Chapter 8

WHERE THE BUFFALO GROAN

             

     Joe.  If I could have delved one million scenes into the depths of my imagination, I would never have pictured myself at a Torajan funeral sitting on a hillside, overlooking a rice paddy, buzzed on palm wine with a couple hundred Indonesians, watching the buffalo fights.

Visiting Tana Toraja is my number one priority in Indonesia. The Torajan people live in the central hills of South Sulawesi. Although many Torajans have moved into the modern world of bustling towns, automobiles and electronics, they, as well as their rural kin, still cling to their traditional cultural obsession with death and funerals.

The funeral is the most important event in a Torajan’s life. Outsiders jokingly say they begin saving for it at birth. I had seen pictures of these events over the years as well as pictures of their traditional houses that resemble long boats, bow and stern pointing up to heaven. Those images drew me here, and although it is not the time of year when funerals are normally held, I had hoped we’d get lucky.

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John.  We arrive in Rantapao late after a long bus ride. The bus is plush and in retrospect spoils us completely. Much to our surprise the bus lets us off exactly where we need to be, and our guide meets us at the bus stop as promised. These are good signs.

Yulis is a wiry little chain-smoking guitar player with a long Bob Marley mane and two missing front teeth. After dinner he and some of his buddies play and sing, not only Bob Marley, but John Denver, and some traditional Spanish songs as well. We have a chuckle when he breaks into: “Almost heaven, west Toraja…” Joe had remarked as we switchbacked up and down the mountains on our last miles into Rantapao that the place looked like West Virginia with palm trees.

On our first morning Yulis leads us on a foray into the countryside to a local burial site. The hike isn’t difficult, winding along a dirt road past rice paddies and farms about four kilometers to its terminus. At the end of the road Yulis sits us down in a stone shelter that serves as a viewpoint for the little valley below and the sheer cliff on the other side, where the tombs are hewn out of the solid rock. Hand-carved, life-sized wooden statues called tau-tau stand guard over the entrance to each tomb.

“The funeral and burial are all that remain from a very strict class system,” he explains. “In the time of my grandfather there was still tribal warfare and even slavery, but that is no longer the case. Modern life and modern religions have changed all of that, but the size of a person’s funeral and the position and style of his tomb still today reflect his status in life.” Bigger is better.

Yulis knows that we want to attend a funeral. Back in town he meets a man on the street, and after a conversation out of our earshot he reports back. “You are very lucky. There is a funeral today, but we must go now.”

I think Joe has peed himself with excitement, but in truth I’m stoked myself.

“It is the custom that you bring a small gift. We will stop and get a box of clove cigarettes. That will be enough, and the family will be very happy with it.”

Yulis arranges transportation for us on the backs of motorbike taxis. We bounce over deeply pocked dirt roads up and down the hills ’til we come to a small village, now grown much larger with temporary buildings surrounding a large open area where the closed coffin is displayed. This is the Day of Reunion and Procession, one of several designated days making up the celebration. Our very hospitable hosts feed us tapioca leaves (good in small doses), goldfish, buffalo, pig skewers, tuak (palm wine) in hollow bamboo stalks, and Torajan coffee. They claim, and I’m on board, that this is the best coffee in the world.

Joe.  Family have come from all over Sulawesi and even all Indonesia for this event. When we arrive, Yulis meets someone who directs us to one of the temporary shelters. The shelters have been fashioned of lashed bamboo, topped with impermeable thatched roofs, floored by planks covered with mats.

Our hosts are Coman and Sita, brother and sister, grandchildren of the deceased. Yulis does not know the English word “deceased” and always refers to the person rather impersonally as “the dead body”. He died four months ago. The dead body, as is the custom, remains in his house until the funeral. He is said to be 100 years old, although it would be very unusual for anyone in this country to live that long.

