by Joe Kane
Some twenty years later J. Calvin Giddings made his abortive attempt on the Black Canyon. Though defeated there, he returned to the Apurimac the following year. His five-man team put in at Pillpinto and emerged intact at Luisiana with stories of an awesome gorge that he called the Chasm of Acobamba. At night they had slept in their helmets, to protect themselves from falling rock. They saw no one. They portaged tremendous distances, at one point carrying their boats for five days without finding a place where they could paddle them.
In the late 1970s an American rafting guide, John Tichenor, led three expeditions over short sections of the canyon. Like Giddings, he reported a murderous gorge from which there appeared, after a certain point, to be no exit but the river. The only other recorded attempt on the Apurimac was made by a well-financed German team in 1976. The leader drowned three minutes after putting his boat in the water.
(It is worth noting that Giddings’s goal in running the Apurimac was the antithesis of Perrin’s: “Soon a dam in the highlands will divert the Apurimac water across the continental divide to the dry Pacific plains. Most of the Apurimac, however, is still untainted by civilization, and its canyon remains one of the wildest in the world. One object of my venture was to demonstrate, while it was still possible, that this river does have lasting values beyond those of hydropower and agriculture.”)
As for maps, the excellent 1:100,000 Peruvian topographic series we had used from the source to Cuzco ended at about Cunyac bridge. Below that the river team would have only the unreliable, cartoonish map Odendaal had shown me in the United States. Chmielinski estimated the team would reach Luisiana in three to four weeks, but this was a guess at best. He had to assume that once in the gorge they would be on their own. Goycochea, however, thought it might be possible to bring supplies in from Cachora, a village high on the canyon rim, and he offered the services of his company for this effort.
The map showed one other settlement, Triunfo, near the heart of the gorge, but no one in Cuzco knew anything about it.
In Cuzco the river team gained a new face: Jack Jourgensen, the fifty-one-year-old self-made millionaire from Wyoming who was the expedition’s chief sponsor. Jourgensen had met Chmielinski and Bzdak in Casper, and had once rafted the Colca canyon with them. Knowing that Jourgensen aspired to documentary filmmaking, Chmielinski had contacted him when Odendaal’s British television deal collapsed. Jourgensen and his business partner, Bryce Anderson, had agreed to back Odendaal’s Amazon film and, to a degree, the expedition itself. Odendaal, in turn, would include Jourgensen as a member of his film crew for a short stretch of the river. As a final gesture he named the expedition after Jourgensen, Anderson, and himself.
Given the state of the exchequer after two months in Peru, Chmielinski and Odendaal were delighted by the arrival of Jourgensen and his healthy wallet. The expedition was nearly broke. The money I had raised was long gone, as were the funds Jourgensen had given Odendaal back in the States. In fact, the day before we had departed Arequipa, Odendaal had gathered us together and told us that to keep the expedition alive we would have to give him our “personal money.” For most of us, including me, that had meant handing over funds earmarked for incidental expenses and emergencies.
Money had become a sore point between Odendaal and Chmielinski. Odendaal was not much for bookkeeping, and shortly after we left Arequipa had assigned that chore to the meticulous Chmielinski. However, as Chmielinski attempted to put the books in order, he lost patience with what he considered Odendaal’s cavalier attitude toward finances and accounting. Equipment purchased in the expedition’s name had never made it to Peru. Money designated for the expedition itself had been spent on the film. That Odendaal did not contribute “personal funds” to the expedition further alienated Chmielinski, and by Cuzco they would not stay in the same hotel. Chmielinski roomed with Biggs and Truran, Odendaal by himself.
Meanwhile, after consulting with Edwin Goycochea, Chmielinski proposed a new plan: Put two white-water rafts on the river. He had one stored in Cuzco, and Goycochea would lend him a second and a guide to go with it for those first twenty-five miles. Two rafts could carry all the expedition’s food, equipment, and personnel except Biggs and Truran, who would kayak. Bzdak and I would escape our sentence in Condorito.
Goycochea also offered a truck and driver to haul us back to the Apurimac. Once we disembarked, we would not use motorized land transport again. And so, after five weeks of faithful duty, Condorito was fitted with a set of spanking new tires and returned with heartfelt thanks to Chmielinski’s Peruvian friend, Antonio Vellutino, who had met us in Cuzco. Then we pared our equipment to the minimum (each member was permitted one small bag of personal gear), loaded Goycochea’s truck at dawn, and waited for our river guide.
Morning became afternoon, the shops closed, the city rested, at dusk the shops reopened. We received news both heartening and disquieting—the Swiss team had quit the river. One of the men was badly injured, his leg, according to rumor, crushed by a falling boulder. We did not discuss this. Shadows grew into night. Our guide did not show. A second message arrived: The guide had fled Cuzco. He did not want to run the Apurimac, not any part of it.
