The motorboat ride to the mainland took about an hour and a half. I was shirtless and shivering. We landed around 10:00 P.M., to find a crowd awaiting us at the mainland dock, the news of our accident having somehow preceded us. Among that crowd, my attention was instantly drawn to a small elderly woman, possibly a Javan from her appearance. In my life I have never seen such an expression of extreme emotion on the face of anyone, except for actors in movies. She seemed to be overwhelmed by a mixture of grief, horror, and disbelief at something awful that had happened, and by utter exhaustion. The woman came out of the crowd and began questioning us. It turned out that she was the mother of the Javan man who had been in the first sailing canoe that had capsized.
I spent the following day at a small guesthouse, rinsing saltwater out of my suitcases and their contents. While my equipment—my binoculars, tape recorders, altimeters, books, and sleeping bag—was ruined and unsalvageable, I was able to rescue my clothes. Malik lost everything that he had brought with him. Under local conditions, we had no recourse against the canoe crew whose negligent motor operation had caused the accident.
On the following evening I climbed onto the roof of a nearby building around 6:00 P.M. in order to re-experience how rapidly the daylight had faded at sunset. Near the equator, daylight fades much more rapidly than in the temperate zones, because the sun sets vertically rather than at an angle sloping to the horizon. At 6:15 P.M., the time when we had been rescued on the previous day, the sun was just above the horizon, and its light was growing dimmer. Sunset came at 6:30 P.M., and by 6:40 P.M. it was much too dark for someone in another boat to have distinguished us and our capsized canoe even at a distance of only a few hundred yards. We had had a close escape and been rescued just in time.
As I came down from the roof in the dark, I was feeling helpless and still unable to grasp what those reckless crewmen had done to me. I had lost valuable equipment, and I had almost lost my life. My fiancée, my parents, my sister, and my friends had almost lost me. My knees were raw and scarred from being rubbed with each wave against the gunwale as I gripped it. All of that because of the recklessness of three young men who should have known better, drove too fast in high waves, ignored all the water splashing into the canoe, refused to slow down or stop when repeatedly asked to do so, swam off with two of the three life preservers, never apologized, and never showed the slightest regret for the anguish and loss that they had actually inflicted on us, and for how close they had come to killing us. Those bastards!
While wallowing in these thoughts, I came across a man on the ground level of the building onto whose roof I had climbed to view the sunset. I fell into conversation with him and told him why I had gone up onto the roof and what had happened to us on the previous day. He answered that, coincidentally, he had also been on the same island the previous day, and had also wanted to go to the mainland. He had looked at the canoe that we hired, with its big engines, seen the young crewmen and their cocky and laughing behavior, and watched how they gunned the engines and handled the canoe coming in to shore to await passengers. He had had much experience of boats. He had decided that he didn’t want to risk his life with that crew and boat, and had waited for a larger and slower boat to go to the mainland.
That reaction of his jolted me. So, I hadn’t been helpless after all! The cocky crew weren’t the only people who had come close to throwing away my life. I was the one who had stepped into their canoe; no one had forced me to do it. The accident had ultimately been my responsibility. It had been completely within my power to prevent it from happening to me. Instead of asking why the crew had been so stupid, I should have been asking myself why I had been so stupid. The man who had chosen to wait for a larger boat had exercised New Guinea–style constructive paranoia, and he had thereby escaped being traumatized and nearly killed. I should have exercised constructive paranoia myself, and I would now do so for the rest of my life.
Just a stick in the ground
The most recent of the three episodes related in this chapter unfolded many years after my canoe accident had convinced me of the virtues of constructive paranoia. Out of New Guinea’s lowlands rise many separate isolated mountain ranges, which are interesting to biologists because they resemble “islands” of montane habitats surrounded by a “sea” of lowlands, as far as the distributions of species confined to montane habitats are concerned. The higher elevations of most of the isolated mountain ranges are uninhabited by people. There are two possible means to reach those high elevations in order to survey their birds and other animals and plants. One is to be flown directly by helicopter to high elevations, but it is difficult to obtain a helicopter for charter in New Guinea, and even harder to locate a clear area for landing a helicopter on a forest-covered New Guinea mountain. The other method is to find a village close enough to the mountain that one can bring one’s gear to the village by plane, helicopter, or boat, and then walk from the village to climb the mountain. The difficulties of New Guinea terrain are such that it is impractical to carry one’s gear to a mountain camp more distant than about five miles from a village. A further practical problem is that, for many of the isolated peaks, available maps don’t show the location and elevation of the highest peak or the nearest village; one instead has to obtain that geographic information by a survey flight.
One particular mountain range interested me because, although it was reported to be not especially high, it was isolated. Hence at the end of one of my trips to New Guinea, while I was starting to plan the next year’s trip, I chartered a small plane to fly a survey along the entire length of that mountain range, and I identified its highest peak. There was no village within at least 25 miles of the peak in any direction, and no garden clearing or any other signs of human presence nearby. That ruled out reaching the peak from the village and required instead a helicopter-based operation, which in turn required finding a natural clearing at which to land a helicopter. (Some helicopters can hover over the forest canopy while passengers and cargo are being lowered by winch through the canopy to the ground, but that requires special helicopters and training.) While one’s first impression of New Guinea forests is of an unbroken expanse of green trees, one does encounter occasional natural clearings at landslides where an earthquake has shaken down a patch of forest, or at a marsh, a dried-up pond, the bank of a river or pond, or a dry mud volcano. On this survey flight I was delighted to spot a huge landslide clearing, about two and a half miles from the peak and several thousand feet lower in elevation. By New Guinea standards, that’s much too far to establish a camp at the landslide and to be able to walk daily to the peak to observe birds. Instead, it would be necessary to fly our gear by helicopter into a first camp at the landslide, then to clear a trail and carry the gear ourselves to a second campsite in forest close to the peak: hard work, but nevertheless feasible.