rssFor a while, it seems as if there is no pain or trouble in the whole of the world. I am riding on a kelotok again with the jungle flowing past the boat in a long cool green breeze. My son Pearce is scrambling around the deck like a gymnast trying to master a new piece of equipment. He’s still young enough to need a father in the way that a father wants to be needed. I think I can protect him in the jungle and still allow him the risks he needs to grow as a person. Our captain, Nanang, looks carefree and happy in a frayed straw hat. He sits on the deck above the wheelhouse with his feet dangling through an open hatch, gripping the wheel with his toes, just as an orangutan would.
We are wandering upriver on the hot, brown Sekonyer into the jungle, yet this is not the dark and menacing place it seems in films. I feel safer on the Sekonyer than I do in the cities we passed through to get here. By now I’m familiar with the route to orangutans, to the only place in the world where a person can mingle freely with them — Camp Leakey in Tanjung Puting National Park on the island of Borneo. There are 6,000 orangutans in the park, though I know from experience that the only ones who will allow us to see them are the 20 regulars at Camp Leakey. These 20 were once kept illegally as pets and have been returned to the jungle by B.C. primatologist Biruté Galdikas and her Orangutan Foundation International.
People come to the jungle for different reasons. Me, I’m writing a book about orangutans as a species on the brink of extinction and want to explore the controversial aspects of contact between humans and orangutans, a relationship experienced nowhere else as it is at Camp Leakey. Unlike most orangutan facilities, this one is completely open to visitors. I’ve brought my 12-year-old son to avoid the loneliness of such a venture and to give him experiences he will remember all his life.
I thought we could use music to soothe us in the jungle, so I invited musician Ken MacDonald to accompany us. A bachelor, a Zen Buddhist and the assistant principal French horn player for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, MacDonald is uniquely qualified. He has played for the orangutans at the Toronto Zoo — an impromptu French horn concert of Bach, jazz and improvisations. MacDonald has his own reason for travelling halfway around the world. He wants to find his voice in the jungle, and plans to use his French horn to create a version of the long call that the male orangutan uses to establish dominance in orangutan society. From what he and keepers at various zoos have told me, classical music can make orangutans quiet and calm, like it does me, no doubt due to the similarity in our primate brains. As the mangrove trees float past, MacDonald plays bold, brassy notes from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The music almost lifts the boat out of the water and into the sky. Beneath the high notes of the horn, the kelotok beats its bass drum of ironwood and metal as it slices through the river, rhythmic thumps echoing against the trees.
We arrive at Camp Leakey, French horn blaring, father, son and Zen Buddhist. The Indonesians grin and wave. A British film crew lounges in the shade, to wait, like us, for the overdue arrival of Galdikas. The film crew is here to document the life and times of Kusasi, at 135 kilograms the camp’s dominant male orangutan. His is a voice to reckon with. Galdikas is a force to reckon with, too. The primatologist established the camp in 1971, when she was 25, and has since created a life attuned to her interests and the rhythms of her nature — as many of us wish we could.
Today, scientists and conservationists consider this the most radical and controversial orangutan project in the world, one where humans and orangutans mingle without the safeguards and barriers that typically protect both species from each other. Humans are sometimes bitten here by orangutans. Orangutans can be infected with human diseases and their natural behaviour changed by contact with humans. Yet Galdikas extends the contact between our species beyond the limits set by other scientists. She believes that it allows the orangutans that were kept as pets, already drastically affected by contact with humans, to mend their broken psyches. She also thinks it’s wrong to confine them like prisoners. “Why should an animal have to go back to the wild?” she told me once. “We have to deal with the great apes as people. It should be up to them to make the decision if they want to go back and live in the wild.”
For my son and I, Camp Leakey feels like a refuge, a sanctuary, a quiet place outside the chaos of the rest of the world. We have been chased by wild elephants in the Kinabatangan flood plain, in northern Borneo, and my son gushed blood from a torrential nosebleed on one of the air flights. The more aggressive male orangutans would be dangerous for us, but we spend our days with the females and the children. One morning at Galdikas’s orangutan clinic downriver, in the small Dayak village of Pasir Panjang, Pearce holds an infant orangutan. The hair is thick and heavy and red. The eyes are a deep, dark brown that linger on ours, as they do when an orangutan is young and still willing to risk intimacy. “She was squirming at first,” my son says later. “It didn’t feel like holding a baby because she was more aware of her surroundings.” When did my son become so discriminating, I wonder.
Another morning, at Camp Leakey, we sit on a bare, sandy path for an hour with the orangutan Princess and her wee son Percy, who is almost two years old. Princess is a mature, confident, middle-aged ape-woman with a history recorded in films, books and articles, and she still knows some of the sign language she was taught two decades ago in the jungle. I’m not a celebrity like her and I feel strange because I can’t converse with an orangutan in sign language. But Percy wants to be daring. He darts out behind the back of his mother several times toward my son, who must seem huge and dangerous to him. Once, only once, does he touch the human child, with a small, leathery finger. “He touched me so gently I could barely feel it,” says my son. “It took a lot of courage for him to do that.” I hope that Princess thinks my primate child is as strong and as smart as hers.
One evening after dark, as Galdikas and I sit in her cabin, we hear Kusasi calling. We had heard MacDonald experimenting with his long call earlier. “I sat down as an orangutan,” MacDonald told me afterwards, “and felt what orangutans must feel — stage fright, the fear that everything depends on the ability to assert the self at that moment to all those listening.” At the kelotok, we could hear him clearly, sounding a little more distant than he actually was, and so could Kusasi. It was a pure and windy blast on the horn like an old Greek god would make. All sound in the jungle ceased.
That same night in the cabin, Galdikas and I stop talking to listen to Kusasi, too, as he makes the kind of low, slow whoop that reminds me of whales under water. “He’s announcing his presence to the world,” says Galdikas. It is impossible to know whether he is responding to the strange sounds of the French horn or to other male orangutans. I think of how, that morning, just after five, Kusasi called as I lay half-awake in the kelotok with Pearce slumbering beside me under the big mosquito net. The long call didn’t wake my son. I let him sleep. There will be time enough for the world to hear his voice.
Shawn Thompson is an assistant professor of journalism at Thompson Rivers University School of Journalism in Kamloops.
