Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Twenty-three years after their first descent of the Awash, Richard had talked four out of the other five surviving Sobek pioneers into attempting the Tekeze. Pledged to the first descent of the last unrun major tributary of the Nile were John Yost, Jim Slade, Bart Henderson, and George Fuller. Only John Kramer, the stalwart of our Tua expedition, was unable to make it. To give the film a narrative focus, Richard and Turner director Bill Anderson decided to focus on the reunion of the five old hands, back in Ethiopia where Sobek had launched its far-flung mission. The footage would try to capture the old gang reminiscing by night and navigating by day down 250 miles of aqua incognita.

  By the time we reached the Tekeze in September 1996, our team numbered twenty-two, an even larger entourage than the one with which we had attacked the Tua. In Bariloche, I had served as a one-man Internet crew, charged with writing, photographing, downloading, and sending everything to Discovery’s offices. The Mungo Park tech team numbered five. Richard would also write daily dispatches, covering different angles from mine; a professional photographer would snag the digital pictures; another fellow would capture video clips and audio bites; and a British techno-whiz would ensure that our laptops and satellite links, all powered by a portable generator, succeeded in sending masses of text and film to Redmond every evening.

  The Turner crew added another eight souls, while the roster was rounded out by junior guides. At the last minute we secured the services of Daniel Mehari, an interpreter who would translate between English and Amharic in the event that we ran into natives living near the river.

  By 1996, Richard was forty-six years old, and I was fifty-three. Neither of us was quite as willing to take crazy risks as we had been in our youth, but on the aerial recon Richard had judged that the rapids along the Tekeze would present far fewer rafting challenges than the furious Tua had sprung upon us. This time my misgivings were not so much about flipped boats as about the media circus we were carrying down the river.

  The Raid Gauloises and the Eco-Challenge had turned semi-wilderness into an engineered race track. But the 220-mile-long Tekeze flowed through genuine wilderness, unknown to white men and women. Our journey was not a race, but, if all went as planned, a true exploratory voyage. To adulterate it not only with filmmaking but with real-time broadcasts gave me qualms that the sheer joy of penetrating the unknown never assuaged. During several spells of downtime on the Tekeze, Richard and I sat on rock benches away from camp and debated the ethics and aesthetics of our venture.

  Although he never let on during the trip, Richard had been briefly assailed by qualms similar to mine. In The Lost River, he confesses to an impulse that seized him in October 1995, as with a small scouting team he finally found a stretch of canyon that would serve as our put-in on the Tekeze. Rather than wait another year to organize the Sobek–Turner–Mungo Park assault,

  Suddenly I had a plan: “Pasquale . . . Conrad has got rafts. What do you say we hike out, fetch a raft, come back and run this thing, guerrilla style. The four of us. We could bag it now.” . . .

  Then I had second thoughts and put on the brakes. “You know, I’d like nothing better than to do this alpine style, quick, simple, light, the way we used to, but we can’t. We have no defenses against shifta [bandits], no safety support for big rapids, no backup if a croc chomps our raft. Besides, we have an obligation to Turner.” Sanity prevailed, not, though, without regrets.

  In New Guinea, the abrupt transition by helicopter from our highland hotel to a gravel bar on the Tua deep in the jungle had been vaguely disturbing. In Ethiopia, after a couple of days spent admiring the rock-cut churches of Lalibela, we hiked 13 miles across rolling hills ablaze with yellow daisies, greeted in Amharic by herders and farmers. The transition was gentle and bucolic, even though we were lugging so much gear and food that it took a mob of porters and three trips by Russian MI-8 chopper to deliver all our goods to the riverbank.

  Richard had decided that September, on the cusp between the rainy and dry seasons, was the only feasible month to attempt the Tekeze, whose current varies from a trickle to a raging flood. On September 9, when we finally started down the river, the water was so low the rafts scraped bottom. But as each small tributary added its flow, the Tekeze slowly took on the power of a massive stream. The only drawback was the equatorial heat, which reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit most days. During the searing midday, from eleven to four, we tasted relief only by pouring buckets of river water over ourselves. In camp each evening, the bugs, including a dozen species I had never before swatted, made life frantic.

