This is the story of our getting lost.

by Jordan Deitcher

Ambarita March 10, 1992.

I find myself reluctant and eager to begin the story of our night in the mountain jungles of Sumatra. Of our hacking our way through the mountain jungles of Sumatra. Of the island eye of the island of Sumatra. Of Samosir, the pupil of that eye. Through the eye and into the heart of Sumatra.

I sit here now, safely back on our little porch at Barbara’s Guest House overlooking Lake Toba, the iris of that eye, in the late afternoon, a beer on the floor beside me, with the memory fresh in my mind, eager and reluctant to let it go. I fear I’ll fail to adequately convey the intensity of our little ordeal. I’ve already missed the extraordinary opportunity of recording it all with my video camera. The only time I even turned it on was when we got up after the soaking cold twelve-hour night. That was the one break in concentration we allowed ourselves. Otherwise we were all business. Except for about three hours in, when Enid felt she had to let me know that she blamed me for mis-leading us into this mess. She had been right, it’s true, but hadn’t been emphatic enough to penetrate my blindness and/or obstinacy.

Down near the lake there’s a monkey perched like an elf on a wayward stump, chewing at the remains of a mangosteen he’s holding with his toes as well as his fingers. Every now and then he swings and scrambles around the perimeter afforded him by the chain from the stump to his waist, hugging the fruity pit with glee. Life at the end of the tether.

Following my gut has sometimes proved risky, I admit. I see paths where others don’t. But that’s sometimes good. This time it was life and death. This time it was only she and I. But I hacked our way out of the jungle, and I’m here to tell the tale.

Enid just lit a kretek for me by herself. Only for you, she says.

We had just spent the night in a kampung halfway up the mountain from Pangururan on our way back to Jenny’s Homestay. As we were about to leave, a village elder saw my camera and asked if I would record a traditional Batak funeral that was just getting underway, and send them a copy after we returned home. He ushered us towards one of the Batak houses, a bunch of giggling, curious kids gathering to follow us. Elevated on log piles, these impressive wooden arks are meant to evoke spaceships, their roofs huge pointed saddles soaring at the horns towards the heavens, to the Pleiades, to home.

We climbed the ladder and squeezed through a tiny door into a room crammed with people sitting or squatting around a polished wood coffin, a cross on its lid. Sunlight sifting in through open eaves illuminated clove-scented smoke hanging hypnotically in the air from kreteks pulsing like fireflies in the shadows. Hymns and eulogies floated above the crying of babies and the wailing of mourners, who were attended by those around them. Finally, the coffin was passed hand to hand to the door, eased down the ladder and escorted by the whole village the short distance to its final resting place. There, accompanied by prayers and a final outburst of wailing from the widow, it was lowered into the waiting grave. We were thanked by many people, and then took our leave, accompanied by a band of laughing children that trailed off after ten minutes.

This was the first time I had ever seen a dead person. Mostly I saw it fuzzily and reduced through the viewfinder, the camera between me and death. But as the song says, Who cares about the living when the camera’s on who dies.

We were hiking through a lush valley in the midafternoon when a storm began to threaten. We ducked into the surrounding forest for a little cover and continued to skirt the perimeter as the rain fell. A butterfly, tangerine, black and beige, began flitting around in front of me. I caught it easily in my hands, and when I opened them, it didn’t seem inclined to move, so we continued walking through the glade. It perched in my open palm like a hood ornament, moving around only a little, sometimes spreading its wings. It’s so validating to share your path with a fellow creature for a moment, a feeling of being in sync.

A half-hour later we merged into a dell of pastureland with an old Batak house in the distance. A few steps in and the butterfly took off, looking for a direction other than the one in which we were taking it. Maybe it knew something.

We escaped the rain into what turned out to be the house of Jhon and his family, owners of the homestay farther up the mountain on the other side of the fence from Jenny’s. We shared our cheese and bread and cookies and cigarettes and candy with them, and they fed us a meal for 2000 Rupiah. I had told them when we arrived that we were going to Jenny’s, but they either didn’t understand me or hoped to change my mind. A long hour later the rain stopped, and they sent their 14-year-old daughter to show us the path. What is and isn’t a path up here is not always evident, and in one such area she stopped and again asked where we were going to stay. I apologetically explained that we had promised Jenny, whereupon she turned and left us in the middle of nowhere, with just a faint path from which to begin.