I look out from Coman and Sita’s shelter to view the hustle and bustle that is more like Rantapao than a tiny farm village. New people are arriving every minute, greeting each other with bright surprised eyes. I don’t understand the spoken words, but the eyes and the body language are like our own culture. An auntie, speechless with wonder, reunites with a little niece, now grown with a child of her own. Cousins embrace as their minds flash back to a shared childhood. All the while children are running and playing everywhere. No one regrets that the reunion is a funeral.

Coman and Sita speak excellent English.

“Do you live in Toraja?”

“No,” says Coman, “I’m a dentist in Makassar. I don’t get back so much these days.”

“And you, Sita?”

“I work in an office in Surabaya. It’s been about two years since I’ve been here. And you, how do you come to be in Tana Toraja?”

“I’ve always wanted to travel to Indonesia, especially Sulawesi, and now that I’m retired I have the opportunity.  I just want to thank you for your hospitality and for allowing us to attend your grandfather’s funeral.”

“You’re welcome. We are very pleased to have you here. We want the world to know about our culture. It is becoming more difficult to maintain our traditional culture, but these funerals are a very important way for us to do that, and we hope you will tell others about it. And take pictures, too.”

John.  This is the Day of Procession. As the ceremonies are about to start, Coman leads us to a separate shelter. To our surprise we meet other westerners. Who are these people? What are they doing at “our” funeral?

They are travelers like us: a German couple, a Swede, and a family of monstrously large Latvian people. Young girls bring us trays of buffalo meat. It has a good beefy flavor, but there is a net calorie loss in the chewing. And tuak, I quickly acquire a taste for this beverage, which is closer to saki than chardonnay.

When it is time for the main procession, the MC calls out over the microphone to get everyone ready. Forty or fifty men in orange t-shirts surround the coffin in the center of the grounds. It is brightly decorated in traditional Torajan colors: brown, orange and custard. The men aren’t family, but have been hired as…coffin wranglers? They circle the coffin chanting. I don’t understand the words, but sometimes it feels mournful, sometimes festive.

Finally, they all move forward and pick up the coffin with its superstructure miniature of a traditional house. It is mounted on a grid of thick bamboo poles that sag under the weight. Then the men start carrying on as if they’re at football game. Everyone is generally laughing as they begin carrying the dead body in procession. Soon the men begin a tug of war–with the coffin. Sometimes the men on one end push against the other. Other times they decide to pull. The family invites me to take all the pictures I want, but to get the best ones I have to risk being trampled or forced over the edge of the adjacent cliff by the advancing procession: anything for a great shot.

After the procession I get word that some of the men are slaughtering pigs down the hill behind the shelters. Joe and I go to see it. Earlier I had seen men bearing them into the compound on bamboo poles suspended by their bound feet. Instead of slitting the throat, they just make a quick stab with a sharp stake into its side just above the shoulder but deep enough to pierce the heart. The pig squirms violently and squeals so loudly that I want to muffle my ears. But, as the wound begins to bubble with blood the noise quiets. They gut it, saving the blood for cooking and toss the carcass on a bamboo fire to remove the hair. With the hair removed, they butcher it on the spot.

 

Joe.  I go to see the pigs killed, because I have never seen it before, and because, since I eat the pig, I should be aware of how it gets to my belly. I don’t enjoy watching the death throes of anything. John is a little more into that part of it. He has worked on a poultry farm before, killing birds, and in that culture animal life is cheap. It’s cheap to me, too, I guess. I eat meat. I suppose the Buddhist side of me would say, respect to the pig that gives its life for me. I wouldn’t even be thinking about this if I hadn’t seen the guy plunge the stake in the pig’s neck.

But this Buddhist flash reminds me of Chris Deeter. I do think of him as I travel the country where he died. He had embraced Buddhism in his later days. It was interesting to see how that chosen path had mellowed him, without detracting from his adventurer’s spirit. He had a very gentle attitude toward animals that certainly influenced me.

But soon the crowd begins to buzz anew. Coman offers me more palm wine, which I accept. Then he makes an intriguing announcement: “I have heard that there may be buffalo fights.”

