Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  “What is your name?” I asked. No answer, then a mumbled response, “Solitario,” in a voice too deep for that diminutive frame. Solitary. Lonely.

  Suddenly, from among the sea of children there appeared at our feet a bottle of beer, a bottle of rum, an onion, a head of cabbage, three eggs, a sheaf of chamomile, and one of mint. Then a man pushed through the crowd, a giant compared with everyone else we had seen, six feet tall, his white hair and blue eyes loud as neon in that world of brown-eyed, black-haired elves. He breached the wall and stopped, as shy and dumbstruck as the children. His name was Adán. “For your health,” he said, and quietly poured yet another round of chicha.

  He took us to his house, a simple two-room affair with a garden and a big earthen oven in which he baked loaves of whole-grain bread. (“For the children,” he said. “When their nutrition is poor they cannot pay attention.”) He gave us five fresh loaves. His own children had gone to Lima, where two attended a university. “I hope they come home soon,” he said. “That city is a terrible place.”

  The urchin army escorted us out of town, along a trail that followed the canyon wall, wound into a quebrada and back out to a breathtaking view of the Black Canyon. Now bathed in the golden-red light of dusk, it looked something like the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, but steeper, narrower, deeper, lonelier.

  A last glance at isolated San Juan, clinging to the side of the canyon without roads, phones, or power lines to cinch it into place. Solitario.

  Down below us the kayakers plowed slowly through the boulder-strewn Apurimac. Relieved of the burden of Odendaal’s gear, they traveled for the first time with full rations. Freed of Odendaal himself, they now moved twice as fast as they would have if Odendaal had been with them. But at times they found no more than fifty runnable yards between each portage, and even then the river, with its sieves and undercuts and siphons, was tougher than ever. Some days they were lucky to advance a mile.

  Despite the river’s demands, Biggs felt his confidence returning. Jerome Truran had a lot to do with that. His kayaking style was smooth and unflinching. He scouted each rapid carefully, but when he had decided how to run it, he did so directly, without hesitation. He alone among the kayakers had yet to be torn out of his boat.

  Off the water Truran was funny, charming, not easily perturbed. Like Biggs, he loved the river life. Competing in the United States in 1978, Truran had discovered the big white water of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. South Africa and Europe had nothing quite like it. Now, after making camp in the fading light of day, Truran and Biggs would often don their paddling gear and play in the Apurimac’s murderous rapids, exulting in the river’s sheer power.

  Biggs was happy, indeed proud, to see the younger Truran developing an appreciation for the rhythms of expedition kayaking, perhaps the one thing Biggs could teach his world-champion friend. No car waited downstream to haul you away if you were injured. You didn’t have a week to rest up after a weekend of hard paddling. You carried as much food as you could in your boat, and when you ran out you went hungry. You settled in for the long haul, adapted to the river’s pace, moved as the river allowed you to move. It wasn’t all exhilarating runs and beach parties. Truran, Biggs thought, was learning a river.

  The days grew warmer, and cactus and small fir trees splashed the canyon walls with a refreshing green. But the river became no easier. Day after day the three kayakers fought to gain a hundred yards here, a quarter mile there. To lighten their boats they ate big meals, gambling that they would gain speed on the river. Frustrated by the long hours spent scouting the river, climbing boulder after boulder, they ran some rapids blind, and paid for it. Biggs suffered another bad swim, Chmielinski broke his nose.

  Six days after entering the Black Canyon the kayakers reached its terminus, the Apurimac’s confluence with the Livitaca River. As they approached it they heard shouts coming from the right. They looked up to see porters lowering a scratched, muddy, but quite happy François Odendaal and his equipment down the canyon wall at the end of a rope. When the rope came up short, the kayakers beached their boats and eased Odendaal down to the river. Then he packed his boat and they set off, a quartet once again.

  Below the Livitaca confluence the Apurimac changed. Its high, pinching walls receded slightly, their sculpted granite broken by long formations of soft rock that the river had ground down to create stretches of wide, flat water. Where the granite reappeared, however, the river narrowed into funnels, creating spectacular, cascading rapids. One of these shook Odendaal out of his boat and nearly pinned him to the face of a boulder.

  That night around the campfire Odendaal mounted an anguished monologue, arguing that the ethics of portaging was a gray area, that his trip with burro and porters did not differ fundamentally from the portages the other kayakers had made, and that, therefore, his claim to having run the entire river remained intact. The other men listened quietly. Clearly, Odendaal was obsessed. Biggs alone tried to assuage his friend’s anxiety. Odendaal, he said, had run the river to the best of his ability. That was all any man could hope to do.

  The next day was hard. All four kayakers had close calls, Odendaal took another mean swim, and in one spot the river was completely blocked, requiring a long, slow, bone-jarring portage. The following morning Piotr Chmielinski called a summit meeting.

  It was time, he said, to address the subject of the competition, and to adjust plans accordingly. They had to move faster. He had not come to South America to be the second crew down the Amazon. If they did not intend to be first, he would go home.

