by Joe Kane
“Jack!” someone screamed, and for a split second I saw Jourgensen in the heart of the rapid. He was under, up, under again, helpless, his life jacket his only hope, for he could barely swim. His face looked bloodless and frozen, his eyes blank. But he wasn’t struggling. It was as if he had resigned himself to the inevitable.
The raft pitched, heaved, scooped me up. Chmielinski lay sprawled across the net, and at first I thought the force of our collision had knocked him out. The raft bolted up, then down. Bzdak, standing in the bucking bow like a defiant warrior, reached into the river and with one hand plucked Jourgensen back from eternity. He dropped the big man on the floor of the raft as if he were no heavier than a trout.
Two seconds later we plunged into Milk Shake.
“FORWARDFORWARDFORWARD!” Chmielinski yelled as he scrambled back into paddling position. We paddled hard to try to regain control of the raft, but it was too late. The front right rose and we began to flip. Jourgensen struggled up from the floor, climbed Bzdak’s back, and nearly knocked him out of the boat. Bzdak wrestled him off and threw himself at the high side with Chmielinski. The raft leveled for a moment, then started to spin left to right.
“SWITCH!” Chmielinski yelled. That was a new one. He and I turned on the tubes and became front men, Bzdak the lone driver.
We handled the third rapid, Liquidizer, but lurched out of control as we tumbled over a short waterfall into Dead Man. We bounced off the left wall, hit a rock, spun a three-sixty, hit the right wall—and somehow ricocheted right across the hole. I got one terrifying glance at its ugly swirling eye, and then we shot into the calm water below it.
We paddled to some boulders along the right bank, climbed out of the raft and sat in silence. You could almost hear the nerves jangling. Then Bzdak said, slowly, “Those were the biggest holes I have ever run.”
Chmielinski agreed but didn’t elaborate, which was unusual for him. Jourgensen said nothing, but with shaky hands tried to light his pipe. After a while Bzdak said, “We call that Wet Pipe Rapid, Jackie.”
And then the laughter started, nervous titters at first, then low howls, then wild insane roaring.
Having once again advanced but a mile over the course of an entire day on the river, we finally began to understand how long a distance forty miles could be. On flat land you could walk that far in two days. We might well need two weeks to travel it on water. We resigned ourselves to a long haul.
That night Chmielinski instructed me to cut our already-lean rations by half. We would fill out the cookpot with our one surplus ingredient, water. Nobody was happy with this, but none opposed it.
As bats wheeled above us we ate a thin gruel—three packages space-age chili, one package powdered soup, water, water, water, eight bowls—then huddled on a granite slab along the river, watching the stars in the slit overhead, following them down to the top of the gorge wall, which in turn was lit up with fireflies. It seemed as if the stars fell right to the river.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more brilliant canyon,” Tim Biggs said. Grunts along the rock affirmed that all shared his thought. We were scared and tired, but those emotions concentrated our attention, told us that we were in a sacred place, a place untouched by humans and perhaps, until then, unseen.
“Rivers have their own language,” Truran said. “Their own culture. We’re not in Peru. We’re in a place that speaks in eddies and currents, drops and chutes and pools. So we only made a mile today. Can you think of a finer mile?”
I walked back to my tent and worked on my notes. An hour later, when I crawled into my sleeping bag, I heard the heavy breathing of Jack Jourgensen, who had pitched his tent near mine. I could not forget the look on his face that afternoon when he’d fallen into the rapid, the blankness of it, the resignation.
Jourgensen was nearly fifty-two, and at a crossroads. He’d been reading Leo Buscaglia’s Personhood and wondering, as he put it, “What does it mean to get in touch with the world and yourself?” He wanted to be more than a man who got rich selling highway paint. His presence on the Apurimac said he was a filmmaker, an explorer, an adventurer—“Viking” was the word he liked to use in the diary he kept for his seven children, the youngest of whom, Leif, was only five months old.
