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Among the first fellings of coming to Sukadana, general impracticalities about the rainforest were the first to fall. All prior experiences with the rainforest—through Lisa Frank’s line of school supplies, television documentaries, and the café of the same name—presented a magical place where an absolute menagerie of exotic flora and fauna wanted to be your friend. In reality though, what the rainforest really wants, is to kill you.

To be precise, and to avoid pithiness, the rainforest does not really want anything (and that might get more at its essence than anything else) but its sheer ruthlessness in the face of modernity (which in most places has succeeded in subduing nature) seems to invoke this sort personification on its own. I suppose this sort of thing occurs to you when you live in the midst of what is basically a giant organism naturally engineered to devour and absorb everything in its path (except the chainsaw). After all, it is difficult to do much of anything without encountering an unending cabaret of insects, vines, weather (apparently it creates its own), lizards, or microbes that seem, if not hell bent on your destruction, certainly unfazed by your presence. The adventures only begin with trips to the bathroom.

More often than not, I cannot help wondering how exactly people, or, to be more precise, any sort of modern, semi-permanent means of social organization have any business being here. In terms of this competition, it is pretty clear that human beings have the means to destroy anything they put their full powers of indifference to, but as for life in Kalimantan, it certainly seems to be contested to the point that you wonder under what terms people deserve to be here in the first place.

Certainly, people who come from a stock that has lived here for hundreds of years have some sort of claim to being here, but when you walk through the jungle you realize that everything in it is rare. It is a place utterly devoid of ‘niche-ism’ in a way that I have never before experienced.

For instance, while walking along, I started counting fungi. While there was certainly plenty to see (I probably tallied 20 different sightings in an hour), the remarkable thing was that I did not see the same type of fungi twice. This struck me as utterly incredible and, what is more, this holds for virtually everything else, from flowers to birds. As this dawned upon me, the ensuing realization that a single organism should not only raze but even strive to domesticate what literally amounts to thousands upon thousands left me feeling something rather far out of place.