The Adventurer's Son(20)
That trip and the time I spent with Tim provided the most dazzling tropical experience of my life. The entire forest was fruiting—hundreds of species of trees, lianas, and herbs—during an infrequent and irregular mast event, alive with more different kinds of vertebrates and invertebrates than I’d ever seen anywhere. A highlight was a night spent one hundred and eighty feet up in a fruiting dipterocarp, my hammock suspended over a crow’s-nest-like orchid epiphyte encircling the trunk and fully ten feet across with dozens of hand-sized blossoms pollinated by thumb-sized bumblebees. That night, dew fell but no rain. At dawn, the rising sun melted away diaphanous mist clinging to rainforest giants. Awakened by the lion-like roar of a big male orangutan, I knew that Peggy and the kids had to experience Borneo.
As expected, they found Borneo’s wildlife in Bako fascinating. A long-nosed proboscis monkey, the size and color of a small deer, picked leaves in the crown of an oak-like mangrove. Below him, a foot-long mudskipper crawled across the muck with a mouthful of water in its bulbous head as a sort of reverse scuba. Literally a fish out of water, the mudskipper pulled itself along using fins as legs, looking like a primitive Permian tetrapod. Back at our hut, an eight-foot serpentine dinosaur of a monitor lizard prowled the premises, its long blue forked tongue tasting the air just steps from the tables and chairs where we played Yahtzee after lunch during afternoon rains.
The kids dutifully recorded these wonders in their journals. Roman had started in Singapore, exclaiming that “Chewing gum is illeagal!” In Kuching, capital of Sarawak, Malaysia, he tasted durian and mangosteen, the king and queen of fruits in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago. He recounted his divergent reactions in tidy print:
I ate a mangosteen and tried something worse than brustle sprouts! The Durien! Yuck! The mangosteen looks like a giant crow berrie. You would have to sqwash it to opan up! It’s the best fruit I ever tasted. It tasted like orange or yellow starburst with a tang.
Besides novel tastes and sights, we caught and handled new fauna and flora. At the edge of a city park lawn, Jazzy spotted a lone draco in a tree. Like the anoles we knew from Puerto Rico, the draco (Latin for “dragon”) is an arboreal lizard that does push-ups and fans its colorful dewlap to challenge territorial rivals. But unlike anoles—and more like dragons—dracos have wings and can glide. Picking up a clod of dirt, I threw it at the brown lizard, knocking it to the park lawn.
I hurried over to pick up the dazed, uninjured animal. The four of us inspected a thin, delicate lizard whose back was the color and pattern of lichen-covered tree bark. He had a short nose and alert eyes that watched us calmly but warily. We gently unfolded his wings that stretched across six ribs on each side, finding bright blue and black patches on their undersides. Used for gliding, the fragile patagia were as wide as the lizard’s body was long, filling the space between his front and hind limbs. We all delighted in holding such an exotic and unlikely creature: a flying lizard.
As an experiment in animal behavior, we decided to watch him glide. I gently tossed the draco ten feet into the air. At the peak of the toss, the lizard opened his patagia and deftly glided to the lawn twenty feet away.
We all looked at each other. “Wow!” both kids called out as they ran over to the lizard waiting in the grass.
Roman picked him up and tossed him again. At apogee, the lizard spread his wings, coasting to the lawn like a paper airplane.
Roman laughed in delight and turned to me. He flashed his teeth in an excited smile: “Cool!”
“Oh, Dad,” Jazzy said, “that’s mean! Let him go.”
“Here, Jazzy, why don’t you let him go. You found him. Just toss him up and toward his tree so he can glide home.”
Jazzy, too, tossed him gently upward, this time toward the tree where she had first found him. The draco curved his glide toward the trunk, then nosed up on his approach and stalled, landing abruptly to scamper around to the backside of the tree where he hid from the human family that had no doubt terrified him.
Later, we would handle harmless ants the size of Jazzy’s thumb and a thrumming cicada the size of her tiny fist, the bug’s proboscis as long as her pinky. We would catch and release fish we had seen before only in freshwater aquaria; feed beetles to nepenthes; feel the pinch of a neon blue-fiddler crab; pull open an ant plant and watch its protectors scurry; taste a dozen new fruits and cuisines from three nations. The discomforts of heat, humidity, and the odd pockets of foul odor were all erased by the hands-on discoveries of new sights, scents, and sounds.
Eager for more, we headed deeper into the heart of Borneo.
Chapter 10
Gunung Palung
Snorkeling, GP, 1996.
Courtesy of the author
We arrived in Kalimantan the day after Peggy convinced me we should push on to GP. Cars were absent, motorbikes few, and bicycles the most common wheeled vehicle. Up to three people at a time rode on a single bike, but most simply walked in flip-flops or bare feet. Traveling as a family, we found that people were eager to please, quick to help, happy to interact. But nobody spoke English in a countryside where houses were little more than palm-thatched roofs over half-walls on stilts.
After crossing the hundred-mile-wide Kapuas River delta by riverboat, we waited alongside a dirt road for a minivan. Our boy and girl sat patiently on our duffels. By the time the van arrived, fifty people surrounded the kids. Caucasians were rare and their children exceptionally so. At first the two enjoyed the attention, but it got old fast. People simply couldn’t keep their hands off the blond-haired, blue-eyed little children.