The Gods Must Be Restless
Living in the shadow of Indonesia's volcanoes
Photograph by John Stanmeyer
rockfalls, toxic gases and glowing ejected rock fragments."
As the volcano's rumbling crescendoed in May 2006, thousands fled the
fertile slopes and settled reluctantly into makeshift camps at lower,
safer altitudes. Even the resident monkeys descended in droves.
Not Udi and his fellow villagers, who take their cues from an
octogenarian with dazzling dentures and a taste for menthol cigarettes:
Mbah Marijan, the Gatekeeper of Merapi. Marijan has one of the more
bizarre jobs in Indonesia, or anywhere else, for that matter. The fate
of villagers like Udi and of the 500,000 residents of Yogyakarta, a city
20 miles (32 kilometers) to the south, rests on Marijan's thin
shoulders. It is his responsibility to perform the rituals designed to
appease an ogre believed to inhabit Merapi's summit. This time, the
rituals seem to have fallen short. The warnings grow more urgent.
Volcanologists, military commanders, even Indonesia's vice president beg
him to evacuate. He flatly refuses. "It's your duty to come talk to
me," he tells the police. "It is my duty to stay."
Marijan's behavior might seem suicidal anywhere else, but not in
Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,500 islands that straddles the western
reaches of the hyperactive Ring of Fire. It's a zone of geophysical
violence, a juncture of colliding tectonic plates that loops more than
25,000 miles (40,200 kilometers) around the Pacific. Geography has dealt
Indonesia a wild card: Nowhere else do so many live so close to so many
active volcanoes—129 by one count. On Java alone, 120 million people
live in the shadow of more than 30 volcanoes, a proximity that has
proved fatal to more than 140,000 in the past 500 years.
Death by volcano takes many forms: searing lava, suffocating mud, or the
tsunamis that often follow an eruption. In 1883, Mount Krakatau (often
misspelled as Krakatoa), located off Java's coast, triggered a tsunami
that claimed more than 36,000 lives. The name became a metaphor for a
catastrophic natural disaster.
For Marijan, though, an eruption is not so much a threat as a growth
spurt. "The kingdom of Merapi is expanding," he says, with a nod at its
smoldering peak. In Indonesia, volcanoes are not just a fact of life,
they are life itself. Volcanic ash enriches the soil; farmers on Java
can harvest three crops of rice in a season. Farmers on neighboring
Borneo, with only one volcano, can't.
On a less earthly plane, volcanoes stand at the heart of a complicated
set of mystical beliefs that grip millions of Indonesians and influence
events in unexpected ways. Their peaks attract holy men and pilgrims.
Their eruptions augur political change and social upheaval. You might
say that in Indonesia, volcanoes are a cultural cauldron in which
mysticism, modern life, Islam, and other religions mix—or don't.
Indonesia, an assemblage of races, religions, and tongues, is riveted
together by volcanoes. Reverence for them is virtually a national trait.
If the Centre for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation, the
government agency that keeps eight seismograph stations humming on
Merapi, represents modern science, Marijan, the Gatekeeper of Merapi, is
Indonesia at its most mystical. When a Dutch hiker went missing on the
volcano in 1996, Marijan reportedly made the thick mist vanish and found
the injured hiker in a ravine.
It is often hard to distinguish the kind of volcanic spasm that builds
toward a convulsion from the seismic restlessness that settles back into
quiescence. But monitoring technology has grown more sophisticated.
Overnight, government volcanologists have raised the alert to its
highest level. The lava dome might collapse at any moment. Hasn't
Marijan heard? The entreaties leave Marijan unimpressed. The alerts are
merely guesses by men at far remove from the spirit of the volcano. The
lava dome collapse? "That's what the experts say," he says, smiling.
"But an idiot like me can't see any change from yesterday."
