Adventure Divas Page 8

  “Well,” she said warmly, smiling from Jeannie to me, “this is one of the best presentations I’ve seen in my years at PBS. Tell me more.”

  Jeannie looked at me, her optimism now spliced with a bit of “I told you so.”

  We launched into our talking points and told Mary Jane of our ambitions—prime-time series commitment, Web real estate on pbs.org, marketing dollars—forgetting, in our zeal, that most groups requesting this kind of cash and commitment were large production companies with long track records, not a linty mother-daughter team.

  We left encouraged but not greenlit.

  Now, back in Seattle, we were in the waiting game. Would they buy the pilot? Would they commission the series?

  At 4:30 A.M. I wrap Sky Prancer in a cheesy I CLIMBED THE GREAT WALL! T-shirt and wedge her in the side pocket of my gray backpack next to a dog-eared paperback edition of The Year of Living Dangerously. All-night bill-paying and packing sessions have become de rigeur on departure eve of these shoots. I wake up the Boyfriend: “Do you still want to come? Jeannie will be here in ten minutes. You don’t have to,” I offer.

  “Is there coffee made?” he responds groggily.

  Mom and the Boyfriend drive me to Sea-Tac Airport as pink takes hold of the Olympic Mountain range.

  “Honey,” she says, her voice concerned as she hugs me good-bye, “I know you found some sort of, of . . . deliverance in all that blood loss last time you were in the jungle, but please be extra careful this time. I’m worried. . . . And we don’t have ‘key man,’ ” she adds bluntly, switching from Mom back to Jeannie, and referencing our production insurance policy that doesn’t cover loss of a critical employee.

  The Boyfriend gives me a kiss and “that look,” which says I-can’t-believe-you-are-leaving-me-again-and-won’t-nest-with-me-but-because-I-am-an-evolved-nineties-guy-I-will-support-you (at-least-when-other-people-are-around).

  Now, dear reader, I know what you are thinking: “Two people drove you to the airport at five in the morning! You are loved! You are lucky!”

  Point taken.

  I am.

  Truth is, I do feel slightly guilty about leaving Jeannie holding down the Diva enterprise, and the Boyfriend with the dog. But I also resent that guilt. Why is it that when Robert Redford–cum–Denys Finch Hatton flies away in the golden glow out in Africa, he is pursuing his destiny? And when I walk away I’m just a chick who’s scared of commitment and on the run, who’s weird for ignoring Glamour magazine’s prediction of her eggs drying up?

  Leaving is an underrated form of liberation.

  Rarely in the books and movies of popular culture, much less in life, do we ladies get to go on a genuine non-male-identified adventure—and avoid punishment. Thelma and Louise, long touted as feminist adventurers—sheesh, well, they got theirs. The nutgrab: You have to be dead to be liberated. Part of the Adventure Divas’ mission is to put new real live icons on the screen. Women who face challenge, gaze beyond their (possibly pierced) navels and white picket fences—and make it to the other side of the canyon. Xena, Warrior Princess, is an exception, if a fictional one. She travels the world with her best friend while slaying injustice. She doesn’t even bother to have a home. It figures that one of TV’s most divalicious characters also has superhuman powers and D-cups.

  So despite my fear of becoming talent, of the twenty kinds of invertebrates that infest the jungles of Borneo, and of the Boyfriend, who is none too pleased that I am once again leaving, I am committed to this adventurous lifestyle. “It’s in my job description,” I now say with legitimacy, embracing the nomada growing within me.

  The good-byes leave me feeling guilty, irritated, and thrilled to be escaping, even though, according to my understanding of the globe, I am being sent the wrong way. (Seattle to Borneo via London?) Details aside, my excitement ramps, and the tray table bows, when I plop down the research that the producer has sent. I HEAR YOU LIKE TO READ UP, says the hurriedly scrawled note attached to a six-inch-thick stack of paper.

  I start highlighting: The Malaysian jungles are some of the oldest undisturbed areas of rain forest in the world . . . existed for about 100 million years. . . . Orangutans are one of man’s closest relatives and have proved highly intelligent. . . . Sarawak is one of the great battlefields between conservationists and timber merchants. . . . Ensure that you have a bag of tobacco leaf to rub on yourself to prevent leeches.

