Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  He promised himself that he would not paddle the way he always had before, back when he had shot any rapid he thought he could run and many he didn’t. It was time to change his attitude. He would run only those rapids about which he felt absolutely sure, and portage the rest. It was the first time in his kayaking life that he had conceded there were limits to his ability.

  Biggs pocketed his harmonica and left the fire. As the cold air stung his face he recognized faint symptoms of his illness, especially the drained lethargy, and hurried to his tent. He lit a candle, crawled into his bag, and finished reading the Book of John. Then he blew out the candle and settled in for a long sleep. He knew the river would demand all his physical and emotional strength. He had to get himself down it safely. And somehow he had to get his good friend François down it as well.

  When I woke up that third morning out of Yauri, fog hung in the canyon, and in the chilly predawn air my body felt stiff and sore. And it stank. I found a quiet sandstone pool amid the bucking rapids, took two steps into it, and sank unsuspecting up to my neck in the freezing water. I emerged shivering, betrayed, and coughing from deep in my lungs.

  “Please turn off cough alarm.” That was Leon, curled up tightly in his snug bag. Farther down the tiny beach Durrant and Bzdak had zipped their bags together.

  As penance for my rudeness I made coffee and oatmeal and served it in bed, or bag. Then we packed and were off, climbing, as the game but exasperated Durrant described it, “fucking up and fucking down,” a thousand feet up the canyon wall and down and up again, seeing nothing but rock and grass and the deep gray pit of the Apurimac. I fantasized about mules. Mules and bicycles. Mules and bicycles and cars, big cars, mountain-flattening monsters with horrible power plants and stereo tape decks and coolers of cold beer.

  From the ridgetop, at about thirteen thousand feet, sharp quebradas fell away to either side like the widespread fingers of a bony hand. The scale of the terrain was immense. We hiked for hours between each small sign of man, the few we did see popping up like unrelated snapshots: a stray llama, strings of bright yarn hanging from its ears; a plume of smoke curling from behind a ridge; a shocked, bowler-hatted Quechua woman standing in the trail, her woven blouse dyed with a blue so vibrant it seemed to dance against the dun landscape.

  We tramped along in a pattern that would last the duration of our three-week trek. Leon and I walked in front, Leon first, moving with the steady rolling gait he’d developed in Costa Rica’s volcanic mountains. He called out the names of plants and flowers, sang songs, and coached my Spanish—this last routine instituted after I’d asked a man we met on the trail to sell us not the eggs he was carrying but his testicles.

  Durrant and Bzdak tripped along at the rear, slowly. Bzdak felt it his duty to explain each nuance of the countryside, its history and culture and geology. He was an enthusiastic man, and once he got going on a subject he was hard to stop. Unfortunately, as his lips picked up speed his feet slowed down. Several times each day Leon or I backtracked to prod the chirping lovebirds into forward motion.

  As we climbed that morning I considered the budding romance between doctor and photographer, which I knew was exactly the sort of thing Durrant had vowed to avoid. They seemed an unlikely match, Bzdak the anarchic artist, Durrant the urbane professional, even here in the wild. In part, perhaps, a matter of balance. And for Durrant, after the hard time in Condorito, of refuge.

  Late in the afternoon we reached our first settlement since Yauri. Hueco (colloquial Spanish for “hole”) consisted of a dozen mud huts squatting amid a ring of the humpy bald peaks called cerros, which aside from the canyon’s walls and quebradas are the dominant feature in the Apurimac moonscape. Each cerro is believed to harbor a benevolent spirit, a spirit that may be made godfather to a newborn child. I liked that idea—how spiritually fulfilling to tramp about one’s personal godfather hill, talking things over with the dirt.

  Next to the first hut a young man pressed mud into forms and laid the bricks in the sun to dry. He was soon to be married. The home he was building, beside his parents’, would be the size of a small shed, with barely enough room for two people to sleep. However, like so much else in that lean country (where a third of the crops fail, and the economy is for the most part a cashless one), marriage is a cooperative venture designed to further the community as a whole. The newlyweds would enter a trial period of perhaps a year to see how well they meshed with their new relatives. If things did not work out, the union would be honorably dissolved. Neither church nor state would be party to it.

