We agreed to disagree. Three years after our journey, in the pages of The Lost River, he reaffirmed his credo. “Would the Tekeze expedition have been a ‘purer’ experience without laptops and digital cameras?” he wrote. “In my mind, no . . . it just would have been simpler.”
Yet twenty years after our Tekeze expedition, I still wonder how much deeper the adventure would have been had we run the river “alpine style,” as Richard had characterized the early Sobek exploratories on the Awash and the Omo. The dispatches, digital photos, and film clips we labored so diligently to produce have long since vanished into the void of cyberspace. Mungo Park itself folded only two years after launching. Whether we provided a vicarious adventure to the thousands of armchair fans Richard envisioned, there is no way of knowing today. Yet my old friend was ahead of his time: hardly an Everest expedition or a polar traverse such as Henry Worsley’s takes the field nowadays without the gadgetry of daily reports on the Internet, or the promise that schoolkids back home can “participate” in the journey via interactive connection with their heroes in the field. The skeptic in me tends to see these media extravaganzas as gimmicks to raise funds for costly expeditions. As to whether almost three decades of hyperconnected adventure have built a public constituency to save the wilderness, I am also skeptical.
Yet in 2017, many of the most challenging rivers around the world still await their first descents. And a small band of latter-day explorers, some of whom choose to go without the comforts and safety nets of sat phones and helicopters, are pushing their rafts and kayaks down whitewater canyons that remain as little known as any places on earth.
Had John Wesley Powell been offered a GPS or sat phone in 1869, I have no doubt that he would have seized upon the technology to bolster his chances of getting down the Colorado River alive. The take-out for that pioneering push into the unknown was predetermined, for the 350 miles from the river’s mouth in the Gulf of California upstream to the vicinity of today’s Lake Mead had been tamed. It was, in fact, a paddle wheeler milk run. The challenge for Powell’s crew was to traverse the gigantic blank of canyon country from Green River, Utah, to the end of the Grand Canyon—a distance of almost 500 river miles.
Very near the end of Powell’s epic journey, three members of the team, having had more than enough of flipped and wrecked boats, decided to leave the expedition and try to hike out. Seneca Howland, Oramel Howland, and William Dunn parted from their comrades at a northern tributary named by the party Separation Canyon. They did not survive their attempt to escape. Powell later traveled to southwest Utah to try to ascertain his teammates’ fate. Mormon settlers told him that the three men had been killed by Shivwits Paiute Indians. In more recent years, scholars have pointed the finger at the Mormons themselves, who on the very fringe of Brigham Young’s breakaway empire feared encroachment on their hard-won land by Gentile “invaders.”
Had Powell in 1869 had the option of calling for a helicopter pickup at Separation Canyon, as we did on the Tua, the Howlands and Dunn would have lived longer—perhaps even decades longer, for the men ranged in age from twenty-six to thirty-six.
Only recently in the history of adventure have its champions recognized the threat posed by technology to the integrity of their deeds. As late as 1953, the British team striving to make the first ascent of Mount Everest believed that any means they could throw into the effort were sporting and legitimate. In the quest for the South Pole in 1910–12, Robert Falcon Scott brought tractors to base camp in McMurdo Sound. Had they worked as planned, Scott would gladly have deployed the machines to carry loads and men as far up the Beardmore Glacier as possible. When Sir Edmund Shackleton’s dream of traversing Antarctica was finally realized by Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hillary in 1957–58, the men rode tractors across the ice.
Once mountain climbers realized that the use of pitons and expansion bolts could solve blank precipices that were otherwise unclimbable, purists began to argue for deliberate self-limitation. Led by the visionary Yosemite pioneer Yvon Chouinard, an ethos called “clean climbing” swept the coteries of alpinism. In part because drilling bolts and hammering pitons damaged the rock, but also because it tended to reduce the challenge to mere engineering, climbers vowed to use only nuts (and later spring-loaded cams) to safeguard and aid their ascents. The ultimate swing toward purism emerged in the vogue of free soloing, or climbing without a rope or any gear—just man or woman against the rock, with a slip any farther than 80 feet off the ground a death sentence. Beginning in 2007, and still in the vanguard ten years later, a young Californian, Alex Honnold, has pushed this ultimate form of adventure far beyond what was previously thought to be possible.