  I also learn that Borneo is the third largest island in the world (right behind New Guinea and Greenland) and is divvied up between Indonesia and Malaysia. The split is just one result of a long history of vying—by white rajahs and the British Empire, among others—for this island’s rich natural resources, primarily oil, timber, pepper, and rubber. Sarawak and Sabah, the states where we are going, became part of the then-new country of Malaysia in 1963.

  Ten hours after leaving Seattle, the plane noses down in Heathrow and my crew meets me on board. “How’s my favorite Yank?” Georgie Burrell greets me with a thump on the back, and heaves her camera bag into the overhead. Georgie is a lanky, long-haired blond Londoner most often found in a T-shirt with a cig hanging out of the side of her mouth. For Pilot Productions and in the name of television, she and I have lashed together a survival lean-to and spent a long stranded night staving off a flash flood with our prayers, and hypothermia with the bubble wrap that protected her camera. We have rappelled down cliffs into raging rivers in the pitch black, and known the blue-green glare of more than one emergency room. Georgie is a tough girl whose only high-maintenance tic is her oft-stated declaration, “I don’t do cold, dahhllling.” Meaning, Georgie will only take international film shoots in locations between the latitudes of thirty-five degrees north and thirty-five degrees south. Cold will not be our nemesis on this shoot. We are headed for 115 degrees longitude, zero degrees latitude. Equatorial Borneo: red, hot, and wet. “Should be a piece of cake, this one,” says Georgie. “What’s a wee walk through the jungle?”

  “Yeah,” says red-haired, pale, and understated Scottish soundman John Burns, “and we’ve brought enough cigarettes to burn off every leech in the country.” He holds up a carton of Silk Cut.

  Eleven overpackaged meals, thirty-seven wet-naps, one flip-flopped magnetic field, and a day and a half after leaving Seattle, I’ve entered that jittery netherland in which the body’s hardwiring goes color-blind; the red wires are wrapped up with the green, and the black one just dangles. The brain is completely flummoxed about what that black one is for. Hunger is a vague, tinny presence that cannot be sated. I look around at my fellow passengers and feel like my entire person is an appendix: irrelevant, useless, taking up space amid much more worthy organs.

  We are on the sixth and last leg of the journey, closing in on Borneo—still in the air, mind you—and clearly I already have circadian desynchronosis, as my aerospace engineer brother Dan, the oldest of my siblings, explained it: jet lag. “Increase pressure in the nasopharynx by performing a Valsalva maneuver [read: hold your nose and blow],” he advised. “And don’t worry about the gamma radiation on those international flights; the only place you really get zapped is over the poles, where there’s less geomagnetic field to protect you. Equatorial area, you’re fine—the field’s pretty thick there,” he said, earnestly.

  The jungle appears fast and definitively, like spilled ink from a well. From up here it looks like a petri dish of mold. Dusty dark green, bumpy, with tiny creases and valleys and shadows. A patternless pattern of crumpled anarchy. Definitely alive.

  Once we land at the tiny, humid airport, we look for the two people who will round out our team: Dutch producer Vanessa Boeye and British director Rik Lander, both of whom have been on the ground in Borneo for a week doing reconnaissance. Vanessa, blond, blue-eyed, tall, and willowy thin (and posh, I suspect, in spite of her casual travel attire), walks up as our pile of twelve aluminum boxes and backpacks appears on the back of a tractor. As the producer, part of Vanessa’s job is to feed “the talent’s” ego. In short, it i
s her place to tell me I look fabulous even when we are two weeks in the bush, sans shower, grimy with bat guano.

  “Nice to meet you. You look like hell,” she says cheerfully, with a British accent.

  We’re going to get along just fine.

  We take over every socket in the lobby of our hotel in the small town of Limbang before setting off for the interior jungle. While the batteries charge, I wander outside the hotel and spot an Internet café, or more accurately, a tiny cinder-block room located behind two cows tied to a metal fence post leaning at forty-five degrees. WIDE WIRLD WEB RM1 TEA 2, reads the handwritten sign. I scuttle around the cows and log on to see if there’s any word from Diva HQ.

  TO: HOLLY

  FROM: JEANNIE

  SUBJECT: AIRDATE!

