by Joe Kane
Odendaal and Chmielinski shouldered one boat, Pastor and José the other.
Late in the afternoon thick clouds filed along the canyon rim. A cold wind picked up, and within minutes the temperature dropped below freezing. We made camp on a narrow ledge where the trail widened slightly. To one side rose a sheer mountain wall. On the other, a thirty-foot cliff dropped into a creek.
By then my euphoria had evaporated. The wind had whipped my face raw, my sweaty socks had chilled, my fingers refused to uncurl. I was cold and tired, and I didn’t know anyone else well enough to share my misery without embarrassment. My head was too thick for small talk. It would have looked bad if I had simply gone to sleep (“The lazy sod!”), so I helped Biggs cook our communal dinner. We fired up our little gas stoves, and by the light of candles that flickered and died in the wind we boiled a pot of powdered-something soup followed by what its aluminum jacket alleged was Swiss steak. This sounds like a simple task, but at fourteen thousand feet it was an awkward, woozy chore. By the time we finished, the idea of actually eating the slop made me want to vomit.
I stumbled off to my tent, which I had pitched near the cliff, facing into the Colca canyon. Though tempted to dive fully clothed into my sleeping bag, I forced myself to shed my filthy trail gear and stand naked to the night wind for one frigid instant. Then, like a knight donning battle armor, I scrambled into clean long underwear, turtleneck, down booties.
The moon, waxing and nearly full, loomed over my left shoulder, and fifteen miles in front of me reflected off the iced face of 19,600-foot Mount Hualca Hualca so brightly that the mountain seemed close enough to touch. The Southern Cross hung over the glistening peak, beaming through the thin, dry air as brilliantly as a movie marquee. I had never seen the cross, but instead of awe and exhilaration I felt only an immense loneliness.
By mid-morning the next day, beneath a high, hot sun, we had gained a ridge at fourteen thousand five hundred feet. The thin air made me so giddy I took delight in the increasingly arduous task of planting one foot in front of the other.
“What a marvelous world!” I thought, but that was only the last rattle of a mind about to go jelly soft. My red corpuscles were begging for oxygen. Altitude sickness is, in its own perverse way, wonderfully egalitarian. An old, fat, chain-smoking drunk is no more likely to suffer its headaches, vomiting, confusion, diarrhea, dehydration, nausea, and short-term memory loss than is a champion athlete. It’s mostly in the luck of the genetic draw. The best way to prepare for altitude is to drink plenty of water, until, as the maxim goes, one’s urine runs “clear and copious.” And to climb slowly, giving the body time to adjust. The rule of thumb is one day of ascent for each thousand-foot gain above six thousand feet, and one day for each five-hundred-foot gain above twelve thousand feet. At about fifteen thousand feet, if not properly acclimated, one risks pulmonary and cerebral edema, which can strike quickly, do permanent, painful damage to lungs and brain, and even kill. Above eighteen thousand feet—what mountain climbers often call the “death zone”—the body can no longer acclimatize fully.
We needed two weeks to adjust correctly, but we were so far behind schedule that we had decided to try to reach the top of the continental divide in a matter of days. We weaved and staggered up the mountain in a long, scraggly line. Though walking slowly—planting one foot deliberately, then stopping as if to make sure it was in place before lifting the other—the first man, Van der Merwe, was more than a mile ahead of the last, Odendaal. The rest of us were spread along the narrow trail, mountain wall to the right, cliff to the left.
I was second in line. By fifteen thousand feet my euphoria had crashed. By fifteen-five I felt as if I were carrying a balloon in my bladder, but try as I might I couldn’t pass water. Slightly above sixteen thousand feet, I vomited. Pastor, hiking behind me with the burros, offered coca leaves. I accepted them with no small gratitude.
The sky grew gray, then black, and a hard wind roared up, followed by snow. I pulled my wind suit tight around me, head to toe, tied my ridiculous safari hat to my head with a bandana, and leaned into the wind. One step, two steps. Blinded by the snow, I could no longer see anyone in front of me, and I was too tired to turn around and look back.
I crossed a ridge, dropped down, climbed another, each step lung-draining and leaden. The trail bent into a canyon, then wound out to a glacial moraine. Tiny creeks and spongy ichu grass spilled like a brown skirt beneath Mount Quehuisha, a glistening pinnacle of snow and ice standing bold against the storm clouds clinging to the divide.
