Sports-jocks and non-geeks may not remember Choose Your Own Adventure books, but as a ten-year-old, I was obsessed. Whether I was evading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain's sorcery, fist-fighting local troublemaker Jake from Glastonbury Market, or interrupting occultist sacrifices to hooded, goat-horned wraiths inside the House of Hell… (far too scary for ten-year-olds, surely), the fear of turning to page 114 to find the words “You are dead” still haunts me to this day.
Today's ultraviolent shoot-em-up games have expanded this first-person heroism a thousand-fold, and the innocence of the 1970s Tolkien-inspired hippie-fest that was Dungeons and Dragons has long since been forgotten. Nevertheless, the written Fantasy genre was, for a long time, the home to first-person heroism, but Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy books were not as revolutionary as they were perhaps thought.
Granted, they gave us a literary fork in the road, asking: To turn EAST turn to page 55 or… to attack the Warlock of Firetop Mountain’s Godzilla-sized dragon with a rusty grapefruit zester you pick-pocketed from Troubled Jake from Glastonbury Market, turn to page 123. Good luck with that!
Yet, in stark contrast with their “Thrilling fantasy adventure in which YOU are the hero!” CAPITALISED, emboldened, italicised, and underlined tagline, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s scary kids' books were not the first to make the reader the hero. No, not by several thousand years...
Today, I’m in the Mentawai Islands, a chain of about 100 islands and islets around 150 km off the west coast of Sumatra. I am in a canoe. The canoe has an outboard motor, and we are being driven five hours downriver to stay with a real-life tribe. I am sitting in two inches of brown river water.
Yesterday, I was on another island because my acquaintance, a 19-year-old Sumatran photography student named Fauzy, who popped up on Facebook asking if I wanted to go and visit the Mentawai Tribe, somehow took us to the wrong fucking island. Despite being from Padang, the actual city from which the ferry leaves to these islands, he managed to put the both of us on the wrong boat, meaning we were 100 km off course.
Jesus Jones! I mean, how the flying fuck is that even possible?
After an hour or two of faffing and failed phone calls, during which time I realised I had clearly found the Lenny to my George, we managed to find a fisherman who would take us to the correct island for the princely sum of one million, five hundred thousand Indonesian Rupiah (U$106). Since he was heading there to go home anyway, I managed to bargain him down by a whole ten pounds to one million three.
But not even this unexpected payout, a drenching in a lightning storm, nor the 2.5 hour ride at break-neck speed in the fastest fishing boat ever to grace the Indian Ocean could dampen my spirits… I was on my way to see my first tribe.
Back on the canoe… We boarded at nine this morning after my camera, and every vital electronic device, gadget, and cable was waterproofed in blue plastic bin-bags. I have noodles and biscuits and a gallon of water as we’re not sure what food, if any, awaits us in the jungle… and so me, Fauzy, and his friend, an egomaniacal Indonesian wannabe army-member / Girl Guide / Brownie that I didn't want, need or ask for called Bobby set off…
As our canoe disappears from the harbour, the river turns from sea-green to chocolate milkshake brown and dense mangroves line both sides of the swampy inlet. Overhanging palm trees form a tunnel, and when we emerge back into the sunlight, the river widens, offering herself to us. A family passes on another boat laden with fruit from the jungle, its V-shaped wake rocking our motor-canoe from side to side. Splashed with water, I am 14-year-old Charlie Fox, and this is my Mosquito Coast.
As we venture deeper into the unknown, a mauve flower is the first dash of colour that isn’t brown, green or yellow in an hour. The mocha water resembles the Amazon - mother of all rivers, and I turn from River Phoenix to Ice Cube, fists clenched, ready to fight giant Anaconda in the muddied waters of deepest, darkest South America. Today was a good day; I didn’t even have to use my AK.
Our driver swivels and pivots as the river bends and weaves to navigate switchbacks, floating logs and flotsam. He’s doing a good job. When Bobby Brownie isn't asleep or busy smoking, being one of those men who pretends they were in the army, he uses an oar to help us round tighter bends. It lends no help whatsoever to navigation, but it goes some way to inflate his fragile ego and misguided sense of machismo.