The water, choppy in a pre-storm wind, is quite a bit higher than when we first got back. Breaking over the banks, in fact. The eye is welling up. Now the wind is spraying me with freshwater tears. Don’t cry for me Sumatera.

Maybe she cursed me, or perhaps had the power to influence events in some way. We had already heard of the eerie reputation that the Samosir Batak enjoy throughout Southeast Asia.

Now it’s raining hard, and Enid has called my attention to those fateful mountains behind us, shrouded in the heavy mist in the near darkness of the end of day. Now the mountains are lost completely in the clouds. That’s what we spent our night in.

About fifteen nervous minutes later we came upon the roughly plowed road that we knew from last time led to the path that led to Jenny’s. We had a happy reunion with her and Anita and the old man and his wife and the kids and the puppy.

At dusk we went looking for those wild horses that had come galloping out of the mist at about this time the week before. We had been sitting outside Jenny’s compound overlooking a beautiful valley, chatting in the fading light with Craig and Holly, whom we had just met. Enid was giving me these rueful looks; young and soon to be married, they reminded us of ourselves fifteen years before. “They should only know,” her eyes were saying to me. They had only been traveling for a couple of weeks, while we were four months in.

We were trading stories, when suddenly we heard the sound of hooves, and turned to see perhaps eight wild horses appear on the dusty path not thirty yards away, the evening mist mingling with their bodies. They stopped when they saw us and kept their distance, pawing nervously at the ground. We talked quietly for a while, then carefully stood up to go back to the compound in the dying light. When the horses couldn’t see us, they broke into a gallop and swept past us into the yard, making a couple of uneasy circles before settling down to nibble on the sparse grass. I was commenting on how hallucinatory this all was, when off in the distance we heard the muted sounds of a flute and guitar, and turned to see a string of five men emerging like a dream from out of the misty field.

Our expectations this dusk were soon interrupted by rain, and we headed inside for the night. Last week, Jenny and Anita had had us all dancing Batak-style for at least two hours while the old man accompanied us steadily on his crude wooden xylophone. Tonight the mood was much more subdued.

The next morning we said goodbye to Jenny and her family and started down the narrow, steepening trail towards Ambarita. After about forty-five minutes we came across a path going down into the woods from the ridge we were walking. Enid said that Jenny had told her to follow the ridge, but this looked better traveled.

This became one of those tussles we’d been having throughout most of the trip, as well as leading up to it, and the consequences of choosing one path or the other seemed almost beside the point, inconsequential. What difference did it make? It was looking more and more likely that we were going to go our separate ways soon anyway.

Anyway, she came along.

Tuktuk, March 11

We are now on the porch of our room at Carolina’s overlooking an overgrown depression in the land leading to the water’s edge below. Small gray and brown birds flit from coconut palms to passion fruit trees to the concrete steps of our bungalow and away again when they notice us. Another bird, unseen down below, delivers a pulsing dry breathy whistle without pause, as if it were manually inflating a bicycle tire. The mountains are backlit by the soft light of late afternoon, virtually featureless in the haze, save for the line of the ridge.

It might have made a difference if Enid had been more insistent; I most likely would have groaned and gone back up to the ridge just to humour her, the long-suffering husband once again compelled to take the road more traveled. But she didn’t, and down we went. The path was fairly wide and clear, and when it narrowed a bit a few hundred yards in, it still offered as much promise as other similar paths had made good on in the past. Soon multiple paths seemed to offer themselves, although they began to reveal themselves for what they were: shallow depressions in the earth invitingly softened by beds of old russet pine needles. I continued to follow the most obvious, or should I say most deceptive, line down through the forest, away from the ridge.

A half-hour later we looked around and realized that we had no idea where we were. Every direction, including the one from which we thought we had come, looked the same, and we had lost both the horizon and the sun to steer by. Clouds and mist enfold these mountains often and overwhelmingly.

Enid, busy with her own writing, just asked me what it was that made us continue deeper into the jungle and into the indecipherable density of the undergrowth. I don’t remember when it was that I actually crossed that line. She was saying, “Follow the ridge,” but it faded behind something else saying, “No. Down. In.” It wasn’t so much a voice as a feeling of knowing the way we were supposed to go.