It was too late to change our plans. In the morning we proceeded without him.
TWO • WHITE WATER
7 • Meeting the Great Speaker
At dawn we drove west, climbed slowly up and out of Cuzco’s fertile green valley, crossed a pass at about thirteen thousand five hundred feet, and descended just as slowly into the brown chaparral of the Apurimac canyon. In Chinchaypujio, the last town before dropping down to the canyon floor, we stocked up on chocolate bars, hand mirrors, bandanas, toilet paper, soap, insect repellent, and pisco—the comforts we would regret having forgotten once on the river. Then we pushed on for the Apurimac. Though we arrived in mid-afternoon, the sun had already set.
Had we paused to think about it—and several of us did—we might have appreciated the splendid idiocy of what we were about to do. We proposed to challenge the most treacherous stretch of one of the most treacherous white-water rivers on the planet with what were, when you got right down to it, novice crews. Chmielinski and Bzdak were experienced raftsmen, Truran and Biggs skilled kayakers. But Odendaal and Jourgensen had only beginning white-water experience, and the rest of us—Leon, Durrant, Van Heerden, and I—had none at all.
That we chose not to stare those rude facts in the face for very long may have had something to do with the bottles of pisco Bzdak produced after we carved out a chilly camp amid nettles and cactus. We toasted the river. We toasted the stars. We toasted the frigid Andean night. And then we toasted our impending departure, knowing that if all went according to plan, we would not leave the river again until the river left the continent.
There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called “adrenaline” sports—skiing, surfing, and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills.
Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport’s essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap.
It’s the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let’s get on with it! Let’s run this damn river!
And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river—say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you’re thrown suddenly into the center o
f the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don’t realize what’s happening.
It doesn’t matter. The results are the same.
The world goes dark. The river—the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you—the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You’re helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you.
Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you—before you see the rescue lines. You’re hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear.
That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again.
As white-water rivers go, the Apurimac’s dangers lie not in her volume, which is middling until she reaches sea level, but in her extreme rockiness and steep descent. She is inclined less to pound you unconscious with big waves than to trap you beneath an undercut rock or suck you into a “strainer”—a submerged, sievelike boulder pile from which there is no exit. She rewards technique over power. That is, she is better run on a small, maneuverable, four-man paddle raft capable of executing a series of tight turns, rather than the kind of boat often used on high-volume rivers like the Colorado—long, wide rafts that can plow roughshod through big water and are usually controlled by a single man working two large oars.
Though both our boats were paddle rafts, we had problems immediately. The raft Goycochea had loaned us, a lumbering, sixteen-foot-long Avon, was stable—it barreled right through waves that tossed Chmielinski’s fourteen-foot Riken willy-nilly—but not easily controlled. And as manned by Bzdak, Odendaal, Van Heerden, and Jourgensen, an exercise in floating anarchy. As the Avon plunged into a hard rapid, each man flailed away with his paddle as he chose, watching out mainly for himself.
Life was somewhat more orderly on the narrower, shorter Riken, if only because Durrant, Leon, and I were so completely hopeless that we reacted to Chmielinski’s every command as if our lives depended on it. For Chmielinski, the military man, failure was not an option. By the end of our second day on the river he had intimidated us into a passably competent crew which, if not strong, at least managed to pull together as a team, stroking frantically at his urgent direction.
And we had another advantage. In its own way, the state-of-the-art Riken raft was as profound a breakthrough in river technology as the canoe or the outboard motor. The beast’s intelligent beauty lay in its self-bailing design. (Chmielinski called it “safe-bailing.”) Its foundation was an independent, inflatable floor affixed to inflatable side tubes by a webwork of rope lashings. When water filled the raft, its weight forced the floor down, stretching the lashings and opening a gap between floor and side tubes. The force of the pneumatic floor trying to rise back up from the river drove the water out through the gap. The manufacturer’s claim was that when filled, the raft would drain completely in five seconds.
The primary task for Durrant, who paddled at the raft’s left front corner, and Leon, who paddled at the right front, was to propel the raft forward. Manning the back corners, Chmielinski and I supplied both power and direction.
As a “driver” I was also charged with scouting the rapids on foot before we ran them in the raft. Chmielinski scouted, I should say. I scrambled along the bank behind him, slipping so often on the slick boulders and sharp rocks that after two days my shins were plum-colored and mushy and my face and hands were covered with scabs.
Nevertheless, Chmielinski committed himself to the unenviable task of teaching me how to pick a safe line of travel through the Apurimac pinball machine. He believed that he could teach us the requisite paddling skills if we had confidence in ourselves—he would provide the head if we hung in there with a little heart. But as a driver I had to understand the consequence of each flick of my paddle, an understanding that involved the ability to decipher the river’s complex hydraulic patterns. However, when asked from the safety of dry land to choose a possible route, I invariably described one that would have condemned us to a watery death—for instance, twisted and pinned under a strainer, dying slowly of asphyxiation and head wounds.
