Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  In the morning, all of us were itching to head downstream. We were up by 6 AM but didn’t launch until noon, because Syddall couldn’t figure out how to script the day’s float. As we lounged in the heat, with sweat bees clinging to our shirts, the natives started to arrive, no doubt from the same village as the women I had scared away on the other end of the Burma bridge. They hunkered upstream, a good fifty yards from us, and simply stared.

  The Sobek veterans were used to such scenes, and they did their best to ignore our audience. We had already been admonished not to offer the locals so much as a stick of chewing gum, should they turn out to be beggars. But I had never been part of such a strange cultural interchange, and I covertly stared back, wondering, What are they thinking? Who do they think we are? Why do they think we’ve come? Our arrival on the Tua had been so abrupt, so artificial, that none of us even knew which tribe the onlookers belonged to, let alone anything about their way of life.

  At last we got underway, leaving a throng of staring locals behind. Not far below camp, the BBC set up their gear on shore and spent three and a half hours filming our rafts through the first sizeable rapid (one I had been happy to walk around).

  By afternoon, the BBC had retreated to the helicopter, and we were free to careen downstream. Every bend gave our sovereign wilderness a whole new look, and as the captains of our three rafts barked orders, I tried to imprint on my memory every scrap of landscape before it spooled out of sight. And now the Tua became serious.

  Toward late afternoon, Skip Horner’s boat flipped. Mike Boyle’s raft, in which I rode, took up the chase. We hauled two of the castaways aboard; the other two splashed through another bad rapid clinging to their upside-down craft. At last Boyle rowed eight people and two boats to the blessed firmness of shore. He collapsed, exhausted. In the middle of this drama, we had become aware of the helicopter screaming overhead; even though we cursed its noise and the wind its rotors blasted us with, we hoped the BBC was getting their footage.

  The helicopter landed; Richard disappeared with Syddall into a story conference. Later we learned that the director had decided that on the morrow we should heli-lift the boats back upstream and run through the thing again. Incredulity gave way to obscenity—though we kept our derision from Syddall’s ears.

  That evening the filmmakers, more spooked than ever, declined even to camp with us. For the rest of our brief expedition, the BBC crew commuted by helicopter from a hotel in Kundiawa, the highland town we had made our headquarters. This meant endless waits on perfectly good mornings before we could continue down the river. One day Syddall’s team didn’t arrive until early afternoon. I learned from the sound man that the delay had been caused by a hassle over changing rooms in the hotel.

  On our third day, we were stopped cold by the Tua itself. A major rapid stretched, uninterrupted, for half a mile. The jungle was so thick it took two hours just to scout the rapid. By nightfall we were camped in drizzling rain in miserable semi-bivouacs among a mass of boulders.

  The captains had been mulling over the nasty rapid. Skip Horner pointed out that it wasn’t the individual moves that made it so tough; it was the lack of calm water between them in which to recover. John Kramer said, “You’d run it if it were the only way out of here. But it’s a life-or-death proposition, not a sporting one.”

  Thanks to the fiendish vegetation, the portage would take at least two days. Guiltily, the guides reconciled themselves to the alternative. The helicopter could be used to carry all our gear and boats past the half-mile rapid. The next morning, the heli-lift went like clockwork. Our crack Korean pilot got everything downstream in only two hours.

  From the onset of the trip, I had been disturbed by the way the demands of the film crew adulterated our voyage. Here was the starkest example yet of how technology cheapened the adventure. Portaging is a time-honored gambit for river runners, who pay in backbreaking misery for their choice not to run a perilous rapid. But if a helicopter could leapfrog the whole expedition past the scary sections, did the claim of “first descent” still have meaning?

  On our fifth day, we ran a solid 10 miles of the Tua. We were deep in the rain forest now, and the banks no longer bore signs of human habitation. Riding my raft, as I gazed at the intricacies of the jungle, I tried to recapture the transport I had first tasted on Denali in 1963—the sense that we might be exploring country no human beings had ever before seen. But the presence of the BBC—the chopper filming overhead, the twice-daily conferences between Bangs and Syddall as to how to shape the story—killed any inkling that we were pioneers.

