First Descent

by Pam Withers

  Must get out. Must self-rescue. No, still in the rapid. Fog seemed to have enveloped my mind. Okay, maybe here. I lowered my legs and tried to stand. Only my chest was above water. Wham! Rocks grabbed my right foot like I’d stepped in an animal trap. Whoosh! The current nabbed my body and plunged me face-first into the water, stretching me between the rock anchoring my foot and the waterlogged kayak on which my hands held a death grip.

  I had to do it. The guys would have to forgive me. I released my kayak. Still I flailed for a breath, the hurtling current refusing to free my foot from the river bottom. Water pushed up my nostrils as, facedown, I slapped and slapped to lift my mouth above the turbulent surface. I simply couldn’t do it; there was no air to be had. At the same time, I kicked, pulled, and yanked to free my ankle, which only caused the entrapping rocks to further gouge the skin around it.

  This is it? I screamed silently. Foot entrapment on a measly Class III rapid is how I’m going to die? My thoughts slowed down, even as the pain and pressure in my lungs built up. Stay calm! I told myself. Then I visualized the good-luck necklace I always carried. It was in my paddling jacket pocket. I’m not going to drown!

  I felt someone’s hands on my ankle. Someone’s strong hands tearing at the rocks around it to free it so I could rise above the surface and breathe, breathe, breathe. I’m free! I gasped, coughed, and tried to take an arm stroke.

  “Roll onto your back and keep your feet up!” Henrique shouted as his arm went around my chest in a lifeguard’s grip. He was out of his boat. He must’ve beached it lightning-fast, run ashore, and leapt in to save me. We floated down the rapid as one unit, Henrique using his strong free arm and leg kicks to maneuver us ever closer to shore. There, Jock, Tom, and Tiago – who’d run upriver from the bank where they’d deposited the two rescued boats and paddles – helped Henrique haul me to dry ground. I rolled my head to one side and puked. The Colombian sky swirled in Technicolor.

  The guys sat waiting.

  “Thank you,” I finally managed. My eyes focused on Henrique and Jock, their heads bent over mine.

  “What happened?” Jock asked. It sounded like an accusation.

  “Tom wouldn’t get off my boat. I couldn’t roll with him on it.”

  “Tom let go of your boat the second you flipped,” Jock corrected me. “And I rescued him. Henrique hung back after you let go of your boat, but it’s still amazing he managed to beach his boat and get to you in time. And Tiago rescued your boat. Couldn’t you tell you were midriver when you tried to stand up?”

  I heard the underlying message: What are you, a beginner?

  “I was feeling dizzy and weird.”

  “You didn’t say anything.” Jock was more polite than Gramps would’ve been, but he had the same way of letting me know I was a failure.

  “Altitude sickness,” I realized. “I haven’t gotten used to the elevation here yet.”

  I could read Jock’s expression: Yeah, right. Henrique and Tiago knew my paddling abilities and believed me, I knew, but in Jock’s mind, I’d been demoted to a novice.

  Tom and I emptied our kayaks and sheepishly climbed back into them for the final leg of the trip. Jock kept a sharp watch on both of us, while conversing only with Henrique and Tiago. Wet and disillusioned, I finally sighted Lina’s car. Please, Jock, I thought, don’t tell that reporter what happened or it’ll get back to Gramps. And don’t tell Alberto when he shows up with the mules tomorrow.

  Both of which Jock did, of course.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I woke up with a head-throbbing hangover the next morning, thanks to Henrique and Tiago, who’d decided I needed a cheer-me-up after the river episode. Their idea was to haul me around bars that didn’t seem to care we were all underage.

  I made it to Jock’s shop looking pretty rough – rougher than my Brazilian buddies – even though we’d stopped at an Internet café to glug coffee. There, I’d notified Gramps and Mom that I was fine, had met up with my teammates, had hired a guide, and needed more money.

  Alberto, waiting with the mules, took one look at my sorry state and sneered at me. He said something to Jock that made Jock, Henrique, and Tiago smile. Alberto’s dark eyes took obvious pleasure in noting that I, alone, didn’t understand their exchange in Spanish. Hopefully he wouldn’t try to use Spanish to drive a wedge between my buddies and me, and hopefully he wouldn’t tell Myriam I was a drunk.

