Tembawang: The Dayak Forest That Calls Our Souls Back to Earth

Bang Doy

Part 1: The Boy, the River, and the Rain

On a rainy morning, a third-grade boy leapt into a small wooden motorboat about to set off upriver, slicing through the dark waters of the Kepuluk. His name was Doy—a wiry little kid, barely noticeable at first among the tangle of logging workers and logistics personnel of the timber company that plied that muddy river every day.

He could hardly contain his excitement. All he wanted was to go fishing, to join his father and grandfather, who had already spent a week camping out in a riverside hut, seeking fish amidst the boundless 28,000 hectares of peat swamp forest. That wilderness was their domain.

Just last December, Doy sat across from me at a café on the outskirts of Ketapang, rain falling relentlessly outside, for an interview. Of course, he was no longer a boy, though people still called him by that childhood name. On his official ID card, it reads Abdurahman Al Qadrie. Today, he is an elementary school teacher, a civil servant in that same regency.

“It was school holiday, around 1983,” he said, running a hand through his unruly hair and scraggly beard. December is always a season of wind and rain. He had braved both just to get to this café.

Ketapang’s modern city center now sits on a delta between the South China Sea and the Pawan River. Muhammad Yamin, when compiling his 1965 Historical Atlas, noted that in the ancient Javanese manuscript Nagarakertagama, Mpu Prapanca referred to Ketapang as Tandjungpura. In the Chinese chronicle Chu Fan Chi, written by Chau Ju Kwa in 1225, it was referred to as Tan-jung-wu-lo. During Dutch colonial rule, this area was designated as one of the Afdeling districts within the Residency of Western Borneo.

After becoming part of the Republic of Indonesia, Ketapang was designated as the largest regency in West Kalimantan. According to official sources, the region spans 31,240.74 square kilometers—roughly the size of the Netherlands or Switzerland. No wonder that from time immemorial, Ketapang has always attracted speculators, Chinese tycoons, and genuine businessmen alike. The land is rich in various minerals. Its forests and timber made many a logger wealthy. And so, Ketapang has earned a sad reputation: one of the fastest disappearing tropical rainforests in the past two decades—felled by illegal loggers, mining permits, or to make way for massive palm oil plantations, followed inevitably by annual forest fires that roast our lungs with their smoke.

That destruction has also severely damaged some 90,000 hectares of forest within the Gunung Palung National Park (TNGP)—a natural bridge between Ketapang and the neighboring Kayong Utara Regency—once a last haven for more than 3,000 orangutans.

According to Karmele Llano Sanchez, Project Manager for the Indonesia branch of International Animal Rescue (IAR), whom I interviewed not long ago, around 500 to 800 individual orangutans remain trapped in the Pematang Gadung peat swamp—one of the few fragments left uncut. The corridor forest that once connected Pematang Gadung with the rest of TNGP has already been cleared.

Data from WALHI (Friends of the Earth) West Kalimantan confirms that Ketapang holds the record for issuing the most palm oil plantation permits. As of July 2013, there were 76 palm companies operating here, managing 838,855.99 hectares of land.

Meanwhile, the Ketapang Mining Office recorded 78 companies holding exploration permits, covering 990,060 hectares. Of those, 56 companies are already in production, operating across 196,592.8 hectares—mining land that in total stretches over 1,186,661.8 hectares. That’s larger than the entire country of Qatar.

Part 2: Fathers, Forests, and Fireflies

Doy sat quietly, his eyes fixed beyond the veil of rain, waiting for his coffee. Memories seemed to gather in the misty air between us, fragments of a distant past hovering just behind the sound of falling rain.

I ordered a warm cappuccino. Marlin, the café owner, swiftly prepared our drinks. To her, Doy wasn’t just a regular. He was a storyteller, a friend, the kind of presence that brought warmth to a rainy afternoon. Her regulars always asked if he had come by lately.

There was no music in the café that day—just the sound of the storm. Power had flickered on and off since late afternoon. In the dim light, Doy’s silhouette reminded me of the late jazz legend George Duke—same wiry beard, same coiled hair. But of course, Doy was no jazzman. In fact, he didn’t even like jazz.

I let him drift in silence, lighting another cigarette, exhaling slowly as his gaze remained fixed. Then, without prompt, he spoke again.

“My father was of Arab descent, from the royal line of the Kadariah Sultanate in Pontianak. He was a brilliant teacher, founded the first elementary school in Pematang Gadung. But when the government turned it into a public school, he gave it up. Returned to farming, fishing the river, merging again with the rhythms of the forest. He used to say, ‘Don’t harm the forest that gives us life. Take only what you need,’” Doy said, almost in a whisper.

He paused, as if weighing the memory.

“He even kept three dogs,” he added, chuckling faintly. “We were a devout Muslim family. But those dogs would always come with us—to the fields, the rivers, especially into the forest when we hunted.”