Earlier we had picked up sticks for support sidling down the slippery path. I now began putting mine to another purpose, first as a game perhaps, then in earnest. We were surrounded on all sides by beautiful 8-foot Rousseau-like ferns which, on contact, revealed themselves to be covered with black 1-inch thorns. I started swinging my stick back and forth to clear a way. It didn’t seem so tough at first, if I was careful, as the ferns fell without much of a fuss. There was something satisfying about slashing open a path. But the going got tougher and, having lost track of a clear destination, we were soon moving just to move.

We started looking for ridges to climb so that we could get our bearings. I whacked our way up to the top of one of them, and was aghast to see nothing but more ridges all around us. I had had a picture of Samosir Island bisected by one long neat ridge from end to end, for this is what you see from the coast. Instead, all we saw in every direction was mountain jungle, with more ups and downs than you can shake a stick at. The seriousness of our situation was beginning to dawn on us.

Although the clouds hadn’t lifted, we were able to see down below us what looked to be a very inviting lawn with long, soft, bright-green grass. Enid hoped that this might connect with the grassy valley that we had traversed on the way up eight days earlier. It seemed less than a half mile away as the crow flies. Not too bad.

By now my legs were bleeding freely from all the scratches and cuts, as if leeches had been having a heyday. I was probably pretty tired, not to mention hungry and thirsty, but didn’t feel it at all. We had brought only a liter of water, some cookies and a few passion fruits that Jenny had given us. I started once again chopping away at those damn ferns with my stick, then holding it at both ends and falling forward with it to flatten them into something we could walk on, lifting my feet free from the tangled undergrowth of strong thin creeping vines to take a step or two. Enid was literally not big enough to do this, so it was up to me.

A half mile as the crow flies is not the same as twice that up and down through dense jungle. It must have been 1:30 by the time we got to the grass. We had left Jenny’s about 10:15. The sun broke through the clouds, and suddenly the soft meadow revealed itself to be a swamp of razor grass about six feet high. I changed into my long pants, which I had been saving for a special occasion, i.e. a comfortable dry dinner back at Barbara’s. We tramped our way through this nightmare, clearing the grass away from our exposed arms with our sticks, lifting our feet very high to avoid the thick stems and swampy, scummy sinkholes around which the grasses grew. We had to stop every ten or fifteen steps to catch our breath. When fifteen minutes later we got to the edge we had been aiming for, our clothes soaked and tattered, we realized that we were no better off than when we started – there was no connection to those grasses we had crossed last time.

Flickers of fear were fanning into flames. The sun was still out, so we decided to circle all the way back to where we had been an hour ago, and to climb another ridge with the hope of getting our bearings. As we pressed forward, fighting for every step, I began hearing whimpers from behind me under the sound of my thrashings. I turned around, gasping for breath, to see what was going on. Bitter tears rolled down Enid’s cheeks. “It’s your fault,” she said.

Tuktuk, March 12.

Woke up today feeling heavy and tired. Yesterday I felt really strong, even carrying both our backpacks from the boat to Carolina’s because of Enid’s sunburn. This afternoon we smoked with Bernie, a local who married an Australian woman seven years after the car accident that killed three of his friends and left him paralyzed from the waist down. He talked about the beliefs of Batak people, and especially about the role of dukuns, the Indonesian equivalent of Malaysian bomohs, the shamans that have become so much a part of our trip. I found myself feeling increasingly heavy, unable to keep up with what he was saying.

A black bird with a wide white stripe from wing to wing just flew by, an outpouring of cheeps and twerps defining its trajectory.

Well, not entirely my fault because she acquiesced so easily, and neither of us looked around until it was too late. But it was my fault just the same. I knew she was scared and that she always has to have someone to blame, even herself, as she also did now. So I understood, and I wasn’t angry, but I was hurt that she would put this between us at this time. She admitted that she was being difficult, but she couldn’t pretend not to feel what she felt. She turned away from me in silence, then pulled out her camera and took what turned out to be her only photo of the incredible tangle we had been fighting.

Enid wants to know if we should have mushroom omelets for lunch. Small, medium, large, too large, as the hilariously scrawled sign says. I don’t know if I’ve got the energy. Although it would probably be a fitting end to this whole experience. Since we were interested in dukuns and looking for answers, Bernie suggested we go to Brastagi, where the dukuns are better than the ones here, less commercial, he says. The dukun you don’t know is better then the dukun you know.

