GoKawiilWhen I imagine a life of pure freedom, I tend to picture a tree house. This is an image pulled directly from my childhood in the suburbs of Chicago. But the tree house I envision is not the slapped-together pile of plywood and two-by-fours one usually thinks of when one thinks of a “tree house.” It is a spacious, elegant, gently decaying structure in a far-off jungle.
I first saw this tree house in an issue of National Geographic when I was about twelve years old. The cover of that month’s issue featured an image of a mountaineer rappelling down a thin rope into a blue-black tunnel of glacial ice, which normally would have enthralled me. But scanning the table of contents on the right-hand margin, my eye was drawn away from the glacier to another story. The title read, simply, “People of the Trees.”
I turned to page 34. The article described a tribe called the Korowai, whose lives were spent roaming the swampy forests of Papua (then known as Irian Jaya). I read on with steadily intensifying fascination. The Korowai wore only leaves and vines, as well as the occasional bone through their noses (specifically, “the thin bone of a bat’s wing”). They hunted with bows and arrows, eating insects, reptiles, and birds. And, on rare occasions, they practiced ritual cannibalism, to “absorb” the “powers” of the slain person. I did not find this story unsettling, or even particularly surprising; its outlines had long ago been etched into my young mind, albeit crudely, by countless cartoons and comic books.
What did surprise me were the lofty tree houses in which the Korowai lived. The story opened with an image of a huge, somewhat decrepit hut built in the uppermost branches of an ironwood tree, more than a hundred feet above the forest floor. It was reached by climbing a long, spindly wooden ladder. According to the home’s owner, he built it to “see the birds and the mountains and to keep sorcerers from climbing my stairs.” I remember lying on the carpet of my room and staring at that photo and feeling an ache of yearning so intense that it bordered on bruise. This, I thought, was how humans were meant to live: far from the suburbs, deep in the jungle, high in the air, hidden away in a place where magic still exists.
Decades later, while sifting through various childhood relics, I ran across that old issue of National Geographic and read the story about the Korowai again. My callow love of the exotic had faded with time, but to my surprise, I found myself admiring the Korowai way of life for entirely new reasons. Their communities had no rulers, no police force, no prisons, and no bureaucracy. Until very recently, they relied upon no modern industrial products for their survival. They lived in small family units on large plots of mostly wild land, but they traveled widely throughout the forest so they could visit family members and exchange goods, stories, and songs. One’s “wealth” (excess food, spare tools) was expected to be shared with anyone who needed it. The Korowai seemed to sincerely believe in the equality of all people and, more incredibly still, to actually behave in accordance with this belief. They also identified on a personal level with the forest around them, knowing that they needed to tend to it to keep it alive, just as it kept them alive.
Rousseau, who despised the foul air and stifling social conventions of “over-crowded cities,” portrayed the “pure state of nature” as a fundamentally solitary existence; humans, being relieved of the bonds that hold one to another, are thus free from domination. But the Korowai way of life offered a stark rebuke to this notion. They were able to maintain an extraordinary level of freedom, it seemed, precisely because they were tied inseparably both to one another and to the forest. True freedom, seen in this sylvan light, was nothing more and nothing less, than a state of wild co-flourishing.
Once I finished reading the story, I paged through it once more, admiring the images of lean, gleaming bodies bent in postures of labor and leisure: an artfully blurred shot of a man carrying a dead cassowary, a woman pounding sago flour with a stone axe. At this point in my life, I was coming to see Western civilization as a monstrously gnarled thing, contorted around its past mistakes, teetering on the brink of collapse. It occurs to me now that these images moved me so powerfully because they portrayed a way of life that had survived wholly outside of that history; to even imagine it was to momentarily escape into something that felt somehow both fresh and unfathomably ancient. I had no doubt that the life of a forest-dweller was more difficult and more dangerous than my own. But wasn’t it also freer, fairer, and in its way, richer? I felt its quiet pull, like a child finding an open door at the back of a house crowded with unpleasant guests, and through that door, a stand of tall trees glowing darkly in the dusklight.
One January, while spending the antipodean winter in Australia with my husband’s family and realizing I was as close to Papua as I was ever likely to be, I decided to fly there, trek through the swamps, and visit the Korowai tree houses in person. After spending many months reading and watching documentaries about them, I was curious to learn if the reality of Korowai life—its flies and rashes and petty frustrations—matched up to the fantasy I’d constructed in my mind.
To get there required a lengthy journey, including three flights, a long ride in the back of a pickup truck, and a two-day trip upriver in a narrow wooden boat called a pirogue, followed by a half-day hike through the jungle. To help us get there in one piece, I tracked down a local guide named Bob Palege, who had led many tourists and journalists like me on this trip. When I spoke with him over the phone, Bob mentioned that he had recently received a similar request from a Ukrainian named Vlad Kutsey, who was a National Geographic photographer. We agreed to combine our little expeditions, in no small part because it would nearly halve the cost.
My husband Remi and I left for Papua from Perth. On our penultimate flight, the plane touched down just after dawn for a stopover in Timika, a trade city near the world’s largest gold mine. Sensing the wait might be lengthy, I rose to go to the bathroom. As I moved down the aisle, a hand reached out and waved me down. “Robert!” a man exclaimed.
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