Those early years with his father—canoeing the rivers, sleeping under the dense canopy, chasing fireflies by the edge of the swamp—bonded him to the forest in ways that went far beyond nostalgia.

After finishing his vocational training at the state technical high school (STM Negeri 1) in Pontianak, Doy briefly worked for a construction firm. But city life didn’t suit him. The asphalt felt foreign. The air, suffocating. So he returned to Pematang Gadung.

He spoke of birdsong, the whine of insects, the shrill cries of the forest’s inhabitants—Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus), proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus), red leaf monkeys (Presbytis rubicunda), Mueller’s gibbons (Hylobates muelleri), ebony langurs (Presbytis cristata), and long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis). He’d grown up with those sounds. To him, they were more melodic than the thumping rhythms of dangdut echoing from the nightclubs of Pontianak.

The memory of fireflies, blinking like tiny lanterns along the swamp’s edge, shimmered more beautifully than the gaudy fireworks of New Year’s Eve in any big city.

Those sounds, those lights—they weren’t just nostalgic. They were sacred. They were, as he put it, “the whispers of the forest, calling me home.”

Doy was even willing to become an unpaid schoolteacher in his village, earning just Rp 450,000 a month—barely enough for a tank of gas—so long as he could spend weekends in the forest: photographing birds, inhaling the aroma of the swamp, and listening to the universe’s untamed music. This, he said, was a luxury money couldn’t buy—not in Jakarta, not in New York, not anywhere on Earth.

Back then, the small rivers and creeks around Pematang Gadung teemed with fish. But not only that—the area was rich in rare flora and fauna, some of them critically endangered.

Surveys by the Ketapang Biodiversity Keeping group—also known as Kawan Burung Ketapang (KBK)—documented a wide array of species: frogs, lizards, crocodiles, insects, monkeys, and birds, including the elusive Black Orchid (Coelogyne pandurata), among the most sought-after in the world. Pematang Gadung was home to a constellation of rare mammals and primates, many of them on the edge of extinction.

For generations, villagers—including Doy and his family—have guarded that sacred forest, lived within it, obeyed its rhythms.

Part 3: Storm, the Stork, and the Heart of Ketapang

The wind picked up outside, lashing at the café's windows. Thank God the power from the state utility finally returned. Doy sipped what was left of his coffee—now lukewarm—with faint reluctance. I waved to Marlin for two more cups. The cold was starting to reach our bones.

“Bro,” Doy asked, half-whispering across the table, “have you ever heard of the Storm’s Stork? From the Ciconiidae family?”

I shook my head. Birds weren’t exactly my forte, though I shared Doy’s passion for forests and the photography of winged creatures.

“They live in Pematang Gadung. I once raised one,” he said. His voice was swallowed by another peal of thunder.

Later, with the help of the internet, I learned that the Storm’s Stork (Ciconia stormi) is among the rarest of birds—critically endangered. Dressed in black, white, and red plumage, its face painted a wash of yellow-orange, it is believed that only 250 to 500 individuals remain in the wild, with habitat limited to parts of Sumatra, Borneo, and Brunei Darussalam.

In 2011, a young civil servant named Erik Sulidra accidentally captured an image of this bird on his camera while exploring Pematang Gadung. That moment led him down a path he hadn’t anticipated—into the world of wildlife photography, a passion Doy and his circle had long embraced. Erik is now one of Ketapang’s finest nature photographers.

One day, Erik told me, Doy rescued a starving Storm’s Stork chick from the hands of a hunter. He paid for it with his own modest teacher’s salary. The little bird, still featherless, was taken home to their village of Tuan-Tuan. Doy’s eldest daughter, Mira, named the bird Edi.

Over two years, Edi grew strong under Doy’s care. He trained the bird patiently in the swamp behind their house. In 2012, Edi was released into the wild, and by early 2013, the stork made one brief return to the pond where it had been raised.

“But it didn’t stay long,” Doy recalled, quoting Mira, who had witnessed the brief homecoming. “It flew off again soon after.”

Another time, Doy came across a gray-headed fish eagle (Ichthyophaga ichthyaetus) in a cage, owned by a Chinese merchant at the Ketapang market. The merchant, weary of feeding the voracious predator, was ready to part with it. Doy didn’t hesitate. It felt like fate. He released the eagle back into the forests of Pematang Gadung, with the KBK crew by his side, celebrating the bird’s return to freedom.

So where, really, is this Pematang Gadung that Doy speaks of with near reverence? The place he calls the Heart of Ketapang?

Administratively, the forest lies within the village of Pematang Gadung, in South Matan Hilir Subdistrict. It’s only about 30 kilometers from Ketapang city. Almost the entire region is peat swamp and secondary forest. According to KBK records, the total area once covered around 28,000 hectares. Today, only about 14,000 remain, including some kerangas heath forest. The rest has been lost—devoured by over 7,000 hectares of illegal gold mining (PETI) pits, and the spread of village settlements now housing about 2,839 people.