So we thrashed on in silence, me nursing my hurt and thinking how typical of her, and she following behind, sheepishly brooding. We were heading slowly up another ridge, not far, we thought, from where we had been prior to heading down into the grasses. Finally the density seemed to lighten as we neared the top, and suddenly with my next step I would have tumbled over the tangled edge of the ridge onto treetops way below. I had to crouch down to steady myself. In the distance, lying so peacefully in the hazy mid-afternoon sun, was Lake Toba and Ambarita and Barbara’s. And we could hear the trucks and the motorcycles and the boats so very near.

It was now about 3 o’clock and I said that I was prepared to take some chances, but that I was also prepared to spend the night if necessary. It was so dense all around us that it was difficult to ascertain the pitch of the drop or if there was something easier in either direction. Hanging on to what seemed to be reasonably rooted undergrowth and bushes, I started carefully climbing ladder-like down the cliff, about a 70% drop. I was able to make it down perhaps thirty feet, Enid following well behind but really scared now, almost crying, when suddenly she said she that this was crazy and she was going back up. I looked up at her, then down, looking for why I couldn’t get a toehold, and noticed that my next step was into the air, as the cliff wall became a vertical rock face, dropping at least a couple of hundred feet to certain death. I suggested that we go back up.

It took a few minutes for us to catch our breath, hard to do with our hearts beating so fast. We certainly wouldn’t be attempting anything like that again. We started down the safe side of the ridge and tried to follow the high line, but when we made our way back up to the top all we could see was jungle. The sun had dipped over the other side of the range and fog was rolling in, blurring the ridges into an indistinct dark gray-green.

We chopped our way down into a gully, where the tangles were always the thickest, and started to claw our way back up. By now I was like a machine, as the animal in me took over. I was neither tired nor hungry nor thirsty. It was about 4:30, the weather was now threatening, and this was our last chance to get out before dark. We had been scouting in vain for a spot large enough to spend the night, and finally settled on a very small irregular clearing under a scruffy pine, the uneven ground and surrounding low branches covered with old pine needles. I looked beyond it and thought I could see that we were once again on the external ridge over Ambarita. I went towards it, swinging away at everything, and saw through the clouds the barest hint of the town and water below. The drop, as far as I could tell, was very steep. I came back to the clearing and reported to Enid that we should get comfortable and prepare for a night of rain.

Brastagi, Sunday, the Ides of March

So there we were, on the small patch of pine needle-covered ground afforded us by this one not very impressive tree. Certainly should the rains come we could not expect much cover. It would be reasonable to assume that no human being had ever set foot on this spot, much less spent the night here. We had an area of about 8′ x 5′, which sloped slightly and was lumpy from hidden roots. Off to the side was a small natural shelter formed by the arching of one of the tree’s roots, just big enough to stash our day pack with the cameras, which we wrapped in some torn plastic bags.

For seven years, since Peru, I’ve been travelling with a ball of strong cord for a time such as this. Unfortunately I had left it in my big pack in Ambarita. We had our two ponchos – Enid’s we would lay on the needles once we padded and leveled the ground some more, and mine we would suspend from the tree and surrounding scrubbery. But with what? Anything that looked slightly viney broke as soon as we tried to knot it. We managed to awkwardly hook the corners of the poncho onto some branches, forming a sloped, but sagging roof. We cut some fringes from the sadum weaving we had bought from Anita the night before, who said it would protect us in our travels, and along with our shoelaces, tried to tie up the hood opening in the middle so that it wouldn’t catch water. There was no way this was going to keep us dry in a strong rain. Maybe we would be lucky.

It was now 5:30, and the sun was well behind the hills. We knew we had twelve hours of darkness ahead and we had to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. We lay down on Enid’s poncho and tried to organize all our things – the pack, our shoes, our half-package of biscuits, our weakening flashlight – so that they would stay dry. So far that day we had eaten perhaps five biscuits each, five passion fruits each and a half-liter of water between us. But neither of us was hungry or thirsty. We had worked very hard slashing our way to this spot, but our bodies were in what I guess you would call survival mode.

It soon became apparent how flimsy and ill-constructed our shelter was. We continued to make adjustments to the poncho, but nothing really was improved. We looked around at our spot in the dying light. We could see nothing but the perimeter of dense jungle which completely enclosed us.