  Bill Anderson, the Turner director, was a different sort of cineaste from Clive Syddall. As we floated from one basalt canyon to the next, the film crew was content to let our journey script their story. Their only qualm was that, so far, none of the rapids had been serious enough to scare even a novice. The Sobek veterans were surprised, for the gradient of the Tekeze from put-in to take-out averaged twelve feet per mile, half again as steep as the Colorado in the Grand Canyon.

  The first night, the Mungo Park team set up shop under a huge tarp supported by oars: five laptops, a sat phone, power strips and cords galore, all laid out on folding card tables and fired by our gas-powered generator. To everyone’s relief, the media center was up and running with the first passage overhead of a geosynchronous satellite. Within minutes we were connected at the speed of light to the Microsoft offices in Redmond.

  I thought I had prepared myself beforehand for the technological overkill of the expedition, but even as I relished hammering out my dispatches—no second drafts for the Internet—I found the strangeness of our situation unsettling. It was a malaise I never shook during the following weeks.

  I wasn’t the only skeptic in our team. John Yost, Richard’s pal since high school and the cofounder of Sobek, had taken one look at our pile of equipment after the last helicopter cargo load had arrived and griped, “On the Baro, we only had five black bags. Maybe one percent of what we’ve got here.”

  Yost continued, focusing on me as his auditor, “It’s not just overkill. It’s a serious safety issue. When a boat’s overloaded, in high water it’s very hard to navigate. Your momentum builds up, and it’s very hard to change direction. And if we have to portage, forget it! We’d have to hire a whole village as porters.”

  Yet the first three days on the Tekeze passed in a lazy, floating trance. Troops of Gelada baboons, with bright red splotches on chest and rump, ran barking up the hillsides away from our boats. Verreaux’s eagle owls and hammerkop water birds stared gloomily from dead branches. Colonies of yellow weavers flitted in and out of softball-sized nests that hung from willow branches over the river. On the third evening, however, George Fuller, one of the Sobek pioneers and the only doctor on our team, fell ill with a raging fever. By morning his temperature had risen to 105. Delirious, throwing up every half hour, shaking uncontrollably, he was too sick to travel, so we lingered on our sandbar as the day turned sweltering. Thanks to our sat phone, we had the option of calling for a helicopter to pick Fuller up and fly him to an Addis Ababa hospital. His friends whispered in Fuller’s ear, “George, do you want to fly out?” At last Fuller mumbled, “No, it’ll pass”—then chucked up another stream of yellow-green bile.

  As I had sat at my laptop the previous evening, I faced a dilemma that had never before presented itself to me in the wilderness. Should I write about Fuller’s illness? If so, his wife and closest friends would learn that he was facing a potentially life-threatening predicament before we could do anything about it. But if I kept his fever secret, wasn’t I sabotaging the immediacy of Internet reporting that Richard passionately claimed would transform expeditionary adventure?

  On the fourth morning, as we lingered on the sandbar, a group of men suddenly arrived, wading the river toward our camp—the first natives we had seen since launching on September 8. They looked agitated, and they were carrying AK-47s. We had not so much as a pistol among the twenty-two of us. Could these be the notorious shiftas—ban
dits the Sobek veterans had run foul of on other Ethiopian rivers?

  Fortunately, shouting from a distance of 50 feet, Daniel Mehari was able to talk to the men in Amharic before they took action. It turned out that they feared that we were shiftas, or even worse—soldiers left over from the Mengistu regime, who during the worst of the civil war had invaded remote villages in this part of rebellious Tigray and had slaughtered civilians, sparing neither women nor children.

  Once we convinced these scouts that we were harmless, they invited us to come and stay in their village. The only trouble was that it lay seven hours away. The warriors, tipped off by furtive sightings of our armada, had hiked all night to intercept us.

  During our long day of inaction on the sandbar, our visitors conveyed their curiosity about what we were doing through Daniel. The three basic questions they asked would be repeated by every group of natives we ran into during the expedition. Where did you come from? Where are you going? Why are you doing this? To use a device such as a raft to cross the Tekeze made perfect sense to these men. What seemed incomprehensible was the notion of employing a raft to go down the river.