While Minnie Bobby Brown tries too hard to be a man, I am blissfully transported back to childhood as the shoreline avenues of palms are replaced by three-metre bullrushes and pampas grass, invoking Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons childrens' book series.
Two hours in, and Cadbury's Dairy Milk-coloured butterflies, evolved to be the same colour as the water, flit past in the breeze. Another hour passes - midday; the sun obliterates another layer of my lily-white Viking skin, and I wish our pom-pom driver was Charon, Ferryman of the River Styx delivering our souls to Hades just to escape the sun. At least the pennies on my eyes would protect my eyeballs from sunburn.
Even taking on as much water as possible, I’ve so little moisture in my body that chewing on my inferior Indomaret Rich Tea biscuits becomes more like eating a Champagne glass.
Oh well, there's no going back; I've crossed the Rubicon. After stopping to refuel from an oversized petrol can, our overpriced canoe driver brings the motor to an idle and ponders his next move as we reach a fork in the river. Had he forgotten which way to go to the tribe?
To take the LEFT tributary turn to page 51…
One o’clock. It’s hotter than every third page of a Michael Crichton novel: Page 4, “Gosh, the jungle is hot, is anyone else hot?” Page 7, “I’d never been so hot.” Page 10, "It's so darned hot, my robot cowboy face is melting off.”
My teeth are sunburnt and every corner we round, the water muddies, the sun intensifies, and I remember my brief time on the Mekong River ten years ago. I feel a Vietnam PTSD flashback coming on... Suddenly, I am Apocalypse Now's Captain Willard, and I'm sure the sun would even burn the gaps between his 14-year-old co-star Laurence Fishburne's teeth.
As I search for words to describe deep crimson, almost black butterflies, Sir David Attenborough's voice comes out instead of my own, and I realise that I am finally on the journey I always wanted; natural historian, foreign correspondent, colonial explorer, Indiana Jones with a baseball cap instead of a fedora, and Indomaret own-brand biscuits instead of a bullwhip.
I am doing exactly what I always wanted. I am the hero of my own life.
The river? Well, that’s still mud brown; not red enough to be the Amazon or the Mekong, but maybe the Congo. And with thoughts of Africa, I am Marlow on his search for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the source material for Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War film.
After more than five hours on the river, we arrive at the jetty, by which time I contain as much water as a baked clay pot. It occurs to me there’s a good reason we never see Indiana Jones travelling to these places. There’ll be no montage of a red marker pen highlighting my route on a map. To truly be a hero like Indy, you must also live through his deleted scenes.
We climb the grey mud banks of the concrete jetty, collect our bags and prepare for an "hour’s hike" (really two) through the jungle to the tribe. Along the way, we meet and chat to a tribesman coming from the village.
Dressed only in a loincloth, this leather-coloured, leather-skinned, sinewy, tattooed and weathered warrior from the Mentawai Islands' Flower Men tribe carries everything he needs: a bat, a machete, and a burning wooden stick, its embers acting as an eternal light for his cigarettes.
For the next few nights, I stay in a shaman's wooden home, a communal house raised on stilts, known as an uma. Dozens of animal skulls hang from the rafters, the remains of monkeys they had caught and eaten.
The medicine man's bare-breasted wife collects and boils water, washes the laundry, and catches fish from the river with sharpened sticks. He, it seems, was in charge of hanging the laundry on the line!
Luckily, monkey wasn't on the menu while I stayed with the shaman (sikerei) and his family. I think they killed one of their chickens, which we ate cross-legged on the floor, sharing from a giant bowl of starchy tapioca or something similar while the puppy eagerly awaited scraps.
At least, I hope it was chicken, but I guess it could have been human. After all, the Flower Men tribe of the Mentawai Islands sharpen their teeth, practice ritual animal sacrifice and, until recently, warfare cannibalism.
Were these guys going to spike me with paralysing tree frog poison, tie me up, cook me in a pot, and eat me? Was that Bobby's plan all along? I wouldn't put anything past that lying, red-armed motherfucker.
That first night in the jungle, I had one of the worst nights' sleep since that time I climbed Anak Krakatau as it erupted and got attacked by a vampire bat and a facehugger-sized insect on Rakata Island beach 900 km to the south, but that's another story for another day...