  Fangs bared, a barking little shepherd dog harangued us through Hueco, until a squat beardless man ran down from one of the cerros and gave the cur a solid boot.

  “I am the mayor of Hueco,” the man said. Despite the run, he was not breathing hard at all. “Where are you going?”

  “To Cuzco.”

  “By foot?”

  “Yes.”

  He hefted Bzdak’s pack. “You are crazy,” he said, then ran back up the hill.

  We pushed on, and late that evening made our rendezvous at the Hanging Bridge.

  As the Incas had directed, the one hanging bridge that still spans the Apurimac is rebuilt every year in a spirit of cooperation between the citizens of Chumbivilcas province, on the west side of the canyon, and Canas province on the east. It is woven entirely of grass, and though its purpose is ceremonial—a modern wooden bridge stands two hundred yards upriver—it is an impressive structure. Once, according to the villagers of nearby Huinchiri, it attracted a film crew from Disneylandia. (Perhaps a convenient identification. After the Pope and Fidel Castro, no icon is more ubiquitous in Peru than El Ratón Mickey.) The villagers demanded payment before they would allow the crew to film. Refused, they burned the bridge.

  Years later, when Condorito chugged into view laden with the arcane matériel of the cinematographer, Huinchirins attacked it. The kayakers arrived at the bridge shortly thereafter, and the entire crew quickly found itself on trial, sat down, like prisoners of war, on a stone bench in the middle of the village and surrounded by a hundred or so angry locals. For nearly an hour Chmielinski argued with the mayor, argued, as Biggs later described it, like a Prussian statesman. Finally, desperate, he offered the villagers a group medical plan—free examination by the expedition doctor. With that, the men were released.

  We hikers limped into camp that night to find the expedition’s mood raw and shaken, and when Odendaal announced that we would carry film equipment upriver the next day so that his crew could stage a shot of the kayakers running a rapid, I made the mistake of protesting. (Odendaal had appointed me “Leader of the Hiking Team.”) I said that we had been hiking twelve hours a day with full packs for the last four days. Bzdak’s heart was bothering him, Durrant’s feet were painfully swollen, Leon was exhausted, my knees were shot. We needed a rest.

  “I am responsible for every person on this expedition!” Odendaal yelled at me. “I know exactly how they feel!”

  His vehemence caught me off guard; our relationship had been cordial until then. I believed he hadn’t spoken to the other hikers—Bzdak, in fact, was asleep, and Odendaal hadn’t said a word to me before announcing his plan—and when I pressed him for some proof that he had, he would not answer me. Stalemated, we walked away from the campfire to hash things out.

  Odendaal leapt to the offensive. He threatened to throw me off the expedition. “And Piotr wants you off, too,” he said.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry—”

  “He wants Kate out as well. What good is a doctor who can’t kayak? And he says Sergio is a needless luxury.”

  Numbed by this drastic escalation in what I had thought a contretemps, I said nothing, though I wondered idly how far I would have to walk to find a ride to Lima.

  “I don’t understand it,” Odendaal said after a while, when we had both calmed down. “You and I got along very well in the United States.”

  “We’re all pretty tired right now.”
/>   “I have been on many, many expeditions. This is nothing. Nothing at all. You will see.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes. Well, I hope it will work out.”

  Perhaps, I suggested, traveling alone in a group of strangers had affected my judgment.

  “Alone?” he said. “You?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “What about me?”

  That was a surprise. I said that it had been my impression that most of the men he had brought with him were his friends.

  “Oh, no,” he said. He shook his head sadly. “Oh, no. You don’t see it, do you? You don’t see it at all.”

  I admitted that I didn’t.

