by Joe Kane
The river poured over him, tore at him, but his right foot found purchase on a rocky nub. His head struggled out of the siphon, his shoulders, his back.
Biggs heard shouts: Truran and Chmielinski. A yellow rescue bag bobbed in the water scant feet away, its white line—life!—leading to Truran.
But the bag bobbed just behind his head.
Give up his hold to lunge for the line? He couldn’t do it, couldn’t abandon the rock.
Water, tons of it, crashed over and around him. The river raged and ripped at him, tried to pull him back from the light. She yanked his feet from the rock. He was going down again.
He prayed strength into his fingertips. They found tiny cracks and nubs, arrested his slide, pulled him back, inch by inch, from eternity. Now he was out to his waist. Now he hauled himself free of the siphon. Now he gained the top of the boulder.
Then he lay facedown in the sun for a long time.
So much river left to run.
We hikers left the Hanging Bridge camp relieved to be on our own again. After two weeks on the trail, our ragged quartet had developed a mobile domesticity, an idiosyncratic routine, that didn’t mesh with the rest of the expedition. It was hardest, perhaps, on Kate Durrant. For one thing, she and Bzdak were not ready to reveal their relationship to the rest of the expedition, and did not sleep together when we were with the film crew and kayakers.
Further, as she noted in her diary, with nine men in camp, much more attention was paid to “what I look like than most of the men. Most of them are not exactly Paul Newmans, to put it mildly … [but I sense] a certain disappointment that I don’t live up to the [image of] glamorous expeditioneer—perhaps the price one has to pay for being taken on because of being female.”
On the trail, dusk was the best time of day. No one would have spoken in the last two hours, except to consult and denigrate our torn, tyrannical map. (“It says we have to do what? It’s got to be kidding!”) Beaten silly, we would trudge through our last jarring descent and collapse on a sandy beach. Slowly at first, then quickly as the temperature plummeted below freezing, we would open packs, discard sweaty clothes to dry, build a fire, boil water, erect tents.
I was on kitchen detail that first night, and I discharged my duties in sullen silence. After my tiff with Odendaal at the Hanging Bridge, I had decided unilaterally that if we were to be removed from the expedition, it would not be because we were too slow. That day I had set a hard pace on the trail, pushing the others to keep up, and they had glared at me with angry eyes.
But something melted over the campfire, its dancing flames a warm center in the cold mountain night. Bzdak initiated a preprandial ritual that we would repeat whenever possible—“Quechua Moonshots” (cane alcohol, or cañazo, he had carried from Huinchiri, mixed with a powdered fruit drink favored, the package alleged, by los astronautas). Leon helped me fix chili, spicing it with wild garlic and onions he had foraged along the trail. Durrant teased me gently into dropping my arrogance, and with it my pants.
I was due for a shot, a rabies prophylaxis against the jungle bats we would encounter if we ever reached the jungle.
“Off with the trousers, Kane. Doctor’s orders.”
“It’s cold.”
“Off.”
“I will make a big fire,” Bzdak said.
He heaped driftwood on the blaze, and I capitulated, whatever dignity I still retained evaporating with an involuntary yowl when the doctor found her mark. There was a round of applause. After dinner, as the three who could still do so sat and watched the river by starlight, I rummaged in my pack and fished out three chocolate bars. I offered them, wishing I could offer more.
We awoke at dawn and climbed hard all the next morning, to thirteen thousand five hundred feet, gaining the canyon rim at about noon. It was like climbing out of a cave. Ten yards away, a solitary gray eagle held at eye level in the thermals swirling up out of the canyon. Forty miles to the northeast, 21,000-foot Auzangate floated like an iceberg above the lesser brown peaks of the Cordillera Vilcanota. In fact, turning in a full circle, all one saw was peaks. Wind tore across the exposed ridge and lightning flashed in the gray-black sky above.
Two thousand feet below us, we could see the point where the Apurimac’s black-and-red walls shifted abruptly from their forty-five-degree slope to nearly vertical. Even from that height the Black Canyon revealed itself as a boulder-strewn mess, its feathered rapids whipping the once-green river into a boiling white.