I think all of us were inspired by the fact that Jourgensen would attempt a journey that scared the wits out of men two decades younger and in much better condition, but I know that I, for one, felt guilty about his being there. The cold truth was that he did not belong on the river. He was overweight, with a degenerating disc, arthritic hips, and a history of gout, and the swimming and climbing taxed him much more than it did the rest of us. Back home, he had a huge family depending on him. Yet in Cuzco, when Durrant had said that as the expedition doctor she considered it imprudent to allow him on the raft—“What will you do if he breaks a leg, or has a heart attack? You could kill him trying to get him out of the canyon”—no one had responded. No one had wanted to lose the golden goose.
I slept fitfully that night, my body bruised from the bad rapids. At first light I got up and checked the food bags for mildew. Bzdak was up, too, on breakfast duty. He made a pot of instant coffee and poured me a cup, although anticipation of the impending confrontation with the Apurimac already had my stomach in knots. We ladled the rest of the coffee into cups and distributed them to the tents.
“Zbyszek,” I said when we had finished, “if we have another rapid like those ones yesterday, will you run it?”
“If there is no choice. Otherwise, no. What if someone breaks his leg? No way out. We put him to the raft and keep pushing. Not so good.”
That morning the river’s gradient increased, and supported by the rain that had fallen over the last three days, the water rose another six inches and grew more volatile. We encountered rapid after rapid that was off the scale of difficulty—Class Sixes. For five straight hours the kayakers portaged and we worked the raft downriver on the end of Chmielinski’s mountain-climbing rope.
This time, however, Chmielinski added a new twist to the lining procedure. He directed Bzdak to ride the raft and paddle it as we tethered him from shore. Chmielinski provided the bulk of the brains and muscle, but it was Bzdak who took the brunt of the risk. These were rapids a man could not swim and survive. The velocity of the water, let alone the rocks and boulders into which it would drive one, would crush a skull as easily as an eggshell. Yet all Chmielinski had to say was, “Zbyszek, go there,” and point to a boulder in the middle of the river, or to an eddy far downstream, and Bzdak was in the raft and flying, with no more response than a hand signal to ask, “At which eddy should I stop?”
During six years in some of the wildest, most unforgiving places in the Western Hemisphere, these two disparate men had learned to depend on each other utterly. Despite the terrible risks they were running, despite our dire straits, it was wonderful to watch them work the precious raft down the beastly river. The only sign of the tremendous emotional pressure they were under was an occasional frenzied exchange in Polish.
By the afternoon of our fourth day in the abyss (and our sixth since leaving Cunyac bridge), Bzdak was exhausted. His eyes were red and puffy and his paddle responded too slowly to the raging water. I felt I should spell him on the raft, but Chmielinski would not hear of it. “This is a special thing between me and Zbyszek,” he said. “We have many years together. It is correct for me to ask him to go, but not to ask you.”
Chmielinski’s reply came as a relief. I was more than grateful to scramble along the boulders behind him, hauling in slack line, paying out line as the raft took off, anchoring him so the speeding raft did not drag him into the river. I preferred the feel of rock under my feet, for by now fear of the river dominated my thoughts. My nerves were so raw from the white water that each afternoon, when the word came down that we were stopping to make camp, a wave of gratitude, of recognition that I had survived one more day, washed over me with a feeling that was palpable—it felt as if my body, one big knot of fe
ar the day through, had suddenly come untied. The simple act of sipping my evening cup of coffee gave me immense pleasure.
Part of my fear was due to the fact that I could not get comfortable on the raft, which was packed in such a way that the fifth, nonpaddling man, either Jourgensen or Van Heerden, was crammed into my left rear quadrant. When Jourgensen rode next to me, weighing down our corner of the boat, I always felt that I was about to be pitched into the river. Van Heerden rode in back when he wanted to film, and jumped around constantly. Once, as we bounced through a rapid, he hit me with his camera, knocking me out of the boat and stamping my right temple with a purple wound. The tiny Riken, the agent of my salvation, of my deliverance through the terrible river, now seemed dangerously overburdened.
In all, it appeared that we might never escape the abyss, that it would never end. There was simply no flat water. It was rapid after rapid, mile after mile, driven by what Conrad described as nature’s “sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something, … in unheralded cruelty that means to tear out of [a man] all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed or hated … which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.”
