Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of
the Earth
By Daniel Glick (www.danielglick.net)
INTRODUCTION
After his divorce, Daniel Glick's ex-wife moved 1,000 miles away to
live with her new girlfriend. A year later, his older brother died of
breast cancer. Torn by these twin losses, the embarked on his journey
into single fatherhood in an admittedly unusual way: by taking his two
children on a five-month, around-the-world journey. Monkey Dancing is
a chronicle of the extraordinary odyssey they took together, as well
as a moving and honest account of the internal voyage the author took
to reach some equilibrium in his life.
PROLOGUE
In the middle of the night, after my daughter Zoe woke me for the
third time because she was afraid of the snakes, I wondered, not for
the first time, whether this trip had really been such an inspired idea.
Earlier, Zoe had been complaining about leeches, and before that mosquitoes,
and it dawned on me that unless you were raised in the rainforest, accustomed
to strangler figs and spiders the size of gerbils, Borneo was a pretty
forbidding environment. For a nine-year-old girl reared in suburban
Colorado, this place looked downright menacing. My thirteen-year-old
son Kolya, also awakened by his sister, didn't help things when he authoritatively
informed Zoe that, since she was the smallest mammal among us, any predator
would obviously eat her first.
I shot Kolya a venomous look that temporarily silenced him and reassured
Zoe that it was unlikely that snakes could board the 55-foot houseboat
(called a klotok) where we were sleeping, moored on the banks of the
Sekonyer River in southern Kalimantan. She wasn't persuaded. Zoe knew
the serpents were lurking. Heading upriver earlier that afternoon, past
suffocating green jungle crawling from riverbanks and proboscis monkeys
hanging from trees like misshapen, mischievous fruit, we'd noticed a
sudden movement in the water. Peering ahead, we felt certain it was
a crocodile. We were wrong. The animal's head, although almost as big
as a crocodile's, belonged to a 20-foot-long python with a body circumference
only slightly smaller than my thigh. We gaped with disbelief as the
python disappeared into the murky water, leaving deceptively minor ripples.
As the ripples receded, we became especially attentive to other motions
in the silty ribbon of river that carried us deeper into the jungle.
I felt acutely aware of the reassuring diesel engine chug that muted
the unfamiliar and suddenly ominous chirps and creaks and rustles emanating
from the overgrown banks. We moved forward from the deck, shaded by
a blue plastic canopy jerry-rigged on metal poles, and positioned ourselves
on the bow like sentries. Within five minutes, we spotted another serpentine
motion in the river and glimpsed a much smaller bright green reptile
with a classic triangular-shaped head, slithering with startling speed
toward the port-side shore: a pit viper, one of the world's most poisonous
snakes.
I held Zoe's hand, tried to convey my amazement rather than fear.
In the space of five minutes we had seen proboscis monkeys, with their
bulbous, clown-like noses, a species that didn't live anywhere else
on the planet-as well as a python and a pit viper. This was what it
was all about for me, heading upriver into Heart of Darkness territory
with my two children-a voyage to the headwaters of grief, loss, and-who
knows?-possibly even the source of healing and grace after such momentous
transitions in our lives.
Dual tragedies had propelled the three of us into orbit: my older
brother's sudden death from cancer, and the departure of their mother,
my wife, after our wrenching divorce. The weight of those losses accompanied
us as surely as our backpacks filled with shorts, underwear, Game Boys,
guidebooks, traveler's checks, portable CD players, DVDs, mosquito netting,
bug spray, asthma medicine, malaria pills, antibiotics, extra passport
pictures, my laptop, and Kolya's skateboard.
After a treacherous passage through the past few years, a long, open-ended
journey had beckoned to me like a Siren's song. Hitting the road had
always served me in times of transition as an entrée into a reflective
trance, as a tool of personal reinvention, as literal and metaphorical
escape. For much of my life, I had sought psychic salve in the thrill
of discovery amidst wild, unfamiliar places and among unpredictable
traveling companions. Borneo certainly qualified as wild and unfamiliar,
and my two children effortlessly supplied the unpredictability.
Still, I feared that my reflexive tendency toward flight might somehow
backfire in my current circumstances. I couldn't even be sure that my
trusted traveling muse would pull me from my current chasm of the soul.
I certainly couldn't predict what the wild and unfamiliar might do for
my two kids in their shell-shocked state. In setting out on this journey,
I knew my children and I would encounter both fear and amazement, the
inevitable result of exchanging quotidian sureties and the comforts
of routine for bumpy bus rides and motorcycle taxi rides and elephant-back
rides and the incessant buzzing of mosquitoes in gecko-squawking tropical
nights.
What I didn't know was what kind of inner journey we would all take.
Here on the Sekonyer River, Kolya had descended into a withdrawn, contentious
teen funk. Zoe had entered her own Heart of Darkness territory, portentous
and terrifying. For her, this part of the trip was an odyssey to the
archetypes of fear, to a motherless land of poisonous snakes and voracious
jungle animals that make little girls disappear without a burp.
Instead of liberating ourselves from the daily reminders of our losses,
I wondered, would we all come unmoored completely in these unfamiliar
and fearsome settings? Was I being selfish beyond all measure? Had I
already pushed the kids too far?
That night, after Zoe had finally been coaxed to sleep by the houseboat's
lapping lullaby, I worried about the kids' ability to cope with the
stress of such an unfamiliar place. No matter how much grown-ups extol
kids' adaptability when we change their routines to accommodate our
jobs or our upwardly mobile dreams or our divorces, children are the
most reactionary of all creatures. If I so much as cut up Kolya's French
toast horizontally rather than diagonally when he was four, he would
wail as if I had knocked him off his booster. Even entering his teens,
he'd eat the same bowl of cereal every morning, spend every afternoon
learning to kick-flip his skateboard, pass every weekend evening with
as many friends as could gather in front of a Sony Playstation.
I knew this, knew that molding this routine-the Cheerios mornings,
the Friday night popcorn and videos at home, the bedtimes and reading
times and Saturday morning chores-was all-important as the three of
us rearranged our lives. Traipsing around the world, then, where the
unfamiliar became commonplace, suddenly seemed like folly rather than
the dazzling idea I had imagined.
Here we were in Borneo, where we had come to see the orangutans of
Tanjung Puting National Park, two months into our five-month around-the-world
odyssey. I had constructed only the basic thread of an itinerary, which
was to take the kids to visit a few of the planet's great ecological
wonders that were in danger of disappearing as the consequence of human
development. Already the three of us had completed a five-day "walkabout"
on an Australian rainforest island, shooed five-foot-long lace monitor
lizards away from our tent site, spotted several rare and endangered
cassowary birds, scuba dived and snorkeled off the Great Barrier Reef,
and climbed the highest mountain in Bali, among other adventures. There
were months yet to come, however, including more jungle treks in Vietnam
and Nepal, surreal border crossings into Cambodia, and, although we
didn't know it yet, the even more surreal events of September 11, 2001,
still two weeks away, that changed the tenor of the whole world.
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