  And now another crisis arose. Syddall’s fear of the river, along with his detachment as director, emboldened him to declare to Richard that he would allow one more river day before declaring our trip a wrap. Richard called his bluff, protesting vehemently that there was no way a chopper-aided float of less than half the Tua could be called a “great river journey.”

  As if the absurdity of our prepackaged adventure needed further underlining, Syddall now announced that the morrow, which happened to be Sunday, would be a day off. He claimed that regulations imposed by the film crew’s union precluded working on the Sabbath. The BBC would linger in the Kundiawa hotel, while we could do whatever we pleased.

  That Sunday saved the journey, though not, of course, the film. While the BBC crew lingered in bed, we were on the river at dawn. By camp that evening, we had covered 45 miles—as long a jaunt as any of the Sobek guides had ever made on any river in a single day. The rapids relented and we found continuously swift current with only a few tricky spots. We passed out of the deep canyon we had started in and entered a zone of rolling jungle hills. The rock turned to basalt, then to a marbly conglomerate, and by nightfall we had glimpsed limestone that presaged the Purari. All day we watched lumbering black hornbills saw through the air, white cockatoos glide from limb to limb, and Brahminy kites loiter in airborne helixes. The terrain seemed virtually uninhabited.

  In the euphoria of camp, the guides began to talk mutiny. Fuck the BBC, they said; instead of helicoptering out, we ought to go for it, take off downstream, run the Purari, and live on our resources. But the next morning, the BBC was back on the river. Before we could launch, however, we had to film Syddall’s idea of a portage. Led by Richard, who slashed away at the foliage with a machete, we carried oars, water cans, and other miscellaneous gear—though none of the rafts, which, needless to say, are the most cumbersome and difficult part of any real portage operation.

  By 1 PM we were headed downstream. The BBC crew helicoptered miles ahead to wait for us on a generous gravel bar. The river had grown to an immense size, and the current, Mike Boyle swore, was the strongest he’d ever rowed.

  Late in the afternoon we stopped to scout a rapid. Once we had accommodated to the scale, it looked terrifying: a pair of savage drops separated by only thirty yards. I chose at once to walk, as did Richard, who simply didn’t like the aura of the thing.

  The first boat burst through in fine fashion, full of water but upright. Boyle’s came second. He missed the line on the upper drop by only a few feet and slid stern-first into a gigantic hidden hole. Boyle was ripped from the oars and flung out of the boat, which danced for a few seconds, stood on its stern, then did a perfect “endo,” or backward flip.

  Boyle’s two passengers managed to crawl to shore, not before thrashing through more rapids. Boyle had the good luck to pop up right beside the third boat, rowed by John Kramer, and was instantly hauled aboard. They barely made it through the lower drop, then set off in pursuit of the runaway raft. Meanwhile, the helicopter pilot, a Vietnam vet, had been hovering to watch the action. Tired of playing taxi driver to the BBC, when he saw the overturned raft heading downstream, he swooped to the left bank and motioned to Richard to jump in. Like cowboys in a corny western, they set off after the raft. Kramer’s boat seemed hardly to be gaining, and so, without much thought, Richard performed a stunt that may never before have been attempted: he leaped out of the helicopt
er onto the upside-down raft.

  Richard slowed the runaway enough so that Kramer and crew could catch up to it, but it took four men and half a mile to fight the thing into submission. Once they had it captured, Kramer lay in the bilge of his raft and gasped for breath.

  That night, our last on the Tua, we celebrated, but in a chastened mood. There was no further talk of turning our backs on the BBC and bombing down the Purari to the seacoast. A reconnaissance just below camp revealed more of the same whitewater, and then much worse, including an unportageable canyon that Richard was sure would have been certain death. The next morning we flew out.

