by Joe Kane
But of course we were not really alone. That we saw no one that first day out of La Angostura was probably a consequence of our garish appearance—bulging aluminum-and-nylon packs, Goretex jackets, sunglasses, big leather boots. I imagined Quechua hiding in the mountains, giggling as we passed.
Or perhaps we had simply been too fatigued to notice anyone. At dinner, after struggling through fifteen miles of steep switchbacks and descents, Bzdak had wobbled away down the trail. Leon and I heard vomiting and found him crumpled in a clump of ichu. We helped him to his tent, and Leon brewed him a stomach-soothing tea from foraged mint.
In the morning, however, Bzdak was in good cheer (“I get sick from no beer”), and the trail ran smooth and level, a foot wide and centuries old. It cleaved to the ledge, then retreated behind soft, loamy slopes. Ducks and geese cruised by, fish surfaced in the river, the weather turned temperate and welcoming. We passed the charred remains of a llama-herder’s fire, a stone hut, and small fields plowed right down to the trail but never violating it. I began to think of us as honorary members of the Quechua Department of Highways. With each step we did our part to preserve the trail, to maintain order. Here an encroaching clump of ichu stomped down, there a revolt of loose dirt tamped into place.
A red-faced Quechua woman studied us from her mud-brick hut, perched like a storybook home on a boulder wedged between trail and river.
“I like your house!” Bzdak yelled in Spanish. The woman blushed redder and ran inside.
In late afternoon we reached the ruins of an Inca fortress. Tucked into craggy folds of rock at the point where the Totorani River joins the Apurimac, it reflected the Incas’ ability to blend into that cleavaged landscape, to hide. The buildings, unlike the famous jigsaw puzzles of the Inca religious and cultural centers, were simple, utilitarian, and long since looted, but their stone lintels continued to define doors and entranceways, and young corn sprouted between the walls. Corn and stone, agriculture and architecture—the material achievements of the Inca state. Their presence in such austere highlands hinted at the dogged endurance of the mountain culture.
We met the kayakers and the camera crew that night, four miles down the trail, at another set of ruins, Mauccallacta. There is an old and complex tradition of reciprocity in the highlands, one form of which, mita, the Incas elevated to a kind of social-security system. In compensation for rotating terms of state labor, the Incas built large public projects for the workers’ communities—roads and irrigation systems—and guaranteed those communities against harvest shortages and famine. Mauccallacta’s round, crumbling stone towers, looming like frozen druids beneath the half-moon, might well have been storehouses for various commodities provided under the mita.
That night I worked in my tent with Durrant, helping her to prepare the packets of antimalarials that we would begin taking six weeks before we reached the jungle.
“Come here, Doctor!” Fanie Van der Merwe shouted through the cold night air. “I have something that needs a little attention.” Cackles rose from the Afrikaner camp.
“Bloody hell,” Durrant said under her breath. She had not enjoyed driving the truck for the two “cowboys,” as she called the Afrikaner cameramen. They had spent one night with a South African engineer connected to the Majes project. While Durrant had cooked and washed dishes, the men had pored over the engineer’s collection of Peruvian erotic art.
“That was all right,” she said. “It diverted their attention. But in the truck, my Christ. They kept winding me up.”
“Come quick, Doctor!” Van der Merwe yelled. “Now it needs a lot of attention.” Howls erupted from the camp, followed by the sound of Van Heerden hacking deeply.
“They’re trying to get me to lose my temper,” she said. “My only defense is to bloody well ignore them.”
I asked if she would prefer to walk with Leon, Bzdak, and me.
“How far?” she asked.
“Ten to twenty miles a day,” I said, and added that it would be harder work than our two-day trek on the Hornillos. As we moved farther down the canyon the country would become much steeper, and we would probably meet Condorito only once a week for resupply. We would have to carry full packs.
“I’m keen to try,” she said. “But do me a favor. Talk to François. Our relationship seems a bit strained. I don’t know what the problem is, but I’m not up to finding out just now.”
I went to the Afrikaner camp, where a pot of coffee bubbled on the fire. Odendaal poured two cups. Then we walked into the dark and the wind, and took shelter in one of the ruined towers.