  Jock carried the first kayak across the grass and, skirting the mule’s hind legs, set it gently on her back.

  “I told Alberto about your episode yesterday,” he said, “only in hopes he’d talk you out of this idea before you get yourself killed.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. As Alberto held the kayak, I followed Jock back to the boat shed to help him, Henrique, and Tiago with the other four kayaks. He’d stashed break-apart paddles in each of them, as we’d arranged.

  Alberto was pretty adept at tying our load securely. He was also pretty surly when I insisted on taking a photo for Gramps and Mom. After the click, he stared at my digital camera, which made me tuck it deep into one of the pockets of my backpack. He gestured at our backpacks, offering to hoist them atop the poor mules. Henrique and Tiago happily handed theirs over, but I shook my head. Not with my camera inside.

  “I’m good at carrying heavy loads,” I said in broken Spanish. It was so broken, Henrique felt a need to translate for me.

  Alberto turned away and patted the mules to urge them forward, leaving the three of us to follow.

  “Good luck,” Jock said, standing on his shop’s doorstep, frowning.

  “See you next week,” I replied with confidence. When I return, I wanted to assure him, we three would have the dream of a lifetime in our hands: a first descent on the Furioso River.

  We adjusted our pace to that of Alberto and the heavily loaded mules. For the first two hours, Alberto said nothing and rarely glanced behind, ignoring Henrique’s questions. He also ignored the Brazilians’ conversations in Portuguese, but when they broke into English to include me, he turned to deliver such a glare that soon we abandoned all conversation.

  During those first hours, the four of us traveled along a dirt road and were passed now and then by colorful old buses, with music blaring and people hanging on to the back doors and roof racks. I dug out my camera to take a picture for Mom. The shot showed everyone on the buses staring openmouthed at us, like they’d never seen mules carrying kayaks before.

  Eventually, Alberto left the road and climbed a steep trail. I examined him from behind: tall, straight-backed, dark, wearing a felt bowler-type hat, old dirty jeans instead of the “skirt” a lot of the indígena men wore, a T-shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt he would no doubt shed as the morning sun rose higher. His high-top basketball shoes were one stitch away from falling apart, and two holes in their soles blinked at me with every footstep. But that certainly didn’t slow him down over the increasingly rough trail.

  Long grass tickled my calves where it managed to poke up inside my jeans.

  “Any snakes around here?” I finally asked Alberto, in an attempt at conversation.

  “Si.” That meant he could understand my Spanish sometimes.

  “Poisonous ones?”

  “Si.” The chill in his voice made me feel like he wished one would strike me on the way. What is it? Jealousy of my equipment and money, or hatred of whites in general? Or is he Myriam’s boyfriend, who has picked up on my interest in her?

  “Is Myriam your girlfriend?” I asked, ignoring the startled look that put on Henrique’s and Tiago’s faces. Might as well get that question over with, I thought.

  He whirled around and narrowed his eyes at me. “My fiancée,” he pronounced, slowly and deliberately.

  “That’s nice,” I said. Judging from the cold-shoulder way she’d treated him during our previous encounter, I doubted it. But at least our mule-guide and I were having a conversation.

  “How many mules do you have?” Henrique asked in Spanish, expanding on my a
ttempt to draw out our guide.

  “Two.” He added something about needing them for harvesting crops. In other words, we were decadent idiots compromising his entire community’s harvesting efforts for the day.

  I figured they must be pretty poor to have only two mules and not be able to take a day off. But the pay Myriam had demanded was obviously enough to make up for it, or he wouldn’t have been sent down. And it wasn’t like I expected Alberto to understand what I was up to. Otherwise he or one of his friends would’ve taken a kayak down their local river long ago. Instead, Fate had saved this first descent for me so I could outdo, and maybe even impress, Gramps.

  As I opened my mouth for more conversation, Alberto stopped abruptly and stripped off his hooded sweatshirt. I wrinkled my nose and turned away from the ripe body odor, then shook my head politely when he offered me the shirt.

