three of us, because they were concerned about their own canoe’s low freeboard and risk of being swamped, but they finally agreed to take four of the five of us left on our hull. We agreed among ourselves that the person to remain on our hull would be the third crew member, who retained our remaining life preserver.
As I stepped into the sailing canoe, Malik asked me where my passport was. I replied that it was in my yellow knapsack, possibly still in the airspace under our hull. The Ceram man who had already dived repeatedly under the hull to retrieve the life preservers now dived again, came out with my yellow knapsack, and passed it to me. The sailing canoe then pushed off from our capsized hull, with six people in it: one of its two crew members in front and the other in back, and behind the front crewman the Chinese fisherman, me, Malik, and the Ceram man in that sequence. I had periodically looked at my wristwatch, which to my surprise was still working despite its immersion in seawater. The time was 6:15 P.M., 15 minutes before sunset. We had been in the water or on our capsized canoe for two hours.
It soon grew dark. Our two rescuers paddled towards the nearest land in the distance, which happened to be the island from which we had set out that afternoon. The sailing canoe rode very low in the water, with just a few inches of freeboard, and one of the men sitting behind me bailed constantly. I reflected that this little, heavily loaded canoe could also tip over, but that we probably were safe now. I didn’t feel any relief or strong feelings; this was all just happening to me, as if I were an emotionless observer.
As our canoe paddled on, we heard voices in the water to our left. I guessed that it might be the voices of our motor canoe’s two crew members who had swum off with life preservers. However, one of my companions could understand better than could I what the voices were shouting in Indonesian. It turned out that the shouts were from the three people in the first rescue canoe (its pilot, and our Ambon and Javan passengers), which was sinking, having taken on too much water from being overloaded. The freeboard of our own rescue canoe was too low for us to pick up another person. Someone in our canoe shouted something back to the three men in the water, and our rescuers paddled on, leaving them to their fates.
I don’t know how long it took us to return to the island: perhaps an hour. As we approached it, we saw big waves breaking and a fire on the beach, and we wondered what the fire meant. In front of me I heard a conversation in Indonesian between the Chinese fisherman and the canoe paddler in the prow, including repeatedly the Indonesian words
Our rescue canoe rounded a point of the island and came into a sheltered bay where campfires were burning on the beach. Behind us in the dark, we heard a motor and saw a motorboat with a bright light come up slowly behind us. Our little canoe stopped in shallow water, and Malik, the Chinese fisherman, the Ceram man, and I stepped out and waded to and climbed into the motorboat, which by coincidence turned out to be a fishing boat belonging to the family of the Chinese fisherman. It had been out fishing, happened to see our two crewmen who had swum off with the two life preservers, picked them up, searched for and found our capsized canoe, and picked up the floating luggage still attached to the canoe (including my suitcases but none of Malik’s luggage). We stayed in the motorboat as it slowly headed towards the New Guinea mainland. We told the motorboat drivers about the three men from the first capsized rescue canoe whom we had heard shouting in the water. However, when we reached the approximate location where we had heard them, the motorboat went straight on and did not circle or shout. Malik told me later that the drivers explained that the three men from the capsized rescue canoe had probably somehow reached shore.
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 fiancee, 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,