Odendaal said he welcomed the idea of Durrant joining us on the trail, and agreed that if she handled the walk to Yauri, she could continue to hike with us. We didn’t go into her reasons for wanting out of Condorito. Odendaal had other things on his mind. He was worried about his film, worried mainly that his cameraman, Van der Merwe, would try to usurp his role as director, if not now then when Odendaal went to South Africa to edit the film. This was an understandable concern. Van der Merwe, several years Odendaal’s senior and a professional filmmaker, had clearly established himself as the de facto leader of the Afrikaner triumvirate.
I asked Odendaal about the river itself. He said the first two days of kayaking, the first thirty miles, had been easy, mostly flat, soft runs. Overall, he was disappointed. The expedition was lacking in adventure.
“I would think there was adventure in the whole effort,” I said. “In the perseverance.”
“We’re too organized,” he said. “Watch Piotr. He keeps notes on everything. Everything. He knows precisely how much coffee we drink. He wants to bring tourists in here.”
“Doesn’t his organizing make it easier for you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. We have too damn many people. If it was just me and two others I’d be halfway down the river by now.” He said the Apurimac would rise quickly once the rainy season began, which could be as soon as a month. We had to get moving.
On that note we said good night. I went back to my tent, and Odendaal returned to the fire, where, judging by the intensity of the whoops and hollers, the ribaldry seemed to have increased.
Parched, dust-ridden Yauri is the capital and only substantial town in the mining province of Espinar. It hovers over the brown puna like a withered mirage, its two hundred or so sun-baked mud-and-tin buildings perched on a low rise that amid the numbing flatness of the surrounding plain is as imposing as a mountain peak. Long before we arrived we could see the imperious spire of the church. As in most poor Latin American villages, it was ostentatious well beyond the meager resources of its flock. Brittle shacks huddled around it like orphans clutching at the skirts of a wealthy matron. In front of the church a man labored shoulder deep in a sandy trench, digging up old graves. Stacked behind him, in a neat row, were a dozen human skulls.
The Spanish conquered Peru primarily for the mineral wealth buried in the Andes, and to extract that wealth, they corrupted the mita into a brutal system of forced labor. There is no accurate count of how many Quechua died as a consequence of the Spanish mita, which lasted more than two hundred years, but the most conservative estimates run to about a million. (It is also estimated that during the first fifty years of the Spanish conquest the native population declined from about six million to less than two million.) Many more fled their homes, and to this day some of the highland valleys remain depopulated.
That bitter legacy continues to haunt mining towns like Yauri. We made camp near the center of town, at a fortresslike weaving cooperative that had been organized by an order of Canadian nuns, with assistance from an Irish priest. That the Irishman had also begun to organize the local Quechua politically and to teach them to read and write had not sat well with the town’s ruling powers, and he had been replaced by a criollo priest from Lima. The Roman Catholic Church in Peru is notoriously conservative (it is the only Peruvian institution that continues to employ the mita), and as a Quechua man working in the cooperative storefront said of Yauri�
��s new priest, “The poor are not his business.” The nuns had carried on, however, and in the cooperative’s cavernous weaving room we rolled out our sleeping bags beneath hand-painted posters urging support for the Sandinistas, voting rights for the poor, and breastfeeding.
Bzdak and Durrant went in search of food and returned with news of beer and pollo dorado (“golden chicken”). After eight days on the trail I could hear nothing sweeter. They disappeared immediately. Truran and I charged out right behind them, only to emerge into darkened streets lit solely by the refracted light of dung cook-fires spilling through open doorways. As we walked in the dark we talked to keep from spooking ourselves.
Although the expedition had been in Peru almost a month, that was the first time I had found myself alone with Truran. This was a function of the expedition’s crowded nature, not any reserve on Truran’s part. Indeed, among the ten of us he seemed the most carefree, the most contented with his life. He was six feet tall, blond, with classic, square-jawed good looks and the natural physical grace of a champion athlete. In Arequipa, girls and women had pointed to him as he passed on the street, giggled shyly behind their hands, and called him “Geronimo,” after a Peruvian soccer star. Thus far, his chief concern on the expedition, other than rigging his kayak with a device that would enable him to breathe underwater in an emergency, had been to keep his waterproof Walkman alive to play the black African pop music he relished.