  Hol—MJ called and PBS is buying the show! We did it. Looks like they are going to schedule Cuba to broadcast on a Monday night in prime time. They’ve asked us to take out your reference to menstruation in the narration “the revolution has moved to my uterus”; and they want you to add a reference to yourself as a “journalist” (more credibility, I guess). But those are the only changes—which MJ says is remarkable for a first submission. Unfortunately, they won’t commit to the entire series until seeing how the pilot rates. She signs all her e-mails, “Onward!” I love that.

  Jeannie/Mom

  p.s. I was looking at your itinerary—why did you go through London? Isn’t that the wrong way?

  I return to the hotel, recharged by the exciting news from home. Our team gathers in the hotel lobby and we set out for the interior jungle of Sarawak. Our guide, Martin, is in his early twenties and has chestnut skin and jet-black hair. He is Dayak (the indigenous people of Borneo) and of the Iban tribe. Though he has taken ecotourists into the jungle before, I wonder if he understands the constant demands and challenges of a film crew.

  The network of chunky, easy-moving, tea-colored rivers is the closest thing to infrastructure in this part of Borneo. Our young, barefoot boatman is poised at the front of our hip-wide longboat, ready to pole when shallows, still water, or rapids threaten our progress. A beefy old outboard motor dangles from the back of the boat like a very important, yet untended to, participle. Vanessa and I stare suspiciously at the sputtering two-stroke.

  On the river, the jaggy mold I saw from the sky has become a dark green, menacing mass that lines the river. The jungle seems aggressive, as if the vines and trees are taking back the water’s edge, instead of cohabiting with it in pastoral bliss, as a forest might meet a babbling brook. I imagine the density beyond our sight as unreasonable and unforgiving. A vicious chaos. I notice Vanessa noticing me recoil.

  “Sorta feral looking,” I say to Vanessa, explaining my discomfort.

  “Rhoyyt then,” says Georgie, with a game smile. “How much longer ’til the lodge?”

  Periodically the jungle breaks and gives way to waterside communities. Longhouses with roofs of corrugated steel (rather than the traditional wood and rattan) pepper the river highway. People work together on the long porches and nod when we quietly chug by. “Dayak do not like to be alone,” says Martin, and I think of Assata Shakur’s saying that, in Cuba, she’d never met people so unafraid of other people.

  The dwellings appear fewer and farther between as hours drift by and we sink deeper into the anarchy I first identified from above, from outside. I’ve come to crave these rare places that are off the grid; they can thrust one into the epiphany zone. Ironically, it is TV, that most “on-the-grid” medium, that now brings me to this state.

  Urban Borneo thrives with the cultural and spiritual diversity of all of Southeast Asia, but the upriver longhouses, though no longer offering the display of bare breasts and bloodletting a broadcaster might hope for, can be a reservoir of traditional spiritual beliefs—a reservoir spiced with baseball caps, T-shirts, and, not so infrequently, film crews.

  Malaysia’s official religion is Islam, but zealous missionaries and North Borneo’s status as a former British colony make Christianity widespread. Yet here in the interior of Sarawak, the rules of the West and the rules of the East are handily trumped by the rules of the Jungle—and animism is operative. Unlike Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and other doctrines of the world, Kaharinga—Iban animism—does not distinguish between this life and the hereafter, between the religious and the secular. Religion is everyday life. Animism, quite sensibly, is more interested in the here and now and the supremacy of nature. Natural phenomena, as well as things animate and inanimate, are all said to possess a soul.

  To the upriver Iban’s traditional eye, the steamy, humid atmosphere is thick with antu (spirits) and petara (gods). The spirits and the people work in concert. (A quid pro quo of sorts: We give you offerings, you help the rice crops grow.) The spirits hold the upper hand, to be sure, and their behavior can run the range from benevolent to capricious.

  Our small procession of overloaded canoes sputters up toward the traditional Rumah Bala Lasong longhouse, where Vanessa and Martin have arranged for us to spend the night with Iban tribal members.

  Martin grew up in a longhouse and, partly due to his excellent English, has landed a coveted job in the world of tourism. I am quizzing him about the surrounding area.

  “What are the biggest hazards?” I ask.