Van der Merwe waited at the turn. When our teammates joined us, each greeted the sight of the splendid mountain with a look that was part reverence, part stupor. The usually ebullient Biggs was quiet and withdrawn. Bzdak’s face had gone puffy and gray. Van Heerden, the chain-smoker, hacked deeply and continuously. Chmielinski slogged along with the burros; the frustration of paying attention to the headstrong animals, and also to their owners, had rendered him short-tempered and agitated. Odendaal, still taking up the rear, looked weary and confused, his eyes bloodshot and foggy. Searching for the source of the Urubamba in 1981, he had suffered two edemalike attacks at sixteen thousand feet and collapsed in spasms and convulsions that had nearly killed him.
Pastor and José, their big mountain-adapted hearts pumping some 20 percent more blood than ours, cruised right past us. Chmielinski yelled to Pastor, and after a brief consultation told us, “He says media hora. Half hour to source.”
We pushed on. The storm intensified, at times cutting visibility to ten feet, and two hours later we seemed to be no closer to the divide. Our pace slowed. It took thirty minutes to walk a quarter of a mile. The trail steepened into switchbacks up a near-vertical slope.
It was too much, but Pastor and José refused to make camp. There was no forage for the burros, and besides, they insisted, the pass was only media hora. They kept going. As he had all day, Chmielinski urged the rest of us on, then chased after the burros. No one had the strength to argue with him.
The wind blew harder still, at what I estimated was thirty knots, and gusted so severely that no matter how far forward I leaned, it stood me straight up. I could no longer feel my face.
I drew my wind suit tighter, popped a golf-ball-sized wad of the local chew into my left cheek, and settled into a high-altitude walking meditation: left foot, right foot, count each step, one, two, three, four.…
At seven hundred thirty-one the snow cloud rolled down into the canyon below, the sun burst through, and Quehuisha glistened white and gold. The trail flattened. In front of me Chmielinski drew a line in the snow. I looked back down the trail, but I could not see the others. I staggered up to the Pole.
“Ten soles, please,” he wheezed. “Now crossing continental divide.”
As best I could I studied Chmielinski’s line. It took a moment to register. On one side he had written “Pacific,” on the other, “Atlantic.”
I stepped across, dropped my pack, and breathed deeply in the thin air, failing to draw the lungful I so desperately wanted. Behind and below, to the southwest, black clouds hung in the canyon we had climbed, sealing it off as if there were no retreat. Quehuisha’s insouciant flanks rose immediately to the right, or east, her coned peak now less than six hundred feet above us. Half a mile beyond her stood Mount Mismi, and between them a ridge flecked with the pale-blue icefall that we would call the source of the Amazon.
A rock cairn about six feet high sat in the middle of the divide, and at its peak two sticks were tied in a cross. Travelers had built this apachita stone by stone as an offering to the wamani who dwelled within the mountain. As custom dictated, I contributed a stone and my coca quid, an offering to the guardian spirit and a recognition of my pain. Then I turned to Chmielinski.
“All downhill from here.” I said. Ho-ho!
“Yes,” he said, “for next forty-two hundred miles.”
One by one the others struggled up after us, their faces so many flaring turquoise medallions. One by on
e they dropped their packs in silent exhaustion, and when, one by one, they erupted in hooting celebration, one by one they were punched short by wracking coughs. Cameras came slowly from packs, and slowly we reenacted the crossing of the divide.
The black clouds swelled and rose out of the valley below, blowing hard across white snow. We had found the top of the Amazon, but there was nothing tropical about it. Minutes later we stumbled quickly down the Atlantic slope, anxious to make camp before the bitter Andean night fell upon us.
Below the divide meltwater had built a webwork of brooks and tundralike islands, one of which had room for all but two of us. Bzdak and I hopped the rivulets and established our own little kingdom.
Never, not even on my very first attempt, had the simple act of erecting my tent required more than fifteen minutes of my attention, but at seventeen thousand feet it was like trying to tie a shoelace in the middle of a roaring drunk. I couldn’t decide which end was top, which bottom. I unfurled the ground cloth and circled it again and gain, trying to gain perspective. Finally, the authoritative crack when I snapped the shock-corded poles into rigid order gave me a fool’s courage, and I proceeded to poke, pull, and zip for a good forty-five minutes.