  When Fuller’s temperature dropped to 99, we piled onto the boats and headed onward. That day we saw our first crocodile, in a shallow eddy near the right bank. Each day thereafter the crocs got bigger, more numerous, and more aggressive. It took me a while to get the hang of spotting them, as they lurked a few feet off shore, only bug eyes and scaly upper head above water, but Jim Slade, in our lead boat, routinely racked up counts of thirty a day—more than any of the Sobek veterans had ever seen on a river.

  By the next day, the occasional croc was charging a boat. Our response was to load up the rafts with baseball-size “croc rocks” that we winged at the beasts to discourage them. One day John Yost suddenly stood up in the bow of his boat and swung an oar viciously overhead, slamming the water just in front of an overcurious croc. Later, another feisty reptile swam straight at Richard’s boat, unfazed by the stones plunking near him, and surfaced with a thump under Richard’s feet before reappearing on the other side of the boat.

  Each evening, we duly reported such incidents to Mungo Park. Thanks to the sat phone, we could even call our editors in Redmond and bitch about how they’d mangled our prose or cropped our photos. And we sent and received a nightly flurry of e-mail messages. I was amused to watch the outback-hardened Sobek guides, used to disappearing from the known world for a month at a time, line up outside the Mungo Park tent to plead for computer time so they could peck out their missives to wives and girlfriends.

  Richard had made sure that our broadcasts were fully interactive by building in a feature called “Ask the Expedition,” whereby fans at home could pose us questions in mid-voyage. One interlocutor mailed in a query as to whether on a trip such as this one it was still possible to know solitude and isolation. That query hit a nagging qualm of mine square on the head.

  Because of the Turner crew’s filming, there was plenty of downtime. One morning I took a two-hour hike up the side canyon near which we were camped. Hearing distant cries, I watched a solitary local jog along the skyline, no doubt alerting his neighbors to the stranger in their midst. Then I scared up a troop of some thirty or forty baboons. Scampering up the ridge above me, the babies rode their mothers’ backs while the dominant males turned to threaten me with shrieking barks. When the baboons felt safe, they paused to groom one another and to swing upside down from tree limbs.

  It was one of my best interludes so far on the expedition. As I pondered that fact, I realized it was also the first time on the trip that I had been alone.

  A week into our trip, 95 miles down the river, we were puzzled by the fact that so far we had seen no evidence of natives living on its banks. Yet every evening, as word spread of our intrusion, a crowd would gather near our campsite to stare at us. A few men got up the nerve to approach and talk with Daniel Mehari. At first we assumed it was the crocodiles that scared the natives away. Indeed, we heard many a dolorous tale of croc death, such as the one related by a young man whose brother had recently perished when he crossed the Tekeze to visit his fiancée. Said another informant, “When a crocodile eats you, he eats every part except the soles of your feet.” But it was George Fuller who, still recovering from his fever, nailed the right explanation. “Malaria,” he croaked. “It’s malaria.”

  Sure enough, the next day a native explained that his people could live with the crocodiles, but had learned that to inhabit the banks of the Tekeze was to invite certain death from the shaking sickness. As we pushed farther north, we talked to many locals whose villages, perched on high mesas, were waterless seven months each year during the dry season. Every day women with large jars on their heads hiked as much as 2,000 feet down to the Tekeze and back just to fetch the life-sustaining water.

  Gradually we passed out of the region of basalt into a sandstone landscape. As the canyon deepened, I was reminded often of the American Southwest, with pinnacles and blank walls looming on either side, a climber’s paradise for the second half of the twenty-first century. The Tekeze carved its way from west to north around the Simien Plateau, a striking upland whose highest peak, Ras Dashen, reached 14,928 feet above sea level. Eventually we stared up at precipices that soared 7,000 feet above the river, as we entered the deepest canyon in Africa.

  For me, the best times on the expedition came when we were camped and I was free to explore the side canyons and hike up the enclosing slopes. On one such foray, hundreds of feet above the river, I discovered a swath of petroglyphs carved on a buttress of orange slate—humans hung upside down, crisscrossed torsos surmounted by upside-down heads, fierce visages caught in the O-mouthed terror of mid-scream. It was impossible to tell whether the macabre panel was recent or centuries old.

