by Joe Kane
Bzdak stopped on the ledge three feet in front of me and looked back. He shouted to me, but I couldn’t hear him above the river’s tumult. He inched his way back and put his head next to mine.
“DON’T LOOK DOWN!”
We wormed along the ledge until we could lower ourselves onto a one-foot-square rock at the base of the wall and a few feet in front of the gate boulder. We squeezed onto that small rock, each of us with one foot on it and one in the air, and braced ourselves as best we could, trying all the while to ignore the exploding river next to us.
Bzdak twirled the climbing rope up off the top of the gate boulder and tugged on it, signaling Chmielinski to send the raft. I wrapped my arms around Bzdak’s waist and leaned back like a counterweight. The raft vaulted the chute. Hand over hand, Bzdak reeled in slack line as fast as he could. I tensed, anticipating the jolt we were about to receive. The raft approached us, shot past, and BOOM! the line straightened and stretched, the raft hurtled down the rapid, I tried to calibrate my backward lean—
“HOLD ME, JOSE!”
I couldn’t. We were going in.
Yet somehow Bzdak was hauling the raft toward us, fighting it home inch by inch. Then the line was in my hands and he was in the raft, tearing a paddle loose from beneath the center net. The raft smashed up against the left wall. The river pounded through the chute, curled into the raft, knocked Bzdak flat, and buried him.
Trying to hold the raft was like pulling against a tractor. I couldn’t do it. But the raft bailed itself quickly, and Bzdak rose from the floor and paddled toward the rock. When he was five feet away he leapt for it. How he managed to land on that tiny space I do not know, but we made our stand there, anchoring the bucking raft from what seemed like the head of a pin.
We watched Van Heerden help a ghost-white Jourgensen over the boulder and along the wall, then down the wall into the raft. The two men took up positions in the front of the raft. Then Chmielinski climbed over the gate boulder with …
… I read Bzdak’s lips: “Shit!” …
… Odendaal’s kayak.
Its owner appeared behind Chmielinski and stared at us. Chmielinski took aim and shoved the kayak down the boulder’s face, dead on into the center of the lurching raft. Then he signaled me into the raft, but the rope had sawed my hands to bloody pulp and I couldn’t uncurl them. Bzdak shook the rope loose. I dove the five feet from the wall to the raft and crawled to the left rear. Chmielinski worked his way down the wall and took Bzdak’s spot. Bzdak jumped into the raft. With Jourgensen squeezed between them, he and Van Heerden got their paddles ready on front. I reached beneath the center net and yanked out a paddle for me and one for Chmielinski.
“What are we doing?” I yelled to Chmielinski.
He yelled back, “François goes alone, he dies!”
Biggs and Truran had managed to traverse the river above the chute and sneak down the far side of the rapid, but it was too risky for Odendaal. Were he to make a single mistake during the traverse he would plunge through the chute and into what we could now see was a deadly hole a few feet below it. Instead, Chmielinski intended to mount Odendaal and his kayak on the raft and run the rapid.
Chmielinski had tried that strategy with an overwhelmed kayaker once before, in the Colca canyon. Like Odendaal’s, that kayak had been almost as long as the raft, and with it strapped over the center net the wildly top-heavy raft had flipped moments after it entered the rapid. Everyone had taken a bad swim, Bzdak the worst of his life. If that happened here, we would drown in the hole. But Chmielinski reasoned that it was better that six men risk their lives than that one be condemned to a near-certain death.
I looked up at Odendaal, standing atop the boulder. His eyes were frozen. He looked paralyzed. I knew the feeling.
Chmielinski screamed at Odendaal. He inched his way to the raft and into it and mounted himself spread-eagled on top of his kayak, facing to the rear.
“Squeeze on that kayak like it is your life!” Chmielinski yelled.
Chmielinski could not hold Odendaal’s added weight. He leapt and landed in the raft as it bucked away from the wall. Seconds later, even before I could thrust Chmielinski’s paddle at him, we were sucked into the heart of the current. With Chmielinski screaming at the top of his lungs—“LEFTLEFTLEFT!”—we managed to turn hard and get the nose of the boat heading downstream. We skirted the ugly hole, but it shoved the raft sideways. We found ourselves bearing down on a “stopper” rock no one had seen, a rock that would upend us if we hit it.
