My friends stood watching, as if expecting me to change my mind. Heather, who had not been well, had no wish to risk the Kitchen Sink, nor could she be left behind to manage that precipitous path; she would need her husband. And though he might have wished to go, Steve felt he had no choice but to stay with her. I sympathized with what I supposed must be his conflicting feelings. On the east coast, Byers and I are saltwater fly-fishing partners who have great fun with the hyperbole and hard teasing that go with that; he could not be entirely happy, I suspected, that after all that talk about the perils of the Kitchen Sink, his antiquated fishing buddy (aged 82), an Eastern greenhorn on this brawling Western river of his youth, wanted to run this rapid out of pure foolishness, leaving his mentor on the bank.
In any case, he had much too much pride to bitch about it, and after all, what was there to be said? And so he teased me, saying something wry about the great loss to American literature we were about to witness. And to help ease a certain tension in the group, get everyone to lighten up, not waste such a fine day, I said half-seriously, ‘It’s all right, you guys, don’t worry. My best work is behind me.’
We laughed, of course, but there was truth in this. I was having great trouble finding the right voice for a difficult novel-in-progress, and also with a second one I sometimes fiddled with when frustration with the first became intolerable. This was my own fault, of course: I had obstinately failed to abide by my own conviction (based on the late work of almost all American novelists I truly admire) that most writers with too much wear lose elasticity and lyric energy and perhaps the ability to startle and astonish and might be better advised to leave well enough alone.
Much more to the point was the fact that in that Whitehorse Rapid, and at other times as well, I had admired Shores’ quick skill and power on those oars with the unsentimental eye of a former oarsman on an ocean haul-seine crew on the Atlantic coast, who for three years had rowed in a heavy dory through the surf. I trusted this guy and I wanted this adventure – needed it, in fact, before I shriveled like a grape on the autumn vine.
Eric neither encouraged nor discouraged me, suggesting instead that we all climb to that point on the path from where the would-be voyager could take a hard look down into the Kitchen Sink before deciding how best to proceed.
Through these narrows between cliffs, the river’s descent is very steep and swift. Seen from high above, the Sink was a seething chute of waterfalls and big black rocks and white waves that collide and explode from bank to bank or rather wall to wall. There is virtually no shore and, as someone had observed about this rapid, ‘It looks like there’s no way through.’ Perhaps Shores supposed that having been provided with a cautionary look, we would approve his preference to take his boat down through that chaos unladen with hapless people who might be trapped beneath or drowned were his raft to ‘flip.’ No, he had never lost a passenger, but he freely admits that he came too close to losing his hardy Annie in this rapid a few years ago while training her as a guide.
‘I guess I could take one passenger,’ he said finally, ‘if someone really wants to go.’ When I said, ‘I meant it. I really want to go,’ Shores glanced over at his old friend Byers as if to say, Well, Bud? What’s to be done with this old coot? You planning to intervene or what? (And I confess I kind of hoped that Byers, a generous fishing partner who keeps a close eye on me on the saltwater, would step forth now and do his bounden duty – do the only decent thing, for Chrissakes, Steve! – and try to save his old buddy’s ass from his own stupidhood.)
‘I thought about it, all right,’ he told me later, ‘and I felt guilty. Maybe I should have. But who was I to try to stop you? You’re a grown man and I could see you meant it.’ I did mean it, that’s true, but it was also true that my lungs were filling with slow dread. In the ocean surf earlier that summer, I had learned the hard way that in recent years I’d lost the strength and the endurance I might need to survive the turbulence I saw below, with those black boulders knocking sense into my head all the way downriver. On the other hand, I lacked the courage to stay behind. To refuse out of mere flimsiness and old-timer timidity what might well be my last shot at a real adventure was to face the fact that a man I used to know was gone for good.