We were looking for the village of Chocayhua. From there the trail would drop back down to the river and eventually cross the bridge, near Surimana, where we hoped to meet the kayakers.
Our trail forked. Here was a Quechua man. Could he direct us to Chocayhua? “That place does not exist,” he said, and took the left fork. We went right. Fifteen minutes later we were in Chocayhua, watching a Quechua crew hew eucalyptus trunks into logs for a schoolhouse. Under yet another form of reciprocal labor, faena, community members would build the school. The government would provide the workers with coca, cañazo, and cigarettes. And, perhaps, when the project was completed, a teacher.
We pushed on down the trail. As we reached the end of the tiny village a voice shouted to us from behind a courtyard wall:
“Chicha!”
Beer or the dusty trail? Not a difficult choice.
We entered the courtyard. Six barefoot Quechua men in clean white alpaca suits sat before three ancient manual Singer sewing machines, drinking freely from bottles of cañazo and sewing banners for a fiesta scheduled to begin the next day. There would be a bullfight, and this being planting season, any human bloodshed would be considered a fertility offering to the earth.
Two stout gap-toothed women moved among the men, refilling their bottles and the ornate ceremonial coca pouches that hung from each man’s neck. They poured us cups of home-brewed chicha, a thick, slightly sweet corn beer. We sat in the sun and drank and watched the men sew. Every few minutes they asked how we were doing, which seemed, increasingly, to be just fine.
An old, drunken man with a big belly entered the courtyard. This was “Papa,” who said he was the father of several of the men, although he could not remember who their mothers were. One of the women began to wail in a high, eerie voice. The men ignored her. Papa attempted a shot of cañazo but missed, a rich stream pouring down his lower face and across his chest. The young men stood and anointed their banners with cañazo and toasted themselves. After a while one fell down and did not get up.
When we inched toward the courtyard gate hands clamped my arms in a way that was not entirely friendly. I tried to pry the leathery fingers loose, but they were firm and unyielding. Two men grabbed Bzdak. They hauled us to another home, another courtyard. The two families sponsoring the fiesta that year were honor-bound to outdo each other. If the moonmen had fun at one home, they had better have fun at the second.
They said Bzdak must take photos, which he did energetically, though without film in his camera. They said we must drink chicha. This I did as fast as I could, until my stomach started to cramp and felt as if it would burst. Leon and Durrant did likewise.
When a commotion at the courtyard gate distracted our hosts’ attention, we ran for it. We were cut off at the gate. A horse reared up on the trail, its rider swinging a kind of lariat looped around a golfball-sized stone. A skilled man can fling the stone some fifty yards with considerable accuracy. But not this mal hombre: After demanding in a gurgling voice to be photographed, he slumped forward in a stupor and fell to the ground like a sack of rice, headfirst, his skull landing with the squashed sound of a dropped melon.
Someone else jumped on the horse, and the mob—the whole of Chocayhua seemed to have spilled onto the trail—trampled poor melon-head. A fight erupted. In the confusion and encroaching darkness we made our escape down the trail and back to the safety of the deep, dark canyon.
Two nights later we found the kayakers camped at the Surimana bridge. Odendaal had gone ahead to Surimana. From
there, a road led out of the canyon and into the city of Cuzco. He was to meet Condorito in the village, then drive into Cuzco with the cameramen. Fanie Van der Merwe had decided to fly out of Cuzco and return to South Africa to teach. Pierre Van Heerden, who would stay with the expedition to continue filming, and Odendaal would drive back to Surimana, where Odendaal would again hire burros and try to meet the other kayakers below the Black Canyon.
Truran appeared tired but, as always, cheerful. He was dressed only in long gray polypropylene underwear with horizontal black stripes, and looked something like an escaped convict. “Do you have any bread?” he asked. “We’re out of food. Would you like tea?”
Chmielinski wore a bold red gash across his nose, and his knee was swollen big as a grapefruit. “Everybody had a tough time,” he said. “One time I was in a hole and it was kind of nice, I was feeling weightless. Then I was dying.” He had bailed out of his boat and been washed a hundred crunching yards through three bad rapids.