  That’s when he put his hands on his hips and pointed at me. “Put it on,” he ordered in Spanish. Henrique translated.

  “No, gracias.”

  “Soldiers, maybe,” he said in Spanish, pointing to the stubby pine trees up the hill.

  I saw Henrique’s eyes widen. Squinting against the bright sun, I saw nothing and wondered if Alberto was just trying to scare us.

  “Now,” he barked, then said something else to Henrique and Tiago.

  “He says neither he nor the mules are taking another step until you shed your backpack and pull his hoodie on. Guess you’d better do it,” Henrique said sympathetically.

  “I’m too hot,” I objected.

  “Just do it,” Tiago said quietly.

  I sighed and reached for the sweatshirt in Alberto’s outstretched hand. Hardly had my head appeared through the top than he reached forward and yanked the drawstring of the hood tight, as if trying to hide my face. Then he removed his felt hat and perched it on my head, tilted to shadow my face, and grabbed my hands to stick them into the ratty sweatshirt’s pockets.

  Henrique and Tiago failed to smother smiles. I definitely didn’t want a felt hat on my sweaty, now-hooded head in the noonday sun. Again, Alberto pointed to the trees, which instantly dissolved my buddies’ smirks. Right, I get the message. He was trying to dress me like an indígena to cover any white skin. He wasn’t worried about Henrique or Tiago because my skin was whiter than theirs.

  I was pissed, but I tried telling myself it made some sense. Maybe now we wouldn’t get delayed by soldiers wanting to question us. Fair enough. I’d go along with the little charade, if only so we could keep moving towards the cooler temperatures farther up the mountain. Not that I could imagine soldiers being the least bit interested in two dusty mules, whose loads resembled green wings, and four young men, one overdressed and carrying a heavy backpack.

  We continued on up the ever-steepening trail for what seemed like hours. The smell of the mules assaulted my nostrils. It was worse when one paused to defecate and I stepped in the mess.

  “Good one!” Henrique teased.

  Only once did we head downhill, towards a grove of trees that I sensed hid the place where the two rivers joined. My heart quickened as I heard roaring whitewater.

  “The Furioso and Magdalena?” Tiago asked.

  Alberto nodded. When we got to the convergence itself, Henrique, Tiago, and I rushed forward to look at the impressive volume of water spilling out between tall, pink granite walls that seemed to march upstream forever.

  “Sweet,” Henrique murmured, stroking his soul patch.

  “Class V,” Tiago said.

  Upstream, the canyon walls squeezed the river into nonstop rapids that made my mouth water, too. Downstream, the rapids joined the fast-moving, much larger Magdalena River.

  When I looked around, Alberto was unlashing one of the kayaks. Like most people who’d never kayaked, he hoisted it atop his head instead of hanging it from his shoulder. He marched it over to thick brush on the riverbank, near the foot of the canyon walls, and dumped it there. Henrique and Tiago hurried to help him with the second kayak while I gathered some branches to cover them with, even though their camouflage coloring made them hard to spot already.

  “Are you sure Jock will find them here?” I asked.

  Alberto kicked the kayaks another few inches under cover and strode back to the mules as if to say he couldn’t care less whether Jock or anyone else ever found them.

  Within minutes, we were back on our difficult trail, the mules down to three kayaks. I paused now and then to drink from my water bottle, as did the rest of the group. Even with the heavy pack, I made sure to keep up with the other three, step for step. Despite occasional shortness of breath, I could tell that after forty-eight hours in the Colombian Andes, I was getting used to the elevation.

  When we ran out of water, we stopped at a stream to refill our bottles. Henrique, Tiago, and I added purifying tablets, which Alberto watched with a mix of curiosity and disdain. He let the mules lap up their fill and checked the straps on the remaining kayaks. Again, he offered to strap my backpack to a mule. Again, I said, “I’m good at carrying heavy loads.”

  Henrique and I tried to start up conversation. I suggested he ask Alberto about the Furioso. But Alberto placed a finger over his lips and pointed at the surrounding forest, like the trees might have ears.

  That prompted Henrique to whisper a question to Alberto in Spanish, which Alberto ignored. He doesn’t like to talk and is tired of our accented Spanish, I concluded. I could understand that.