When I finished I had a surprise: The tent had grown an extra pole. An extra pole! That was rich. The tent seemed fine without it. Chuckling to myself, I stuffed the pole into my sleeping bag, anticipating another good laugh after dinner.
“Joe,” Bzdak said, “how you feeling?”
“Like a million soles!” I replied. What a knee-slapper!
“That fifty bucks. Not so good, eh?”
I followed Bzdak as he meandered herky-jerky to the big island. Biggs shared a big two-man tent with Odendaal, and he had volunteered it as a galley. We wormed in, pitched ourselves onto bags and packs, and removed our shoes.
Biggs, tucked in his sleeping bag, was not feeling well at all. Somewhere in his travels he had contracted chronic brucellosis, an incurable infection whose symptoms include depression, extreme lethargy, and fever. Usually Biggs could control the condition with antibiotics, but a few months before leaving home for the Amazon he’d developed glandular fever (akin to mononucleosis), which in turn had triggered an attack of brucellosis. He’d been bedridden three months, and had yet to fully recover.
“Evening, mates,” he said. He smiled, but he was wheezing.
“How you feeling, Zulu?” Bzdak asked.
“Zbyszek,” he said slowly, “you’re getting so big they’d make you King Zulu.”
“What for dinner?” Bzdak asked.
Without getting out of his bag Biggs pawed through the supplies. “Chili. Sweet and sour pork. Beef burgundy. I think … Zbyszek, I think I’m going to puke.”
“What make you feel that?”
“Your feet stink.”
This was no small declaration. At high altitude the sense of smell is greatly diminished. The molecules that build scent are too heavy to travel well in thin air. And so the dominant smell of high mountains, really, is no smell at all. Unless you’re trapped in a tent with …
“Sorry, Zulu. What I can do?”
“It’s okay, Zbyszek.”
“Don’t want to make you sick, Zulu Man. I will leave.”
“No. No! Just kidding. Nowhere I’d rather be than right here with my buddy Zbyszek. Really.”
“How about with wife?”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
Soon the tent was a jumble of arms and legs and pots and spoons, one man lifting stoves, another reaching for food bags, a third lining up bowls. Now a hand held the big pot while another pumped the stove. Here were tea bags and coffee cups, and later a steaming pot of soup.
A head in the tent door, vapor billowing from mouth and nostrils.
“Food ready?” Odendaal asked.
“Soon, soon.”
We cooked and poured, and Odendaal, recovered from the hike, carried soup through the snow to the men in the tents, returned with reports—“Pierre’s coughing badly, Piotr can’t hold food, Pastor and José like the tents we gave them”—and departed with bowls of chili and rice.
Biggs couldn’t eat. I managed a bowl of chili. Bzdak gobbled seconds.
When my head felt as if it were being punched from inside, Bzdak led me back to our tents. I shook with cold the night through.
When I awoke I forced my head out the tent door into a wet gray cloud that seemed to have smothered all sound and shredded the day’s light into a shadowless pall. It could have been dawn, or noon. Below the gray spread a white plain of fresh snow, from which I retrieved my frozen boots.
“Zbyszek.”
A thick voice gurgled up through the white mound next to my tent. “What you want?”
“Breakfast.”
“I take your order. Breakfast to bed for Señor Amazon. Then you puke.”
He was right. I could no more hold food than stand on my head. Or, for that matter, my feet. I stood, wobbled, sat down, pulled on my heavy clothes. The day’s plan was for Pastor, José, and me to leave camp ahead of the others with the burros, hauling all the expedition kit we could carry to the weather station where we hoped to meet Condorito. Our map said the station was on a plateau some fifteen miles north of the source. The rest of the team would stay behind to film the icefall, then, with lightened packs, hurry down the trail to join us that night.
Before we set out, however, I wanted to see the source for myself.
Compass in hand, I slogged back up to the divide, gave the apachita a nod for luck, and turned left, east, groping uphill through snow and scree. An hour later, the fog spread below me like a gray sea, I was locked alone on top of Peru with the solemn, treeless peaks that guard the birthplace of the Amazon like court eunuchs: Quehuisha, Chayco, Mismi, Huillcayo.