  “A few leeches, sometimes a snake. Only drink the bottled water,” he responds casually, offering a whitewashed version of reality. In fact, I know there are tens of thousands of species in this national “park” (a misleading term that implies the jungle is somehow under the control of humans) and some of them, particularly the cold-blooded ones, could be a problem.

  Put a frothing rabid dog in my path, and I respond with the calm of Atticus Finch. Bring on a mama grizzly, and I am as sharp as her claws slicing through the flesh of a wild king salmon. But show me a cold-blooded, slithering critter and I turn into an irrational, mute, quivering . . . appendix.

  Indulging a strange habit of dashing toward what I fear, I press Martin on the snake issue. Vanessa has told me there are twenty-five kinds of snakes in this part of Borneo, many of them poisonous.

  “Yes,” Martin admits, “there’s the Python reticulatus; the Javanese reed snake, Calamaria borneensis; the red-headed krait, Bungarus flaviceps; the banded Malayan coral snake, Maticora intestinalis; the cobra, Naja naja; and the—”

  I hold up my hand to stop the recitation.

  “You had me at python,” I say.

  My phobic (that’s phobic, not phallic) response to snakes irks me. I can’t stand having an irrational fear that plays right into the hands of Freudian pundits.

  We move through the hours at double the river’s slow pace: outboard time. The rhythm is in marked contrast to my time in Cuba, when we were constantly racing from one diva to the next. Here, we tinker with equipment, apply sunscreen, and get to know one another with banal small talk, as if it were the first day at camp. What tribe are you in? How many languages do you speak? How much tape stock do we have? Where do we pee?

  After hours of collective ruminating, we round a bend and, out of nowhere, Martin says, “They are expecting us.” When, thirty seconds later, we hear the distant sounds of a welcoming party, I look over at Martin and think of Spock, his deep Vulcan wisdom, always right and always three steps ahead of his earthly comrades. Then again, I know the ring of a telemarketer a mile off, so it makes sense that Martin is tuned in to the greeting rituals of his home turf. As we close in on our destination, a collaboration of gongs and drums begins to overtake the jungle’s cacophony of cicadas.

  We round a gentle curve on the snaking river highway and see a headman, or tuai rumah, walking down a planked pier followed by a dozen boys, women with babies on their hips, and excited children. The headman is small and must be seventy; lithe and bent, but not at all decrepit. On his shoulders are swirling floral and reptile tattoos. He is wearing a flamboyant arching warrior headdress decorated with enormous black and white feathers of the locally revered hornbill, a sp
ecies no longer found in these rain forests. We have heard of this sacred welcome ritual, called a bedora, but didn’t expect we’d earned such a greeting—which is clearly camera-worthy.

  Unfortunately, to be dignified and move fast at the same time is the rare province of Bolshoi ballerinas, successful NASA liftoffs, and, occasionally, Nelson Mandela, but hardly ever film crews in boats.

  CANOE #1

  I stand too quickly and Martin lunges for my ankles to keep the canoe from tipping over. I will the headman’s eye contact to me so he does not notice the frantic fumbling about that is emanating from Canoe #2.

  CANOE #2

  “Goddammit, start filming.”

  “Bugger, the battery just died. Get another, quick.”

  “We don’t know how long this will laaaast.” The obvious is stated with friendly Brit urgency.

  “Martin,” Vanessa queries with a nervous smile toward Canoe #1, “do you think the headman would do it again for us?”

  He looks at her blankly.

  We clamber out of the canoes and follow the welcoming procession up the walkway to the longhouse, which stretches into the distance like an army barrack, but is much more inviting—especially as it rests on wooden stilts. Stilts, meant to protect the house from floods and animals, are surely the friendliest of architectural elements.

  The longhouse is the traditional communal living structure, home to approximately fifteen families and up to a hundred people. We climb a wooden ladder to reach the first of three primary areas: a “porch” that stretches the length of the structure and is exposed to the outdoors. This is the area where clothes hang to dry, visitors arrive, and muddy shoes are removed. The second is a screened avenue, or gallery, that also runs along the length of the building, and has a bamboo floor. The gallery seems to be where life happens: One woman is in a distant corner mending a fishing net while another is weaving an intricate cloth with a wood loom; children romp around, excited by the prospect of visitors.