  This was the moment Biggs had been dreading. He did not want a race to the sea. This was a river trip, a journey of exploration, an adventure to be shared with friends. He had had his fill of racing.

  On the other hand, if the expedition’s goal was to be the first to travel the Amazon from source to sea, then so be it. As river captain, it was his duty to realize that goal.

  Then things really went crazy.

  Jerome Truran had an idea or two about this whole so-called race. If Odendaal regarded his long portage around not only the Black Canyon but much of the water above it as tantamount to paddling it, if he believed it was legitimate to complete the river’s crux move by burro, then why were the other kayakers risking their lives on the water? Why paddle at all? Why not hire burros and porters and catch the competition by land? Hell, why not fly to the sea?

  No, Truran said, if it really was going to be a race, then Odendaal was out. He simply did not have the ability to kayak the river. He was like a beginning client on one of the commercial trips Truran led in South Africa. Truran, Biggs, and Chmielinski were “buttering” the river for him, carrying his gear and coaching him through the few rapids he actually ran. That the three of them would battle the Apurimac while Odendaal took credit for the descent was an outrage.

  In fact, the way Truran saw it, Odendaal didn’t belong on the river at all. He hated kayaking. On the water his face was tortured with worry and fear.

  Truran said he hoped, for all their sakes, that there was another François Odendaal beneath the one he knew. But he hadn’t seen such a man, not yet. If Odendaal wanted Truran to help baby-sit him down the river, fine. Truran could never afford such a trip on his own. But Odendaal’s money bought only Truran’s skill, not his complicity in a lie.

  Shattered, Odendaal turned to Biggs, but Biggs, though upset with Truran for lashing out, was also upset with Odendaal. For six years he’d been after Odendaal to master at least the basic skills of kayaking. Odendaal had known how dangerous the Apurimac would be, but had not adequately prepared himself. Now his lack imperiled them all.

  Biggs let Odendaal stew for the rest of the day, but that night the two of them had a heart-to-heart talk to straighten out their differences. Meanwhile, Odendaal spoke to Chmielinski about removing Truran from the expedition.

  In other circumstances Chmielinski might have agreed with Odendaal’s suggestion. On an expedition of which he was the sole lead
er Chmielinski would not have tolerated Truran’s insubordination. But now he was not sure what to do.

  For one thing, Chmielinski had never seen a kayaker with Truran’s skills, or his courage. As the river grew, it produced the most thrilling runs the team had yet encountered. This was Truran’s country now. A white-water river was so alive. If one were good enough—confident and skilled and strong—one became part of its spirit, absorbed its rhythms. Truran was that good, and more. It was not simply luck that only he among the four of them had yet to come out of his boat and swim at the mercy of the Great Speaker.

  Chmielinski’s technical skills had improved rapidly under Truran’s influence. He knew that with Truran leading the descents, the team would continue to move quickly. Speed was now foremost in the Pole’s mind. To him, the news of the second kayaking team made this situation similar to Amundsen’s and Scott’s race to the South Pole.

  But speed concerned Chmielinski for another reason as well. A year before, in Wyoming, he had received a telephone call he had been expecting for months. When he had left Poland in 1979, he was in love with a woman named Joanna. They had spoken of marriage but had agreed to postpone their wedding until Chmielinski’s return. A year later they managed to meet briefly in New York, but shortly thereafter martial law was declared in Poland and Joanna could no longer leave the country. In 1984 Joanna learned about the possibility of going abroad with a tourist group. She wrote Chmielinski, who contacted an old friend from Krakow, a monsignor who had become right-hand man to the Pope. The friend began the arrangements for a Vatican marriage.

  Two months later Joanna called Wyoming: She was in Italy. Chmielinski landed in Rome twenty-four hours later, and within days they were wed. (The Pope himself gave the couple his blessing.) Then they began the sticky process of getting Joanna out of Poland legally and into the United States. They filed papers with the Vatican, with the U.S. Embassy, with the Polish Embassy. Joanna returned to Poland, Chmielinski to Wyoming.

  There were delays, and more delays. He had not seen her since, and it had been months since he had been able to speak with her by phone.

  She was due to arrive in the United States, alone, shortly after Chmielinski finished running the Amazon. He had to be there to receive her, but now that schedule was in jeopardy. Odendaal’s slowing the team on the river was concern enough, but if he became separated from the other kayakers and had a bad accident, the expedition would grind to a halt.

  The best thing for all of them, Chmielinski thought, would be for Odendaal to leave the river for good. On the other hand, he needed Odendaal. If Chmielinski could learn something about filmmaking on this trip, he might someday be able to translate his own adventures into profit.

  Chmielinski had a business agreement with Odendaal. He would stick to it. But he decided that removing the skilled and courageous Truran would seriously jeopardize the expedition.

  Intact, the team pushed on. That afternoon they reached Pillpinto, and their rendezvous with the hiking team.

