The Last Wild Men of Borneo Read online

  During the winters Bruno kept a rented room in the village of Nufenen in an old timbered house roofed with flat stone shingles, stacks of cordwood twenty feet high along its outside walls. He wandered far and constantly, visiting friends and relatives, exploring caves in France, learning to bake bread and work leather. After three years Erich left their life together and lit out on the hippie trail, living for the next two years in the Swat and Chitral valleys of Pakistan and Kabul north to Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. Bruno wouldn’t budge, however, and in 1978, after four years with the cows, which required a working partner, he switched to the solitary life of a sheepherder, climbing up to a wooden hut the size of a one-car garage perched on the edge of a box canyon.

  He arrived there on the first of July 1978 with his dog, Prinz, and 535 sheep, the details recorded with a ballpoint pen in his neat hand on the inside of the wooden door of the hut’s closet. He would stay the next six summers, a period of beauty and solitude and backbreaking work, of becoming one with the animals and the environment. He rose before dawn, spending long days walking tens of miles up and down the mountains with his curved shepherd’s stick and the sheep, which had to be constantly watched. He tanned his own leather, cut and sewed leather jerkins and lederhosen, made his own wooden backpack. Erich, returned from traveling in India and Afghanistan, and, ever inspired by his younger brother, took a herd of sheep to the alp on the other side of the mountain, and sometimes they hiked to the top to visit in the evening gloam.

  In the summer of 1977, Bruno met Georges Rüegg. Ten years his senior, Rüegg stood over six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and had begun herding cows on a neighboring alp after a six-year sojourn through North and South America. Rüegg exuded a quiet strength and physical power, a self-confidence that in later years made him one of the few people able to stand up to Bruno. He had a deep well of experience and an articulate soulfulness; he had hitchhiked across America for years, had wandered deep into South America, loved the natural world and life on the Alps as much as Bruno. They met briefly at a dinner held by a local farmer, and then, not long after, Bruno simply appeared while Georges was sitting on a rock watching his cows. “We sat and talked and talked and talked,” Rüegg said. “We talked about everything. History. Biology. Politics. Geography. Women. Neither of us wanted things. We were collectors of experiences. We both liked to collect songs and to sing.”

  Bruno, he said, “was always doing outrageous things.” Where they lived high in the Alps you could see anyone coming up the paths to their huts for miles. “But Bruno, you never knew when to expect him. He would never come up the usual path. He’d climb up the back side of the mountain and sit there at the top and watch you first, then appear suddenly in your midst. He could never do things like anyone else.”

  Bruno learned to read the weather from the animals—when the wild deer pranced and ran, snow was coming—and he bathed naked in the rushing streams of melting snow. At a little plateau jutting out from the steep hillside below the house, he planted a grove of trees, which are now forty feet tall. He carved a face in a tree stump and perfectly symmetrical swirls twelve inches in diameter in the doors of the hut. His mother and sister visited, friends came and went at times, hiking up from the valley below. Once he and his little sister Monika came upon a cow that had fallen and broken a leg. Bruno killed it then and there, skinned it and butchered it. “He used to say that you should have everything you need to live inside a backpack,” Erich said, “and that if you wanted meat you should kill it yourself. If you wanted clothes you should make them.” He kept ten goats, which liked to feed on the herbs in the highest, most precipitous mountainsides, and when it rained they often got stuck there. Yet they had to be milked every day, and Bruno would climb after them. And he hunted—poaching, in effect, because hunting was illegal in the Alps. “He would eat small animals,” Rüegg said, “and say, ‘God made everything and the animals are here. Why shouldn’t we use it?’”