  Back in Kundiawa, as we packed up to head home, I tried to digest the experience we had all shared. In the end, I wrote a sardonic account of our journey for Outside magazine, under the title “Rafting with the BBC.” Not surprisingly, Syddall responded with a letter to the editor asserting the integrity of his production. When Syddall’s contribution to Great River Journeys appeared on TV, I watched it. The film turned out to be deft, dramatic, and every bit as far from our New Guinea reality as I had feared.

  The attempted first descent of a great wilderness river ought to be an immersion in true discovery. Thanks to Richard’s bargain with the cinematic devil, our trip instead landed in the limbo between the blatant artifice of a simulated voyage and the genuine risk and excitement of the real thing.

  Thirty-four years later, I vividly remember the best moments of our nine days on the Tua. Foremost in my mind, when I drift back to that star-crossed adventure, are the alienness of the rain forest stretching to unknown horizons beyond our camps and the terrifying power of the river itself.

  If our 1983 expedition had sought the first ascent of some striking peak in the Himalaya, you can be sure that by 2017 that mountain would have been climbed. But in the decades since Sobek descended on New Guinea, the Wahgi/Tua/Purari remains untamed, a challenge for the next generation or the generation after that. Thanks to the daunting logistics of that convoluted wilderness and to the fury of the river itself, no subsequent team has even attempted the first descent.

  In this sense, the art of running the most difficult rivers on earth remains a work in progress. By 2017, all the highest and nearly all the hardest mountains in the world have been climbed. But the hardest rivers are still virgin. Among the forms of terrestrial exploration that still promise the allure and challenge that Powell’s men found on the Colorado in 1869, the quest for first descents stands high.

  Thirteen years after our New Guinea adventure, Richard invited me on another river journey. This time the objective was the Tekeze (pronounced “TALK-ah-zay”), one of Ethiopia’s great rivers and the last major tributary of the Nile to be explored. The Tekeze had been high on the wish list of the Sobek pioneers in the 1970s, but before they could get to it, the 1974 revolution that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie burst upon the country.

  Under the brutal Communist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam, between five hundred thousand and two million Ethiopians were murdered during the next seventeen years. Tourism of any kind ground to a halt, as an endless civil war pitted the ruling junta against rebels from various ethnic groups, most notably the Tigrayans in the northern part of the country. In 1991, the government collapsed and Mengistu fled the country.

  It took Richard five more years to organize his assault on the Tekeze. The take-out location was self-evident: a bridge carrying the highway between the ancient cities of Gondar and Axum, which had been bombed and rebuilt during the civil war. But the headwaters were a mystery. After several aerial reconnaissances, Richard homed in on the highland town of Lalibela, a center of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity since the twelfth century, where cruciform churches carved out of bedrock paid a stunning tribute to a faith that had been cut off from Rome for centuries. The rivulets that converge to form the Tekeze spring from foothills only a few miles west of Lalibela.

  No matter what compromises and disappointments the wedding of our expedition to the BBC had inflicted in New Guinea, Richard remained a firm believer in the conjoining of filmmaking with river-running. This time he had snagged the sponsorship of Turner Original Productions. But Richard’s plan to package our adventure didn’t end there. In 1995, he had been lured away from Sobek by an offer from Microsoft to create an online adventure travel magazine. The appeal of covering a wilderness exploit “in real time” via dispatches, photos, and film clips sent from remote campsites to personal computers all over the world seemed to Richard to promise an unmitigated boon. As he would later write in The Lost River, a memoir focused on our Tekeze journey, “Why not take the power of the World Wide Web into the field and allow virtual travelers to join an expedition, follow it and participate from the portals of their computer screens, be they at offices, schools, or homes?” The ambitious “magazine” Richard created bore the name Mungo Park, after the great Scottish explorer (1771–1806) who lost his life on the Niger River in West Africa.