Brastagi, March 16

I’m sitting on the bed of our hotel room in Brastagi writing in the tinted light of the louvered windows, looking out at the rusted galvanized roofs in the foreground, the clump of trees just beyond and the dark outline of the mountains in the distance. It is sunny out and the temperature is very pleasant. Some children are sitting on the ground outside talking together, A tabby cat with a white ruff sits roast-like quietly by. They eat cats here, and dogs. But which ones?

We put on every bit of clothing we had in anticipation of the cold mountain night. I had on a T-shirt, then my sweatshirt, then over that my other T-shirt, damp and dirty from the day’s walk. I wore my long damp black pants, my only dry socks and my sandals, because my running shoes were wet. I tied my Righteous Rider bandana around my head. Enid also had on everything, including her magenta down vest and her scarf, which she wrapped around her head like a babushka. Thus braced, we lay down on her poncho and covered ourselves with our two thin sarongs, a towel and Anita’s sadum weaving.

By 6:30 the sky was not yet quite black, and the first light rain began to fall. It fell softly through the needles and the ferns on to the spongy ground and tapped lightly on the flimsily suspended poncho. It increased in strength and the poncho began to sag, its underside soon damp and dripping. We had sealed the hood-opening as best we could, but gravity loves a leak. Every few minutes, as the rain fell harder, I would poke the sagging spots so that the water would run off the sides, but because the area protected by the poncho was so small and I was on the downside, the water inevitably fell on me. We huddled as close together as possible, spoon-like, both to keep as much warmth in as we could and also to try to stay out of the direct rain.

As the darkness became complete we abandoned the illusion that we might remain partially dry. Every fifteen minutes or so, when our hips became too sore from lying on our side on the gnarled ground, we would slowly and laboriously reverse the spoon, trying both to stay within the confines of the poncho and to keep our thrashings from mashing our coverings into sodden balls at our feet. The important thing now was to keep warm, so we decided to use Enid’s poncho as a cover and sleep directly on the damp ground. If the weather stayed bad and we were still here the next night, we would still be wet and would have lost a lot more of our energy, with virtually no food or water to sustain us. I knew that I could survive this night with no real problems, but tomorrow would be essentially our last chance.

Enid was scared and would occasionally start to cry a little. Neither of us could get comfortable enough to sleep and the night became long. At some point the rain died down and we began to feel optimistic, but fifteen minutes later it began to fall harder than ever, with flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder, and continued this way for most of the night. We were now wrapped in our soaked clothes and Enid’s useless poncho like a strudel. We tried to disturb this arrangement as little as possible, but because of the pain brought on by our positions we still had to turn every half hour or so. The covers ended up kicked somewhere into little balls and were nowhere to be found in the total darkness.

Today Frans took us to his village, Suker, to see a dukun, a woman he called Mami who reminded us only a little of Mother, the bomoh from Kuala Lumpur. When we asked her what had happened to us on the mountain, we got the answer others had given us, that the ghosts of those who had died there sought to lure us in. The spirit spoke to her through her neck, and she translated to us while deeply puffing away on a stream of kreteks. I couldn’t hear the spirit myself, but Frans assured me he could. It wasn’t a very impressive performance, none of the bells and whistles that accompanied Mother’s ritual – the torchlight, the trances, the sacrifices – and we felt a little let down. Mind you, Mother was channeling Kali to exorcise the evil eye she saw had possessed me, so more elaborate production values were probably needed. We asked Mami other questions about our life and purpose etc., but everything was pretty vague. She said if I studied with her for five days she could teach me how to have a spirit talk to me through my neck too. Crash course.

The night both dragged and flew. It seemed so much longer than twelve hours, but the immediacy of each moment absorbed every part of our being. We said little to while away the time because we were too miserable. I shivered and shook often, although not from a deep place, because I still felt reasonably warm inside. It was a violent yet superficial shaking off of the cold and wet. We laughed a bit at the absurdity of our situation, and reminded ourselves about how much colder and more miserable we had been when we climbed Mount Kenya. The only thing that made this situation worse was that we had no way of knowing if we would be able to find our way out of this mountainous jungle maze the next day. I kept one cold hand under her down vest where it was damp but warm, and I sometimes turned my thoughts to what Enid had said about this all being my fault.