  “I’m the one who is most alone here,” he said. “I have Fanie pushing me from one side, Tim from another. I have to figure out how Pierre will support his family while he’s gone, because we certainly won’t finish on time. Piotr is just waiting for me to make a mistake. And the river …” He shook his head again. “No, you don’t see it at all. I am the one who stands alone here. So alone.”

  We shook hands, and he left me sitting there by the river, chewing on what he had said. I believed that it was my duty to speak up on behalf of my fellow hikers. Nevertheless, I regretted having further burdened a man so troubled already. And I began to suspect that I had no real understanding of how terrifying a river could be.

  The next morning, while the rest of the expedition marched upstream (Leon pressed into service as a film-crew mule, Bzdak carrying only his own cameras), I, the squeaky wheel, was assigned to be interpreter and factotum for the offices of Dr. Durrant. Patients began to assemble at dawn, and by the time she had her clinic erected in the big tent, two dozen Quechua were huddled silently near Condorito, with more arriving hourly.

  Most were women who appeared to be suffering from rather vague ailments. None spoke Spanish, nor I Quechua, either of which might have rendered their pains more specific. Though several had brought husbands or sons to translate for them, I found myself fumbling for unfamiliar Spanish words. I had no idea how to say, for example, “Is she still menstruating?” and so bumbled forth with “Does she continue to have a river of blood falling from time to time from between her legs?” Hesitant consultation between man and woman, then, “No. No river.”

  One young woman had back and stomach trouble. In the preceding seven years she had borne four children and suffered three miscarriages. Another had given birth to ten children, five of them still alive. Another had eight, three alive. And so on. Few of these women were over thirty.

  We saw about three dozen patients. Several had walked as far as five miles. None had ever visited a doctor. A few had the deteriorating gums and missing teeth that are the marks of coca-chewing and dietary deficiency, but other than that, Durrant said, most seemed healthy. All had remarkably low blood pressure: “No fat in the land, no fat in the people.”

  What these peasants seemed to want most was an ear, and sorcery. To the more insistent Durrant dispensed aspirin, which cannot be found short of the daylong trip to Cuzco and is quite expensive by local standards. But she did this reluctantly. “It’s too much like a laying on of hands,” she said. “The magic white doctor dispensing magic white pills.”

  Our final patient, the fish-eyed young wife of a very old man, had been hit in the head with a rock three years before. Her head still hurt, and her eyes focused on two entirely different places, like the headlights of a funky car. After a quick examination Durrant determined that she probably needed glasses, considerably more difficult to obtain than aspirin, and not at all what the old man wanted to hear. At first they refused to leave. After a few tense minutes, however, they hit the trail.

  “There didn’t seem to be many serious problems,” I said.

  “These people are like anyone else,” she told me. “Medical problems are not always the point of a visit to the doctor. When they’re sitting around with the neighbors they want to be able to say, ‘I went to the best specialist in town.’ ”

  Two hours later the old man shuffled back into camp, alone, carrying a pot filled with small, sweet potatoes and pieces of marinated lamb. He watched silently as we ate. The food was delicious. We cleaned the pot. When he left he said only, “Thank you.”

  At the Hanging Bridge we once again split up into three teams. We agreed to rendezvous in five days, at the village of Surimana, in the notorious Black Canyon.

  Two days after the kayakers departed the Hanging Bridge camp Biggs made a decision he found distasteful: Odendaal would have to leave the Apurimac and portage around the entire Black Canyon. Biggs believed—wanted to believe—that his friend had the physical ability to run the river. Emotionally, however, Odendaal was faltering. He took forever to decide whether to portage or paddle a rapid. Mostly he elected to portage, which meant he spent twice as long at each rapid as the rest of the team. Too often on those occasions when he chose to run a rapid, he froze up and endangered himself on the water. Meanwhile, the other kayakers carried most of his gear in their boats, which made their own portages that much harder.

  Biggs tried to persuade Odendaal to shoot more of the smaller rapids, so as to build up his confidence, but Odendaal refused. Biggs thought about forcing him to run them, but he was afraid this might backfire, that Odendaal might break completely. Yet something had to be done. Odendaal’s fear was rubbing off on the rest of them, especially Biggs, who was second-guessing himself, running the river through Odendaal’s terrified eyes.

