The Adventurer's Son(22)
The first night, Peggy recoiled at our accommodation. We arrived at a creekside hut just before dark to find mildewed mattresses and rotten floors. The conditions distressed her and Jazzy, but the inch-long giant ants, palm-sized hunting spiders, and other bugs that had taken over the squalid shelter excited Roman. We moved to a cleaner, drier hut the next day and Peggy soon forgot the previous night’s discomforts.
On our first day hike in GP, Roman spotted an orangutan mother and baby feeding on figs high in a tree. We passed binoculars around for an hour, until she “kiss-called” at us in warning and we backed away and left. Returning to camp, we watched a yard-long giant squirrel as it bounded through a tree crown. Farther on, a hunchbacked lesser mouse deer darted across the path. The tiny deer’s size, stature, and movements brought to mind a cottontail rabbit. We looked at its tracks in the trail’s mud: cloven hoofprints the size of my thumbnail.
Later, Roman climbed inside a one-hundred-foot-tall strangler fig. The host tree had died and rotted away long ago to leave the fig as a natural, cylindrical ladder. Eight feet up the fig ladder, Roman found a tree frog. As he reached to catch the reddish-backed frog, it jumped, then glided away with toes spread wide, revealing oversized webbed feet as wings. It even circled back to land below him.
“Whoa!” he chuckled in surprise. “Dad! Was that a flying frog?”
“Yep! Good find, Rome! I’ve never seen one of those before!”
On one trip to a nearby waterfall, Roman found another unique frog called a rock skipper. A Bornean specialty, this frog clings to slimy overhangs after skipping across moving water like a flat stone thrown across a quiet pond. Somehow the boy caught one. With excitement in his eyes, he showed me the rock skipper’s emerald green skin and azure blue toe pads. Afterward Roman scrambled down to a lower plunge pool and I followed.
Above a short waterfall, he moved deliberately across slick rocks. I knew his exhilaration, but also feared for his safety. A fall could break a limb or lead to scrapes, cuts, and a nasty tropical infection. I wanted to call out and warn him, “Be careful!” Instead I praised him for his good rock-climbing moves. Every parent knows this vacillation between apprehension and pride as a child reaches for independence.
Six-year-old Jazzy showed herself a natural athlete with common sense about risk. A joy to behold, this tiny towheaded girl would spring gracefully from boulder to boulder. If we offered help, she’d say, “I don’t really need it, but just in case,” and put her little hand in ours for slimy crossings above steep, rooted drops.
The hazards of nature—bears in the woods, tree fall in jungles, avalanches in snow country, rapids in whitewater—worry all parents who share the outdoors with their children. We were no exception. On one hike, we witnessed a huge tree limb fall from high above and strike the ground with a crash. The sight, sound, and damage were terrifying. We inspected the one-foot-diameter branch covered in orchids and ferns. It seemed best to wait out future downpours next to big buttressed tree trunks, the way we’d each crouch beneath a doorjamb in an earthquake.
Rainfall dictated our routine. Back in camp following our mornings of sweaty exploration, we would change into dry clothes. If it rained all afternoon, we would read while the kids wrote in their journals and sharpened their arithmetic playing Yahtzee. If it was sunny, we would spend the hottest part of the day at the creek. The kids dug holding ponds in the warm sand to more closely observe the fish they called needle-nose—caught on the surface—and “toe-nibblers”—caught on the bottom—in small hand nets.
“Daddy!” Jazz shrieked in joy, “come see the fish! The water’s not that deep, only up to here!” Roman snorkeled around his “obstacle course” of sunken logs and sandbars. Beneath the backdrop of wild diversity, Peggy and I watched our kids at play in sunny, cool water. It felt like paradise.
At night, we holed up in our bug nets. While we were safe from malaria and dengue in the wilderness, the diversity of biting bugs equaled that of every other kind of creature and plant. Most nights we enjoyed meeting our “dinner guests”: strange, wonderful, and often giant bugs that would fly at night into the dinner hut, attracted by its single electric light. Roman found a moth that looked like a scorpion when threatened, recording in his journal:
I saw a moth during a huge rain storm. When I bothered him he would open his wings and lift up his abdomen, pretending it was a stinger. Cones on his head would bulge out. Fur on his legs would stick out. He was cool!
Once, I brought a glow-in-the-dark bracket fungus to Peggy and the kids to entice them into the night. We turned off our headlamps, closed our eyes, and let our pupils expand. Eyes ready, we opened them to see phosphorescent fungi glowing green in the dark. I recorded Roman’s poetic description in my journal: “They look like puddles of water reflecting the night sky, except you can pick the puddle up, then turn on your light and see you’re holding a rotting leaf with a little mushroom growing on it.”
Cabang Panti’s main building served as the pantry, kitchen, dining hall, and gathering place. A half-dozen shelves held a moderate-sized library of reference books, field guides, and Xeroxed scientific papers in binders. As in all the huts, the library was open to the humid forest air, without air-conditioning, walls, or even screening. Book pages felt damp, soft, and moldy. At night a bewildering variety of colorful cockroaches swarmed across book bindings. Some of the thicker volumes had been tunneled by termites. I pored over the mildewed texts undeterred and scribed notes in my journal to share what I learned with Peggy and the kids. It was exciting and rewarding to see such a wonderful and novel place firsthand while learning from books and articles on site.