We turned to each other huddled in fetal positions face to face, and started to laugh and shiver, shiver and laugh, and soon we were kissing, something we hadn’t done in a long long time.

Towards first light our body heat reserves began to go, and we were reluctant to move and open ourselves to the cold morning air. We finally roused ourselves at about 7 o’clock. The rain had just recently stopped and we stepped outside our sopping nest to look out on the day. We were a comical sight, our clothing clinging soggily to our bodies. Enid retrieved the video camera, which had stayed dry with the rest of the daypack in the little grotto. I turned it on and asked her to describe to the folks back home what was going on. “Well, we survived the night,” she said, and began singing “Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.” She went on to describe our predicament in measured tones, her eyes continually scanning the density in stunned disbelief, and how we hoped to find our way off this mountain today. I panned the camera over the clearing and perimeter to give a sense of what we were confronting, then gave it over to her. She recorded the remains of our ludicrous shelter, then pointed it at me, looking like a drowned rat, I’m sure, as I said a few words, beginning with, “Brr Brr.” This turned out to be the only time we used the camera during the entire ordeal. I was thinking, but didn’t say, that if they discovered it next to our remains, we should leave a note saying, “If found…”

We packed up everything in a sodden, dirty heap, thanked the powers that be that no strange insects had found their way onto our persons, ate two passion fruits and a couple of biscuits each, had a gulp of water, straightened up and looked around for a direction. It was still very cloudy and no obvious way presented itself. Enid confided to me that one of the things that she had obsessed about during the night was that somebody would sneak up on us and make off with our cameras. You can take the girl out of the city…

Bukit Lawang, March 17

We slept last night on the bamboo and rattan roof deck of our bungalow in the middle of this jungle paradise, on a comfortable foam mattress with clean sheets under our mosquito net. It grew fairly cold after the unexpected heat of the day, and we had only Enid’s sarong to cover us, but we didn’t mind. The sound of the river rushing over rocks was joined at dawn by the music of birds as they danced with small monkeys in branches just a few feet from where we lay. The sun came up over the low hill a hazy brilliant orange.

Yesterday we were casually informed by one of the rangers working with the orang utans that the torrential rain we had experienced on the mountain had been a blessing because it kept the snakes and poisonous millipedes underground.

We headed to the ledge I had checked the night before, only about thirty feet away but through heavy brush. We were still socked in by morning mist, but the drop appeared to be almost vertical, so we came down the safe side a little and tried to stay parallel to the ridge line. When we climbed back up about twenty minutes later, we found that we had somehow gotten ourselves on to another interior ridge. Ambarita was nowhere to be seen.

We needed to get as high as possible. We chose a nearby ridge which rose from a deep, heavily forested gully below us. I hated these gullies. We knew that the whole day could go like this, and that we had to keep going if we were ever to return to the outside world. I kept beating back the ferns and flattening them to gain a step or two, tripping constantly on the undergrowth of strong thin vines. Enid started calling for help, “Help. Tolong.” I joined her at the top of my voice, but the sound was just swallowed up. Nobody, unless he was very close indeed, would hear our cries. But periodically from then on, we renewed our calls.

As we approached the bottom of these gullies, the ferns thinned out and gave way to scraggy pines. The ground was a bed of pine needles and the going, for about fifty feet, would be steep but easier. At the bottom I swung away at the impenetrable tangle with abandon, not stopping until we began the climb back up, laughably trying to build some momentum. This one was quite steep, and we had to pull ourselves up with our hands. Every minute or so we stopped to catch our breath, then fell to it once again until we saw some sky through the ferns and leaves, with the promise of a view of civilization. We finally got to the top, and to our horror discovered that all we could see were more ridges.

It was only 9 o’clock, and we could not let ourselves become too dispirited, so we immediately continued on, again dropping down from the ridge line but trying to stay high. The sound of rushing water down below us brought our attention to a deep gully. Here was a hope. It sounded like a substantial stream, and if it flowed eastward, then it was flowing down towards Ambarita, and maybe we could follow it. We would need the appearance of the sun to determine that.

The way was dense and steep, and when we finally came within sight of it, there was still no sun for us to determine which way it was flowing. We couldn’t just stay there, so we climbed back up. During the long, tough going we called for help now and then, just in case. At the top the story was the same: just more dark, misty, claustrophobic ridges.