It was in this forest that Doy was born—four days before Christmas, in 1975. His parents, Yahya Abdullah and Syamsiah, were subsistence farmers, seasonal fishermen, and hunters. They had ten children. Doy was the seventh.

That night, I could feel his restlessness. It had a texture, like mist or unfinished sentences. I could feel it crawling under my skin too. What could I do but listen? I asked him to continue.

A month earlier, I had stood myself at the edge of the Kepuluk River in Pematang Gadung. The water had turned to mud—tainted by illegal gold mining upstream. Not even a seluang fish (Devario regina) could be found, let alone crocodiles.

“I’ve seen a glimpse,” I said. “Can you tell me the part I couldn’t see, Bang Doy?”

He didn’t answer right away. He reached for another cigarette. I lost count of how many he had smoked. The ashtray was full.

“The forest keeps shrinking. When I was little, it was a paradise for birds. A granary for the skies. Home to all kinds of monkeys, mammals, even the vertebrates that orangutans snack on,” he said, sounding like a scientist. And maybe he was, despite the lack of academic credentials. Doy and his friends had identified dozens of flora and fauna species there—especially birds and plants. They noted their names, both local and scientific. Doy could tell you which animals were endemic, and which were just seasonal migrants.

That’s why he believed Pematang Gadung was a miniature Ketapang. “Ninety-five percent of the bird and mammal species in this regency can be found in that forest,” he said.

Before government licenses allowed palm oil expansion, before gold miners began breaking the soil, the forest had been a beautiful place—a life source for creatures and humans alike. The villagers fished, foraged, hunted. But they did so wisely, with restraint. Not like today, he said. Not with this kind of greed.

Since the 1990s, the threats to the forest—logging, mining, fire, oil plantations—have steadily choked the space that both humans and wildlife rely on. The forest doesn’t only feed and shelter. It holds economies, cultures, memories, and spiritual meaning for the people of Ketapang.

Part 4: The Village Head and the War for the Forest

Doy’s activism began when he was still just a volunteer teacher in his village. Quietly, he began warning families not to fall for the promises of mining and plantation companies who were eyeing their ancestral lands. He spoke at local gatherings. He went to seminars—whenever he could afford the travel—even national forums on conservation and forests.

In 2007, he was elected village head. The job gave him just enough official authority to do what he had always done—but now in the open. That same year, he began publicly opposing companies that sought to grab land and clear the forest of Pematang Gadung.

He and a group of allies founded Kawan Burung Ketapang (Friends of the Birds of Ketapang), a grassroots activist collective. Later, the name evolved into Ketapang Biodiversity Keeping—but they kept the acronym: KBK.

Its members were mostly wildlife photographers, nature lovers who roamed the forest with cameras slung across their backs. Doy’s modest salary often paid for fuel, food, and film.

“All because of that,” he said, flicking a cigarette ash, “a high-ranking security official in Ketapang once threatened to shoot me in the head.”

The accusation? That Doy had assisted a national TV station in filming a report on the damage caused by illegal mining—how it was poisoning the Kepuluk River, and jeopardizing the last fragments of forest in Pematang Gadung.

Whether the report ever aired didn’t matter. With or without cameras, Doy was fighting to protect his forest.

Recognizing the importance of this area, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) included Pematang Gadung in its 2012 Indonesia Forest and Climate Support Project (IFACS). Their Ketapang regional office began mapping the forest and assessing its conservation value.

Other NGOs followed. Fauna & Flora International (FFI), International Animal Rescue (IAR), and others began conducting surveys and field research in the area.

But the rain wouldn’t stop that night. Nor would the deepening sense of grief. Our coffee had long gone cold—cold like Doy’s quiet conviction that the Indonesian government would never truly side with the people of Pematang Gadung.

Though the Ministry of Forestry had supposedly issued a decree designating 14,000 hectares of Pematang Gadung as official Village Forest, Doy had never seen the actual letter.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he muttered, “Pematang Gadung is still in danger. Still prey to speculators and capital.”

And so he sat there, across from me, late at night, as the rain fell and the town seemed to disappear into itself. The interview had ended long ago. But he kept talking—about the forest, about its mysteries, about how its stories were as tangled and unknowable as the future of mankind.

He reached for another cigarette but didn’t light it. Maybe he was tired. Maybe we both were. The rain didn’t let up. Eventually, I had to go. I walked back through the storm to my guesthouse. Doy saw me off.

The next day, Indosiar News reported that seven regencies in West Kalimantan were submerged in floods. Tens of thousands of homes, farms, and livestock destroyed. Several people drowned.

I thought of Doy, the conservationist who had given his life to guarding a single patch of forest. 

(When I later heard that he had passed away in Ketapang, something inside me shook for days. Though we shared no blood ties, we were connected—by our shared love for the forest, and for nature itself.)

 

—Mid-December, 2013