Ironically, purism has been a reactionary thread in climbing since the first decade of the twentieth century, when an Austrian idealist named Paul Preuss declared that even the use of a rope (let alone pitons) corrupted alpinism. He fell to his death from the Mandlkogel in 1913 at the age of twenty-seven. Preuss’s aesthetic was considered so radical that he inspired very few imitators before the 1980s, when a handful of free soloists upped the ante on harder and harder routes.
Deliberate self-limitation has become the guiding principle in all kinds of adventure today, but in ways that fall far short of the purism of Paul Preuss. The trend is epitomized by the Antarctic traverse on which Henry Worsley set out in November 2015. Skiing solo, Worsley chose not to accept a single resupply, which meant that all the food and gear he needed for his nearly three-month-long journey had to be carried on the sledge he hauled behind him. Even at the South Pole, where the scientists manning the Amundsen–Scott Station heartily greeted him, he accepted not a bite of food or swig of drink from their hands. In 1996–97, the great Norwegian polar adventurer Børge Ousland had completed the Antarctic traverse in admirable style. His only mechanical aid was a kite he sometimes unfurled to use the wind to speed his passage.
In refusing to use a kite, Worsley felt justified in touting the exploit he attempted as “the first solo unsupported crossing of Antarctica”—sticking an asterisk on Ousland’s deed. As noted above, Worsley’s hero and historical mentor was Shackleton. Yet he never contemplated pushing the purism of his crossing to the extremes that Shackleton took for granted. No observers questioned Worsley’s toughness or endurance. But only a few pointed out how vitally the man counted on his high-tech safety net. It was a compromise that made a mockery of all comparisons to Shackleton.
There are still rivers in the remote corners of the world that no one has explored. Four of the current generation’s boldest river runners are Ben Stookesberry, Chris Korbulic, Pedro Oliva, and Ben Marr. In 2015 they descended the Beriman Gorge on the island of New Britain, part of the country of Papua New Guinea. Though only 30 miles long, the gorge is virtually inaccessible by foot, with sheer sandstone walls as tall as 4,000 feet guarding a gauntlet of rapids and waterfalls in the canyon depths. To get to their put-in, the team was dropped into the upper gorge by helicopter. Before their trip, the men had spent a week reconnoitering their objective by chopper.
On such tight, highly technical rivers, rafts are useless, so kayaks must be brought into play. Although cameramen filmed the team in action from a helicopter, they would have been powerless to effect a rescue or aid an escape from the gorge. The kayakers took thirteen days to make the first descent of the Beriman. Among the toughest tasks they faced were three portages around death-trap falls and rapids. One portage took two and a half days to complete, as the men drilled bolts and strung fixed ropes along the enclosing walls, then had to carve their way with machetes through the jungle to regain the river.
The descent of the Beriman combined the high-tech disciplines of canyoneering and whitewater kayaking. Stookesberry, who has notched 120 first descents spaced across thirty-two countries, swore that the journey “was like nothing I’ve done before.”
A year earlier, on a very different sort of expedition, the same team had tackled what they called North America’s most remote river, the Nachvak, whic
h cuts its way through the Torngat Mountains of Labrador, in the Canadian Arctic. The journey unfolded across forty-one days and 500 miles of paddling. One of its most daunting aspects was a marathon jaunt along historic canoe routes on other rivers just to get to the headwaters of the Nachvak, a river that had never before been attempted. Of the final leg, Stookesberry later reported, “It was the first time in my expedition kayaking career that a first descent was made with no portages and at the same time had multiple drops approaching a hundred feet tall.”
