Bit of Borneo Sticks to a Writer Born for Adventure

Under the heading of life in the urban jungle, Eric Hansen recently joined the ranks of countless New Yorkers when he found he could not communicate with his cab driver.

Hansen, fresh from a meeting about his new book, “Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo” (Houghton Mifflin), was clutching one of his favorite photographs at the time. It depicted two men of the Penan nomadic group in Borneo’s rain forest, both wearing loincloths and carrying huge hunting spears.

Hansen marveled at the irony. For seven months in 1982, he had had little trouble speaking Malay and making himself understood to his native guides as he trekked across 1,500 miles of jungle.

And now, speaking English, “I couldn’t get this guy to take me to the East Side.”

Hansen’s difficulty doesn’t mean he’s not resourceful. His sense of the absurd and his willingness to make a complete fool of himself, he is the first to concede, were among his most valuable tools in his seven-month hike across Borneo and through several strata of modern civilization. What he took out of a walk that started with a change of clothes and a pair of Nikes was a firm faith in his own intuition, a sense that first impressions are usually right.

“They have an expression in Malay, ikut hati ,” he said. “Literally, it means ‘to follow your liver.’ ” In contemporary American English, the phrase might translate better to “follow your feelings,” or, said this native Californian, cringing just slightly, “go with the flow.”

A Life Lesson

That was Hansen’s life lesson and the message he hopes readers will take from his book. In a glass-and-marble Manhattan high-rise, the soon-to-be-40-year-old adventurer sipped from a foamy mug of cappuccino and talked about what sent him into a forest where tribesmen display the headhunting swords of their ancestors, where crime is failing to share with one’s fellows, where thick vines and leaves blot out all traces of sun and sky.

“I think everybody, all of us, we have these fantasies of where we want to go,” he said. “Usually it’s easier to keep these as a fantasy because if you follow the fantasy, more often than not, it falls on its face.”

The tall and lanky Hansen spent his childhood fighting imaginary dragons and demons in his family’s garden in Piedmont, Calif., a rarefied East Bay suburb. There was only one black family in this exclusive community high above the Oakland hills, he said, and “a couple of Asians.”

Hansen’s father was a chemical engineer in San Francisco. His mother focused her life on Hansen and his three sisters. Only his grandmother, who later financed his first trip to Europe, had traveled much.

It was Ozzie-and-Harriet time, Hansen said: “I sort of grew up in the middle of the American dream.” There was “so much nurturing and love and guidance” that as a grown-up, “I’ve had absolutely no desire to buy a house, settle down and do all that.”

Hansen’s first encounters with reality came as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. Having convinced himself that he had seen a bit of the real world, Hansen, weaned on Kipling’s “Jungle Book,” decided “I wanted to see the rest of the world.”

Off he went to the Soviet Union, part of an exchange project with other students in the Department of Architecture and City Planning. Immediately, he became embroiled in a sponsor professor’s scheme to smuggle precious icons out of the Eastern Bloc, “using the students as his cover,” Hansen said.

But this was Berkeley in the early ‘70s; this was normal. Hansen glided dreamily through this existence until the day he received a letter from the Selective Service, informing him he had been chosen to become a member of the armed forces.

Hansen had never demonstrated, never participated in a single anti-war protest. Nevertheless, he headed to Canada, leaving the country with “exactly $800” in his pocket.

“Looking back on it, it was stupid,” he said. “But I felt I was put in a situation where the choice had been taken away from me.”

(Hansen was able to return to the United States after President Jimmy Carter granted a pardon to draft evaders in 1977.)

Fully expecting that he would never again set foot in the United States, Hansen lived in northern Spain, then drifted to North Africa. Using skills he had learned in design school at Berkeley, he worked as a goldsmith in Israel. He became friendly with Bedouins, then migrated to Greece.

In India, he ministered to the residents at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute Dying, “one of the most peaceful, soothing places I have ever been.” For one year, he lived in Nepal. Then someone offered him a job managing a cattle ranch on an island off Australia.

“It was one fabulous job after another,” Hansen said.”I’ve never really made plans. They just happened.”

All the while, he kept copious notes. Having flunked high school English--”I had to go to summer school to get into college”--he had no grandiose plans of writing a book. Yet he kept taking notes, recording memories and conversations, writing imaginary letters to family and friends.

“I just kept the journals to remember,” he said.

He Couldn’t Say No

In 1976, Hansen and a female traveling companion were working their way toward Singapore when the chance for a side trip to Borneo came up. Borneo? How could Hansen say no?

Soon, in the company of a man who assured them that his head-to-toe tattoos protected him from crocodiles, they were setting forth on a river trip into Borneo’s jungle. Hansen’s friend was less than enthralled, but for Hansen, the experience was tantalizing. He knew he would return.

By 1982, he was back. “I wanted to completely get out of the habits of what I had been doing,” he said. “I wanted to have a unique experience, to go somewhere few Westerners had been.”

Besides, Hansen said, “I do get bored very easily. I hate routine. I can’t stand people telling me what to do.”

Yet there in the jungle, with guides who stood to his shoulder, Hansen ceded all control. They were the experts, he reasoned; he was the novice. He plucked leeches from his legs, ate food fresh from the kill. He compiled a Malay dictionary and read the only book he had brought for himself, “Gabriela” by Jorge Amado, “about 25 times, from cover to cover.”