Chmielinski screamed “RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT!” and we were sideways, then “INININ!,” a steering command intended for me, and I hung far to my left and chopped down into the water and pulled my paddle straight in toward me so the rear end of the boat swung left and the front end right. Then a wall of water engulfed me and all I saw was white.
Somehow we shot around the stopper rock’s left side but we were still sideways in the rapid “GOGOGOGO!’ paddling hard forward fighting in vain for control and the river slammed us up against another rock, this one sloping toward us, Chmielinski’s side of the raft shot up on the rock, mine lowered to the river coming behind us, the water punched at the low end, drove it into the rock and stood the raft up on its side, teetering, “UPUPUPUPUP!” and I fought to climb the high side, to push it back down with my weight, but Odendaal and his kayak had me blocked and I saw Bzdak trapped the same way on the front end, the water pouring in knocked me off my feet, the boat started to flip “GOGOGOGO!” and all I could do was try to paddle free of the rock digging blindly with my paddle “GOGOGOGO!” and BOOM! we were free and bouncing off the left gorge wall and then heading straight for the gentle tail at the end of the rapid and the calm flat water beyond.
Just above the rapid’s last one hundred yards we found an eddy and put Odendaal out of the boat to walk along a sandy bank that ran almost, but not quite, to the end of the rapid. We ran the rest of it, two small chutes boom-boom, and met Truran in the softly purling water below. He pointed overhead, to the narrow crack of sky between the gorge walls. Storm clouds were snagged on a dark peak. We had to find a campsite quickly, before the boulder-loosening rain hit.
But Odendaal had run out of walking room and stood stiff as a statue thirty yards upstream of us, at the rapid’s tail. Biggs sat in his kayak in an eddy near Odendaal, shouting at him to jump in the rapid and swim. Odendaal refused. The exchange continued for ten, fifteen minutes. Then, as the sky darkened, we all began to yell at the Afrikaner. He looked up. He slipped. He was in the river. He bounced through the rapid unharmed and Biggs fished him out at the bottom. After we put his kayak on the water Biggs escorted him downstream.
We got lucky—the gorge widened and we found a generous expanse of sandy beach. But after we unloaded our gear Odendaal lambasted Biggs over the scene at the last rapid, saying that as the expedition leader it was his right to have stood there two hours if he so chose. Disgusted, Biggs walked away and joined the rest of us around the fire. When Chmielinski had dinner ready Odendaal sat down but did not speak, choosing instead to play Biggs’s harmonica softly to himself.
Chmielinski guessed that we had covered barely a mile that day. This was disappointing, but for the time being we relaxed. The storm clouds evaporated and we sat by the fire on that fine beach and watched a star show in the thin opening overhead, the river that short hours before had been a deafening monster now bubbling along tranquilly beside us.
During the morning run on our second day in the abyss the gorge walls closed in on us once again, narrowing to perhaps thirty feet. At first this was a shock, but the river ran smooth and fast, and we calmed down. Truran, Biggs, and Odendaal paddled their kayaks ahead of the raft and disappeared around a bend.
Fifteen minutes later a gnawing worry gripped the five of us on the raft. Four hundred feet ahead of us the river appeared simply to stop. The gorge turned left, and the wall that crossed in front of us seemed to swallow the river. We expected to see a white line between the river and the w
all, a line of riffles, the tops of rapids. The absence of such riffles suggested a waterfall.
We drifted, tense and uncertain. In the front of the raft Bzdak and Van Heerden shipped their paddles. I used mine as a rudder, keeping the bow pointed downstream while Chmielinski stood up and studied the river before us. After a few minutes he said, “Okay, I see a white line.” Then we saw it, too, but it looked strange, too hard and unwavering to be riffles.
Jourgensen, sitting between Chmielinski and me, asked, “What if that line is part of the rock formations on the wall?”
We drifted in silence. After about a minute, Chmielinski said, “Shit!” I had never heard him use the word. “It is a rock formation! To the bank, fast!”
We paddled urgently for the left wall, and when we gained it Bzdak and I dug in the slippery rock for fingerholds. While we held the raft Chmielinski stood up and tried to determine what lay below the natural dam we assumed we were now approaching.