John. I am immediately excited by this prospect. “That would be awesome!” My imagination is churning. I can only picture what they might do to each other from televiewing other animals in the wild.

Coman does not want to raise my hopes only to have me disappointed. “It is not certain. I’m told some of the men are trying to arrange it.”

“When will they do it? And where?”

“If it happens, it will be in the rice paddies down the hill.”

Momentarily, we all notice people begin to move in that direction. The young men are moving most quickly and jostling each other as they go. “You say  ‘if’. Is it something unscheduled?”

“Yes, exactly. It’s not something that happens at every funeral. It’s a special event. Sita and I are not going, but I think you will find it interesting. Go. Go. Just follow the crowd.”

We follow the crowd down a muddy path through the woods, like a throng heading to a football game after tailgating, and descend into an area of sunken rice paddies surrounded on three sides by elevated pathways. We are at the valley head. These catwalks are the bleachers. In the front row legs dangle over the edge of a twenty-foot drop to the arena floor. Soon locals of all ages, shapes and sizes fill the “stadium” downing tuak and screaming for action. To be clear, no one is drunk and rowdy, but most adults are basking in the warm glow of the fermented beverage. I know I am.

The wranglers lead the buffalo into the muddy battleground and let them loose.

The buffalo, despite their fierce appearance, are docile beasts. They really don’t want to fight, but the handlers put them nose-to-nose and try to rile them up.

The first few confrontations result in draws due to lack of interest (by the buffalo). The crowd is not happy. But finally the men find two who are willing to go at it. They charge each other from short range and butt heads like 2000-pound linemen, fighting and clawing for every inch of ground, digging their hooves into the muddy earth. They don’t try to impale their opponent with their horns. They just kept butting, locking, and twisting. The fight ends, as they all do, when one gives up and runs away.

After that a few more pair get into the act, and the crowd is back in the game. One particularly aggressive bull chases his opponent through several adjacent fields down the valley and out of sight. Both wranglers sprint after them at full speed to wild cheering and laughing.

The bowl shape of the arena magnifies sound of the crashing horns and skulls. The crowd hoots and hollers, although it sounds more like movie Indians attacking a circled wagon train than a Sunday crowd at Paul Brown Stadium. Joe and I look at each other as if to say, whoa, we’re really not in Cincinnati anymore.

Joe.  If we, or you, are thinking that things can’t get any stranger than this, we would all be wrong. The next day we begin our Toraja trek, a mini odyssey into the farms and backcountry villages of Tana Toraja. Yulis comes calling at about nine a.m., for us the hour of first speaking. He is a bundle of energy. He leads us via a series of bemo rides to a spot several miles east of Rantapao, where a path branches off the main road.

A bemo is a tiny vehicle whose passenger compartment has two benches facing each other. Even with only small day packs, squeezing in is a chore for an average size western man. Without my new knee, this would have been a difficult agony. But the other passengers are congenial and helpful managing our gear, and our day begins with good laughs.

Our hike takes us along progressively smaller and smaller tracks until we are walking along the narrow embankments of the rice paddies in a slow ascent up to the valley head. Along the way we make some interesting creek crossings on bridges that consist of three uneven bamboo planks. I find a balanced stance and inch my way across until I am far enough that I dare to dash. A misstep would not mean death, but probably injury, a total soaking, and the loss of a camera and other valuables. Other fords are single logs. None is very long, but require my full care and attention. They’re a non-event for John.

After the last crossing we begin a long uphill. My pack with camera weighs about five kilos which makes it something of a workout–which is fine. We reach a vantage point. Unfortunately, it is not yet the high point of the trek, but the place that offers the best panorama of the hills and valleys of Tana Toraja.

We trek onward, up and up, a little down, but mostly up and up. My legs are begging for rest and food, mostly food. My brain is as hungry as my legs. My focus flags. I wonder how I’ll do with the next balancing act over the next creek. More snacks and possibly more water might have been a good idea here.

