The Other Side of the World (18 page)

Small fires were burning everywhere—the cut-up trees laying on the ground looked like chunks of amputated limbs and torsos—and the roar of our engines close to the ground drowning out the sounds of their machines, the men, most wearing wide-brimmed sombrero-like hats, stopped work to watch our plane, and waved as if truly happy to see us.

“We got all the big stuff out a few weeks ago,” Nick said. “Tens of thousands of board feet of good lumber. What you're looking at now is just mop-up. Amazing resources here, Charlie—half the world's tropical timber comes from this one fucking island, did you know that? Every time somebody somewhere puts a toothpick between his teeth, it's better than two-toone the toothpick comes from Borneo, and when—”

“Stop,” I said.

“Why—you going to turn bleeding heart environmentalist on me? Do me a favor and stop being Mister Nice Guy for a change—and remember what we taught you: that palm oil has more uses than petroleum, that it's a renewable biofuel that can be with us forever, and after we—”

“Give me a break,” I said. “I mean, you're used to it, but I've never been here before—never seen anything like this place. It's a shock to the system, so back off.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “It's just that I get
excited
whenever I see one of our places—the amazing fucking speed with which we can change things! But hey—shocked the hell out of me too once upon a time. Like I was looking at an ocean of mud that was going to become the biggest fucking set of football fields in creation.”

“Enough,” I said. “I asked you to cool it.”

“In a minute,” he said, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me to him as if he were going to whack my forehead
with his. “Only first you give your shit-eating conscience a rest and listen up.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“And I don't need your smart-ass condescension either, because when it comes to what's happening here, you don't know shit. Because, in case the news didn't reach you, what goes on here is going on all over the planet, buddy—in the Amazon, in China, in Malaysia, in Kansas, in Alaska—you name it—and when haven't we been raping the world? Answer me that. But we come first is what I believe, even if you don't and probably never will, and what I've come to realize is that the really good news, see, is just that—that we get to see the changes up close and personal.”

“Lucky us.”

“Lucky us is right,” he said, letting me go and opening the cabin door. He waved to the people who were waiting for us, then turned back to me, and when he spoke this time his voice shifted, and he talked easily, as if nothing in the world was bothering him.

“So look,” he said, “I know what you're thinking—sure—because believe it or not, I felt the same when I first got here, but then one day I got to remembering those time-lapse films we used to watch in college, where plants came out of the ground, grew, blossomed, and died in three or four seconds—or where the sun rose and set and a whole day had come and gone before you could blink, and it dawned on me that what was happening here was pretty much the same thing.”

“I don't understand a word you're saying.”

“Remember when you, me, and Trish got trashed doing mushrooms,” he went on as if I hadn't said a word, “and I got hold of this grad assistant to give us a private show of a bunch of those films?”

“I remember,” I said.

“So lucky us is right,” he said again, “because think about it
for a minute, Charlie—really think about it: what happens invisibly most of the time in most of the world, or what takes years and years, we—you and me, babe—we have the good fortune—the privilege—of seeing it happen right in front of our eyes in real time.”

“And if we didn't do it, somebody else would, is that it?” I asked.

“Not at all—oh not at all!—and you can bet your sweet life on that,” he said, and he did so in such a condescending way—laughing at me as if I were some kind of fool—that, and not for the first time, I felt ready to kill the guy.

Then he was walking down the steps, shaking hands, and pointing to me, and as soon as he did, four of the five men, all Asian, bowed their heads in greeting. The other man—a Dutchman named Hans Martens I'd learn a few minutes later—gave me a broad grin and a thumbs up.