The small band of aficionados seeking out first descents all over the world keeps the roster of virgin rivers a closely guarded secret. But veterans such as Stookesberry have no fear of running out of prizes. One of the paramount challenges of recent decades was the first descent of the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet, through the deepest canyon in the world, whose walls rise as much as 17,000 feet from river to rim. After numerous attempts costing several lives, a seven-man team successfully navigated the fierce upper gorge in 2002.
The lower gorge, even more chaotic and dangerous, remains untouched, a challenge for the best river runners of the next generation. But there are other canyons hidden all across our planet, through which run rivers that the boldest explorers have yet to confront. The feats to come may well transcend the wildest dreams of the Sobek pioneers who descended on Ethiopia in the 1970s, full of hope and ambition, as they slid their rafts into the Omo and Awash with no idea how their adventure would end.
FIVE
FIRST CONTACT
On my two expeditions to wilderness rivers with the Sobek veterans, the most memorable events included our contact with natives who had seen few white people before. On the Tua in New Guinea in 1983, the encounter was limited to my solitary meeting on the Burma bridge with the man who dashed up the jungle hillside to fetch me a giant yam, then later that day and into the next with a crowd that gathered near our campsite to stare at us for hours.
On the Tekeze in Ethiopia in 1996, the interplay with natives stretched through the eighteen days we were on the river, from the warrior-scouts toting AK-47s who hiked through the night to confront our intrusion to the Agaw who, living on the edge of starvation, found our mission unfathomable. Never before had I come face to face with men and women (mostly men) who were so unaware of the outside world. And though on the Tekeze, thanks to Daniel Mehari, we were able to craft the beginnings of a dialogue with the locals—to ask them a few questions and to answer a few of their own—our passage downriver had been so impetuous that the cultural exchange ended up fleeting and superficial.
In signing on to Richard Bangs’s campaigns to make the first descents of two major wilderness rivers, all of us who rode Sobek rafts expected a unique adventure. If I came home from both trips disillusioned by the ways in which modern technology had tamed and diluted the adventure, still, those encounters with peoples living near the banks of the Tua and the Tekeze lingered long afterward in my imagination, charged with tantalizing hints of worldviews so alien from my own that they stretched my concept of humankind.
In their abbreviated fashion, those encounters echoed the shock and surprise that greeted explorers throughout history as they thrust into “unknown” lands and discovered people living there. The phenomenon that anthropologists call “first contact” is inevitably profound and all too often tragic, as men obsessed with gold and land and saving pagan souls failed again and again to comprehend how their coming tore asunder the cultures they invaded.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, true first contact was no longer possible anywhere in the world. All the more reason now, I believe, for me to sift through the debris of history to understand what my own glancing interactions with natives in what we call remote regions have to say about the true nature of adventure.
In 1995, a year before my trip to Ethiopia, on assignment for Smithsonian magazine, I spent ten days among a people called the Suyá, who numbered only 180 men, women, and children, and who lived on an island deep in a mangrove swamp in Brazil’s Mato Grosso. To reach the village required a four-day, 800-mile journey by VW bus, motorboat, and dugout canoe into a labyrinthine wilderness. My host and guide on that mini-expedition was the anthropologist Tony Seeger, nephew of folk singer Pete Seeger. In 1971–72, with his wife, Judy, Seeger had spent fifteen months with the Suyá, as they became the first two outsiders to master the tribe’s language, while Seeger made the first (and still the only) comprehensive study of the people. To do so, the pair had to give themselves over completely to the Suyá way of life. If they did not contribute to the backbreaking labor of the tribe’s very existence, they would go hungry. As Seeger later wrote, after fifteen months “I could paddle, fish and hunt about as well as a 12-year-old.”
By 1995, the Suyá were far from acculturated, but they had acquired shorts and T-shirts, a radio and a few firearms. A thatched dwelling in the village had been converted into a school where the children were learning Portuguese. But not a single man or woman had yet left home to try to live in mainstream Brazil.