We pass through yards of traditional Torajan homes with their lumpung (rice barns, no added “s” to make a plural) and their obnoxious watchdogs, warning, but not really menacing us. The lumpung are mini versions of the traditional house elevated above a wooden platform by four posts on the corners. Out here it’s all about farming: rice, of course, and exotic crops, like cloves, coffee, fennel, bananas, cacao, tapioca; and animals, mostly chickens and buffalo.

We stop at a house near a village and Yulis harvests tapioca root from the garden for our lunch, pulling it from the ground like a monster carrot. It’s time to carb up: tapioca and noodles. This isn’t tapioca pudding like mom used to make. It’s more like a potato, slightly sweeter and more fibrous. Yulis also serves some of that delicious Torajan coffee and a minor miracle occurs.

For the last few years I have had to avoid caffeine, and therefore regular coffee, because of acid reflux. But everybody has been telling me how great Torajan coffee is, so I take a chance and try it. I am able to drink it with no bad effects. Coffee is possible again. What a great day!

Our host’s name is Lottong. His simple house is built on sturdy stilts with a long steep stairway to the front porch. As I walk in and toward the back of the house, I pass three bedrooms on the right, go through a small dark unfurnished area, and take a left through a short hall into the kitchen. The floors throughout are just wooden planks, nailed to the frame, not always sturdily, and not necessarily tightly joined. The kitchen has a stone cooking-hearth that requires crouching to use. Yulis is the cook. We all eat on the front porch and have a mixed language conversation from which I learn that Lottong has a daughter who has a child, which explains the tiny laundry drying on the line below us. My Indonesian is steadily getting better.

After lunch we continue, well refreshed. Our trek is more up and down rather than all up. Rural folk along the way, doing simple things that are out of the ordinary to us, wave or shout greetings. Women stand knee deep in flooded rice paddies bending over to harvest the rice, pulling out stalk after stalk. Whose back can stand a lifetime of this? Other women take newly picked coffee beans and spread them on mats to dry. There are men, far from any house or farm building sharpening knives with stones. They have many of them, mostly the ubiquitous machetes, as if it is a business, but they have no shop. Not even Yulis can explain why they are out in the middle of nowhere.

Our trek probably covers fifteen to twenty kilometers, including our morning and afternoon hikes, until we finally arrive at Adi and Etti’s farm. They are friends of Yulis, and he has brought us here to have dinner and spend the night. “You have to pay them something for food and staying the night. I think 50,000 is good.” I hadn’t understood that from the beginning, but it seems reasonable, and I have no problem with it.

Adi and Yulis cook chicken for dinner in the traditional way: in bamboo. They stuff a hollow stalk with freshly killed chicken, coconut, young banana root, garlic, and some other seasonings. They cook it over an open fire, built against rocks, laying the bamboo tubes at an angle, mostly upright, for easy frequent rotation.

The chicken is almost ready when the skies open and a downpour begins. Adi and Yulis finish the chore under umbrellas that can’t prevent them from being soaked. But oh, do they ever do good work.

The rain would have implications for tomorrow’s trek, but it leaves the evening cool and the night cold. Combined with a hard bed (think plank and thin mattress), my night’s sleep is tidak bagus (not good). This is also our first night sleeping in a house with a “sickness person”. That’s the English translation for their idiom for a dead body. Grandpa has been dead for several months and occupies a corner of the main sleeping area. No one tells us about this until after we leave. Prior knowledge wouldn’t have creeped me out, just made me curious.

I am pretty beat when I am awakened for the second time at eight in the morning.  The roosters had first crack around five…until six. I am in good humor despite this, so is The Bear, because we had expected it, and because today, we will be attending another funeral–this time for the Day of Sacrifice.

The distant thunder seems both a portent of a brewing storm and a beckoning to some unreal place, sacred and awful, beyond our experience and imagination. We will see ten buffalo ceremonially slaughtered. That’s all I know, but I am eager for the adventure.