 

During the day we tramped around the property, Nick and the Asians (three Chinese, one Japanese) explaining what would be required once the land was cleared and new trees delivered: water, fertilizer, herbicides, drainage canals—how many workers, what equipment, and so on. After lunch, sitting inside a large tent, cool-water air-conditioners plugged into generators and roaring away—the heat and humidity were at least as bad as in Singapore, but with the additional perk of angry squadrons of hungry, flying insects—we went over figures and schedules, made lists of what we needed, and talked about vendors and costs. Nick handled financial negotiations, and he was good at it the way he'd been good at poker (he once claimed he'd earned his entire tuition, the year after he quit football and lost his scholarship, from poker). For the first hour and a half, palm oil was never even mentioned. The talk was about family, food, women, weather, travel, mutual acquaintances—and just when I was about to remind Nick why we were there,
he
acted as if he'd
just remembered. He reached into his briefcase, took out four envelopes, one of which he handed to each of the Asians (Hans worked for us) as if presenting them with honorary degrees. After this, we got down to business and were able to sign off on agreements—mostly arranged beforehand in Singapore—in less than two hours.

My primary responsibility was to see that the palm oil seedlings arrived on time and in good shape, and I passed out copies of agreements and contracts I'd prepared, along with scheduling and contact information, all of which, to my surprise, evoked enormous gratitude, along with gifts, about which Nick had warned me, and which I'd been told I couldn't refuse: a Montblanc fountain pen, a monogrammed silver money clip, jade cuff links, and a black and white flowered kimono whose silk was as soft as a baby's skin.

In the evening our hosts prepared a feast for us—wild boar roasted slowly in a deep pit—along with bottle after bottle of splendid French and Spanish wine. Nick and I slept in separate tents that night, three men armed with machine guns standing guard until morning (Nick was carrying the bulk of the month's payroll, in cash, in the larger of his two suitcases), and after breakfast in the morning—savagely bitter coffee, and mushy rolls with sticky-sweet jam—we said our good-byes, flew off over a small mountain range, and set down a half hour later on a runway covered with a glossy olive-drab substance, located adjacent to the site of one of our larger industrial plantations.

Nick and the foreman who welcomed us—an articulate dark-skinned man I gauged to be in his forties, though his skin was so smooth he might have been ten to fifteen years older—from one of the indigenous tribes (“I am your original wild man of Borneo,” he announced when Nick introduced us)—gave me a tour of the facility. The foreman's name was Saul—his mother had named him for an Englishman she said was Saul's father—and he was about my height, close to six feet, but weighed a
good twenty pounds more, most of it solid muscle. The heat was unbearable here too—I felt as if I were living inside an open-air furnace—and several young women accompanied us wherever we went, fanning us with large fans that looked as if they were made of starched banana-yellow burlap, and regularly handing us wet washcloths and canteens of sweet, tea-flavored water.

Saul took us into a forest where men in trees, mostly barefoot and without harnesses, were batting down clusters of fruit from branches, some of the clusters, he told us, weighing close to a hundred pounds. Under the trees, teams of young boys and girls held onto large pieces of stiff canvas—like fireman's rescue nets—into which the clusters fell, and Hans explained that they'd begun doing this fifteen or sixteen months before—had learned it from one of our engineers, a Turkish man who'd observed the technique when he'd worked in olive groves in southern France. This was giving us an edge on our competitors, he explained, because it minimized the bruising of the nuts and fruit, which, when the clusters fell directly to the ground, had been an ongoing problem during harvest time.

I'd arrived near the end of the harvesting, and the haul this year, Hans said, had exceeded expectations. Although palm oil trees could produce their nuts and fruit within three years, they didn't peak until they were about twenty years old. The grove of trees we were looking at was eighteen years old, and according to Hans was now producing nearly nine thousand metric tons of oil per hectare.

Within a little more than two hours, when we stopped to rest and get out of the sun—Saul, sensing that the heat was wearing me down, had begun shortening his explanations—I'd gained a tangible sense of what, until then, I'd only read about: how the process worked from start to finish—from the harvesting, fermentation, sorting, boiling, mash pressing, purification, digestion
(releasing the oil from the nuts), to the purification and drying of the product for storage and shipping.