Mustering a jaunty grin, I left my friends and followed Eric back upriver to the raft. At the torrent’s edge, the boatman who turned to thrust a life vest at my chest and shout last instructions through the roar of stone and water was a grim-faced professional, suddenly all business. When he waved me forward to the bow and I hollered out that I’d rather ride behind him where his body might shield mine from the cold spray – and from where I might throw my arms around his neck in case of trouble – he barely smiled. ‘Your one responsibility,’ he called sternly, indicating the spare oar lightly lashed to the gunwale at my right hand, ‘is to free that oar and pass it to me quick if I break one of mine. And I mean quick.’ The broken oar is the most common mishap in an eight-knot current that may pin the boat broadside against one of those big river-twisting boulders.
I nodded and climbed in and faced forward, stowing my shades in my rain parka and groping for something to hang onto (no safety belts are worn since in case of a flip, the passenger’s chances are much better when thrown free than when trapped under the boat), while reminding myself that in case of accident, thrown from the raft into the torrent and on my merry way downriver through the falls and whirlpools, theoretically upright in this life vest and coming along nicely as I shrug off the heavy blows of rocks, I must not neglect to yank my knees up to my chest. In such a strong current, a dangling foot caught in deadwood or rock fissure can neither be freed nor snapped off like an oar and in all likelihood will drown you.
‘Just one more thing,’ warned Eric, pushing off. ‘There’s a big rock down here at the bottom of a fall that we are going to hit head on. There’s no way to avoid it, and it’s going to fold the boat – actually fold the bow up and back toward your face, I mean – so just hang in there.’
Oddly, the dread had already subsided. I felt calm – a bit dull, perhaps, or numb, but very calm. Okay, let’s do it, I was thinking, and right then, we did it. In the first few feet, we were seized up by the current and swept over a small waterfall, and Shores banked skillfully off that big barrier rock and around and down, and after that it was all rush and thunder of white water, with hard loud bangs and jolts that came too close to catapulting the unbelted passenger right overboard, and sudden falls that seemed to plunge six feet into their caldrons, and wild way-out careenings at bad angles on the wave face – Christ! I was amazed by the sheer oar strength demanded to maintain any sensible sort of course with so many perilous passages and hairbreadth escapes evolving all but simultaneously, one hard upon another, all of them controlled by the tall pale river guru on his throne somewhere up behind, for here I was, amidst surging walls of water at near arm’s lengths, sometimes cresting overhead, and not one errant wave did I receive full in the face in all that very long two hundred yards …
At the bottom, in the smooth flow again, the river silenced, in the stark beauty of the canyon, I could not stop grinning. ‘Great job,’ I said, utterly contented. ‘Thank you very, very much.’ Exhausted but relieved and happy, too, Shores eased over to the bank to await the others. Knowing they might be a while, making their way down the steep slope, he climbed out and eased his body down and back against a rock, on his face the broad sleepy smile of affable old Eric. I sighed after a while, ‘I never would have done that if I hadn’t trusted you.’ And he nodded, saying quietly, ‘Oh man. I had to trust you, too, you know. Like, taking a guy as old as you through that? I don’t think so.’ And we laughed some more.
All that evening, I was on a high – not only exhilarated but somehow cleansed, as if that passage had scoured off a rust of bad old stuff and perhaps the first dust of oncoming decrepitude. I felt full of myself in the best sense, years younger, all set to raise hell. But pride, as they say, goeth before a fall, and I got my fall that ver
y evening when I sullied the purity of the crystal gin martinis concocted by our host in Bozeman by vaunting my great whitewater adventure, only to learn too late from Byers that some years earlier, this modest man (our pal, the writer David Quammen) had not only run the Bear Trap in a kayak but had flipped it in the Kitchen Sink. Unable to right himself, he had passed through the worst of that ‘boat-eatin’ bugger’ upside down.
A Tohunga with a Promise to Keep
BY KERI HULME
Keri Hulme’s novels, short stories and poems are widely published. Her novel, the bone people, gained global recognition when it won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction in 1984, and the Booker Prize in 1985. In homage to her mixed heritage, her writing interweaves diverse mythologies - Maori, Celtic, Norse - with the everyday. Hulme has published short stories and poems in several book-length collections, as well as journals and anthologies. Her long story ‘Te Kaihau/The Windeater’ appears in Nine New Zealand Novellas. She lives in the South Island of Aotearoa-New Zealand, in a region famed for reef herons and whitebait.