“What do you think, Tim?” I asked Biggs later that day.
“I don’t know, mate,” he said. “But I’d be lying if I didn’t say the river had me a bit scared.”
Rainy season had begun in the high Andes. Influenced by tributaries miles above us, the river changed color daily. At times she appeared a coffee-and-cream brown, at others emerald green, still others a glacial gray. In the early evening she might run smooth and unthreatening past the camp, yet by morning, having come up a foot during the night, be thundering and powerful. In some places she was studded with three- and four-story boulders, in others her banks were packed with crushed gravel. Given these changes in mood, in appearance, it was impossible not to think of the river as having a will and intent of her own. In the end, however, it was sound, a voice, that most gave her life—she roared as she charged through her canyon. She seemed not only willful but demonic, bent on the simple act of drowning us. You could shout at her, curse her, plead with her, all to the same effect: nothing. She barreled on indifferent, unrelenting.
And so, inevitably, we turned our frustrations inward. On the river a shouted instruction might end as a yell and a grumbled epithet. In easier times, choice tent sites had been shared or left for another; now, as soon as we found a camp each man scrambled for the best land. Food was eyed greedily and served in strict portions.
In the abyss the competition between Chmielinski and Odendaal festered into open hostility. The Afrikaner’s insecurity over his titular role as expedition leader manifested itself as a kind of delight when the Chmielinski-led raft encountered trouble. This attitude, though hardly admirable, was understandable. Several times a day Truran, Biggs, and the raft team would run rapids that Odendaal couldn’t, and his solitary portages seemed to set him apart, to isolate him.
Chmielinski, for his part, had no respect for Odendaal as a riverman, and did not go out of his way to hide his disdain. “He is afraid of the water,” he would mutter on the raft as he watched Odendaal portage yet another rapid he considered easily runnable. He did not regard Odendaal as his equal, let alone his superior, in any way.
At the end of our fourth day in the abyss, when it appeared that both Odendaal and the raft team would have to make a long portage, Odendaal’s face cracked in satisfaction. “I’ll be in camp two hours ahead of you!” he said, and laughed. Then he clambered up a boulder, hauled his kayak after him, and set off.
This goading was more than Chmielinski could stand, for the raft carried all of Odendaal’s food and most of his gear. After the Pole scouted the route, we portaged the food and equipment bags downstream in three backbreaking trips, heaving them up and over boulders and nursing them along jagged crags. Odendaal did not see us and did not know that we had managed to put the lightened raft on the river instead of portaging it.
Kayaking downriver ahead of us, Biggs had found a tiny cave with a soft, sandy floor. We reached this camp well ahead of Odendaal. He looked shocked when he arrived, and without a word left to set up his tent.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of Odendaal’s voice at Biggs’s tent, which was pitched near mine. Odendaal wanted Biggs, the river captain, to command Chmielinski to deflate the raft and portage it over the next few kilometers. This, he argued, would be faster than lining. Biggs was noncommittal.
On the face of it, Odendaal’s was a strange bit of logic. We lined the raft much faster than we could portage it, and as we had demonstrated the day before, we portaged our equipment and lined the lightened raft faster than Odendaal portaged his kayak.
However, if it came down to portaging the raft without the option of lining—if we deflated the raft—Odendaal would certainly move faster than we. And for Chmielinski, there was a world of symbolic difference between carrying a deflated raft overland and working an inflated one down the river. Deflating the raft would be humiliating, an admission of defeat.
Biggs fetched Chmielinski, who had a mumbled exchange with Odendaal that quickly escalated into a shouting match. Chmielinski told Odendaal that he knew nothing about white water. Odendaal threatened to throw Chmielinski off the expedition at Cachora.
I left then, and went to the cave. Truran was making coffee.
“If anyone goes at Cachora it should be François,” he said. He was silent for a moment as he filled my cup, then said, “It’s a constant game of one-upmanship with those two. They’ve got to get over that, or we’ll put ourselves in even more danger than we already are.”