The machines, large and small, including boilers that were one to two stories high, ran mostly on diesel generators, the generators housed in old, windowless, yellow school busses. Some of the processing was still done by hand, and Nick was at pains to point out that though there were mechanized, steam-driven hydraulic systems that could and did perform most basic tasks for us, the company also paid teams of young men (boys, really, no more than ten or eleven years old) to do the manual threshing: to cut the spikelets from the bunch stems with axes and machetes, and pass the fruits of their labor on to elderly women and small children who sat at long tables and separated the fruit from the spikelets by hand.

The company used battery-driven golf-cart-size cars to transport most of the nuts from the forest to the village, but there was also a steady line of men and women coming in with large baskets of nuts balanced on their heads—another way, Nick pointed out, we were taking initiatives to employ as many local people as possible.

“And with full equality for women, children, and senior citizens,” I said.

“Of course,” Nick said. “We help the local economy while building a strong sense of community.”

“You, me, and J. P. Morgan, right?”

“I think the sun's begun to fry your brain,” Nick said. “All that air-conditioning in Singapore must be turning you soft.”

While we rested in the shade, Saul switched on the kind of moveable cold-water air-conditioners they'd had in the tent at our first stop. On two ping-pong size tables—in order to educate the workers, he claimed, and boost morale—he'd prepared a small exhibit of the uses to which palm oil could be put: for cooking oil, engine oil, medicines, biofuel, industrial lubricants, food additives, soaps, detergents, and cosmetics, and I acted as
if this was all news to me, and refrained from asking why he didn't have a container of napalm next to the other goods.

When it was my turn, I took out charts and papers, at which point Saul beckoned to a young man of about twenty, to whom he showed the papers, which they discussed in whispers, and I became aware that for all his articulateness—his charming British accent, his impeccable courtesy and impressive vocabulary—he could not read.

When I asked where the workers lived and slept, Saul assured me they were well cared for, but Nick laughed and said Saul was being discreet when there was no need for discretion. “Most of them sleep in the fields,” Nick said. “Much cooler, and that way we don't have to deduct housing fees from their pay the way other companies do.” In his ongoing campaign to persuade me our company was environmentally enlightened, Nick also pointed out that the massive amounts of sludge collected from the bottoms of our boilers and purifiers were used to kill weeds, and he had Saul show me ways we recovered fiber and shells from the early stages of the process and used the residue as fuel for the boilers.

By the third day, when we'd flown forty minutes further inland to one of our smallest operations, a facility that, Nick said, had predated Singapore Palm Oil Technologies Limited's existence, I was feeling achy, dizzy, and nauseated. The constant heat and humidity, and the absence of anything resembling air-conditioning in a village of fewer than three dozen families (an elderly woman would occasionally wipe my face, neck, arms, and shoulders with a damp cloth), made me woozy and faint by midday, and seeing me stagger, Nick put an arm around me, led me back to our plane, laid me down across two seats, had the pilot turn on our air-conditioning, and told me the same thing had happened to him—that he hadn't even lasted a full day his first time here.

“You're stronger than you look,” he said.

“Smarter too,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “It's why you said yes to coming here to work with me.”

 

By the time I woke, the sun had slipped below the level of the highest trees and there was a slight breeze. Back in the village, Nick had a group of men and women put on a show for me, demonstrating the traditional method of extracting palm oil—washing the fruit mash in warm water, then squeezing the mash by hand to separate the fiber and nuts from the water-and-oil mixture. Next, they passed the mixture through wooden colanders to filter out dirt and debris, after which they placed the mixture in a large iron pot, along with firewood, and set the whole thing boiling.

A few hours later—they'd arranged things as if they were putting on an exhibit at a county fair, so I could see all stages of the process one after the other and not have to wait until each stage was completed before going on to the next—they would take out the firewood, add herbs, and when the mixture cooled to just under a hundred degrees—to the body's temperature—they'd skim off the palm oil with a bowl. The oil, which had a reddish hue from the large amounts of beta-carotene in it, was easy to store and transport because, high in saturated fats, it became semi-solid at moderate temperatures.