  Bruno seemed a man without ambition, remarkably content to live for so long doing so little, in such a small world. But to say he had no ego, no ambition, was wrong. “Lately I’ve realized how far removed I am from the ideal of most people,” he wrote to Rüegg. “I have come to terms with solitude in my own way. There is a profound sadness in this. It’s true that I have certain gifts and skills that enable me to provoke oohs and ahs with a nature photo, a drawing or a crazy act. But I don’t depend on superficial admiration anymore. If no one ever challenges you, the game loses its appeal.” Women loved him—he would meet them on his winter wanderings, and they would be taken with him, hike up to visit him in the summer. As they hiked down the mountain a few days later, they had no idea where they stood with him. He had a purity, a recklessness that attracted people, drew them to him, and a powerful ambition and competitiveness, not professionally, not with other men, but with himself. Up there in the Alps, “it is beauty and watching, watching until your eyes fall off, and being so intensely alive,” said Rüegg. “But you are alone and you can’t share it with anyone and that makes you sad. We experienced so much. We were close to the animals. Birds. Beautiful clouds. Eagles flying. That created a cruel longing, not just in us, but also in the people who met us. To long is a strong power for relationships. Bruno had a lot of relationships, women who admired him because he was so alone. He would share his diary with anyone. He didn’t keep it private. Women met him, read his diaries, said, ‘How can you do that?’ We both had many very close relationships in those days, but I’d say, ‘You’re not my girlfriend.’ I was honest. But he was a butterfly jumping here and there with women who expected things from him and admired him and tried to be there for him, to love him, but he would never confront them. In that way he was weak. He was not able to stand tall and say, ‘Okay, I cannot be monogamous.’ He avoided confrontation. That’s why he and the Penan were soul mates, because they both hated confrontation.”

  He—and Michael Palmieri too—craved original experience and a certain loneliness that came with it. “I had an aura,” Michael told me, “when I returned from a couple of months in Borneo. People looked at you differently and you felt different from everybody else.”

  Bruno had a supreme belief in his own competence, a feeling he had that he could do it, could read the risks, and he wanted more, all the time, and that more for him came at first in climbing trees and sleeping outside in the cold, as a child, and then in the Alps in the form of work, plain simple work, and then solitude. How much could he bear? And how many things that he needed to survive could he make himself, and how far could he walk? If all he really wanted was to live a quiet life, he would have done so. He could have been a hermit, but he wasn’t. He was always on the move, always testing himself, poking, prodding, learning. Did he plan to go to the jungle in those early days? Probably not. Did he plan to lead a revolt and become a saint? Definitely not. In later years he would be venerated for his selflessness, his generosity, his courage. But that was only part of his personality. He could also be self-indulgent, thoughtless, reckless. The rules didn’t apply to him.

  The idea of taking it all a step further grew in him on those long summer days in the Alps, the notion of going deep, somewhere, in some jungle, someplace of pure unadulterated nature. In late 1983, after his tenth summer in the Alps, in his local library in Basel he was researching nomads and stumbled upon a single photo of a Penan hunter with the caption “A hunter-gatherer in the forests of Borneo.” He dug further but found almost nothing about the Penan, “and so I said,” he would later tell an interviewer, “I want to go there.” As luck would have it, he simultaneously heard of a British caving expedition planned for Sarawak.

  The Mulu caves had first been discovered by Spenser St. John, then British consul general to Rajah James Brooke’s kingdom of Sarawak, who tried to reach the summit of seven-thousand-foot-high Gunung Mulu in 1858. Around the base of the mountain St. John found “detached masses of limestone, much water-worn, with caverns and natural tunnels.” He failed
to summit, stymied by limestone cliffs, dense forest, and sharp pinnacles of rock. “It is almost impossible,” he wrote, “to conceive the difficulty of ascending this mountain.” It wasn’t until 1932 that Mulu was climbed, and not until 1961 that G. E. Welford, of the Malaysian Geological Survey, first penetrated some if its caves. In 1978 Britain’s most famous speleologist, Andy Eavis, as part of a fifteen-month Royal Geographical Society expedition exploring Mulu, surveyed thirty-one miles of caves, the start of many expeditions to reveal the underground formations as among the largest on earth. Eavis returned to survey another thirty miles in 1980, and as he planned his third expedition to the caves slated for 1984, he received a note from Bruno asking to join the expedition. “They were the finest caves in the world and I had hundreds of people who wanted to come,” said Eavis. “He sounded like an experienced caver, but I wrote back and said no.”

  Bruno didn’t care. The caves were the most spectacular on earth and they were right at the doorstep to the Penan—the perfect excuse to get there. Bruno showed up anyway, at the end of his six-month sojourn in Thailand and Perhentian Kecil. “I was in base camp,” said Eavis, “and I got a radio message from the forestry department that some guy named Bruno was there, trying to come up to the caves. I said, ‘No! I told him he can’t come!’

