by Tim Cahill
And so we paddled out of the eddy, caught the current, and went spinning down the Tons, crazy brave fools who would risk watery death but who were, demonstrably, no more interesting than your basic dancing bear. The Gujars had stolen our thunder and destroyed a romance. "Stupid damn hats," a man paddling beside me said. "Makes 'em look like nitwits."
Two days later, we hit Main Squeeze, the first really nasty rapid. It was hellishly technical. The river narrowed down to thirty feet, and, naturally, a bridge spanned the Tons at the point of its greatest fury. The water thundered between rock walls in wildly irregular waves that clashed, one against the other, throwing spray ten feet into the air. Just before the bridge, the river rose up over a rock—a domer—then dropped four feet into a hole. The hole was six feet long,
and at its downstream end, a wave four feet high curled back upstream.
We wanted to hit the hole dead on, power paddle into the curling wave, punch through, jog right to avoid the tree trunk pylon for the bridge, duck under the bridge—Jack Morrison said he'd never seen the Tons so high—then hit hard to the right. Ten feet past the bridge, the river widened to fifty feet, but a rock thirty feet wide cut the Tons into two ten-foot channels. The left channel was shallow and rock strewn. We would need to pull hard right as soon as we passed under the bridge.
There were three boats. Seven of us were in the paddle boat: three of us on each tube with paddles and Jack Morrison manning the oars from the frame in the back. Jack called out orders—"paddle right"—and muscled the bow into the line we'd chosen. We had spent two hours scouting Main Squeeze and we ran it smartly in thirty seconds.
Those of us in the paddle boat were getting cocky, impatient with all the scouting Jack thought necessary. We were a strong team and we worked well together. Why couldn't we just R and R: read the river and run? There was some grumbling about this matter.
A tributary I couldn't find on the map—local people called it the Pauer—emptied into the Tons, effectively doubling its volume, just before the town of Tiuni. The river below gathered force and the gradient steepened until the Tons was dropping one hundred feet every mile. It was a wild ride, the Tons below Tiuni. There were, for instance, five major rapids just below the town, with no more than twenty yards of flat water in the whole run. Occasionally we hit a hole out of position and people were thrown from the boat— "swimmer!"—but we managed to right ourselves and scoop swimmers out of the water without stopping.
A mile downstream from the town, we passed a dozen or so men sitting on the rocks beside a six-foot-high pile
of burning sticks. We were paddling hard, dodging rocks, and punching through curlers, but there was time enough to see the body on top of the funeral pyre. A yellow sheet covered the torso to the shins and flames licked at the bare feet.
The ashes would be dumped into the Tons and they'd flow into the Yamuna, which empties into the sacred Ganges. There, in those holy waters, the soul of the departed might achieve moksha: liberation from the cycle of being, from the necessity of being reborn.
At the moment, however, the physical body was being consumed in the burning flame of Shiva's open third eye.
On the second to last day, the river entered a long narrow gorge. The cliff walls that rose on either side were an oddly striated travertine that looked like decorations on some alien and inhuman temple. We had come seventy miles, dropped almost three thousand feet, and the river had spent much of its power. There were long flat-water floats where the river was so quiet we could hear the chatter of monkeys and the calls of cuckoos. The land, which upstream had looked like a steeper version of the northern Rockies, now took on a more gentle, tropical rhythm. Palm trees grew at the edge of the cliffs, and their roots dropped eighty feet into the nourishing water of the Tons.
There were waterfalls here and there, and once, floating languidly under cobalt skies, we passed through a falling curtain of mist that stretched one hundred feet along a mossy green cliff wall. It was warmer here, 85 degrees, and I raised my face to the cooling water. The sunlight was scattered in that silver curtain—each drop a prism—so that for a moment what I saw was a falling wall of color that shifted and danced in the breeze. The mist had the scent of orchids in it, and I wondered then why it was that anyone would want to be liberated from the cycle of being.
There was big trouble the last day. The Tons had lately been so flat and friendly that the last series of rapids were a major surprise and are, in fact, called Major Surprise. I followed Jack and his boatmen as they scouted the noisy water: there was a hole, a pretty good curling wave, a house-sized rock, and a small waterfall called a pourover. We needed to skirt the rock, punch through the hole, and pull left in order to hit the pourover at its shallow end, which would give us a drop of about four feet.
Major Surprise ate us alive.
I recall hitting the hole and punching cleanly through the curler. But we didn't get left, not even a little bit, and the boat rose up over a domer so high that I found myself looking directly into the sky. We tipped forward—the drop was eight feet—and the boat seemed to hesitate momentarily, like a roller coaster at the summit of the first rise. This, I told myself, does not bode well.
The first thing a person notices underwater in the turbulence of a big hole is the sound. It's loud: a grinding, growling jackhammer of unrelenting thunder. You do not register temperature and, if you are being Maytagged, you have no idea where you are. It's like catching a big ocean wave a bit low: there's a lot of tumbling involved, not to mention a sense of forces beyond human control.
The river took my swimming trunks. It ripped the tennis shoe off one of my feet, sent me thudding against unseen rocks, shot me to the surface dead center in the middle of the hole, sucked me down again, and batted me around for a period of time I was never able to calibrate. It didn't seem fair. I couldn't even recall falling out of the boat: the entire situation was unacceptable.