Once the kayakers left Yauri, Truran said, the Apurimac would drop steeply, and his real work would begin. In 1983 Biggs and Chmielinski had made the only known descent of a twenty-mile stretch of the river, a week below Yauri, that Biggs had named the “Black Canyon.” It had taken the men ten days to kayak those twenty miles. They had run out of food, become quite sick, and endured several serious accidents. Truran described the canyon as the upper river’s “crux move,” its hardest section, but one that had to be run if the team was to claim a complete kayak descent of the river.
Truran was concerned about the team’s ability to execute that crux move. He said that Chmielinski was physically strong and mentally disciplined (“He will do the right thing under pressure”) but weaker technically than Truran had expected. Something was bothering Biggs—he seemed timid on the water—and Odendaal was not prepared at all. “He hasn’t done his homework,” Truran said. “He should have spent every weekend of the past year working on his paddling, but he hasn’t. It shows. I think Tim will end up carrying him down the river.”
“Are you worried about that?” I asked.
“Not really. That’s Tim’s problem, isn’t it?”
His cold tone caught me short, but before I could ask him anything more we heard Bzdak’s high laughter cutting through the night. We tracked the sound to a dirt-floored cantina lit by one bare bulb. The rest of our team arrived right behind us, in Condorito, and parked in front of the cantina. The vehicle quickly attracted a crowd of sullen young men.
Meanwhile, when our pollo dorado was served a beggar boy and a phlegmy drunk took up posts inside the cantina door. We heaped food on a plate and passed it along to the boy. He sat in the dirt and bent himself to the task of eating, the unshaded light throwing into relief the scabs on his shaved head. The drunk cajoled a cigarette from Van der Merwe. One of the young toughs entered the cantina, reached behind me, and tried to slip my plate off the table.
“Fuck off!” Van Heerden yelled, and swung at the thief, who retreated beyond striking distance without saying a word.
“Many beggars here,” Chmielinski said. “If you are not watching, they will take your head. Better they should go find work.”
“A man can make of himself what he wants to, can’t he?” Van Heerden said. “If he’ll work at it.”
“Do I hear the voice of the Nationalist Party?” Odendaal said.
“You hear the voice of a white male,” Durrant said.
There was a commotion outside, and, being nearest the door, I bolted for the truck. The strong young faces retreated into the shadows, but no farther.
Two women approached me. They wore tight denim jeans, silky blouses despite the cold night air, high heels, thick makeup, and cascades of cheap jewelry. One introduced herself as “Nancy,” the other as “Mary.”
“Would you like to go to the disco?” Mary asked in Spanish.
I tried to imagine what would constitute a disco in the dark folds of that poor town, and declined their invitation. Van der Merwe and Van Heerden appeared in the doorway.
“Who are these lovelies?” Van der Merwe asked.
“Mary and Nancy. They want to go to a disco.”
“I think we could manage that,” Van der Merwe said. Neither of the Afrikaners spoke Spanish, but that didn’t seem to matter. Grinning, they strolled off arm in arm into the shadows.
Biggs felt weak, and soon the four kayakers left, too, together with Leon, driving Condorito back to the cooperative.
Two men and a boy entered the cantina carrying a guitar and flutes. Bzdak, Durrant, and I ordered three more bottles of Cuzqueña. The beer was warm, flies buzzed our table, the drunk leered at Durrant. Bzdak told us about the time in Lima that he had almost died from malaria. He had slept in a bathtub filled with ice.
“Why do you stay over here?” Durrant asked. “Why don’t you go home?”
“Cannot. Same with Piotr.” He said they had come to Peru in 1979 with permission from the Polish government to stay six months. Half the team returned on time, but two years later five still remained in the West. They scheduled a flight to Krakow for December 23, 1981. On December 13 the Polish government outlawed the Solidarity movement. When the news reached Lima, the Poles organized a five-thousand-person march led by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. They went first to the Polish embassy, where Llosa delivered a letter of protest to “the only person with enough nerve to stick his damn head out the gate,” and then moved on to a nearby park, where they were met with water cannon.
