Ripcord Adventure Journal 2.2

35
her dad would always talk humorously about these things.
Utopian Fruits
Audun Amundsen
If nothing else he could always get a t-shirt or two from listening to
the Missionaries, he said. But deep down Aman Paksa knew he was
probably the last of his kind.
In one of our countless trips in to the jungle, we stopped at a huge
tree and Aman Paksa started to clean up around its trunk. It was so
old that it didn’t provide fruits any longer but I saw some marks of
hands and feet carved into the bark. I could tell they were the size of
a three or four year old child. Aman Paksa sat down on the ground,
took some tobacco and rolled it into a banana leaf. This was the
place he could come to grieve one of his lost children. He told me
they had had ten children all together but now only three of them
were alive.
“The jungle looks so nice and clean when I see through your camera,
but in reality it is ugly and uncomfortable,” Aman Paksa stated
while puffing his tobacco.
By now I knew what he was talking about. Aman Paksa had taken
care of me many times, healing stings and infected wounds,
parasites, stomach-aches and mosquito related diseases. It was a
tough life. I realised that the natives didn’t live sustainably out of
awareness. They were simply forced to do so by nature. But now
the power shift had begun.
The motor had made trading with other Indonesians at the river’s
mouth more accessible than ever. Even though we felt relatively cut
off from everything at Aman Paksa’s house, there was one creature
that reminded me of civilisation; the cockroach. Aman Paksa had
planted cocoa trees around his house and used to go to the village
for trading and returning to his house he had unwittingly brought
the cockroaches with him. They proved impossible to get rid of.
It quickly became obvious that Aman Paksa and I was moving in
different directions. In a way he was looking for the artificial and I
was looking for organic.