Some time later I came to the surface and the hole was behind me. The river ran right, between a large rock and a canyon wall. A person could get wedged in there, underwater. I swam left, and suddenly felt myself being hurtled
down a smooth tongue of water toward a series of peaked waves of the type boatmen call haystacks. It was like being sick, like vomiting. After the first painful eruption you think, good, that's all over. But almost instantly your stomach begins to rise—oh, God, not again—and that is the way I felt being sucked breathless into the second rapid.
While I was zipping along underwater, trying to get my feet downstream to ward off rocks, the other members of the paddle boat team were enjoying their own immediate problems and proving Jack Morrison's contention that we were taking the river entirely too lightly. John Rowan and Martha Freeman had been sucked to the right and managed to pull themselves out after the first rapid. Jack and Billy Anderson held on to the boat, which was still stuck in the hole and being battered by the upstream curler wave. Sue Wilson and Douglas Gow were somewhere out ahead of me in the second rapid.
I surfaced and spotted Gow in the flat water between that second and third rapid. He was ten yards downstream and he didn't seem to be swimming at all. His helmet was missing. I thought he might have been Maytagged rather badly, that he might be unconscious, and I am proud to say that I swam to the man who needed help. (Actually, Gow had taken off his helmet because it slipped down over his eyes and he couldn't see.)
"You okay?" I called when I was within arm's reach. Gow practices emergency medicine in Australia and is used to reacting calmly in tense situations. "Fine, thanks," he said, and then—oh, God, not again—I was pulled down into the third rapid.
There was, in time, a sense of water moving more slowly. Sunlight shimmered on the flat-water surface, which seemed to recede even as I swam toward it, but then there was air and a handhold on the rocky canyon wall. Presently, Morrison and Anderson came by in the boat and fished me out of the river. I lay on my belly on the floor of the raft and spit up a quart of yellow water.
&nbs
p; We were somewhere else then, pulled up onto the sand at the left side of the river. Sue Wilson and Doug Gow were
gasping on the bank. Someone gave me a pair of swimming trunks to wear. This did not seem to be an important matter. I lay on my back, on the floor of the raft, looking at the sun, and there was a moment when it seemed to darken slightly, but I did not lose consciousness. I thought of Shiva's blinding third eye, of a long lewd wink.
I went to Rishikesh, the holy city on the banks of the sacred Ganges, just in case. The river runs through a wide, rocky gorge there, and every day pilgrims by the thousands cross over a suspension bridge that spans the Ganges and leads to the temples and ashrams of Rishikesh, to what the guide books call "the abode of saints and sages." To get to the bridge, you have to walk down a wide staircase set against a white cement wall. There are large rectangular boxes sculpted into the wall, and sitting in these boxes are the most unfortunate, the most horribly mutilated beggars in all of India. Either they lived in those boxes, or they were carried there each morning, because it was clear that none of them could walk. As I passed, they called out to me, called out in the most theatrically pathetic and heart-rending tones: "alms, alms, ALMS ..." I made them invisible and passed on to the abode of saints and sages.
A wide cement walkway ran along the ridge top and, in the formal gardens on either side, sacred cows grazed on a variety of colorful flowers. Beggars didn't seem to be allowed here, near the temples, but holy men lined the walkway. There were more sadhus and gurus and anandas and babas and bhagwans and rishis and maharishis than a guy could shake a stick at. A man in a white loincloth with yellow sandalwood paste on his forehead offered to bless me for a rupee. I gave him the eight cents, just in case, and he held out his palm to me, like a policeman stopping traffic. Under a tree set in the center of the walkway, a thin dark man lay on a bed of nails, a collection bowl for donations by his side. He wore a skimpy loincloth that revealed a thin
appendectomy scar that angled up from his groin. Nailed to the tree was a large frame containing four photographs. The first three showed the same man lying on his bed of nails in front of what I took to be various holy places. The fourth was him reclining in a pile of thorns.
Farther down toward the main concentration of temples I stopped into an herbal medicine shop where, according to a leaflet I was given, they sold "chandra prabhavati," which was said to "cure piles . . . rheumatic pains, gonorrhea, syphilis, and spleen complaints." I asked to buy some mahavrinraf oil, which "checks the fallings of hair, invigorates the nerves, and removes brain fag." They were fresh out of mahavrinraf oil.
Some earnest young people—three or four Indians and a like number of Westerners—urged me to follow them to their ashram. "Let's go," I said brightly, but something in my attitude—brain fag maybe—put them off.
There were steps that led down to the holy river, and places along the bank to bathe. A bath in the Ganges is said to wash away a pilgrim's worldly sins. The river was swift and cold, hard to swim. I got myself out into the teeth of the current and let it carry me several yards. It felt good, going with the flow like that.
Passing back over the bridge, I stopped in front of the boxes in the wall and allowed myself to finally see the beggars. "Alms," they cried, and I gave them alms. I stood there tossing wet sponges into the fires of hell, just in case.
Later that night, in Dehra Dun, I met N. N. Badoni. He told me that the soul seeks its master. I told him about the Tons river.
^ BO UT THE AUTHOR
Tim Cahill is the author of two previous books, Buried Dreams and Jaguars Ripped My Flesh. He is a columnist and founding editor of Outside magazine and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. Mr. Cahill has recently completed a fifteen-thousand-mile trip in a stock pickup truck from the southernmost point in South America to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and is at work on a book about the journey. He lives in Montana, in the shadow of the Absaroka Mountains.
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