by Joe Kane
Meanwhile, Biggs refused to continue on the river until Chmielinski signed a statement recognizing Odendaal as the expedition leader and agreeing not to split the team. Biggs based his stand on a principle almost as old as men and boats: Water is no medium for democracy. When you signed on for a voyage you agreed to accept the leadership without question.
Chmielinski, of course, refused to sign anything, and he, Odendaal, Biggs, and Jourgensen spent most of that afternoon a hundred yards downstream from camp, arguing amid the thorns.
Meanwhile, Durrant, Bzdak, Truran, and I discussed the crisis among ourselves. Bzdak brewed a pot of coffee, and though we were sweltering in the midday tropical heat, Truran and I built a fire. The four of us sat around it hoping, in vain, that its smoke would discourage the pesky mosquitoes.
It was clear to us that if the “B” squad (as Durrant referred to Bzdak, me, and herself) were forced to leave the canyon, the chances of our rejoining the river team would be slim. In effect, we would be off the expedition. “If Piotr is serious about taking the raft alone and leaving Tim and François to continue on their own, I’ll go with the raft,” she said. Bzdak and I were prepared to do the same.
Much to our relief, Truran agreed to accompany the raft if the team split. Without a kayaker scouting ahead of us, and ready to rescue us in the event of an accident, the Apurimac would be even more dangerous than she had been so far. Truran’s decision did not come easily, however. He would now be competing against one of his closest friends, and as he put it, “Tim doesn’t finish second.”
There were elements of tragedy in Truran’s decision. Although he rejected Biggs’s dogmatic Christianity, he respected Biggs as a principled man, one who acted with little regard for personal gain. But Truran disagreed with Biggs on the subject of François Odendaal, and the disagreement was as profound as the bonds of friendship. Biggs believed that Odendaal’s strength was his ability to carry an expedition to completion. He also thought, however, that Odendaal would be better off traveling without people “who knew his past history.” Truran, alone among the rest of us, knew that history, and he had concluded that Odendaal was fundamentally unfit to lead a river expedition.
“Frans lost a mate a long time ago,” Truran said, “and he’s been trying to make up for it ever since.” He said that a decade before, when he and Biggs had been members of the kayaking team at the University of Natal, Odendaal had come to them seeking men for a source-to-sea attempt of Africa’s Limpopo River. Odendaal had already tried the river once, but three weeks into that first expedition his entire team save one man, Johan Smit, had left. Odendaal and Smit pushed on alone and became trapped in a whirlpool. Odendaal lost consciousness; when he came to, Smit was dead. Odendaal quit the Limpopo.
“When Frans asked me to go back there with him,” Truran said, “he told me his mate had died trying to rescue him, and that he had to ‘beat’ the river.”
(Odendaal had never mentioned the accident to me, but months later, reading his unpublished Urubamba manuscript, I came across a passage describing his state of mind when he thought he was dying from altitude complications:
“Crazy, I thought. This happened to me once before. In the whirlpool with Johan Smit. When I saw no way out of my drowning and realized that the world concerned me no more, I had laughed. Under the water. I was unconscious when the water released me, he died. I was there again, alone.”)
Truran, Biggs, and several other men returned to the Limpopo with Odendaal. According to Truran, two-thirds of the way down the river, just above its worst rapids, Odendaal got in a violent argument with them and left the expedition. The rest of the team went on to make the first recorded descent of the Limpopo’s roughest water, only to be stopped at the Mozambique border. Without mentioning the split, Odendaal later wrote that political events in Mozambique had prevented the expedition from reaching the river’s mouth, but that he was satisfied he could do it. Truran considered this highly disingenuous, and had never forgiven Odendaal.
Truran said that he had come to South America out of loyalty to Biggs and a love of white water, but as far as his relationship with Odendaal was concerned, he was a hired hand. He was convinced that Odendaal was on the Amazon for the wrong reasons. He was exorcising ghosts, battling the memory of Smit’s death. “He’s not a kayaker,” Truran said. “He’s terrified of water. He’s a man with something to prove.” Odendaal was free to do that, Truran said, until his behavior compromised the integrity of the expedition, as it now threatened to do.