Still, at least in my sleepless state, I got some cool shots of a million yellow, red, white, and blue stars and the Milky Way. Just me and the Gods.
The next morning, we wash in the river, eat a late breakfast (jungle brunch), and chat with the shaman. In the afternoon, we hike a few miles to a school in the middle of the rainforest. After entertaining the jungle kids with magic tricks, I get bored of ego-maniac Bobby's tall tales, which were becoming more grandiose and unbelievable with every telling. So, I trek alone a couple of miles back along the track and take the small path back to the shaman's house...just as dusk settled in around 6.30 pm.
Presuming I'd got lost, Bobby and Fauzy assumed I had walked five miles from the school along the main track, missing the turning to the shaman's house, and ending up all the way back at the jetty. They were wrong. I was sitting in the shaman's house, having a whale of a time without them.
I learn that Mentawai cultures practice an ancient animistic religion called Arat Sabulungan, which connects the tribespeople to the spirits of their ancestral forefathers and the nature that surrounds them in the rainforest. The Flower Men tribe believes that all living beings, animals, and objects contain a spiritual essence that must be respected.
Through my smattering of Bahasi, Pidgin Ingriss, a series of drawings and acting out charades, I convey to my sikerei host that animism and shamanism were global phenomena, and that there is only one story, the monomyth, or as my hero, Joseph Campbell called it, The Hero's Journey.
Bobby and Fauzy got back a full two hours after me in the dark to find me sitting, smoking, laughing, and chatting to the shaman and playing with his puppy. And boy, was Bobby pissed that I had found my own way back without his pretend military protection. In an act of revenge, he or Fauzy knocked my camera and tripod over, cracking the lens protector.
Next, this delusional fantasist and pathological liar told his unlikeliest tale yet. Bobby reckoned he'd killed a policeman in Jakarta by throwing him out of a sixth-storey window. Now, I don't know much about murderers, but I'm sure they don't go around telling people about their crimes. Plus, if you kill a policeman in Indonesia, they'll execute you. He was trying to convince me he was in the army and a wanted man, on the run for murder.
I'd had enough of this Cluster B personality-disordered, tattooed twat; I was taking my destiny into my own hands... by hook or by crook, I was outta here. Just like House of Hell, I would choose my own adventure.
Before dawn on the third day, I rose, silently packed my backpack and camera bag, and attempted my escape. Unluckily, Bobby woke up and asked what I was doing and where I was going. "I'm leaving..." I explained.
He told me that I couldn't trek back to the jetty alone. I offered two words in reply, "Watch me," and set off back along the path through the jungle.
I soon came across a river crossing that would save several hundred yards, and removing my shoes and socks again. Only trouble was, it was a rickety jungle canyon rope bridge, straight outta Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. With so many missing struts, this was going to be my leap of faith...
After traversing the rope bridge from Stewart Lee's Scooby Doo and the Jungle Pirate Zombie Island, I made the jetty in about 45 minutes. There were no canoes heading back into town, but apparently, there was an old track into town. However, it was nearly impassable, difficult to navigate, littered with obstacles, in a bad state, and needed much repair. I somehow managed to convince a young man to let me hire him and his motorbike for a third of the price of a canoe. The kid filled his bike with petrol, and we set off down the bumpy track with him driving and me riding pillion.
Within minutes, it became clear this was never gonna work. Weighing two of him, I suggested I drive the bike while he rode shotgun, so we swapped places. "Berapa jam?" I asked the skinny motorbike owner. "Empat jam," he replied. Four hours. "Tidak... tiga jam!" I insisted, tapping my chest with my palm, Bahasa plus sign language for "No. I'll do it in three hours."
Driving like the devil was at our heels along the flats, every so often, the verdant green jungle-lined landscape gave way to burnt fields. Shell-shocked, sickly, deathly thin, malnourished tribe members stepped off the track or stared from their stoops at the blur of a European speeding past on a motorbike. What the hell had happened here? Something eldritch.