This morning’s trek will be about eight kilometers. Last night’s downpour makes for a muddy track. The short cut across the rice paddies turns into a challenge. A rain swollen creek bars our path, and from a distance a bamboo pole appears to be our only route across, hand over hand, with pack and camera–uh,oh.

But if it was ever truly used for that purpose, it is not for us to attempt that day, because it is already broken. Judging by its size, it would have been one of us to take the fall because of our weight, had someone else not spared us the trouble. We finally find a place to cross the torrent. The slick rocks make it a slow go, requiring patience and care. At thigh deep any misstep will make a big problem.

After that crossing and one more balancing exercise, the trek turns into a long uphill slog, dodging mud pits, and climbing, climbing, climbing into the clouds. The mist soon turns to droplets as we near the sacrificial ring. The fog makes the scene more eerie. Like the site of the other funeral, permanent and temporary structures surround an open area like a courtyard. We enter between two of the buildings and notice three palm trees in the center where the wranglers will hitch their buffalo and keep them calm until they are destroyed.

Red and gold bunting, bright even on this dreariest of days, adorns the buildings. The family serves coffee and tea to the guests that number several hundred. The crowd is quiet but not at all somber. An anticipatory murmur makes a background for the master of ceremonies on the loudspeaker as he gongs the people to attention.

The mist and droplets became a downpour. We take refuge under a lumpung and watch the sacrificial pit become sloppier by degrees until the time comes for the deed to be done. The animals are huge, but they are of the most gentle disposition. They seem to have no sense of foreboding about their fate. Their only reticence is an aversion to stepping into the rope that will hold them fast while the other end is tied to one of the central palms.

The crowd is mostly quiet except for an occasional hoot as the first buffalo avoids the leg noose. When he finally takes the fatal misstep, the crowd murmurs approval. That is his first mistake…and last. Once secured to the tree, the handler calms the beast, stroking it gently, getting it to raise its head. Hold it. Steady. Then pulling a machete from his waistband under his shirt, with no hesitation, makes one fatal hack, an uppercut across the extended throat, opening a gaping hole in the neck.

Blood pours out as the animal stands there quietly stunned. Soon the part of the brain that lets him stand on all fours is deprived of its precious nourishing fluid, and he staggers and collapses with a great splash of mud and blood and blood and blood.

The beast is quiet, not at all like the pigs whose woeful squeals bespoke pain and panic. No, the buffalo is quiet, but thrashes and struggles to right himself. He succeeds for a time. The crowd hoots and hollers, as he gets to his feet in one vain last stand. Then he topples again, blood still gushing, to the crowd’s general amusement. Down he crashes with a thud. It is finished.

All that is left is slow, heavy, labored breathing. Steam rises from the snout and the gash. The other buffalo walk around oblivious to their fallen fellow. The rain pours. Flies begin to swarm around the body. Chickens peck their way around the carcass as if it isn’t there. The dog patrols with an air of detachment.

The breathing finally stops, but not before the next sacrifice. More hooting as the victim repeats the dance of death: avoid the rope as long as possible; be still; the unsuspected slice; the vacant eyes that do not seem to understand what has just happened; the stagger; the struggle; the final collapse.

Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The carnage is complete. The arena is filled with blood. The crowd has its fill. The grisly ritual seems to have outlasted the attention span of many. But most have watched in rapt amusement and at least some level of reverence, as this most important of animals and symbol of status is offered for the sake of the living and memory of the dead.

The ceremony has been at once ritual and picnic, sacred and casual, profound and profane. I am left excited and drained. As we walk away, I stare at my feet slipping down the muddy hill, so as not to fall. I don’t see, only hear: children playing in the rice paddies, a machete hacking bamboo, a rooster crowing, the final silent absence of rain no longer falling, a distant dog doing his duty. I look up to see a buffalo and her calf on an embankment. For them it is a good day.