“This is the thing you are always afraid of,” he said. “You cannot go back, you cannot portage, you cannot climb out, the water is dropping away in front of you. Even if that is a waterfall, the only thing we can do is go.”
We set off uneasily, no one speaking, all eyes on the water line. Where were the kayakers? Now the river ended fifty, now forty feet in front of us. We went to the wall again, found a crack, inserted fingers. Chmielinski climbed the crack, but when he was fifteen feet above us he fell, returning to the river in a dark blur that ended with a splash and his red-helmeted head bobbing toward the falls.
Bzdak and I paddled furiously. Van Heerden unclipped a rescue line and threw it downstream. We hauled the raft captain aboard just as we began to shoot over the falls …
… but it was not a waterfall at all, just a long, gentle rapid. Steep—hence no riffle tops—but straight, no boulders, all lazy, harmless waves. And luck.
Then our luck ran out. We reentered pinball country. We lined the raft through a cluster of gargantuan boulders, hour after hour of whipsawing rope, bloody hands, and bruised shins, and at the end of the day had to negotiate an ugly rapid that took an hour to scout and half a minute to run.
Something happened to me in that half minute. The rapid was a tricky one. It had three chutes and a dozen turns, the last around a broad hole. We handled the first two chutes well, but the third had a ten-foot drop—a small waterfall. At the top of that last chute Chmielinski yelled “OUT!,” a signal to me to set the raft’s nose straight, and I managed two correcting strokes before we hit the chute’s left wall.
Then the raft burst through the chute, a wave broke over the top of the raft, I saw nothing but water, and I heard Chmielinski screaming “OUTOUTOUT!” I dug with my paddle and managed three more strokes before we hit the edge of the big hole and the force of the currents spinning around the hole jerked the raft and threw me into the center net.
Or had I jumped into the net?
I could not honestly tell. The rapid had been a difficult one, that much was clear, and when we completed it Biggs and Truran shouted congratulations to us. Chmielinski was jubilant, beaming, charged with adrenaline. “Perfect,” he said as he shook my hand.
I wasn’t so sure. I suspected I was beginning to crack.
In general, however, that run buoyed our hopes—perhaps we would break free of the abyss the next day. There was a good feeling in camp that night, except for my self-doubts and a blowup between Biggs and Odendaal over Odendaal’s failure to follow Biggs’s instructions in a difficult rapid.
“Tim’s in a terrible spot,” Truran said to me as we sipped tea before dinner. “He’s like a veterinarian injecting his own dog. If Frans drowns, the responsibility is on Tim. People will say to him, you were the river captain, why didn’t you take Frans off the water? But Tim really cares for Frans. He wants him to have a good outing, so he’s reluctant to send him off. Maybe the lesson in all this is that if you can’t do the job yourself, you don’t put a friend in charge. You look for someone impartial.”
That night Odendaal came to my tent. He was smoking his pipe and seemed pensive and subdued.
“Is my behavior on the river causing you rafters worry?” he asked. Speaking for myself, I said, I was concerned mainly with running each rapid, with getting through the abyss alive. He was an afterthought, except when we had to carry him on the raft.
“That’s good,” he said. “I was afraid … well, Tim’s being too emotional. I am paddling at my best, but Biggsy is overworried. In a good way, of course. I know he acts as he does because he cares for me.”
I said Biggs certainly did appear to care for him. Then he wished me good night.
Thinking about it later, I found his assertion that he was “paddling at my best” surprising. As far as I could tell he was portaging any rapid he could. However, I did not think less of him for this. If anything I admired his prudence, and at times was envious that he could portage his kayak around many rapids that, with our much bigger raft, we had no choice but to run.
I worked on my notes, but this did not distract me from questioning my own behavior on the river, especially on that last rapid. I had always assumed (without ever really testing that assumption) that the one thing I had control over was my nerve, my ability to act under pressure. Now I wondered if I had misled myself.
We had advanced one mile our first day in the abyss, two miles the second day. Our third day started off with no more promise. A hard rain had fallen through the night, and by morning the river had risen six inches. Biggs estimated that it had come up 20 percent overnight, from four thousand cubic feet a second to five thousand. We were awake at dawn and on the water by 8 a.m. By 11 a.m., lining the raft through three unrunnable rapids, we had progressed a grand total of about four hundred yards.