  “‘You have to take him,’ they said. ‘He’s a tremendous Swiss cave explorer and we want you to take him!’

  “The irony of it all is that the forestry department forced him on us. He arrived on the scene and initially we were cold and hostile to him. But the thing about Bruno was that not only was he a very interesting character, he was a very good, very skilled cave explorer. He could climb, he could swim, he could survey, and he soon became an integral part of the team. A lot of people talk, but he was just this really interesting, really competent human being who could do anything.”

  All of which meant that by the time he finally met the Penan at the ripe age of thirty, Bruno had been climbing trees and catching bugs and snakes and sleeping outside and marching up mountains and exploring caves and sneaking up on elephants for a very long time. He had been practicing all of its component parts for so long that the Penan recognized in Bruno, as did Eavis, competency. Not the usual inept westerner in the forest, someone who got lost and couldn’t find food and was entirely dependent on them, but—strange as it might sound—a kindred soul. And Bruno plunged right in, his back turned to the West, the rupture complete.

  Michael Palmieri on a dhow sailing across the Persian Gulf to Iran in 1967. (Michael Palmieri)

  Four

  Three years after Michael Palmieri hugged his mother goodbye in Los Angeles, he was on the move again. It was late June 1967, just weeks after the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and he sat huddled next to the binnacle of a wooden sailing dhow crossing the northern end of the Persian Gulf bound for Abadan, Iran. As usual, he was traveling light. A pair of blue jeans. A double-breasted navy pea coat. A pair of boots. A white cloth Ibiza bag holding a single change of clothes. That was it, except for thin wafers of gold sewn into the waistband of his blue jeans. June though it was, a cold wind whipped the Gulf into whitecaps, and Michael wrapped himself in his pea coat as spray and spindrift flew over the gunwales. Against the bulwarks around him sprawled men in turbans and heavy overcoats, and right in the center stood the helmsman, hands on an old spoked ship’s wheel. A thousand and one nights. Persia. The footsteps of Alexander the Great. He was eastbound, free, his head filled with wanderlust and an exotic fantasy that had to be sated.

  Like Bruno heading into the Alps for the decade after his release from prison, Michael too was deep into a ten-year sojourn that would lead him to Borneo. Michael was always handy with a camera, and over countless evenings in his house in Bali he dug more and more photos out for me, pictures of a journey so improbable it seems made up. Except it wasn’t.

  From L.A. that day when he said goodbye to his mother back in 1965, he’d jumped in a VW van with his friend Timmy and a bunch of other guys and headed to San Blas, Mexico, and then Mazatlan for a few weeks of surfing. He had no real plan, just a deep curiosity about the world, a hunger for experience, and a vague urge to get to Europe, France in particular, the citadel of romance in his mind. Not to mention his desire to escape the draft. In Mazatlan he and Timmy grabbed a bus for Veracruz, Michael paying for both of them, the $5,000 burning in his pocket like a bonfire. From Veracruz they shipped out to Cadiz, Spain, on a Panamanian-flagged freighter, where they chipped rust in the hold for the ten-day passage. Arriving in Cadiz, they took their pay in cash and stuck out their thumbs for Paris, where they crashed in the cheapest hotel they could find in Montparnasse.

  “That was how it all started,” he said, pulling out a photo of himself in a black turtleneck and vest, his hair glossy and black, leaning on a wrought iron Parisian balcony, looking so handsome and hip a stylist might have been standing just off frame.

  Timmy soon disappeared. Michael moved to a room on the rue de Buci in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, enrolled in language classes at the Alliance Française, stayed ten days, got bored, dropped out. Wandering the streets he met a girl sitting on the sidewalk, a beautiful French hippie playing folk music on her guitar. He fell in love for a spell, and the next thing he knew he was speaking French and wooing one French lass after another with his cowboy boots and athletic good looks and they took him in and called him “mon petit cowboy” and life tasted sweet. By the early spring of 1966, his money gone, he headed to Alicante, Spain, hoping to crew on a yacht. He quickly found a big old schooner owned by a German couple. He swabbed the decks and hauled sails and served the guests as they sailed the Mediterranean. The Balearic Islands. Sardinia. Corsica. Then Ibiza, full of musicians, artists, writers, hippies, junkies, a new vision of paradise for Michael, and where he ran into an old friend.

