Will Hobbs
``Wake up. Wake up,'' Brian whispered as he beamed his flashlight in my eyes. I rolled out of the puddle of sweat that my mattress had been too full to absorb. I rolled onto my dirty laundry whose detailed description is not printable and beyond any olfactory metaphor.
``Welcome to Borneo, the glorious land of mud,'' I said to myself as I looked through my wardrobe for something with less than three days worth of mud and sweat on it. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in this quest, but then so was everyone else in our group of sixteen Earthwatch volunteers that had all lived and perspired under the same roof for the past week.
We were all from the United States, Canada, or Australia, and we had been enticed into the adventure of working with wild orangutans in Borneo while helping collect valuable data for the study of primates. But as the days wore on, it seemed that it was the native Dayak guides and helpers that lived the adventure and made the worthwhile contributions, while we volunteers stumbled around in the swamp. The experience was turning out to be like summer camp, and we were all looking for something worthwhile to do besides being babysat by the Dayaks as the clumsy Westerners with large wallets.
The study was conducted by Biruté Galdikas, the world's foremost orangutan researcher who ranks with Jane Goodall and Dianne Fossey in the study of primates. She not only tracks and studies wild orangutans, but also rehabilitates ex-captive orangutans that were illegally abducted from the wild. Today Brian and and I had accepted the mission of tracking a ex-captive mother named Tutut and her adolescent, juvenile and infant offspring, taking minute-by-minute detailed notes on what each of them did for two two-hour sessions. Well, somehow when we heard the plan, it sounded a whole lot easier than it turned out to be.
We decided that I would yell out the orangutans' actions every minute while Brian feverishly scribbled something down in his notebook for the first session, from 8 A.M. to 10 A.M. It started out simple enough. Unlike the wild orangutans, the ex-captives generally hang out on the dock for hours on end. Well, today somehow it didn't quite work out that way. Today, probably because God was getting back at me for all the times I drank orange juice straight out of the bottle instead of pouring a glass, it seemed our little mother had a fetish for swampland. At 8:30 Tutut waded across the river and claimed the only spot of dry land around. So we spent the rest of the morning balancing precariously on tree roots above the muck, observing her.
Then as Brian was coming back through the swamp from a grub run to the camp, a centipede approximately the size of a large farm animal attached itself to Brian's neck. As he picked it off with his hand to fling it away, it bit his finger. He rushed over to me.
``Are you okay?'' I asked.
``Well, I'm a little numb in my fingers,'' Brian said, starting to point to the spot where he was bitten. ``Now I'm a little numb in my whole hand, Wow, my arm feels weird. Kind of numb. Now my ''
After I sat him down, I had him taken back to camp by the Dayaks. Later I sat around with the two Dayaks that were helping us follow the mother and her kids. We crossed a profound trans-cultural gulf as we traded profanities in each other's languages, waiting for my next minute-by-minute session to start at 2 P.M.
Well, by the time two o'clock rolled around, we had followed Tutut to a tree towering over a large muddy bog which looked like Mother Nature's answer to toxic dumping. Of course, like a good little scientist, I waded into the cesspool and began taking notes--solo this time, since Brian's little get-together with Marlin Perkins' Wild Kingdom had left him incapacitated.
As I was busily taking notes, I suddenly felt something, a sensation, a tingling, a buzz, an irritation, and then it grew. It was an itch, centered somewhere on my ankle. It was an incessant, unceasing, relentless, continual, utterly redundant itch. I scratched it with my other shoe, deep in the brown water. I rubbed it with a stick, a rock, a pencil, a tree, a root, a notebook, a backpack. Then I touched it with my hand, and now it was on my hand, and soon to be all over my body if I wasn't careful. But it was too late. The itch grew in area and intensity, until my entire leg was on fire!
But I held on and took notes, wanting so much to contribute to science somehow. Then suddenly I felt a tap behind me, and I turned to meet another ex-captive orangutan, trying to get the food out of my coat pocket by circumventing the regular opening and chewing a hold in the bottom. Then after becoming frustrated with my pocket, she began to shake me thoroughly. But like a dedicated scientist, I kept scribbling my notes.
But suddenly as I stood in a muddy bog being shaken to death by a starving orangutan, while my skin was being eaten away by a Satanic itch, Tutut did something amazing.
She saw her nest on the other side of a bog ten yards across. A dead tree stood on her side of the bog. She broke a large branch off the dead tree and positioned it at the edge of the bog, perpendicular to the tree. She pushed the dead tree down, across the branch, and it landed perfectly in a V formed by two trees on the other side. Then I realized why she had placed the branch where she did. It braced her end of the log, that would have otherwise slipped into the bog. Tutut had constructed a bridge, across which she gracefully strolled with her children in tow.
I had just witnessed sophisticated tool use by a primate. Finally I had something to contribute to science. I was ecstatic.
I battled with the hungry orangutan and my incredible itch until I had faithfully taken my two hours of notes, and then I ran back to camp with the passion of a man who could not find a bathroom in a public place. I reached our dorm and doused myself in calumine lotion until I was a dark pink. I lay down on my bed, unable to move from shock. I looked over at my dad across the way, who was also immobile due to a hammock casualty, and I felt like Indiana Jones. I thought I realized now what science was all about.
I was wrong. I didn't really realize what science was all about until the next day, when I found myself spending the entire afternoon recopying my notes in triplicate with carbon paper.