  It was well past noon by the time we trudged into a dirt-caked plaza with an outdoor clay oven beside a group of rundown buildings. The biggest was a former hacienda. Half-naked children with runny noses ran around, chasing hens. Wrinkled old women sat spinning on simple, ancient looms or preparing food. They looked up and stared, unabashed. They must have been expecting us, but we were an exotic sight anyway.

  Alberto lost no time pulling the Brazilians’ backpacks off the mules and throwing them at Henrique and Tiago. Then he unloaded the kayaks and tossed them roughly into a corner of the plaza, which made me wince, even if they were indestructible plastic. He motioned for me to return his sweatshirt and hat, which I did happily.

  Then his entire demeanor changed. He turned his back on us, laughed and joked with the old women, and picked up some children to tickle and tease. He stole some food off a baking tray one woman was preparing and popped it into his mouth with a smile as she, also smiling, shook a wooden spoon at him. He filled his water bottle from a pipe that ran down a hill and dripped into a pile of rocks – from the river, I guessed. That made my parched throat long for a swig.

  Then he led the mules off towards a lean- to without so much as a backward glance at his three paddler-clients.

  Henrique and Tiago promptly sat down on a bench in the shade, stroking a dog while chatting to each other in their own language, as if they dropped into Andean villages all the time. I stood there with my backpack in the center of a square teeming with honking geese, cackling hens, barking dogs, a cat nursing kittens, drooling children, and barefoot old women with long skirts, shawls, and felt hats on their heads. Everyone carried on with their tasks as they looked me up and down with their dark leathery faces.

  I burned with discomfort. Sweat trickled down my face, even in the cool mountain air. I’d never felt so foreign or alone. Just as I was about to utter the question “Myriam?”, the old lady who’d been selling herbs in the market shuffled out of the largest building with her cane. Her face radiated a warm welcome. But she seemed less steady than when I’d last seen her. In fact, her face looked a little pinched and her eyes a little glassy.

  “Rex Scruggs,” she said, patting my hands as Henrique and Tiago glanced up. She was so tiny. “Hungry? Thirsty?”

  I was so relieved to hear two Spanish words I knew, and I straightened as Henrique and Tiago looked at us. Nodding at Myriam’s grandmother like she was an old friend, I eased my backpack off, then introduced her to Henrique and Tiago. She greeted them in turn, then spoke to one of the older children, who br
ought us something that looked like a patty of cornbread. I said gracias and munched on mine slowly. It was delicious.

  The old lady shuffled back into the building, then reappeared with a plastic chair like my mom has on Gramps’ deck at home. It was outfitted with an embroidered pillow. Mom would be amused at that, I knew, but I resisted pulling out my camera. She insisted I sit in the chair as Henrique and Tiago retreated to their bench and played with the dog that had befriended them.

  As Myriam’s grandmother issued orders around, I got the sense she was an important elder. Soon I had a cup of coffee in my hands, and it tasted incredibly good. Then someone brought me a chipped ceramic plate with a sandwich on it. I peeked inside: a fat slice of avocado. I was about to offer pieces of it to my buddies when two more sandwiches appeared.

  Someone fetched the old lady a plastic chair, and she pulled it up to mine like we were best buddies on a camping trip, all but ignoring the Brazilians. Again, as I looked at her closely, I got the sense she wasn’t all that well. Children chasing about the plaza gradually began to circle me, then came closer to sit cross-legged on flagstones as the old lady started talking to me. Henrique and Tiago didn’t seem to care; they were engrossed in their own conversation.

  “I’m Myriam’s grandmother,” she began, reaching forward to pat my hands again. Her palms felt clammy, like she had a fever. “You may call me Abuela.”

  Spanish for “grandmother” – at least I could remember some words. I bit into the sandwich. It tasted so good, I could’ve downed it in two bites.

  “How are you related to Malcolm Scruggs?” she asked.

  My eyebrows went up. “He’s my grandfather.”

  It seemed like she’d been expecting this. “You look like him.”

  Not many people say that, but I was okay with it. “You met him many years ago when he kayaked here?”