Then Durrant raised another point. “François wants the raft off the river,” she said to me, “because he wants you off the river. He’s performing terribly, and he doesn’t want you writing about it. He realizes he made a mistake bringing you here.”
In the end we reached an uneasy truce. Odendaal, though refusing to acknowledge that he had a mutiny on his hands, agreed to include the raft as part of the river team. Chmielinski signed Odendaal’s agreement, primarily because he believed the film project a worthy pursuit. But the next day, as we loaded the raft and prepared once again to confront the Great Speaker, he said to me, “Francois is my enemy.”
The Cachora confrontation led to at least one unexpected but welcome development: The raft team became a tight unit. Jourgensen, as was his prerogative, remained with the raft. But he was tired now, content to ride most of the time as a nonpaddling passenger, and he wanted friends. Durrant took Van Heerden’s place at the right front paddle. Though not as physically strong as the departed Afrikaner, she was more confident. She was a swimmer, and she knew water. When Chmielinski yelled “Go!” she paddled hard.
After we executed our first rapid smartly, bending neatly through three sharp turns and catching a benediction of cold spray at the bottom, a wave of shared knowledge rippled through the raft: This boat belongs on the river. For the next three hours we shot rapid after rapid, maneuvering like a seasoned crew, whipping the blue balloon through a slalom of tight curves. We were in control, running backward and forward and sideways, through elevator-like drops and rolling waves. We laughed and hollered in our exhilaration.
This river, this forgotten place, was ours now, and ours alone. No towns, no bridges, no roads, no huts, no gold panners, no peasants working postage-stamp fields. A wild river. “It’s running,” Chmielinski said, and we were running with it.
The canyon narrowed; again the walls rose sheer and slick. An unnamed river poured in from the left and mined the Apurimac with boulders, but we ran them without mishap. When we had beaten them Durrant looked up and shouted: To our right, above the canyon’s east rim, rose the spectacular white-and-maroon peaks of the Cordillera Vilcabamba. We finished the day with a long, gushing seesaw of a rapid, three hundred yards of troughs and waves, at the bottom of which we were as wet and happy as ducks.
Truran and Biggs were waiting in their kayaks. As we waved in greeting Biggs screamed and pointed behind us. Odendaal’s kayak was shooting along, overturned and riderless.
Its owner surfaced upstream, bloody and gagging and clinging to a boulder in the middle of the river. Biggs fought his way against the current and got Odendaal onto the tail of his boat and safely to shore, but the accident lent an eerie note to an otherwise wonderful day. With the exception of Biggs and perhaps Jourgensen, the rest of us had witnessed the Afrikaner’s suffering with indifference.
We camped on a small, pretty beach at the foot of a granite cliff. Chmielinski made dinner. He was the expedition’s most orderly cook. He took pains to prepare a kitchen, erecting driftwood-and-rock counters and a rock fireplace replete with chimney, laying out his utensils in a careful row, throwing a cloth over our waterproof food crate to convert it to a table.
When Chmielinski got down to the actual cooking, his philosophy was, as he put it, “I am a slave for that time.” He served each person himself, moving rapidly from one to the next, refilling tea and coffee cups, dishing out seconds if there were any. He prepared the expedition’s most elaborate dinners. That n
ight, he cooked a pot of powdered mushroom soup, a thick stew of packaged beef bolstered with fresh onions and carrots Leon and Durrant had brought into the canyon, and two desserts—fresh bananas and chocolate bars, and a pudding made of instant rice, raisins, cinnamon, and evaporated milk.
After dinner, when the others had retired, I packed the food crate while Chmielinski cleaned dishes.
“It was good today on the raft,” he said. “Good running. This is the way a river should be.”
“We seem to have regained some confidence,” I said. “And Kate is very good with a paddle.”
“Confidence is the thing. We must be prepared to take the raft alone.”
“Do you think it will come to that?”
“I do not know. But we must be ready to do it.”
Early the next morning the kayakers shot a big rapid and signaled us to follow, which we did without scouting. After all, now we were running.