“Pinball,” Truran said.
“Tim had the worst,” Chmielinski said. “He was half a meter from no way.”
Bad as the water was, however, they were equally worried about news gleaned from a gold panner. Two European kayakers had also set out from La Angostura. They were two weeks farther down the river, and bound for the Atlantic. It was a race.
Truran brewed tea and we pitched camp in a downpour. Thirty feet up the bank, in a small cave lit by two candles, Tim Biggs drew river scenes in his sketchbook, as if with black ink and white paper he could conjure order from the chaos of the Great Speaker.
It rained the night through. In the morning, shivering in the damp air, we climbed the two miles into Surimana.
An army of morose children followed us through the village. Their leader, a tall, skinny girl, hissed at us in Andean Spanish, but the idiomatic expressions for shit, whore, and fucker tumbled from her lips uneasily, without much venom, as if she were experimenting with them.
A bust of José Gabriel Tupac Amaru II stood in the plaza, near the locked doors of a church that is opened but once a year. The neglected memorial, its base cracked and in need of paint, marks the end of the dirt road chiseled into Surimana from Cuzco in the 1970s by the government, which had hoped the birthplace of one of the Western Hemisphere’s great revolutionaries would attract tourists. But the tourists did not come. There is nothing to eat in Surimana and nowhere to sleep.
The road, the only one into the Black Canyon, does not seem to have helped the village much—the local store offered only a basket of white flour, three candles, and a tin of cañazo. The only vehicle we saw was a jeep bearing the acronym of a government relief agency. Judging by the appearance of the townspeople, the road was used mainly when in need of Cuzco’s polyester shirts and aviator sunglasses.
In a way it is the road, not the neglected bust, that embodies the spirit of Tupac Amaru II, whose story seems to capture all the desperation and wild hope the Apurimac canyon provokes. He was born José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a great-great-great-grandson of Felipe Tupac Amaru Inca, whose sadistic beheading in 1572 signaled the end of the Inca dynasty and the final subjugation of indigenous Peru by Spain. The Spanish forced Felipe’s two daughters to watch the beheading. Magdalena died within a year, but the penniless Juana married Felipe Condorcanqui of Surimana and settled in this forgotten canyon.
Under an Inca system bent by the Spanish to their own ends, the Condorcanquis, like other Quechua of Inca caste, were curacas. They governed the Apurimac canyon and the surrounding highlands for their absentee Spanish overlords, overseeing conscription for the terrible mita and enforcing the feudal encomienda, by which the Quechua were forced to pay the Spanish vast tributes of produce and precious metals. By the time José Gabriel Condorcanqui was born, about 1743, the family had become one of the most prosperous in Peru. Raised as a nobleman, he was well educated and wealthy, with a serene disposition and the elegant manners of a European aristocrat.
When José Gabriel became curaca of the Surimana area, Spain was in decline and its exploitation of the Quechua had increased. Millions died in the mines during the first half century alone. Unable to ignore the suffering of his people, José Gabriel adopted his ancestral title, then journeyed to the Lima courts. He believed that the laws of Spain were just, but that greedy tax collectors, a corrupt clergy, and a sadistic military had grossly perverted them. His entreaties were ignored. In 1780, declaring himself a loyal servant of the King of Spain, Tupac Amaru II revolted against the colonial administration.
His revolution was short-lived—it ended in 1783—but at its height, reaching from Colombia in the north through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northwestern Argentina, it was grander in scope than the American Civil War and almost every European war preceding World War I. Tupac Amaru, however, was captured in 1781 and marched to Cuzco. The Spanish handcuffed him, his wife, his son, his uncle, and five compatriots, stuffed them in sacks, and dragged them through the streets with horses. They forced the Inca and his wife to watch while his eighty-year-old uncle and twenty-year-old son had their tongues cut out and were garroted, then made the Inca witness his wife’s garroting. When the iron collar failed to crush her tiny neck, the hangman wrapped a lasso around her throat and yanked on it until she died, beating her all the while. Then he cut out the Inca’s tongue, tied his limbs one each to four horses, and drove the beasts in the four directions. When they failed to tear him apart, the exasperated hangman first disemboweled the Inca, then hacked off his head.