Peru maintains strong ties with the Eastern bloc, and for the next six weeks the Poles were kept under surveillance by the secret police. Harassed, and with Chmielinski suffering a severe case of hepatitis, they fled to Casper, Wyoming, which they had visited briefly in 1979. They settled in Casper, gained U.S. residency, and eventually returned to Peru, where, after running the Colca, they were embraced as heroes by then-President Fernando Belaúnde Terry.
“Does it bother you, Zbyszek?” Durrant asked. She had the pronunciation of his name down cold. “You know, that you can’t go back to Poland?”
“If I go to Poland I have an interview, they take my passport away, and I go to prison. For sure I am never let out of Poland again. So it is not so bad. No home, but no prison.”
“What about your family?”
“No trouble for my parents, I think, or my little sister. It is five years now. They write me a few letters. They were … interviewed a few times, but there was no trouble.” He hesitated, then finished his beer. “At least no one ever tells me there is trouble.”
The man with the guitar began to play a soft, soulful huayno, a kind of Andean folk song. The boy accompanied him on flute, its tone at once melancholy and comforting.
“I don’t see how you do it,” Durrant said. “I’ve only been in Peru a month and I’m wondering why I came at all.” Her feet were swollen and blistered from the hike, but she did not want to return to driving Condorito. “And I have this feeling I’ll forget everything I see here as soon as I go home. I feel like, I don’t know, like this won’t affect me.”
“You will learn more on this expedition than in five years at home,” Bzdak said. “It will always affect you.”
“Do you really think so?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Four beers to the good, Durrant disappeared behind a greasy curtain in one corner of the cantina. Lurching, the drunk was about to follow her in when Bzdak shouted a Spanish oath across the room. The man met Bzdak’s glare with a dull look and slumped against the wall. When Durrant returned, she
and Bzdak danced to the guitar and flute, her feet miraculously, if temporarily, cured.
I returned to the cooperative. Van der Merwe and Van Heerden tumbled in behind me, sweating despite the cold and breathing heavily. Their dates, they explained, had walked them past an alley. They had heard low whistles, upon which the girls had apparently experienced a change of heart. Run, they had gestured frantically, or your throats will be cut.
The next morning the expedition once again divided into three teams. The kayakers manned their boats and we hikers set off on a trail along the river’s left wall. Condorito would drive east out of Yauri, pick up a road that ran northwest through a valley that paralleled the Apurimac, then cut back into the Apurimac some thirty miles later, at the site of the only grass hanging bridge left in Peru. We agreed to meet there in four days.
As Truran had anticipated, below Yauri the river began to demand from the kayakers increased technical expertise and physical stamina. As the Apurimac cut deeper into the earth, huge rocks formed sieves that could suck a body underwater in seconds and keep it there forever. For hundreds of yards at a stretch two-story boulders buried the river completely. The kayakers hauled their heavily laden boats over the boulders and committed several flying “seal-launch” reentries, but weary of portaging, they took greater risks, at times running open pools without first scouting below them.
All four kayakers suffered, but Odendaal suffered most. Though with his weak feet and legs he was the man least capable of portaging his boat, he did so twice as often as the other men, slowing the team severely. Frequently, Chmielinski, the strongest portager, would race ahead with his own boat, then return to carry Odendaal’s. Despite this help, Odendaal grew increasingly shaken and temperamental, and sometimes seemed overwhelmed even by the simple demands of making camp. Biggs worried about his friend. The river would only get tougher.
The second night below Yauri, Biggs sat quietly before the campfire, playing his harmonica, wishing the orange flames could burn away the conflicts he felt brewing within and without. Beyond the fire’s warmth the canyon air was frigid and foreboding. Above him, in the narrow slit between the high black canyon walls, he could barely make out a thin ribbon of gleaming pinpricks. He thought about his new wife, Margie. They had been married only a few months, and he felt uneasy about being away from her for such a long expedition. The least he could do was come home alive.