It is July, 1985, and our group, Te Whanau o Aotearoa, is flying to Tahiti. We are a varied lot – kapahaka performers in the main, but there are other artists in paint or sculpture or words, plus three or four bureaucrats from Maori arts organisations, and our own diplomat (who is fluent in Maori and French as well as English). We are headed for the Fourth South Pacific Arts Festival and we are fairly excited. Some of us think of tropical fruit and raw fish salads, of hangi’d pork & chicken. Exotic new foods, like breadfruit. ‘And they’ll have good French wine! Cheap!’ Some of us think of the free and easy sex-life of Tahitians, others of marvellous islands and beaches and lagoons. ‘Bali Hai was a Tahitian island!’ And most of us are thinking we are so lucky, headed for a Polynesian arts festival, where we will see the performance gamut of all the islands of Polynesia, including participants from places in Melanesia. Waua!
There are two forlorn protesters standing by the departure lounge doorway as we go to board the plane. We know them – they are esteemed Maori artists – and they know many of us. They try to persuade us, individually, not to go to Tahiti – but we thank them, and go on our way....
Their protest is entirely understood: Aotearoa-New Zealand and France are not friends. France has been testing atomic devices on Mururoa atoll, and Aotearoa has sent a protest fleet to the area – and two navy frigates, complete with a Cabinet minister to make it official. Meanwhile the French military rams and boards protest boats, infiltrates protest movements. Little do we know that they are also planning direct action in Aotearoa itself.
The flight to Tahiti is uneventful, and we land at dawn at Papeete. The welcome as we get off the plane is by a small party but we appreciate it very much: the man does the calling (which is a kind of mild shock), and there is a short song from the four women, but there are careful stacks of fruit, and a young pig with pale eyelashes is tied by its feet to a bamboo pole.
‘Bodes well, eh?’ says my seat-mate.
The transport doesn’t bode well. They are weird wee diesel vehicles, with bench seats, open to the air along each side of the passenger back deck (thank heavens!) but with an airflow problem that means the diesel emissions are channelled back into the passenger compartment.
‘Geez! Travelling gas chambers!’ says someone.
We arrive at our accommodation. It is a secondary school, emptied for the holidays. In the dining room there are set out, for exactly the number of people who are expected, a bowl, white bread rolls, made-up milk, and canisters of black coffee. O, and sugar bowls.
‘Fuck o dear,’ says someone, ‘this is it?’
It was.
A person guided us to the student dormitory we were to sleep in.
The aunties sent out all the able-bodied men immediately to buy cleaning materials and extra sarongs. That’s when we discovered Tahiti was an extremely expensive place to live.
Maori generally travel with their own pillows and blankets. At home, when you arrive to stay at another community’s marae, you know you’ll find a supply of good mattresses and sheets. You know the place will be clean, hospitable, and able to cope with anything. Most of us had brought our pillows and a blanket, but these mattresses – and all the amenities – were something else.
Much later that day, someone said, ‘Shit. We shoulda listened to those fellas at Auckland.’
It didn’t bode well.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The festival itself was genuine, engrossing, wonderful. Some very small islands had spent the last year preparing materials for their costumes and accoutrements and instruments, and their performances – well, pretty well every island’s performances – were riveting, spine-tingling, brain-enhancing. I didn’t have a camera then but I can still review what I saw in my head … What will never be seen again.
I was wearily astonished that there weren’t a lot of Pakeha people in the audiences.
But then, the amazing trip happened....
. . . . . . . . . . .
Before we’d left home, it had been canvassed among Te Whanau of Aotearoa that since we would be so close to the most sacred space in all of Polynesia, would any of us like to go there?
‘Yes!’ said twenty of us, and so we had prepaid the necessary extra ferry fees and beachside motel accommodation and transport costs. However after Tahiti-nui, a lot of us were having second thoughts....