No one saw the hole. The raft bucked once and vaulted Chmielinski and me forward off the back tube like rocks from a slingshot. As I flew over Bzdak, paddling on the left front, our helmets cracked, and then I was underwater. I came up perhaps ten seconds later, punchy and disoriented, and forty yards downstream of the hole.
Jourgensen got the worst of it. He and Bzdak stuck in the hole, and it sucked him under three times before the Pole was able to haul him out. Later, his eyes dull as stone, Jourgensen said, “I thought I was dead for sure.”
It had been a mistake not to scout the rapid. We could not afford an injury. We were traveling through unpopulated, impenetrable country. The terrain between the canyon floor and its rim was hot, dry, scrubby, and unforgiving, with no sign of people, not a single cultivated terrace, not a hint of a trail.
For the next two days we ran almost continuous rapids, and got battered in the process. Jourgensen’s bad swim had given him the appearance of a zombie, and he never really recovered. Paradoxically, Odendaal’s stubborn pride was emerging as his most admirable trait, but he had endured several punishing swims and wore an ugly gash along his right cheek. Once more we carried him on the raft through a rapid he could neither portage nor run, and it angered him. Biggs was worn down from the grinding internecine contention, and Bzdak, his heroism now quotidian, badly damaged his left knee. It was swollen and immobile. Chmielinski crumpled his right hand in a fall and could barely use it, and he developed a pain in his right foot that Durrant suspected was a fracture (though he refused to acknowledge it as anything more than an irritation).
My own nerves were shot: Every rapid was a terror. I lost two fingernails and most of the knuckle skin on my right hand, and badly bruised the heel of it, which made paddling extremely painful. Scouting the rapids, scrambling over one wet slick boulder after another, stumbling and falling so often that it now felt as commonplace as walking, I had beaten both shins to pulp.
Durrant, to my amazement, was unfazed. The hole that had nearly killed Jourgensen she had found “somewhat exciting.”
Truran, as ever, slid easily through the worst the river threw at him, as if the apu Rimac had designated him our guardian angel. He alone had yet to swim, he rescued those of us who did, and if he was ever frightened he did not show it. His presence boosted the raft team’s confidence immensely; in an activity that depends to such a great degree on rhythm, hesitation induced by doubt can be deadly.
Meanwhile, the schism within the expedition widened. Odendaal all but stopped speaking with Durrant, Bzdak, and me, talked to Truran and Chmielinski only as necessary, and spent long hours huddled with Jourgensen and Biggs. Chmielinski insinuated himself into these sessions to the extent he could. Jourgensen was beat up—“I’ve had two close calls … and enough white water to last a lifetime,” he wrote in his diary—and had decided to leave the river as soon as we found Triunfo. Whoever he gave his money to would gain material control of the expedition.
Each night, for the sake of future travelers, Chmielinski labored over his graph-paper notebook, sketching in the section of river run that day, consulting with Truran to corroborate his memory, marking the turns, the rapids, their class of difficulty, branding the worst with names ominous in their dry simplicity: “Broke Nose Here,” “Jack Almost Drowns.” The Peruvian military map we had actually to use was grossly inaccurate, but in the absence of anything better a convincing seductress. “Triunfo,” it claimed with all the authority of the printed page. The gullible read the black dot below the name as a guarantee of hot food, cold beer, a cantina—life.
Late in the afternoon of our fourth day out of Cachora Biggs spotted a faint trail climbing the river’s steep left bank. Two miles up the trail sat Triunfo (“Triumph”), which proved to be nothing but the ruins of a sugar mill abandoned more than a decade earlier in response to land reforms instituted by the radical general Juan Velasco Alvarado, who had seized power in a 1968 military coup (he was ousted in 1975). Instead of cold beer and dancing partners Triunfo offered crumbling mud-brick walls and scraps of rusting metal. Only the mill bearings, their stainless-steel races chipped but gleaming, suggested that Triunfo had ever been anything more than an elaborate hoax.