And there, suddenly, not fifty yards away, hung the blue veil of the icefall. I started toward it but stopped. I have never been sure exactly why. I had to get back to camp and on the trail, and I was drained by the effort of climbing, but that was not all. It seemed irreverent to say, this is it, I’m—what? Touching the source of the Amazon?
It seemed vaguely silly, too. Defining the source of the Amazon is like unwinding a ball of string and trying to decide which of the tiny frayed threads at its core is, in fact, the end. By generally accepted definition, the source of a river is that tributary farthest from the river’s mouth (as distinct, say, from the tributary carrying the greatest volume of water). For years—centuries—the Marañón was considered the Amazon’s source, but aerial photos taken of the Andes in 1955, and later translated into excellent topographic maps for Peru’s Instituto Geographico Militar, revealed that the Apurimac, one of the Ucayali River’s feeder streams, made the Ucayali system some sixty to a hundred miles longer.
Which left only thread measuring: Which of the brooks and creeks feeding the Apurimac is the longest?
In 1971, after studying the Peruvian maps, an American, Loren McIntyre, traced three Apurimac tributaries (the Hornillos, the Challamayo, and the Lloqueta) to a spongy cirque, and from there to the continental divide. He reported on his exploration in National Geographic magazine:
On October 15, 1971, we reached an ice-edged ridge above Carhuasanta, longest of the five headwater brooks. The Indians call that 18,200-foot summit Choquecorao.…
A thousand feet below the ridge we sighted a lake, its crust of ice thawed by the midday sun. We clambered down to quench our thirst with its transparent meltwaters. Here at 17,220 feet was the farthest source of the Amazon—more a pond than a lake, just a hundred feet across.
[My partners] named the lake after me, more or less in fun, knowing it may not always be the most distant water of the River Sea. It could disappear in a single season. The Andes are new mountains; they still buckle and break.…
McIntyre was right about the shifting terrain, but I think he was wrong about Carhuasanta being the longest of the feeder brooks. Our maps clearly showed that the Apacheta, two streams west, is longer, th
at a third stream, Ccaccansa, is longer still, and that another system altogether, draining nearby Mount Minaspata, is at least as long if it runs year-round. Nicholas Asheshov, an expatriate British journalist living in Peru, climbed Minaspata in 1970 and claimed it as the source; to the writer Alex Shoumatoff (in his book The Rivers Amazon), Asheshov dismissed McIntyre’s pond as “a marshy lake one kilometer above the mine where everybody goes and has a pee.”
Do these differences matter?
No. What we are talking about, after all, is a distance of perhaps a mile, which in the context of a 4,200-mile river hardly merits debate. Man must name, even if his definitions drain the natural poetry of a thing, but the source of the Amazon is not one particular pond or a single nugget of ice. It is the whole place, all of that cold gray web. The icefall, yes, and Lake McIntyre, but also the fog, the wind, the peaks, the fragile lace of mud and grass that spills below the mountain wall.
Snow fell. Weren’t these flakes the first drops of the Amazon? Can you separate snow from creek, ice from air, wind from sun?
The wind howled, the snow fell faster, the fog obliterated the icefall. Wheezing and confused in the thin air, I stumbled back down the mountain.
Our camp was nearly whited out by the storm. After loading the burros and conferring quickly with the others, Pastor, José, and I set out, slipping north through the tundralike sponge along a defile some three hundred yards wide. The storm descended, lifted, descended. In the spaces between the enveloping whiteness the dark peaks loomed menacingly, softened only slightly by their mantles of fresh snow.
No sign of people, no trees, no boulders, nothing but the odd patch of golden ichu jutting up through the white blanket. A splendid isolation. Creeks burbled down out of the mountains every hundred yards or so and buried themselves in the valley floor. Then, half a mile below our camp, they formed the Apacheta, the first coherent body of flowing water on the eastern side of the divide. A mile later we passed a quebrada, a deep, narrow slice in the valley’s west wall. Quebrada is Spanish for “broken,” and no one word better describes what is the most common geological feature in the high Andes, cracks deep and eroded out of all proportion to the often minuscule flows that carve them. The quebradas look as if they have been struck by some wamani’s giant axe.