Chmielinski would look at me with quiet exasperation, then patiently explain a more prudent route. As we memorized the turns, stops, and starts we would try to execute when we actually ran the rapid, our conversations proceeded something like:
“Okay, Joe. Pointy rock.”
“Pointy rock.”
“It is a killer for sure, that one. I am in with my paddle, you are out, we are turning left, then we are go, straight, we are running, we are pulling for our lives. A killer. But not a problem.”
“Pointy rock. Killer. No problem.”
Such conferences were always—always—followed, on my part, by a vigorous expelling of urine. I learned to judge the true danger of a rapid, a danger that only my subconscious could objectively perceive, by the volume issuing from my bladder.
Almost without exception our painstaking choreography evaporated the moment we entered a rapid. Then it was up to Chmielinski to bring us under control with his precise set of commands, delivered at a pitch never less than savage.
God help the crewman who got out of position on the raft, which, unfortunately, was all too easy to do. The position one must master to paddle a raft correctly runs counter to all survival instincts. For example, as a driver, I was supposed to sit squarely on the left side tube at its junction with the back tube, tuck my left toes under the cross tube in front of me, and, spreading my legs as if sprinting, push the bottom of my right foot hard against the back tube. Then, anchored to the bucking raft only by the tension on my left toes, right heel, and buttocks, I was to hang my body out to the left, over the water, so that I could dig my paddle straight down into the river.
At first this struck me as mortally ludicrous—Chmielinski wanted me to expose half my damn body to that terrible river, daring it to snatch me. Over time, however, and after the Apurimac had once too often treated me as a blender does a banana, I learned that being extended over the water, my paddle dug into it, was safer than bouncing about the raft’s interior. Our supplies were stored dead in the center of the raft, under a net. Carrying this weight, the raft floor—one was desperately tempted to dive onto it, hug it shamelessly, and weep—delayed slightly before responding to the river’s turbulence, in fact moved in counterpoint to it, while the lighter, independent side walls moved in synch. Riding the floor was like sitting on a trampoline while someone else jumped. One quickly vaulted up and out, into the smothering arms of the Great Speaker.
And so one fought one’s instincts, a battle in which Commander Chmielinski was ever willing to assist.
The Apurimac tested his talents as captain and teacher most severely on the fourth and last day of our shakedown run from the military bridge to Cunyac bridge, when we confronted our worst rapid. It was a series of rapids, in fact, all of them Class Five, which means something like “high degree of technical difficulty, and if a mistake is made, possible mortal consequences.” Your basic “killer, no problem” sort of thing. (Class Five rapids are considered the upper limit of runnable water.)
We scouted that particular chain of rapids, about a half mile long, for two hours. Finally, Chmielinski picked a line of descent. Two boulders formed a narrow chute at the top of the rapid. As the river forced its way through the chute, it compressed from some fifty feet wide to fifteen. Then it exploded through the chute like gas exiting a carburetor, spilled over a short waterfall, and at the bottom built a “keeper,” a wave that flows back on itself. Someone caught in a keeper makes several mind-altering spins b
efore escaping. People who have experienced them also call such waves “Maytags.”
Below all of this lay the kind of roiling mess that you knew, just by looking at it, could send you home in a wheelchair.
“It is a killer,” Chmielinski said when we had finished scouting the run.
I knew the correct rejoinder: “No problem.”
Then I let fly with an act of urination so wildly out of proportion to my liquid intake for the day that I felt my face begin to pucker.
Back at the raft, Durrant asked about the rapid.
“It is a part of a cake,” Chmielinski said.
We backstroked out of the eddy and turned upstream. (By paddling against the current we maintained control of the raft, sort of.) We swung our nose slowly into the current, like a hand on a clock: upstream, cross-stream, downstream. Then we inched into the quickening water.
I remember, as we hit the chute, the roller-coaster-stomach, sick-sweet sensation of falling through air. I remember white walls of water rising around us, that we blasted into several boulders, and that the explosions we made when we hit them were louder even than the river itself. Once, my head snapped so violently I worried I had broken my neck. I remember the raft pinned to a boulder, up on its side about to flip, and us climbing to the high side while the rapid roared at our feet. I remember staring straight down at a knife-edged rock and watching it somehow shoot past my head. I remember the urgency of Chmielinski’s screams, louder and more desperate by far than any I had heard from him before.
And then I remember calm sweet waters of peace and joy, drifting quietly in the raft in the wide easy river below the rapid. I remember that we were breathing hard but otherwise silent, and that in the slow water it seemed as if we and the river were one, motionless, while mountains and sky swept past us on their way upstream, to the source of the Amazon, or to wherever it is that mountains and sky might choose to go.