I had been the one keeping our spirits up, keeping us going, but for the first time I let my anxiety show and I let out a cry of frustration and despair, not knowing whether Enid would be able to take over, at least for now.

She started making promises to God: that she would appreciate what she had, that she would always tell the truth, that she would always be a good person, and that if we ever got out we would have a… a… a… child! There, she said it. She had never said it before. I rolled my eyes. We had always said we had no time for a kid, busy NYC artists that we were. And half a day ago we were ready to split up. But there it was.

I asked Enid to choose our direction. There was a particularly high ridge that she thought might lead to Jenny’s, and which I hoped might at least give us a sense of where we were. Either way, it did not look at all like an easy climb. We hacked and dragged ourselves down into a gully, crossing a small stream, then pulled and scrambled our way up the toughest, steepest climb so far.

We finally got to the top. No view. But when we looked down at our feet we saw that we were on a path! And about fifty feet down the path a stick with a daub of yellow paint was stuck in the ground. I don’t know if we were more elated or shocked, as if we hadn’t actually expected to find our way out and were now emotionally unprepared for it. We dropped our packs and collapsed to the ground, lying spread-eagled on our backs, trying to claim as much of the path with our bodies as possible, not wanting to move for fear of losing it again. We lay there, breathing heavily from exhaustion, from emotion, looking up through the layers of leaves to the sunless sky, still unable to ascertain which way was what. We took a few minutes to calm down, then got up, gathered our stuff and turned left towards the yellow marker, which we were guessing was north. The path stayed reasonably clear, and when it got fuzzy, another yellow marker was there to show the way.

We walked for maybe a half hour without finding a useful view. There was almost no up-and-down, so we must have found the ridge that was the spine of the range, which was aligned north-south. If this were so, then about 15 miles north lay Simanindo at the tip of the island. This was promising because the mountain gradually flattened out towards the end, as we had seen when we had cycled out there the week before, and we would probably be able to get down without too much trouble. But 15 miles was 15 miles. And which way was north?

We weren’t sure what we would run into if we were to go south. We knew it wasn’t as far, but we remembered it as far steeper. When we had climbed from Ambarita to Jenny’s that first time, the steep mountain path suddenly broke through heavy foliage onto a roughly plowed road in the middle of nowhere. It had abruptly ended as a small path where a yellow marker, like the ones we were seeing now, led us to Jenny’s. Could this be part of the same path? We doubled back towards what we were hoping was south.

We counted markers back to where we had begun, and then continued on. Whenever the path seemed in danger of disappearing, a yellow marker was there to show us the way. But was it the way? And then suddenly, about an hour later, a plowed road! But was it the same road as last time? Enid kissed the ground.

We walked, both lightly and heavily, for we were very tired. The walk soon started to seem too long. Two broad low points in the road up ahead were completely flooded, leaving no alternative but to wade through. But our road hadn’t been flooded at all. Was this all from the rain of the night before? Or was it the wrong road? We doubled back to see if we had missed the path to Jenny’s, but we didn’t see anything. We went on, crossing the two floods, and when the road turned a corner we saw four backpackers a few hundred yards ahead, talking in the middle of the road.

We didn’t run. They didn’t see us. We hoped they would stay there until we got to them. And they did. And they saw us. And we said hello. And then we poured out what had happened to us, realizing even as we spoke that we were not communicating the seriousness of what we had just gone through. We both had this intense need to share our experience, to have some witnesses, but we were obviously failing to make an impression. They made some polite responses, but finally we all hoisted our packs and made ready to go. Two were going back to Ambarita, and two to Jenny’s. We felt too tired to go down so we decided to go to Jenny’s. Accompanied.

When we got there, they all seemed surprised to see us. Enid rushed to Jenny and broke down in sobs, knowing that even if she didn’t understand the details she would appreciate a show of emotion. Jenny was so sorry, so disturbed, that she announced that, this being Sunday, she was going to walk the hour-and-a-half to church to thank God for saving us. And ten minutes later off she went.

We hung around as the afternoon grew late, trying to explain to whomever would listen, both locals and the few travelers, about what had happened, finding in each telling an additional detail that would make our experience more vivid to the uninitiated, as well as to ourselves. We ate a little, although everything was over-chillied, slept a little, breathed. We were deeply exhausted.