Chmielinski did not deflate the raft, but that morning, as we attempted to line it through a rapid, it lunged around a boulder and pulled up short, teetering on its nose. Using one of our rescue lines, Bzdak, Truran, and I lowered Chmielinski thirty feet down the boulder’s face. He freed the raft by slashing the snagged climbing rope, but the rope then ricocheted into aquatic oblivion. Suddenly, all we had left in the way of rope was our five short, thin rescue lines, which were dangerously frayed from overuse. Soon, unable to line the raft, we would be forced to portage. It would be slow, difficult, nasty work.
By lunch we had not advanced five hundred yards. Chmielinski sat by himself and spoke to no one.
That afternoon the rapids got worse. We would fight through a few hundred yards of bad water, lining some rapids, running others, but always hoping that beyond the next bend we’d find a calm, clear stretch. Then we’d peek around the bend and think, “This is getting ridiculous.” The rapids only got bigger, meaner, and longer.
Late in the afternoon we faced yet another monstrous rapid around which we could not portage the Riken. Chmielinski picked a rafting route, and then, in an attempt at conciliation, consulted with Biggs and Odendaal, who concurred. “You’ll do well,” Odendaal said to us as he set off to portage his kayak along a thin ledge on the canyon’s left wall. Biggs agreed: “You’ve run much worse.” He and Truran shouldered their boats and went with Odendaal, and Chmielinski instructed Jourgensen to follow them. (He feared that Jourgensen’s next swim would be his last.) Bzdak, Van Heerden, and I waited for Truran to reach the bottom of the rapid and position himself to rescue us. Then we took up our paddles.
No one had read the current moving left to right just beneath the top of the rapid. I’m not exactly sure what happened when we hit it. One moment I was in the boat, the next all was darkness and silence. I grabbed for what I thought was the raft and got river. The water grew cold, colder, frigid. I tried to swim, but I couldn’t tell if I was going up or down, and in any case my flimsy strokes were useless against the powerful current. Something squeezed the wind out of me like a giant fist. Again I tried to swim, searching for light, and again I was dragged down and flipped over and over and over.
I had taken some bad swims before, but this one was different. In a moment of surprising peace and clari
ty I understood that I was drowning. I grew angry. Then I quit. I knew that it was my time to die.
Suddenly, as if rejecting such sorry sport, the river released her grip.
I saw light. Kick. Pull. Pull toward the light. A lungful of water. Pull.
AIR!
Then the river sucked me back down again. Blackness, tumbling, head crashing off rocks.
AIR!
LIGHT!
I surfaced to find the gorge wall hurtling past me. I hit a rock, snagged for a second, and managed to thrust my head out of the water long enough to spot Truran in his kayak at the foot of the rapid, holding in an eddy.
“Swim!” he yelled.
A blast in the back and I was in again. Everything went black. I sucked water up my nose and into my lungs. I bounced off something hard and surfaced next to Truran.
“Grab my waist!” he shouted. I wriggled onto the stern of his kayak and clamped my arms around him. He deposited me near a sandy bank on the river’s left side and told me to wait there.
I knelt in the sand and vomited. When Truran returned, I waded into the river, stopped, and turned back to shore.
“Get in the water!” he yelled. “Now!”
Then we were in the rapid, and I was hugging him with whatever strength I had left, and the river was beating over me, as if angry she had not claimed me. Long minutes later I stood at the foot of the gorge’s right-hand wall.
Van Heerden was smoking a cigarette rapidly and shaking. Chmielinski looked at me as if at a ghost. When the raft had flipped the alert Poles had grabbed onto it again immediately and been yanked from the hole. Van Heerden had been tossed clear and driven toward a flat-faced boulder. The river went directly under the boulder. If Van Heerden had gone with it he would have been shoved under the boulder and killed, but as he was about to hit it Truran, scouting in his kayak, had yelled to him. Van Heerden had turned and reached for the raft, which was trailing him. The raft had slammed into the wall and pinned him. Van Heerden had been sucked under, but Chmielinski had managed to grab a hand, and Bzdak his head. When the raft bounced off the wall they wrestled him free. They assumed I had gone under ahead of him.