  Microsoft was not the only outfit toying with new technology that would bring adventure instantaneously to the living rooms of an armchair audience worldwide. In December 1995, I had been hired by Discovery Channel to report from Argentina on the seventh annual running of the Raid Gauloises, an adventure race that drew teams from all over the globe. Instead of attending the event and writing about it when I got home, as I had done during my previous fifteen years of magazine journalism, I was asked by Discovery to write dispatches on my laptop each day and send them to Washington, DC, where techies would edit and format the pieces and put them up on the Web within hours. In addition, I was given one of the first prototype digital cameras to fire off snapshots, download them to my computer, and send them to Discovery headquarters to accompany my writing.

  Since I was (and am) an irredeemable Luddite when it comes to technical gadgetry, my editors gave me a crash course in downloading and sending before I went to Argentina. Even so, they were as nervous as I was about whether the whole show would crash before reaching any of Discovery’s hordes of enthusiastic browsers. The camera was so crude, they warned me, that I shouldn’t try to photograph any subjects from farther away than six feet.

  I arrived in Bariloche full of misgivings, not only about my technical duties but about adventure racing itself. By turning the stunning peaks, rivers, and deserts of northern Patagonia into a racecourse, with forty-eight five-person teams careening their way on foot, by horse, and in rafts through a 250-mile gauntlet, supported and refereed by hundreds of company staff and reported by scores of journalists (mostly French), the Raid threatened, I thought, to desecrate the wilderness. Aside from the sheer human impact, racing against competitors seemed to me a perversion of the contemplative mind-set with which men and women had explored the natural world for centuries.

  It took only a couple of days for my skepticism to give way to total involvement. I rented a car to get around, since I needed to seize upon one of the few cyber cafes in Bariloche every evening to download and send. The rest of the time, I drove recklessly along a sketchy network of roads, studied the maps, and hiked as fast as I could into the wilderness to intercept and interview teams strung many miles apart along the intricate and challenging course. My grasp of the language helped me to communicate with the French teams, several of which ended up in a breakneck dash for first place.

  The Raid offered helicopter rides to the journalists to help them solve the complexity of the circuit, but the fawning and begging it took to snag a ride offended my pride. I resolved to cover the race only by car and by foot, and I took great joy in outsmarting the other journalists to find a given team deep in the forest or high on an alpine ridge.

  The French photographers, from Paris-Match and Figaro and L’Equipe, sneered at my point-and-shoot digital camera. But at a checkpoint during a lull in the action, one of these veterans, cigarette dangling from his mouth, asked to look at my toy. He turned it over disdainfully in his hands, but when he handed it back to me, he said, “That fucking thing is going to put us all out
of business.”

  When the race was finished, I was exhausted. But there was a giddy relief in the thought that I didn’t have to go home and write my story—and when I caught up to my own dispatches and snapshots on the Internet, I felt a burst of pride at what I had hammered out under such diabolical time pressure.

  Later I covered the Eco-Challenge, America’s answer to the Raid Gauloises, for Discovery Channel. This time the race unfolded in the glacier-hung mountains of British Columbia, with the gemütlich town of Whistler as its base. Here my competitive juices really started flowing. The Eco-Challenge was concocted by Mark Burnett, the media entrepreneur who would later create Survivor and The Apprentice. But in the media headquarters in Whistler, he was a man overwhelmed by his own production. Snafus and minor disasters were cropping up hourly, radioed in to headquarters by the referees and safety personnel in the field, and Burnett’s addled response was to make whimsical changes to the rules of the race in midstream.

  After a couple of my dispatches critical of Burnett went up online, he banished me from the media room. That snub only redoubled my drive to scoop the competition, so I dashed in and out of the wilderness and caught the leading teams in full charge even more skillfully than I had in Argentina.

  So in 1996, when Richard Bangs unveiled his plans for the Tekeze expedition, I was gung-ho from the start. Yet the challenge of filing words and pictures from a canyon deep in the Ethiopian wilderness was far dicier than that of reporting from cyber cafes in Bariloche or Whistler. All of us on the Mungo Park team met beforehand at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to work out the glitches—and to come up with a plan to fake our way through the potential disaster we had nicknamed “the seventeen-day blackout.”