WHEN THE GIANT FALLS
On the third day, amidst soaring valleys and tropical rainforests, a four-wheel pickup truck with opened trunk carried us through steep winding paths. From paved roads narrowing into tight dirt tracks, the route turned increasingly ragged and steeper as we approached our destination. What I could feel instantly, since crossing over into the region yesterday, was the mass of greenness. I could not differentiate between what was or was not a patch of the Malaysian forests. It had been immensely green the whole way through. Not a single bald mountain was in sight. Covering non-jungle areas were dense rubber plantations or reforestation zones.
Today, we started our shooting at the loggers’ camp. They were still sound asleep when we arrived. Sang, the sawmill manager, and Bay, the forest-concession owner, launched a surprise attack on the workers, knocking loudly from room to room, and yelling into their tents. We, too, were caught off guard, grabbing our equipment almost not in time to capture the men dressing up for work.
At midway, we stopped at a courtyard, a fresh market selling timbers where buyers could select and purchase them in preferred sizes and species. There were timber trucks looking as if coming off the Mad Max movie, their drivers looking tough and seasoned in a perfect match with the trucks; they climbed and loosened rope slings tied around timbers in a manner as cool as western cowboys.
Bay spread out a concession map, mumbling to the workers in a local dialect for a while. I saw them shake their heads and then tell us to hop into the pickup truck for further travel. I wondered what happened. Kit, Sang’s son, who could speak Thai, explained that the tree they had prepared to cut down so we could photograph it at its site, after another inspection, had not reached the age criteria yet. Either they were afraid to break the laws or conscious of the ethics of someone making a living out of the forests, or maybe both, the not-yet doomed tree just narrowly dodged its death.
For someone who was not into trekking, and never thought of entering a jungle, like me, I could tell as soon as I stepped out of the truck that this place was completely unsuitable for thin-skinned urbanites. Local mosquitoes, in XXL size, welcomed us in agregarious giant swarm. Between the mosquitoes and the surrounding air, I wondered which one had the bigger mass. I could not stand still. I had to shake my body and used my hands to brush them off my head and ears all the time. The problem was, in this state of such a poor concentration, how could I photograph anything? This scene was the ultimate climax and seemed to be the most challenging shooting session in this project.
I drew out a big checkered loincloth and used it to cover my head and body, leaving only my eyes exposed so I could see the way. A man holding a chainsaw talked to me in a local dialect that I could not decipher. But reading from his face and body expressions, I could tell he was asking me whether I was ready to go. He had been waiting for too long now. To tell the truth, I was under a load of pressure at that moment. Mosquitoes were one thing, but I also had to photograph something I never had experience with before, in a weird and weighty situation, and I had to squeeze it out within a limited time.
Those jungle’s vegetations were incredibly cruel. Some species, to me, looked just like ceiba trees in hell. Their whole structure contained nothing but big sharp thorns. Plus, they vined out in tangled spreads like deadly trapping nets for big animals, which could not escape once ensnared. The logger stopped at the base of a giant tree, its girth probably measuring at least two to three persons embracing it. I could not tell the height as its canopy shot high up way beyond the grove. He walked around the tree to inspect it, feeling the base with his hand, looking up and stare at its top as if to estimate something.
Then I asked a question I should have asked some while ago but forgot to as I was too busy with surviving, “To which way the tree will fall?” He probably understood my supplementary hand gestures, because he looked back up to the tree’s top before answering without turning around to look at me, “No idea!” Loud and clear. And probably the only Thai words he knew. I turned to look at my assistant in panic. What should we do now? The ground was weedy and rugged. The soil was spongy we could not walk properly. Every movement must be planned and pre-calculated. If you do not know to which way a tree will fall, then let it be a case of every man for himself.
The logger made the first swing of his sword. The saw blade cut easily into the tree’s flesh like a knife cutting through pork. I push my wide-angle lens as close as possible to capture the emotion of wood bits flying towards audiences as requested by the art director. After carving out a triangle portion like a wedge of cheese, he proceeded to the other side. In hand gestures, he told me and my assistant to move around to the back. We could guess by now that the tree would fall toward the opposite direction, on the side that the cheese wedge was carved out in preparation. He started to chainsaw the tree on the other side. A short moment later, the logger stopped to estimate the situation. Then we heard a cracking sound, like the sound when we snapped a small branch with our hands, but it resonated a hundred, a thousand times louder.
The logger jumped back away from the tree base. The sound of wood cracking repeated in rapid succession, followed by a set of whooshing sounds of the giant falling down through the grove, followed by a deep roaring thud so intense there was a tremor beneath my feet when the giant hit the ground, sending scraps of branches and leaves, along with dust, flying around in a big cloud. The scene of King Kong floating down before it hit the ground from the top of a skyscraper that my father took me to see when I was seven-year old flashed up in my head. Everything that just happened seemed like a slow-motion scene. It lasted only a few seconds if we had timed it. Yet, it felt so much longer than that. We freeze some events in our memory, playing it back repeatedly until those moments seem eternal. Right or wrong, good or bad, I did not have enough time to think about it. But that brief moment was deeply impressed inside me. I could not tell how I felt. I just knew that it shook me tremendously
Strangely, trees I previously perceived as alive, or sometimes not so, were the most alive in the split second when they were falling. Even as the giant lay motionlessly on the ground, I could still hear its faint breaths. As I stood there overwhelmed by deep mourning, my trance was interrupted by the yelling from the logger asking me whether I was ready to move on now. There were other trees he had to cut down. He received his wage in piece rate. Without waiting for an answer from me, he began to hack his way vigorously through the bush, opening up a return path. I and my assistant rushed to gather our equipment and leaped forward into his wake without sending any signal to each other.
APICHAI SUNDARAVEJ
Co-founder of the UNDERDOG.bkk. A story collector/photographer/writer/school skipper/hitch hiker/carnival goer. Picking up camera thirty something years ago just to “look cool” without any clue it would become a life long journey. Camera opened doors to all aspects of life, high and low, light and darkness, good and evil, joy and sorrow. It’s a passport into people’s private life, their house, their work, their leisure, their dreams, their struggles. A way of studying life, both in width and in depth. A way of telling those stories with most honesty possible.