  “Michael!” the friend said. “Oh my God, the timing is fantastic. I have three beautiful rich women, help me out!”

  The friend took him to a luxurious villa overlooking the sea in Santa Eulària des Riu, owned by a forty-year-old French woman with a rich husband back in Paris. She reminded Michael of Simone Signoret. Her husband was elsewhere, and she took a shine to Michael, as women did. Michael jumped ship. They played all summer—Casablanca, Madrid, the Canary Islands—a young boy toy on the arm of an elegant woman. Cafés and shopping trips, and then September rolled around and she said, “Le soir est fini!”

  But Michael had a Pierre Cardin sports coat she’d bought him in Madrid, nice shoes, a bit of money in his pocket. He flew back to Paris. And as fall turned to winter and his money dwindled again, he got an idea. He’d get someone else to cash his last $500 in traveler’s checks, then report them stolen and double his money. In the Café Buci he befriended a young Moroccan, told him his scheme, said, “I’ll give you a percentage.” It was cold now in Paris, snowing, and Michael was in his Pierre Cardin and the Moroccan was wearing an old khaki-green coat full of holes, and they walked to Le Bon Marché, a big department store where, the plan was, the Moroccan would buy a few inexpensive items to effectively cash the checks. As Michael handed them over, the Moroccan said, “Wait a second. I’ll look better if I’m wearing your jacket.”

  In short order the situation became clear: Michael would never see his traveler’s checks or his Pierre Cardin jacket again. Penniless in the snow, he trooped to American Express and reported the checks stolen, this time for real. His fantasy life was souring. He slept in cars and under bridges, was desperate, and couldn’t go home because the Vietnam War was heating up and the FBI was now banging at his mother’s door.

  But fortune always had a way of smiling upon Michael, and that’s when he met Rank Rick on the streets of Montparnasse. Rick was from New York, and he said to Michael, “I want to show you something. Come up to my room.” Michael did, and Rank Rick opened a suitcase full of dollars, pounds, deutsche marks, French francs. Michael had never had seen so much money in his life. “Want to make some money?” Rick said.


  “Yes! Of course!”

  Rick explained his scheme, which involved flying to Lebanon and importing some contraband. “It’s easy,” he said, “you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Michael was always game in those days. He was twenty-three years old, heedless of consequences, fearless, hungering for intensity. Why not? They flew to Beirut, rented a car, and drove up to Baalbek, to a farmhouse lit with flickering kerosene lanterns. Rick made the deal, they drove back to Beirut, and Rick handed him a suitcase and an airplane ticket. “I’ll meet you in Paris,” he said.

  Michael suddenly felt nervous, a moment of fear, but what the hell, he needed the money and he felt immortal and his luck had always held up and his third eye was pulsing, telling him to go for it. He approached the counter, handed the suitcase over. Overweight! No problem. He paid the overage, flew to Paris, and sailed through the nothing-to-declare line to find Rick waiting for him with two thousand bucks.

  Nineteen sixty-six turned to 1967 and he was bored with Paris. He had that itch, and couldn’t stop thinking about the exotic East, especially India. His taste for adventure and experience and risk was growing. In this way he and Bruno were the same. The cultural ethos they inhabited had broken down; the post–World War II Western dream of faith, family, a good job, those all-important milestones of success, was unraveling around them. The script had been the same for decades: a young man graduated from high school, maybe he joined the military, maybe he went to college, then he got married and settled down with a wife and kids and a house in the suburbs. Those were the rituals that young men went through, that defined them, that made them grown-ups, members of the Western tribe. But those rituals had suddenly lost their meaning, their relevance. In tribal societies pubescent boys became men by having their teeth knocked out or undergoing painful scarifications or circumcisions; in the world of the Dayaks they raided villages and took heads. They left their old bodies, their childhoods, behind and became adults, as had their fathers before them. But Michael and Bruno didn’t want to be their fathers. They had sprung from a group, a tribe, that they didn’t feel a part of any longer.