcerates me jitter like the preamble to an acid trip.

  The spongy, fetid jungle floor is alive, a constant microorganismic frenzy. It is sending out an endless, deafening, gurgly hum that tells me that billions and billions of small creatures are surrounding me and are very hard at work and I am just lying there like a dead animal, soon to be decomposed.

  Mosquitoes (malarial, I’m sure) swarm mercilessly. I become convinced that a slimy overwhelming power is morphing me into something else, and I will end up a moth—and not in that comforting reincarnation way.

  I would just be a moth.

  It’s when I hear myself nearly whimper that I ask myself what a diva would do. Take action. I scramble to my feet and turn the camera on myself in a desperate Blair Witch moment. This is as good a time as any to deliver some “top tips” and “emotional diary entries,” both of which were mandated by the series producer, who is currently sitting in a posh office back in London’s Notting Hill.

  “Whenever you’re hunting for wild boar in the jungles of Borneo, wear a long-sleeve shirt,” I say to camera and pan down my arm, which is dripping blood from the hostile vine. Of course, only one in a million viewers will ever hunt wild boar in this godforsaken hell.

  Seems Berti and the others are long gone, and rightly so. My stealthless presence made their chances of sticking a boar about as likely as my chances of finding my way out of this jungle unaided.

  I just hope they’ll come back for me.

  I hang my sweaty overshirt (now ripped for additional ventilation) on a branch of a tree that I notice has been molonged. The Penan tradition of molonging trees consists of marking the trunk with a machete to signify it as a fruiting tree, rather than a lumber tree. If a tree has been molonged, other Penan will not cut it down, but only pick fruit from it. This example of ecological stewardship stands in ironic contrast to the mowing for profit I witnessed last night.

  I wander about twenty yards and position myself in what passes for a clearing. Like any good Chicagoan, I try to face the virtual door so that when a threatening mobster character comes in to take me out, I will be prepared. Unfortunately, the jungle is all doors. Pity the editor who has to go through the footage I burn during the next ten minutes as I deliver my “diary moments,” which rumble closer to a pitch of pure panic with each minute that the Penan hunters do not come back for me.

  “Excuse me, but I do not think Julia Roberts was put through this when she did a show in Borneo. Please, they just wheeled her out of the trailer, stuck baby orangutans on her ample breast, and rolled film.” And finally . . .

  “My brother gets my record collection; my sister the dog; sign the 100k death-and-dismemberment insurance over to Adventure Divas.”

  Does wretchedly slow decomposition count as dismemberment? I turn off the camera and watch the blood weep down my leg from the latest leech incursion. I sop the ooze from another ulcer, an older bite. Leeches have three jaws, each of which contains a hundred teeth. They use one end of their body for attaching to their host while the other end feeds. Their saliva contains an anti-coagulating agent and a mild anesthetic, so that they can suck you dry, unnoticed. In a half hour a leech can consume up to five times its body weight—that is, half a shot glass of blood. They can balloon from two centimeters to two inches fat, depending how much blood they suck. I flick off a small leech that is beginning to dig in at my ankle.

  And then it becomes painfully clear that one tampon was not enough for today’s excursion.

  The army of jungle bugs turns up the volume a notch in unison. At this moment, in the belly of the beast, Borneo’s tropical rain forest seems endless and all-consuming. Hard to conceive that it could all be destroyed. Yet, if all systems remain go—that is, the logging continues 24/7 under floodlights, and the Penan who are staging protests do not prevail—it will be gone in five to ten years. Forever. Poof. Like the film crew that tried to record it happening. But my compassion for the rain forest atrophies with each moment the environment keeps me trapped and fearful. No Stockholm Syndrome for this panicking pig hunter.

  I slide into what my friend Kate calls the “secret happy place.” That is, the place where you go in your mind when your heaving face has been planted over the toilet in a third-class Indian train for six hours straight; that place you go when your sister has had one too many cocktails at Christmas dinner and you can see her wind up to chuck a hardball at the dysfunctional house of mirrors that tenuously holds the gathering together; that place you go when you have intestinal parasites and shit your pants on a Guatemalan Bluebird bus (and that place you go after you clean yourself up and it happens again five minutes later); and finally, that place you go when you’ve been abandoned by Penan tribesmen in the jungles of Borneo and find yourself seeping from five different holes—some natural, some not.