Just as darkness fell, Jenny appeared, in her Sunday clothes, carrying a 100-pound sack of potatoes on her head. She brought it into the kitchen and dropped it heavily on the floor. I measured her 4’4″ height against my 6’2″ to see if carrying the load had shrunk her another fraction, as she claimed it did. Later on the old man played music on his wooden xylophone, as he always did, and the women danced a bit with beer bottles on their heads, as they always did.

At about 10 o’clock I went out into the beautiful star-filled night to pee with the pigs in the front yard.

Here at Bukit Lawang, in the beautiful sun-filled day, I’m being treated to a chorus of tweets, twitters, trills and the occasional monkey scream. I was writing in just my underwear before, and Enid decided to take a video of all my cuts, scratches and scars, most of which have almost healed. I narrated as she panned over my body: “These are the scars from my hacking our way through the jungle to save my life and that of my beloved wife thank you very much.”

I turned to go back in when I noticed, on the horizon, that one particularly bright star was behaving most strangely. I thought perhaps that some leaves from a tree in the distance were blowing around in front of it to give it the illusion of movement. But no, it was above the trees and its movements were impossibly quick and precise. It would be still, then suddenly shoot across the sky and come to an instant stop. Then off in another direction. Then back again. Then some smaller glowing objects seemed to shoot off from it into the heavens, leaving brief trails of sparks. Nigel, a Scot who was staying the night, came onto the porch and watched it with me. I called Enid to come outside with the video, but it was too dark to pick up anything other than our voices as we talked about what we were seeing. Anita came out and said that they saw these all the time, especially at three or four in the morning, when there might be several. Bintang gila, she called them, crazy stars. She said they were the space ships from the Pleiades that brought the Batak people to Sumatra long ago, and would one day return to bring them back home.

We all watched for awhile, then the others went back in, including Enid who, despite wanting to stay outside, couldn’t stay awake anymore.

It was incredibly quiet under the canopy of stars.

In the distance a patch of jungle was suddenly lit up a bright white, and then went dark in an instant. I couldn’t tell how far away it was, but it was at the same elevation as we and seemed to be at least a few hundred yards in diameter. I continued watching the movements of the star, then after a while went back in to see if Enid was okay. When I came back out the star was still flitting around. Suddenly another patch of light briefly illuminated the jungle not far from where I had seen the first one, this time more yellow, as if a car had turned a corner in the night and the headlights had briefly played over the trees. But there were no cars there. There wasn’t anything.

As I stood there in the moonless night, excited but exhausted, the star-filled heavens as vast as the jungle had been close, everything suddenly stopped. My senses widened, dilated, intent on absorbing an awareness that was expanding into every cell of my being. In the pause a veil lifted, and I could now see that the universe was clearly paying attention. To me. And always had been. This was my reward for having survived our ordeal: a glimpse of the alien, into the immensity of life, an affirmation that there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. I felt blessed, redeemed even, by this moment of grace that gave shape and meaning to what I had just gone through. And I not only felt lucky to be alive, I felt lucky to be alive.

I had every intention of getting up at 3 AM to see the UFOs, but of course I slept through. Oh well. Jenny said it had clouded up anyway.

Bukit Lawang, March 19.

Enid read this account before we went to sleep last night safe under the mosquito netting on our beautiful roof deck, and said that it conveyed very well the feeling of what we experienced. She talked about how when we had kissed during the storm, she felt the old closeness with me that she had all but forgotten. All her irresolution and wavering fell away as we faced our ordeal together. She propped herself up on her elbow and gave me a long meaningful look. Then something came into her eyes and she started to laugh: we had both hoped that this long trip would clear away the dense undergrowth of old hurts and resentments, but she, at least, hadn’t counted on our actually having to live through the metaphor. We were both stubborn people, and she wondered if we’d still be together if we hadn’t gone through this.

She lifted the corner of our mosquito net, reached for the candle and blew it out. She tucked the net back in again, gave me a kiss on the cheek, plumped up her little travel pillow and settled down. Night sounds from the surrounding jungle filled the moonlit silence. Intermittent laughter from one of the restaurants across the river came floating in on the tropical night air. Then, as if on cue, “It was still your fault.” Perhaps. But as I stretched out on the mattress beside her I replied that, rather than getting us lost, maybe I had gotten us found. She rolled over towards me and took me in her arms.