Three good things had happened in Tahiti-nui. We had seen the small but wonderful group of performers from Easter Island/Te Pito o te Ao: ‘Goodness!’ I’d thought as they’d come out –male with topknot, females calling, loincloth and thatchy cloaks – ‘That’s my lot from the far south, 200 years ago.’ (And I could understand quite a bit of their dialect.)
And the Fijian contingent had invited us all for a kai. Their quarters were even more spartan than ours. But the meal was corned beef and coconut cream, rice and greenery, and they must’ve paid heaps for it. It was so warm-hearted, so spontaneous, so very Polynesian/ Melanesian-peoples proud of being able to be hospitable, that I nearly cried.
And we had, as a group, been invited to the home of people who lived a traditional lifestyle. The man came out and haeremai’d us, waving greenery while in the background his wife tangi’d (again, not unfamiliar to Maori). We were then welcomed into their home, hongi and hug, take your footwear off, and go into a traditionally-built house.... There was an in-built hangi-pit, and there was breadfruit cooking. There were also fish, fruits I had never tasted (and loved!), green coconut juice and coconut milk.
Around the eating area, altogether seated on the ground, was a man I’d never noticed before. He wore our group’s ‘Whanau o Aotearoa’ tag but seemed withdrawn, otherwise absorbed. I figured he was one of the bureaucrats, staying in Papeete motels. I said to my mate, the other Keri, ‘Big fucking bureauwig, eh?’
‘Nah,’ she answered. ‘That’s a tohunga who nearly died last year. He made a promise to nga atua tawhito to bring a tribal treasure to Taputapuatea and leave it there in thanksgiving.’
It was sitting there inside that whare, listening to that man and others speak, that I learnt more of our shining-cuckoo lore and that my great-grandfather on the wahine-Maori-side, a whale-ship captain, was almost certainly half/ Tahitian. You get a tohunga and foreign locals speaking together...oh, it should happen so much more!
So, in late-ish July, we boarded the overnight ferry from Tahiti-nui to Raiatea. It was a large-enough vessel to feel comfortable on – about half the size of the old Cook Strait ferries. We were deck passengers – the old blanket and pillow-carrying habit worked fine – and the few stops at smaller intervening islands didn’t really make much impression (the smell of kerosene lamps and diesel generators were childhood memories, and the evocative scent of fried meats meant buggerall to a fish-eating vegetarian). But the arrival in Raiatea did....
Firstly, there had been the extraordinary double rainbow round the ferry as we approached the island. And that it had an enti
rely different atmosphere from Tahiti-nui. There were excited people at the wharf. They used cars and a tractor-with-trailer to transport us to our motels. They gave us real lei, made of flower and shell, hongi’d properly, and presented spontaneous gifts. And the motels were a revelation: they literally were built over the sea, and you could see fish and other marine creatures under your veranda; they were clean and more than adequate. We all had a celebratory drink – of non-French wine (the wine had turned out to be so bad in Tahiti that we joked it was dried Algerian plonk, revivified). This wine was good. And in the morrow – Taputapuatea....
Breakfast was substantial, the first good one we’d had for a fortnight. Lot of fruit, omelettes, really good croissants, excellent coffee (did I mention the coffee in Tahitinui was shit-awful?). And now, we were all really excited.
I hadn’t seen the old tohunga on the voyage to Raiatea, but he was there when our party’s two waka arrived. The waka were motorised single-outrigger jobs, perfect for travelling by sea round the island. It didn’t take long to get to the hallowed place.
Let me briefly explain what Raiatea, and especially Taputapuatea, mean to Aotearoa Maori: we know where we come from, and we know where the sacred spaces were and are. The tohunga knew the names of the mountains, the islands, into Raiatea – he chanted them as we came past them, that next day. He’d never been there. He didn’t have a savoury past – but he was trusted because, since early childhood, he’d been taught and entrusted with deep knowledge.
Taputapuatea, the Sacred/Sacred Open Gathering Space, is part of that deep and ancient learning – it is the centre of Polynesian being.
When I woke that morning, my mate said, ‘Ooo, look! Your friend has followed you!’
Outside her window was a reef heron – which also lives in my area of the world especially.
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