  On another day, as we floated lazily downstream, one of the junior guides spotted a hidden set of cliff dwellings high on a right-bank cliff. We parked the boats while several of us scrambled up to the site. Homely furnishings—a stool, a flywhisk, a gourd full of grain—testified to current use. But on the walls there were charcoal drawings of winged creatures and writing in a script that Daniel identified as ancient Ge’ez. In the dim recesses of the troglodyte alcove I saw what looked like sealed-shut tombs.

  Later, downriver, two young natives told us that the place we had visited was called Hassena. It was a hermitage for the ill, and those who failed to recover were indeed buried within the holy site. The shrine was guarded, the men said, by a resident monk who had made himself invisible as he observed our trespass.

  As the trip progressed, the Turner team grew increasingly worried that the rapids weren’t living up to Richard’s pre-expedition hype: the “Terrible Tekeze,” he had proclaimed, “the Last Great First.” At every gentle class II rapid we spent hours filming the Sobek five as they splashed through the waves, straining grim-faced at the oars as the camera shot telephoto footage from inches above the sandbars. Toward the end of the journey there was even talk of trucking our four tons of gear from the takeout hundreds of miles over to the Awash, just to bounce through some photogenic rapids the veterans had first conquered twenty-three years before.

  Personally, I was quite pleased that the river dealt us no hairy runs, much less flipping boats as the Tua had in 1983. The landscape grew more and more stunning as we coasted beside the Simien Plateau. Here, we encountered natives who spoke almost no Amharic. They were Agaw, impoverished herders of goats, sheep, and cattle, sneered at by the Amhara upriver. Once they learned that we meant them no harm, they asked their own questions through halting exchanges with Daniel. One young man, we learned, had hiked two hours to greet us. Certain that we must be starving, he offered to find a friend who would sell us a goat. He confirmed that he had spent his whole life within a corridor of land only seven miles long beside the Tekeze.

  Gradually we realized that these Agaw were living on the very edge of survival. During the wet season just before our arrival, not a drop of rain had fallen.
Twice we saw men plowing the dusty river bank with yoked oxen, desperately hoping to plant sorghum in sand sprinkled with alluvium from the far-off highlands. At one stop, several men begged us to let them ride our boats so they could go somewhere else—anywhere else, out of their hopeless lives on the margin of famine.

  Several times during our trip, I sought out Richard to argue about how the filmmaking and especially our Mungo Park connectedness transformed what should have been a true wilderness journey. On my Alaskan expeditions in the 1960s and 1970s, the absolute separation of “in” from “out” had cast its spell on me and my teammates. On Mount Deborah in 1964, for forty-two days Don Jensen and I had had no contact with the outside world, not even a bush pilot flyover checkup. At first the transition was cruel, as I longed for the easy habits of newspaper and telephone and friends dropping by. But once my psyche adjusted to “in,” a spell of magical grace came over my life. For six weeks, Don and I became our own society. If we got in trouble (as we did in spades), we had to get ourselves out of it. But once adjusted to our wilderness, all the half-formed worries and nuisances of “out” simply fell away.

  On the Tekeze, I never felt fully “in.” It was not just that a problem such as George Fuller’s delirious fever could be solved by sat phone and helicopter. The nightly communication with our Mungo Park editors halfway around the world rendered the river experience weirdly secondhand. I noticed, for instance, how the whole team began to focus not on the raw encounter with a charging crocodile, but on how the croc footage looked when we downloaded it in camp, then sent it off to our live “audience.”

  Richard was unmoved by my purism. “I think,” he said, “that in the future we’re going to see more and more vicarious exploration. There’ll be communities of armchair travelers who care passionately about a river in Ethiopia without ever hoping to go there. I actually think that sharing our experience with all the folks who call up Mungo Park is less selfish than just making the first descent of the Tekeze by ourselves.” The nightmare scenario for river runners is dam-building. Already Richard had seen the magnificent Bio-Bio in Chile, of which he had made the first descent, ruined by a dam. Shortly before our visit to Ethiopia, an Italian company had proposed a dam on the Tekeze. Vicarious adventure of the sort we were offering, Richard believed, could build an environmental constituency that would help save wild rivers.