  At lunch that day, Biggs told Odendaal of his decision. At first Odendaal was shattered. Though he would be allowed to rejoin the team later, his journey would be broken. He would not be able to say, in the strictest terms, that he had kayaked the entire Amazon. However, he agreed that the plan was for the best. The team would push on that day and make camp near the Chaca bridge, where they would hire porters to carry Odendaal’s gear into Surimana, six miles downstream.

  Then a difficult thing happened.

  The canyon broadened and the river flattened out. The rapids became easy, open, gentle. In the unconstricted river, Odendaal began to paddle well, and over the next couple of hours his confidence soared. Then, above an unexpectedly tight turn, he froze up once again. Chmielinski was bearing down behind him. Trying to avoid Odendaal, the Pole flipped his boat. Biggs and Truran, scouting along the bank ahead, scrambled for their rescue lines. As they did, Biggs looked up, and saw that Odendaal had successfully negotiated the rapid and was whooping with joy in the calm water below. Biggs knew what Odendaal was thinking: If Chmielinski could not handle this stretch of water, he too should be made to leave the river.

  Truran and Biggs rescued the battered Chmielinski, but Biggs stuck to his decision. That night they made camp at the Chaca bridge, and the next morning Odendaal was sent off, his kayak borne on the shoulders of two Quechua men.

  5 • The Black Canyon

  Below the Chaca bridge the Apurimac began to show her darkest side. Now she began her great plunge, boring through a turquoise-and-steel-blue canyon clotted with mile after mile of bouldery blockages and frothing water.

  “We came to a place where enormous rocks covered the valley floor. The water charged in frenzy at these giants, boiling between and beneath them in search of a distant sea.” That is how a University of Utah chemistry professor, J. Calvin Giddings, described the entrance to the Black Canyon of the Apurimac. In 1974, he and a partner made the first recorded attempt to kayak the canyon, but abandoned the effort almost immediately. “Navigation,” Giddings concluded, “would be suicide.”

  When Biggs, Chmielinski, and Truran entered the Black Canyon, they were already feeling lonely, isolated, and run-down from the hard work and insufficient rations of the preceding leg. Almost at once Biggs met the hole that in 1983 had given him one of the worst scares of his life.

  It was a siphon, really, a powerful sucking maw that lurked behind an overhanging boulder. Truran and Chmielinski scouted it and waved Biggs through. It did not look like a difficult
run. Biggs had only to skirt the boulder. But when he hit the first drop above the boulder a little too slowly, the river snagged the tail of his boat and threw its nose high in the air. By the time Biggs corrected, he found himself heading for the heart of the siphon.

  For one horrifying moment he realized that he was in exactly the same predicament as two years before. Here it was again, like a recurring nightmare, this agent of the apu Rimac tugging him slowly to his death. How could this be? Paralyzed for a moment, shocked, he could only stare at the rock he would be sucked under. It was a “tea strainer.” The river went under the rock in one big flood, but it went out the other side through holes too small to pass a body.

  He snapped out of his trance and tried to pull away from the siphon, bracing his paddle against the overhanging rock. No luck. His boat flipped. He stole his last breath. The river tore the paddle from his hands. When he bailed out of his boat he felt himself going down, felt the siphon sucking him under, deep under, to a place without light or sound.

  His lungs ready to burst, he fought in vain against the unseen power pulling his feet and torso farther under the rock.

  This was it. The end.

  Dear God, Biggs prayed, don’t let me go like this.

  He thrust his hands up into the swirling green above him. His last hope was his boat, rocking overhead. He slapped one hand on the kayak and one on the granite roof and pulled.

  Air!

  The siphon sucked him back down. It slammed him along the rock, into a different boulder. Here was hope: tiny fingerholds in the moss-covered granite. Then from behind, a shove—his boat again!—and he was pinned to the boulder.