This was no controlled stubble burning. Vast swathes of rainforest were gone, replaced by blackened tree stumps and eerie ashen-grey fields, resembling a scene from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. The acrid smell of burning and death hung in the air. I never did find out what happened in this hellish place, but I suspect it was timber logging by the white man.
I pulled on my trusty volcano-climbing goggles and tied my bandana behind my ears. I wasn't sticking around to find out what had happened to these poor people, so I surged on past, leaving them in a cloud of dust.
Every ten minutes, we encountered some obstacle or other: a fallen tree, giant rock, small canyon, rickety rope bridge, river ford, wooden bridge, traversible up-and-down seesaw plank, crater, pothole, or mudhole in the middle of the road. They all required moving, going around, or over.
My passenger would get off and carry my two bags as I revved the shit out of his bike to make it over giant rocks, or balance and teeter along planks of wood. I always wanted to appear on the 1980s BBC TV show Kickstart.
By the time we made it into town, the bike was seriously overheating, as testified by the thick black smoke farting out of the boiling exhaust pipe.
We made town in a little over dua jam... or two hours.
I took the ferry back to Padang, and while at sea, my brother texted saying that our Uncle John had died. Godspeed into that good night, Uncle.
During my canoe ride, sleepless nights in a shaman's hut, and breakneck motorbike escape, I was carried not only down a magnificent river, but through a swathe of other settings and characters, real and imagined, from the books, films and TV shows I've enjoyed throughout my life. Today I was the hero. But while Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Choose Your Own Adventure books were visionary, they were not revolutionary.
You see... YOU already are the hero of every book you've ever read, every film and TV show you ever watched. YOU are the protagonist. The main character is YOU.
Ask ten people why they like movies and nine of them will say "escapism." Those nine people miss the point. We don't read books to escape; we shouldn't be switching off while watching movies (even during Michael Bay movies); we should be sitting up, wide awake, listening to their message, following their lead, and taking action.
Stories are cautionary tales about YOU - every single one of them. We have just forgotten. But, luckily, I am here to remind you. When we see a SLIPPERY WHEN WET sign, we instantly recognise that the cartoon figure is us potentially falling over, right? Sixty-five thousand years ago, the first caveman to draw spear-carrying stick figures next to buffalo on rockfaces (to pictorialise the region's abundance of food) wasn't drawing himself... he was drawing the next nomadic tribe to come along. He was drawing YOU!
Stories aren't make-believe; they are blueprints to show you how to live your life. This communication of essential knowledge is the reason we drew on cave walls, passed down folk tales, told stories around campfires for thousands of years, and read about heroes and heroines for hundreds. That’s why we’ve gone to the theatre since Ancient Greek times. It should also be the reason we watch Marvel Superhero movies today.
So let me ask you... Who is the hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh? Homer's Iliad and Odyssey? Shakespeare's Hamlet? Heart of Darkness? To Kill A Mockingbird? Star Wars? The Lion King? The Wizard of Oz, Sex and the City? Lost? 24?
Gilgamesh. Achilles. Odysseus. Prince Hamlet of Denmark. Marlow. Scout Finch. Luke Skywalker. Simba. Dorothy Gale, Carrie Bradshaw. Jack Shephard. Jack Bauer. Wrong. Wrong. And Wrong again.
It’s YOU. It was always YOU!
You are Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Odysseus. You are Prince Hamlet of Denmark. Marlow is you. You're Scout Finch and Luke Skywalker. You're Simba. Carrie Bradshaw. Jack Shephard. Jack Bauer - they're all YOU.
If you’re reading this from your office, YOU are Neo from The Matrix. YOU are Walter Mitty and Being John Malkovich. Mr Robot is YOU.
If you’re in school, YOU are Mr Holland's Opus. YOU'RE in The Breakfast Club's detention. YOU are Dead Poets' Society John Keating, inspiring children to love poetry. YOUR school is School of Rock, YOU are Clueless!
If you were raised on a farm, YOU are Dorothy Gale. YOU hired The Seven Samurai. YOU are Clark Kent / Kal-El / Superman... and only YOU can save the world. If YOU build it, they will come...
But if a Kansas farmhouse has just fallen on you, YOU are The Wicked Witch of the East. Ding Dong. Turn to page 114. YOU are dead!