anarchy. Definitely alive.
Once we land at the tiny, humid airport, we look for the two people who will round out our team: Dutch producer Vanessa Boeye and British director Rik Lander, both of whom have been on the ground in Borneo for a week doing reconnaissance. Vanessa, blond, blue-eyed, tall, and willowy thin (and posh, I suspect, in spite of her casual travel attire), walks up as our pile of twelve aluminum boxes and backpacks appears on the back of a tractor. As the producer, part of Vanessa’s job is to feed “the talent’s” ego. In short, it is her place to tell me I look fabulous even when we are two weeks in the bush,
sans
shower, grimy with bat guano.
“Nice to meet you. You look like hell,” she says cheerfully, with a British accent.
We’re going to get along just fine.
We take over
every socket in the lobby of our hotel in the small town of Limbang before setting off for the interior jungle. While the batteries charge, I wander outside the hotel and spot an Internet café, or more accurately, a tiny cinder-block room located behind two cows tied to a metal fence post leaning at forty-five degrees. WIDE WIRLD WEB RM1 TEA 2, reads the handwritten sign. I scuttle around the cows and log on to see if there’s any word from Diva HQ.
TO: H OLLY
FROM: J EANNIE
SUBJECT: A IRDATE!
Hol—MJ called and PBS is buying the show! We did it. Looks like they are going to schedule Cuba to broadcast on a Monday night in prime time. They’ve asked us to take out your reference to menstruation in the narration “the revolution has moved to my uterus”; and they want you to add a reference to yourself as a “journalist” (more credibility, I guess). But those are the only changes—which MJ says is remarkable for a first submission. Unfortunately, they won’t commit to the entire series until seeing how the pilot rates. She signs all her e-mails, “Onward!” I love that.
Jeannie/Mom
p.s. I was looking at your itinerary—why did you go through London? Isn’t that the wrong way?
I return to the hotel,
recharged by the exciting news from home. Our team gathers in the hotel lobby and we set out for the interior jungle of Sarawak. Our guide, Martin, is in his early twenties and has chestnut skin and jet-black hair. He is Dayak (the indigenous people of Borneo) and of the Iban tribe. Though he has taken ecotourists into the jungle before, I wonder if he understands the constant demands and challenges of a film crew.
The network of chunky, easy-moving, tea-colored rivers is the closest thing to infrastructure in this part of Borneo. Our young, barefoot boatman is poised at the front of our hip-wide longboat, ready to pole when shallows, still water, or rapids threaten our progress. A beefy old outboard motor dangles from the back of the boat like a very important, yet untended to, participle. Vanessa and I stare suspiciously at the sputtering two-stroke.
On the river, the jaggy mold I saw from the sky has become a dark green, menacing mass that lines the river. The jungle seems aggressive, as if the vines and trees are taking back the water’s edge, instead of cohabiting with it in pastoral bliss, as a forest might meet a babbling brook. I imagine the density beyond our sight as unreasonable and unforgiving. A vicious chaos. I notice Vanessa noticing me recoil.
“Sorta feral looking,” I say to Vanessa, explaining my discomfort.
“Rhoyyt then,” says Georgie, with a game smile. “How much longer ’til the lodge?”
Periodically the jungle breaks and gives way to waterside communities. Longhouses with roofs of corrugated steel (rather than the traditional wood and rattan) pepper the river highway. People work together on the long porches and nod when we quietly chug by. “Dayak do not like to be alone,” says Martin, and I think of Assata Shakur’s saying that, in Cuba, she’d never met people so unafraid of other people.
The dwellings appear fewer and farther between as hours drift by and we
Once we land at the tiny, humid airport, we look for the two people who will round out our team: Dutch producer Vanessa Boeye and British director Rik Lander, both of whom have been on the ground in Borneo for a week doing reconnaissance. Vanessa, blond, blue-eyed, tall, and willowy thin (and posh, I suspect, in spite of her casual travel attire), walks up as our pile of twelve aluminum boxes and backpacks appears on the back of a tractor. As the producer, part of Vanessa’s job is to feed “the talent’s” ego. In short, it is her place to tell me I look fabulous even when we are two weeks in the bush,
sans
shower, grimy with bat guano.
“Nice to meet you. You look like hell,” she says cheerfully, with a British accent.
We’re going to get along just fine.
We take over
every socket in the lobby of our hotel in the small town of Limbang before setting off for the interior jungle. While the batteries charge, I wander outside the hotel and spot an Internet café, or more accurately, a tiny cinder-block room located behind two cows tied to a metal fence post leaning at forty-five degrees. WIDE WIRLD WEB RM1 TEA 2, reads the handwritten sign. I scuttle around the cows and log on to see if there’s any word from Diva HQ.
TO: H OLLY
FROM: J EANNIE
SUBJECT: A IRDATE!
Hol—MJ called and PBS is buying the show! We did it. Looks like they are going to schedule Cuba to broadcast on a Monday night in prime time. They’ve asked us to take out your reference to menstruation in the narration “the revolution has moved to my uterus”; and they want you to add a reference to yourself as a “journalist” (more credibility, I guess). But those are the only changes—which MJ says is remarkable for a first submission. Unfortunately, they won’t commit to the entire series until seeing how the pilot rates. She signs all her e-mails, “Onward!” I love that.
Jeannie/Mom
p.s. I was looking at your itinerary—why did you go through London? Isn’t that the wrong way?
I return to the hotel,
recharged by the exciting news from home. Our team gathers in the hotel lobby and we set out for the interior jungle of Sarawak. Our guide, Martin, is in his early twenties and has chestnut skin and jet-black hair. He is Dayak (the indigenous people of Borneo) and of the Iban tribe. Though he has taken ecotourists into the jungle before, I wonder if he understands the constant demands and challenges of a film crew.
The network of chunky, easy-moving, tea-colored rivers is the closest thing to infrastructure in this part of Borneo. Our young, barefoot boatman is poised at the front of our hip-wide longboat, ready to pole when shallows, still water, or rapids threaten our progress. A beefy old outboard motor dangles from the back of the boat like a very important, yet untended to, participle. Vanessa and I stare suspiciously at the sputtering two-stroke.
On the river, the jaggy mold I saw from the sky has become a dark green, menacing mass that lines the river. The jungle seems aggressive, as if the vines and trees are taking back the water’s edge, instead of cohabiting with it in pastoral bliss, as a forest might meet a babbling brook. I imagine the density beyond our sight as unreasonable and unforgiving. A vicious chaos. I notice Vanessa noticing me recoil.
“Sorta feral looking,” I say to Vanessa, explaining my discomfort.
“Rhoyyt then,” says Georgie, with a game smile. “How much longer ’til the lodge?”
Periodically the jungle breaks and gives way to waterside communities. Longhouses with roofs of corrugated steel (rather than the traditional wood and rattan) pepper the river highway. People work together on the long porches and nod when we quietly chug by. “Dayak do not like to be alone,” says Martin, and I think of Assata Shakur’s saying that, in Cuba, she’d never met people so unafraid of other people.
The dwellings appear fewer and farther between as hours drift by and we
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