  My secret happy place is under a piece of heavy oak furniture where I mouth to myself, “You’re all alone in this world and the sooner you realize that the better; you’re all alone in this world and the sooner you realize it the better.” My decades-old ritual response to pain (secret, but come to think of it, not very happy) has adapted, in this case to: “You’re all alone in this world—except for the goddamn cr
ew, who’d better come find me—and the sooner you realize that—one dumb gringa life is nothing compared to the genocide—the better—I’ll miss the broadcast of the Cuba show! I’ll never know if the project comes to fruition. You’re all alone—calm down calm down . . . oh god. Jesus. I’m not cut out for this nomad life—and the sooner you realize it . . .”

  To calm myself, I try to buy into the Penan belief in the interconnectedness of all things material and spiritual, a belief that puts a more palatable spin on death. After all, when you’re in the tropics with very limited access to medical facilities, death can strike at any moment and, in the cosmos of the local people, fate can never be avoided. Without a conceptual distinction between this life and the hereafter, one cultivates an easy acceptance of death. This, in turn, it is said, leads people to live joyously.

  I am so not there.

  Another ten minutes pass, and I begin to wonder if this is all one of those malaria pill–induced psychotic moments Peg mentioned.

  And then, it happens. Eight feet to my right, at about two o’clock on the cosmic clock, a five-foot-long black and green snake with orange stripes slithers into a patch of sun that managed to defy the thick jungle canopy and beam onto the forest floor.

  The snake stops.

  I stop.

  The world stops.

  The snake does not recoil to strike, nor does it coil to sunbathe. The snake simply lifts its head three inches off the ground and stares. At me.

  Oddly, instead of heightened panic, I feel utter calm. No itching. No fear. A strange union.

  It sticks its tongue out at me.

  I stick my tongue out at it.

  Everything has disappeared—the jungle cacophony, the weeping leech sores, television. This staring contest lasts a full two minutes. Biruté Galdikas says looking into the eyes of an adult orangutan is like looking at a hundred million years of history. Calming and frightening at the same time. I avert my eyes, in submission. The snake slithers away and I am left to interpret its message.

  A half hour later Berti finds me sitting on a log. I don’t tell Berti or anybody about the snake. The visit was like a strange gift from Boo Radley, hidden in the trunk of a tree. Nobody’s business, really. Especially not the cable-viewing public’s. There was no kill today, but somehow I think I got the nutgrab.

  “Tell us what it was like,” Georgie asks, sticking the hulking DigiBeta camera in my face. “I already did, to camera, in there,” I say, pointing into the arboreal abyss, and handing her the Canon. “Let’s be done for the day,” I say.

  On the way back I think about Berti’s feet and the snake’s eyes, and the twirling sago and the disappearing magic. All the secrets that are being felled.

  3.

  HOLY COW

  diva, from Italian diva, goddess, lady-love, “fine lady”: Latin diva, goddess, female divinity, fem. of divus, divine, god, deity.

  deva, from Sanskrit deva, a god, a bright or shining one.

  —OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

  Mount Rainier, its jagged edges buffed by a thick blanket of snow, was looming presidential and sparkling as it took up what seemed half of the clear, blue horizon on the day Mary Jane called from PBS: The Cuba show had aired to good ratings and great reviews, and the top brass was greenlighting an entire Adventure Divas series.

  We bought martinis for our soon-to-be-paid interns. “To the empire!” Clink, clink. For a pink, potential-filled moment, it looked as if our dream might actually come true. The energy wafting around felt like that pregnant pause when “The Star Spangled Banner” ends, just before the hockey crowd goes wild. A slice of unbridled possibility. Of course, in our private moments, Jeannie and I felt like the characters at the end of The Candidate, when the idealistic darkhorse candidate, Bill McKay (Robert Redford), who never thought he would get elected, does just that. McKay looks at his equally shocked campaign manager and simply says, “What do we do now?”

  Teamwork, Jeannie and I agreed, rolling from the heels to the balls of our feet in preparation for what was to come. We had to deliver eight programs, on four countries, in six months, and we were determined not to become formulaic. After all the months of idling, we suddenly slammed the rig into overdrive. Unfortunately, we had no chassis to speak of.

  We needed headquarters, pronto, so I confidently plunked down a check for $2,312 to our new lefty landlord, Knoll Lowney. If you stood on a chair and pointed your tippy-toes southeast, you could make out the top of Rainier from the window of our storefront office. Our neighbor to the west was called Outlaw, a barber whose chair had been the seat of neighborhood information and ten-dollar haircuts for thirty years. To the east was Philadelphia Fevre, a cheesesteak joint, a rare bastion of meat and grease, for which we were grateful in vegan-leaning Seattle. Upstairs, there was a firm of environmental lawyers who also owned the building (threatened salmon were frequent clients). Our office’s last retail incarnation was as a pager store, but more recently, and more importantly in terms of juju, the space was the crash pad for the leaders of the protesters who stymied the World Trade Organization talks, and got the attention of the world, in 2001. The protesters slept like litters of puppies on the floor of this office when they were not dodging tear gas or putting HISTORY WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU stickers on the walls. I figured the anti-globalization smudge would be good for our small business that hoped to promote a different brand of World Organization.