And then we encountered a chute almost identical to the one at the entrance to the abyss. The Apurimac compressed to about twenty feet wide, and the walls rose not just vertically but in fact narrowed—the powerful river had cut its gorge faster than gravity could bring the upper ramparts tumbling down. The kayakers found what they called a “sneak” along the right wall, a small chute next to the main chute that was an easy run for them but too small for the raft. Meanwhile, we couldn’t scout the rapid and we couldn’t line the raft through it.
Once again Bzdak and I climbed the gate boulder, inched along a thin ledge on the left wall, and retrieved the raft after Chmielinski shoved it through the chute. Once again Van Heerden and Jourgensen worked their way down the wall and into the raft. Once again we bore down on a monstrous hole. In fact, it was the biggest hole I’d seen, a gargantuan churning turbine easily thirty feet across, its eye sunk a good five feet below its outer lip. With Chmielinski screaming furiously we managed to skirt the hole, but as we did I had the distinct impression of it as a demon lurking over my right shoulder.
We shot past the hole, bounced off both walls and spun clockwise in a circle. With the portly Jourgensen riding on my corner of the raft we sat low in the water and the river pelted us constantly over the stern. Now, as we spun, he lost his balance and with an assist from the water beating me on the back sent me flying out of the raft. On my way out Chmielinski reached across and jerked me back in.
Just as I got back into position I saw that we were bearing down on Biggs, who was in his kayak, in a tiny eddy right in the middle of the rapid, poised to rescue one of us in the event of a spill. Bzdak screamed a warning, but in the narrow gorge Biggs had nowhere to go—we had come on him too fast. We ran him down, trapped him beneath the raft, and hauled him fifteen yards before his boat popped out, riderless, from beneath ours. Then Chmielinski managed to reach under the raft, grab Biggs by the life jacket, and yank him free, alive but distraught.
We broke for lunch exhausted and demoralized. After five hours of work we had advanced perhaps eight hundred yards. Food went down hard, because each man felt within his gut a stone of fear and fatigue. To our right, in the east, the sight of snow-capped 21,000-foot Auzangate hovering over the
gorge brought little joy, for it reminded us that we were still some six thousand difficult feet above sea level.
After lunch Chmielinski, Truran, and I scouted downriver and discovered our worst rapids yet. Four thundering drops, each at least two hundred yards long, with so much white water that at first they appeared to be one continuous froth.
Truran broke the rapid down into distinct runs: “Ballroom, Milk Shake, Liquidizer, Dead Man.” He turned to me. “Whatever you do, keep paddling. Keep control of the raft. And do not swim.”
Bzdak joined us on the rock and appraised the river. “What do you think?” I asked.
He shook his head slowly. “Don’t swim. My god, don’t swim.”
He and I climbed back to the raft and sat on it, waiting for Chmielinski. From utter emotional exhaustion I fell asleep, and awoke to Chmielinski splashing water in my face. He ordered Van Heerden to accompany Biggs, Truran, and Odendaal, who had found a portage route too tight for the raft but adequate for their kayaks. The cover was that Van Heerden could film the rapid. The reality was that by now Chmielinski did not trust Van Heerden. The Afrikaner would not respond to Chmielinski’s commands, and his habit of smoking on the raft, and of tossing the empty cigarette packages in the river, had already led to harsh words between the two.
After the kayakers and Van Heerden left, Chmielinski said to Bzdak, Jourgensen, and me, “Okay, guys, looks good. All we do is keep straight in the top chute.” He paused. “If you swim, try to go to the right.” I had never heard him suggest the possibility of swimming a rapid.
We paddled upstream, turned into the current, maneuvered above the chute, and slowed slightly as we dipped into it. Then the river picked us up and heaved us forward. We were airborne. The only time I had felt a similar sensation was as a teenager, when I had ridden a motorcycle off a small cliff.
The raft hit the water, jackknifed, spun one hundred eighty degrees. We went backward into the Ballroom. Chmielinski and I cracked heads and then I was on my way out of the raft. I grabbed netting as I went over the side.