News of the barbarous execution reached Spain, drawing attention to the other atrocities in Peru, and a new administration was installed. A half century later, however, Quechua and criollo joined forces to drive Spain out of Peru. Whether this freed the Quechua from the barbarities visited on them by men of lighter skin is, of course, another matter altogether, one that is at least partially addressed by the fact that, two centuries later, much of the Apurimac canyon was under martial law, Peru’s criollo leaders locked in a brutal war with an army of guerrillas whose veins ran thick with Quechua blood.
Everything about the Andes is abrupt: the geology, the flora, the weather, the people. You walk but a few miles and feel as if you have traveled into an entirely new region, or an entirely different season. Two days below Surimana our dusty trail suddenly became a mossy carpet. The omnipresent ichu drowned in a flood of white daisies, pink-flowered bromeliads, cactus blooming in purple and white, wild roses as big as fists, blood-red geraniums, yellow broom, bright tiny flowers that ran among the rest like golden ants. The air smelled of mint, peppermint, chamomile, and, as we drew near the village of San Juan, eucalyptus, freshly turned earth, and the first buds of pear, apple, and maracuya. Small birds strafed the fruit trees and the honeyed tones of Andean panpipes drifted down the hillside.
A hedge ran along the uphill side of the path. A battered straw hat rose above it, followed by a well-used earth-brown face, a gnarly hand, a plastic jug …
“Chicha?”
Our narrow escape from Chocayhua notwithstanding, could we refuse? We had marched out of winter into spring: Here were Quechua families preparing their fields, the men working the ancient foot plows, the women laying out bowls of boiled corn and pitchers of chicha. It is custom in that roadless, wheel-less country to treat the traveler as kin. We sprawled in the dirt and sampled the local brew.
The fields in San Juan, like the families who work them, have a lineage at least a dozen generations old. (Parts of the Peruvian highlands have a native agriculture that can be traced back four millennia.) That those fields continue to produce, and produce well, is, as the American writer and farmer Wendell Berry put it, evidence of “an agriculture of extraordinary craftsmanship and ecological intelligence.”
Consider the potato. Nobody knows how many varieties of potato grow in the Andes, though estimates run from four hundred to two thousand. In addition to wild potatoes, an extraordinary array of native varieties is grown for table—as many as forty-six have been found in a si
ngle half-acre field. (My conceptual favorite is an exceptionally tough table potato called lumchipamundana, “potato that makes the young bride cry.”) There are also potatoes called chuño, which are freeze-dried. Each day for about a month the Quechua hand-squeeze the water out of them and let them freeze by night. The end product has a shelf life of years and tastes about like any other freeze-dried product, which is to say, awful.
A seven-year fallow cycle controls a predator nematode with a six-year life. Rows carefully contoured to the land minimize the overwhelming threat of erosion. If these peasants must sing to their fields to get them to produce; if they offer chicha to spirits they believe live in the rocks and trees and caves; if they choose to measure their plots of land not in square meters but according to their fertility; if they name each plot after the plants that grow best in it—well, it works. Here, where the land is so steep it seems to spill right off the sides of the mountain (stand up and your head is closer to corn sprouts than it is to your feet), the Quechua have evolved a system of sustainable agriculture in sharp contrast to our topsoil-devouring corporate farming. Farmers in tabletop-flat Iowa lose a foot and a half of topsoil every year. A Quechua farmer can’t afford to lose an inch.
A crowd of barefoot schoolchildren, wearing white shirts and black pants, led us to the sea-of-mud plaza. Behind us, between teetering mud houses, mud streets twisted up the canyonside. Before us they accelerated toward the canyon, ending there abruptly, as if one could walk to the edge of town and step directly into the abyss of the Apurimac. Staring down into that chasm, one respected the Quechua’s decision not to invent the wheel—what chaos it would cause in such precipitous country.
Fifty dark, Asiatic faces stared at us. The smallest boy singled me out. His hair was close-cropped and, like so many children we had seen, his scalp was covered with scabs.