INDONESIA'S MOTTO, "Bhinneka tunggal ika—Unity in diversity," speaks to
some 300 ethnic groups and more than 700 languages and dialects. The
government officially recognizes six religions: Islam, Catholicism,
Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, but mysticism
riddles all faiths and bares their animistic roots. Sumatra, the vast
island northwest of Java, is home to the Batak people, converted to
Christianity by European missionaries in the 19th century. Yet many
still believe the first human descended from heaven on a bamboo pole to
Mount Pusuk Buhit, an active volcano on the shores of Lake Toba. The
Tengger, Hindus who live around Mount Bromo in East Java, periodically
climb through choking sulfurous clouds to throw money, vegetables,
chickens, and an occasional goat into the crater. On Flores, the Nage,
Catholics like most on that island, are buried with their heads toward
Mount Ebulobo, whose cone fills their southern horizon.
Likewise, on largely Hindu Bali, volcanoes are sacred, none more so than
10,000-foot (3,000 meters) Mount Agung, its highest peak. It is said a
true Balinese knows its location, even when blindfolded, and many sleep
with their heads pointing toward it. In 1963 a catastrophic eruption of
Mount Agung killed a thousand people. Others starved to death after ash
smothered their crops. "The very ground beneath us trembled with the
perpetual shocks of the explosions," wrote an eyewitness. Yet what once
was spoken of as divine wrath is now seen as a gift. The rock and sand
thrown up by the eruption built hotels, restaurants, and villas for
hordes of foreign tourists, who started arriving in the 1970s. Despite
attacks by Islamic terrorists in 2002 and 2005, which killed more than
220 people, tourism remains Bali's biggest industry. And by the grace of
Agung and its neighbor, Mount Batur, houses that once nestled in fields
of chilies and onions now overlook quarries filled with workers
shoveling volcanic sand into trucks.
Not everyone has been lifted by the rising tide of tourism. Seven
hundred people in the village of Trunyan squeeze into a mountain
stronghold near Mount Batur. Their ramshackle houses cling to a sliver
of land along a lake in a vast caldera. The villagers fish in dugout
canoes and grow crops on the steep shoulders of the caldera. The
village's creation myth explains its isolation, telling how a wandering
Javanese nobleman fell in love with a goddess who lived in a giant
banyan tree. She agreed to marry him, but only if he covered his tracks
so nobody else could follow him from Java.
While tourism has brought breakneck development to the rest of Bali,
Trunyan's cherished isolation now spells economic marginalization.
Elders watch helplessly as a younger generation traces the same path to
Bali's towns and cities as Batur's rock and sand. "There are no jobs
here, no opportunities," admits Made Tusan, a teacher at Trunyan's only
school.
As if economic malaise weren't enough, a recent catastrophe added to the
litany of woes. A giant banyan tree that had shaded the village for
centuries crashed to the ground during a storm, flattening the village
temple, though miraculously sparing the holy statue of Dewa Ratu Gede
Pancering Jagat, the local deity.
A village elder, I Ketut Jaksa, blames the disaster on Balinese
politicians and businessmen. He "won't name names," he says guardedly,
but he insists they angered the volcano deity by praying to advance
their careers while ignoring Trunyan's growing disrepair. Others blame
the new road, which recently connected the village to the rest of Bali,
destroying its isolation and leaving it open to spiritual contamination.
IN INDONESIA, it's a given that human folly can trigger natural
disasters. Eruptions, earthquakes, even a toppling banyan tree, have
long been regarded as cosmic votes of no-confidence in a ruler—a fact of
which the country's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is painfully
aware.
Two months after the president's inauguration in October 2004, an
earthquake and tsunami struck Aceh Province on Sumatra, claiming 170,000
lives. A quake hit Sumatra three months later, killing perhaps 1,000.
Then Mount Talang erupted, forcing thousands of villagers to flee their
homes. A chain text message flashed across cell phones, imploring
Yudhoyono to perform a ritual to stop the calamities. "Mr. President,"
it read, "please sacrifice 1,000 goats." Yudhoyono—a former general with
a doctorate in agricultural economics—publicly refused. "Even if I
sacrificed a thousand goats," he announced, "disasters in Indonesia will
not end."
They didn't. There were more eruptions—a statistical certainty in the
volcano-studded country. One catastrophe followed another: a quake, a
tsunami, floods, forest fires, landslides, dengue fever, avian
influenza, and a mud eruption. Trains derailed, ferries sank, and after
three major plane crashes—one at Yogyakarta airport—an editorial in the Jakarta Post advised air travelers to pray.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/volcano-culture/andrew-marshall-text/3
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