  We began to staff up and, in order to enhance our modest PBS-lined coffers, Jeannie and I took our pitch to the outdoor retail industry for additional underwriting, and to venture capitalists for cash investment.

  Meanwhile, an excellent core group of colleagues came together. Jill Hodges on editorial and Kate Thompson on design began expanding www.adventuredivas.com, managing our growing online community and preparing for pbs.org deliverables. Michael Gross, who was the lead editor on the Cuba show, and so critical to its success, climbed on board full-time. Heather Reilly, Rena Bussinger, and Susannah Guttowsky hammered away on research and preproduction for our next shoots. This represents only a few of the many individuals who contributed to the enterprise.

  Two weeks after we moved into the office, we were laboriously rearranging our heavy, gray metal desks bought for five dollars apiece at Boeing surplus. I noticed Jeannie staring ominously at the calendar; her face stiffened. “We need to settle on producers now,” she said—her way of telling me to quit interviewing and start making decisions.

  After the Cuba shoot, Jeannie and I had decided that a divide-and-conquer approach would be best for business (not to mention family Christmases for the next thirty years). She would manage the office stateside, and I would take the shows on the road.

  The Cuba show received significant attention and excited freelance producers out of the woodwork. Among them was seasoned feature-film producer Julie Costanzo, whose career was forged in the Coppola crucible in the Bay Area. The day she arrived she had to leap, in her two-inch heels and pure silk chemise, over a stream of raw sewage to reach the door of the new Diva world headquarters. Her long dark hair and smashingly sophisticated Italian good looks immediately lent our office new credibility.

  Experienced, smart, and willing to work for a modest sum, Julie seemed perfect. But I was worried about her high fashion sense, a forte that would surely wilt under 110-degree heat. Plus, could she work effectively with a stomach full of amoebas?

  “What is your next destination?” asked Julie.

  “India,” I replied, scanning her reaction for any sign of quiver. “Look, Julie, I have some concerns. I don’t know if you’ve done shoots exactly like this. We’re talking difficult conditions . . . high ideals, but low budget . . . and . . . and . . .”

  “I know what you think,” she said, assertively uncrossing her Manolos. “Don’t worry, I can go days without sleeping, have a constitution of iron, and a stash of Cipro that could keep a crew of twenty working for a month.”

  And, she hadn’t flinched at the sewage-line break.<
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  Hired.

  We wanted to go to India because our research had identified Indian women who were making massive change, activism on the scale of the huge challenges the country faced. And the “nominate a diva” section of our website was regularly turning up people from the subcontinent.

  But I had other reasons, too. Spirituality was a floater in the corner of my vision and perhaps it was time to coax the little irritant away from the periphery and into the center. Diva means “deity,” says the OED, and according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, India is chock-full of them. “Some estimates put the total number of deities at 330 million,” the guidebook says of the Hindu pantheon. Certainly a country with a three-to-one human-to-deity ratio must have an inside line on the big question: how to find the divine in the everyday.

  “Delhi has ten million people,” says our taxi driver, Rajbir, as a way to explain our lurching progress down New Delhi’s Pusa Road on our first day of a three-week stay in India. I’d learned from Cuba about the shortcomings of too brief a shoot.

  “Yeah, but,” I say to Rajbir, noting the unusual traffic jam we found ourselves in, “it’s the ox carts, buses, rickshaws, scooters, and—”

  Rajbir suddenly slams on the brakes: eeeeeerrreescrrrrrrrrruchhh!!!

  I plunge forward and my head snaps to a stop, eye to eye with a statue of the goddess Kali on the dashboard altar. A displaced shaft of incense smoke juts sideways in slow motion, and the garland of orange carnations slung over the goddess swings like a slow, heavy pendulum.

  “—the cows that make it tricky,” I finish, picking my chin off the back of the front seat.

  A large white cow with a heaving udder and a fuchsia smudge across its neck languidly saunters across the road in front of us. Julie bends over to collect the rolls of 16mm film that have tumbled onto the floor. “How’s it going with Phoolan Devi?” I ask her about India’s well-known bandit-turned-member-of-Parliament. Julie has been in India for a week scouting, and Devi is one of the people she’s been trying to connect with.