During that trip, I learned an uncomfortable truth about myself. As curious as I thought I was about peoples whose worldview was utterly different from mine, I was psychologically ill-equipped to make the passive surrender it takes to probe deeply into another way of being human (to borrow Gene Lisitzky’s pithy phrase). I found it hard to adjust to the Suyá diet—95 percent of it manioc and fish. The tribal dances, for which the men stripped almost naked and painted their bodies in vivid colors, were spectacular and strange, but after four nonstop hours of monotonous singing and drumming, I grew bored. I was much happier joining the soccer games that sprang up in the dirt courtyard. It was tiresome to understand not a word anyone said, except when Seeger translated. Hardest of all for me was the absence of privacy. For the Suyá solitude is anathema, the resort of witches. When I retreated to my tent each evening, the people worried that I might be cold and lonely, though the temperature never dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit and there was not a moment of true silence. Craving escape, I declined the chief’s offer to exchange my tent for a hammock in his hut.
As an adventurer and as a person, I now realize, I need to stay in motion, and I’m all too used to staying in charge of the agenda of my life. (I suspect this is a failing from which most mountaineers suffer, as, for example, in the Himalaya they dash through the lowlands, feigning fascination with native cultures, hiring porters but haranguing them when they go on strike, on the way to the real goal—the great peaks and glaciers where no one lives.) I realize that I could never have mustered the self-abnegation that Tony Seeger had accepted when he immersed himself in the Suyá existence. I could never have gone solo into the Trobriand Islands like Bronislaw Malinowski or Samoa like Margaret Mead.
Did my decades-long fascination with the Anasazi depend on their having disappeared from the Colorado Plateau? I could control my searches for their ruins and rock art as I could not control the schedule of daily activities among the Suyá. The Anasazi were more interesting to me than the Puebloans who were in some sense their descendants: the dwellers at Hopi, Acoma, Zuni, and Jemez. The fear that my cultural curiosity might partake of dilettantism has bothered me since the age of twelve, when I came across a cartoon in my parents’ New Yorker. Well-dressed society matron entering a hogan-like dwelling in the American Southwest, to discover an Indian family eating dinner. Caption: “Oh, I beg your pardon! I thought you were extinct.”
As late as 2017, claims of the accidental discovery of “uncontacted tribes” in the Amazon rain forest still occasionally splash the pages of newspapers. We seem to have a romantic need to believe that Rousseau’s noble savage may flourish somewhere, untouched by the corruption and squalor of modern civilization. Yet even in remote corners of South America or Southeast Asia, marginalized tribes today are all too aware that “we” exist.
When the catastrophic tsunami swept the Indian Ocean in 2004, causing massive losses of life, many experts feared that the tidal wave might have wiped out the S
entinelese, inhabitants of one of the Andaman Islands—a people often labeled “the most isolated tribe in the world.” But when a helicopter flew over the island to check, a Sentinelese man raised his bow and arrow, mutely signaling “Go away! Leave us alone!” A photo of that encounter went viral. The astonishing conclusion that anthropologists could not avoid was that during the sixty thousand years the people had lived on their island, they had learned from watching the water when a tsunami was coming, and had fled to higher ground to survive it. Theirs was a hard-won lore that nearly everyone else in the world had forgotten—including the tens of thousands of seacoast dwellers from Indonesia to Thailand who drowned in the flood.
Throughout history, true first contact brought devastation on a colossal scale: think of Cortés and the Aztecs, Pizarro and the Inca. In adolescence, I fantasized about being part of an exploring party that stumbled across natives previously unknown to the outside world. As an adult, when I read the classic narratives of first contact, including Bernal Díaz’s The Conquest of New Spain and William H. Prescott’s A History of the Conquest of Peru, I railed against the ethnocentrism of the European accounts. Why could we never know what the Aztecs really thought when the fair-skinned, bearded warriors marched toward Tenochtitlan from the east?
Thanks to accidents of history and logistics, and to the extraordinary work of a pair of Australian journalists, the last great pageant of first contact played out anywhere in the world can be witnessed and apprehended from both points of view. This unique cultural clash, which took place in the early 1930s, unfolded in the highland valleys of New Guinea.
Limits of the Known Page 17