We had no choice but to climb out of the canyon in search of Leon and Van Heerden. Jourgensen had to leave the river, and we badly needed one last resupply before the Red Zone.
At dawn the next morning, leaving Bzdak and Durrant to attend the camp and the slower Odendaal and Jourgensen to ascend at their own pace, Chmielinski, Biggs, Truran, and I clawed up through unruly stands of mango and banana and about noon stopped briefly at a hut no larger than our raft. Inside it sat a grinning Quechua woman with a baby at her brown breast. She gave us platanos, like bananas but plumper and not as sweet, and we rested briefly at the door of her hut, chomping the fruit and admiring the view. The intense Andean light, the vast blue sky, the parade of humpy brown cerros atop the canyon rim, the white peaks of the Cordillera Vilcabamba receding into infinity like ocean waves—these were shocking after four weeks in the deep, dark canyon. I felt as if I had been released from a prison.
The river ambled along thousands of feet below, but all I could see was a silver-gray rock crease where the canyon walls seemed to have sealed her off. I was startled by how isolated the Apurimac was. She had nothing at all to do with life in these mountains. She was utterly alone.
We passed through a settlement called Marabamba with no word of Leon and Van Heerden and at sunset reached the village of Karquique, about halfway up the canyon wall, its sixty huts set around a network of neat paths, here and there a tin roof reflecting the evening light. The village teacher said that he had not seen any gringos, or heard of any being spotted on the mountain trails. He directed us to a crossroads three days’ hike away. Perhaps our friends would be there.
As we readied ourselves to depart, a young girl ran toward us.
“Gringo!” she yelled, and pointed far up the mountainside. Two mules were easing down the trail, led by a man too tall to be a Peruvian. If we had left Karquique an hour earlier, we might have missed Van Heerden and Leon altogether.
Van Heerden brought disturbing news, gleaned from a BBC shortwave broadcast along the trail: Capetown had exploded. The riots were the worst in recent history, the death toll high. Biggs and Truran fell into a deep funk. This lifted slightly when the teacher induced Leon to cut his five-year-old daughter’s heretofore unshorn locks, thereby becoming her godfather. In return, the teacher cooked us chicken soup and guinea pig and let us sleep in the schoolhouse.
Jourgensen and Odendaal arrived the next day, having spent the night in Marabamba. Jourgensen would leave for Cuzco with Leon and Van Heerden and the mules, and proceed from there to the United States. “If you can’t trust one another,” he asked Chmielinski and Odendaal in a tired voice, “what’s the point of the expedition?”
Still, Jourgensen believed that the expedition must have one undisputed leader, and in the end he backed Odendaal, who was also his business partner in the film. “Frans and I had become good friends in j
ust a few weeks,” he wrote that night in his diary. “We liked the way each other thought about things, and we both have a fairly even temper. Frans is a philosopher at heart and so am I. People who love adventure tend to love life … Frans is a VIKING!”
Chmielinski felt deeply betrayed. He and Jourgensen had been friends for years, and here on the Apurimac it was the penniless immigrant Bzdak who had twice risked his life to save Jourgensen’s. Chmielinski told Jourgensen he was “crushed.”
Then we gave letters to the battered rich man, said good-bye, and descended again into the dark canyon.
Below Triunfo the river grew with every mile, expanding remarkably in width and depth, and the rapids grew with it. We ran them well, considering that our raft was laden with three weeks’ supplies, but we had worn an irreparable hole on one of the floor tubes, rendering it floppy and unstable. As each rapid approached (that’s how it felt, as if the rapids were charging up to confront us), I wondered, is this the one that we will underestimate, the one that will swallow us for good? On the biggest drops I found myself diving shamefully for the center net. I did not want to swim again, ever.
Two days below Triunfo we passed the mouth of the Pachachaca River and paused to bathe in its translucent green waters. A few miles farther we crossed the Pampas confluence. We had anticipated a raging beast (the Pampas is one of the Apurimac’s principal tributaries), but we met a docile giant. And abruptly, right there below the Pampas, the fearsome Apurimac gorge appeared to end, opening into a valley filled with light. It was like sliding out of a cave.