Always, Hansen walked in the middle, one guide in front of him, one bringing up the rear. His feet grew tough, and he learned to laugh at his own inexpertise. His very awkwardness became an asset, as he learned that “the thing about being a newcomer, or vulnerable, is that people will really help you.”

It was damp all the time, and everything, all the meager possessions he carried in his rattan knapsack, grew moist and moldy. He slept on a bed of three logs, usually a foot or more too short for him. Villages meant new diversions, but also new challenges, since some tribal people suspected he might be a demon.

His Magic Charm

“They didn’t understand why I wasn’t afraid of the spirits,” said Hansen, an atheist. In a moment of inspiration, he explained to them that he had a magic charm that protected him from the spirits. Prodded to produce the amulet, he displayed a tiny cloth pin, shaped like a banana, a friend had given to him when he left Australia.

“I was always associated with the Christian missionaries--that was the real block--because I had white skin,” Hansen said. In a culture that practiced public births and that treasured its own system of spirits, missionaries who preached change were not universally accepted, he said.

On breaks from the long hikes through the dense jungle, his compatriots would talk about their lives as hunters. They could re-enact a particularly dramatic kill, he discovered, endlessly. Sometimes it made him buggy: He wanted to talk about cerebral experiences, about dreams or tribal traditions. They wanted to talk about how they slew an especially menacing wild boar.

“That was the most difficult part of the trip,” he said. “Sometimes I got extremely lonely.”

It was painful at times, and difficult to explain in a culture where “depression is not part of the mentality.” Introspection is too self-indulgent, he said. “They don’t have time for it.”

At such times, Hansen would pull out his journal. “OK,” he would write, “here I am; I got myself into this mess.” Or, he would draft an imaginary letter to a friend or to his grandmother. “You wouldn’t believe the weird situation I’m in right now,” the letter might begin.

He learned to be indirect, to approach an issue or to answer a question in a sideways fashion.

“I really love the way they converse with one another,” he said of the tribal people he met and lived with along the way. “You never confront. You make suggestions.”

Back in his own native culture, “I find I change,” Hansen said. “See, I’m much more direct here.”

His exploits in this ancient, gentle culture often sound like subtle psychological tests, or perhaps job interviews for the position of village buffoon. He found himself doing sword dances, parodying himself and his own virility. There were vast drunken parties, and sudden challenges to his reflexes. To his astonishment, one day he fatally speared a wild animal in order to save an elder of the village.

But bravery, Hansen mused, “bravery I don’t think had anything to do with it. I think this was a case of persistence and keeping a sense of humor.”

Maybe he was too naive to be afraid, he said. Maybe he was too involved in his own inner journey, in letting go and becoming a part of this dark and mysterious world. He dismissed, for example, the suggestion that perhaps his Caucasian head might have been of some ceremonial value somewhere in the jungle.

“They used to collect heads, but that pretty much stopped,” Hansen said. “People’s heads are still cut off occasionally, but that doesn’t have anything to do with headhunting.” The natives do not own guns, he said, and beheading is a matter of simple efficiency. “That’s how you kill somebody there.”

Hansen was reminded of how he had changed, how he had learned to relax and accept what each new step in life brought him, when he returned to the jungle in Borneo last summer with an Australian film crew. He had been brought along as a translator, but found he spent most of his time translating the jungle culture to the Australian film makers.

“The producer got so upset because he was unable to control things,” Hansen said. “The sound recorder had a nervous breakdown on the fifth day.

“It was just because they wouldn’t give over. They wanted control.” To no avail, Hansen tried to reassure his colleagues. “I kept saying, ‘Look, don’t fight it. These guides are the experts.’ ” He might as well have been speaking Malay, said Hansen, so alien was that message.

After he returned to Sydney, the city he calls home half the year, Hansen’s friends urged him to write about his adventure. But he was not convinced: “It’s one thing to take an interesting trip, another to write a book about it.”

But at dinner one night he found himself seated opposite Bruce Chatwin, author of “In Patagonia,” and, more recently, “The Song-lines.” Hansen had never abided by conventional travel writing, but both books tell stories about people and culture, more than about places. That night, he listened for four hours as Chatwin told stories. It was a kind of full circle, for storytelling, he realized, was among the most valued traits of the jungle.

So for three years, beginning at a friend’s kitchen table in Berkeley, he pecked away at a manual typewriter, fashioning a book that ultimately required only a single page of suggestions from an editor at Houghton Mifflin.

“I didn’t want to write a book that said, ‘Aren’t I great? I did this and you didn’t,’ ” he said. “Rather than telling the readers about what I had done, I wanted them to experience it.”

Finally, about six months ago, Hansen sent the completed manuscript to his parents in Piedmont.

“My mother was pleased. She thanked me enormously,” Hansen said. “She was so relieved, because finally she knew what I had been doing.”

Hansen hopes next to write about North Yemen, where he landed after he was shipwrecked in 1978. There will be no shortage of future adventures to fill more volumes, he is confident. After all, here he is in Manhattan, “where there are so many similarities to the Third World.”

His lessons from the jungle have served him well in Manhattan, Hansen said, mainly the notion that he should follow his first impression, listen to his viscera, act now and think later.

He smiled and headed to the corner, to hail a cab no doubt.