  6 • Trail’s End

  According to our map, we faced a long, steep hike out of the Black Canyon. From San Juan we would climb the canyon wall, gaining two thousand feet of altitude, then cross a pass at fourteen thousand feet that would probably be covered in snow. Coca-leaf time. We were getting used to the altitude, but such severe climbs still left us gasping and achey headed, and as the Quechua discovered centuries ago, the leaf is an excellent tonic. I had read many accounts condemning the locals for their coca use, but I now suspected most had been written by people who owned cars.

  A woman on the trail offered a fistful of leaves and a chunk of llipta. When Leon asked directions to Toccorani, she pointed straight up in the air and laughed in the shrieking way the Quechua sometimes did, a laugh all the more unsettling for the rarity of its appearance.

  The Andes display staggering contrasts—weather that changes forty degrees in minutes, monolithic geological formations that erupt from flat, eroded tracts, waterways that burst and explode rather than flow—but the most surprising are found in those few places in which man has wedged his tinkering fingers: his villages. Each village in the Black Canyon had an air, a tone, that was distinct and identifiable. Hueco had been primeval and isolated; Surimana sullen and unsure of itself, corrupted by the road; San Juan fertile and welcoming.

  As we circled Toccorani, on the trail to the pass, we saw a manicured soccer field and near almost every hut a horse of impressive size and coat—something like finding a Mercedes-Benz in every driveway in an American suburb. The field suggested a surfeit of what in the States we call leisure time, but leisure time in the Andes also means time to quiz the gringo. We avoided Toccorani, hiked through the pass, spit our wads on the apachita, slouched through the snow and down into deserted, forlorn Santa Lucia, fifty huts clustered wall to wall and perched like a muddy pulpit two thousand sheer feet above the Apurimac. Where was everybody? (In the fields, planting.)

  Across the canyon Omacha’s tin roofs glinted in the sun. Omacha was a couple of miles away as the condor flies, but the immensity of that country was deceptive. It didn’t encourage things to expand and connect; it compressed them into tiny, isolated universes. To visit Omacha we would have had to climb back to Surimana, cross the bridge, and walk down the far side of the canyon. The trip would take a week.

  Black clouds coagulated along the canyon rim, amplifying Santa Lucia’s barren, marooned feeling. We hustled up the trail. Rain fell and stopped. Below us a sea of cotton-topped clouds obliterated the river. A black wall rose from that white sea, rose and whitened, and snow fell on the mountain peaks across the canyon. Beyond the peaks the sky swirled with a thousand shades of purple. The colors mixed with such slow subtlety that, unable to bring the sky into focus, I felt as if I were about to lose my balance and fall down.

  The sun slid out of that purple pocket and lodged between two of the peaks. We sat on a rock and ate chocolate. The storm ascended the canyon once again, rained on us, and receded. The sun, which appeared to have set, burned through the clouds. Chimneys of cold fog levitated up from the canyon floor.

  This meteorological wizardry, dizzying and eerie, lent the mountains an air of mystery. Like most travelers stumbling into a mysterious place, we felt as if we were discovering it. But there, clinging to the mountain ledge three-quarters of a mile below us, was a tiny hut. On our map was a corresponding dot. The hut had been there at least thirty years, perhaps hundreds.

  We wouldn’t reach Huayque that afternoon. Instead, we pitched camp on the only flat place we could find, the trail itself. As a friend once wrote, traveling narrows one’s horizons. Moving from place to place, securing food and shelter, become full-time work. In the three weeks since I had stepped out of the truck at Lari and first set foot on the trail, the Andes had stripped me of excess. I slept on the trail, scrounged food, and traveled by the oldest and simplest means known to man.

  To reduce our weight, we now carried a two-man rain fly instead of tents. This we hurried to erect before the storm hit, and squeezed into it hoping that four bodies would generate heat sufficient to keep us from freezing. We needn’t have worried. Though it snowed all night our body heat stoked the humidity beneath the plastic to unbearable levels. In the dead of night Leon bolted headlong into the storm, dragging his sleeping bag with him. He returned five minutes later, stark naked, soaked, shivering, and asleep on his feet. Bzdak dried him off and dressed him in long underwear. Then Durrant and I laid him down between us and wrapped our arms around him until, half an hour later, he stopped shaking, and we heard the sound of deep, rhythmic breathing. In the morning he said he had dreamed he was Superman.

  It was late September, but in the Andes the seasons have as much to do with altitude as with time. The next day we once again hiked down out of winter into spring, walking through a chorus of yellow daisies, hot-pink bromeliads, the blue medallions of flowering wild potato, and aromatic eucalyptus groves, which are planted near settled areas for reforestation.
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br />   Huayque, too, was a surprise. Cobbled streets and a stone canal ran through the village carrying water and, from the looks of it, anything else that would float. But the biggest revelation was the houses. They had two stories, a design we had not seen before, but were built on Quechua scale. It was like walking through a children’s amusement park, or a Hollywood set, where everything is slightly smaller than real life. I stopped in front of one mud-and-thatch home, reached up, and touched the top of the second-story shutters.

  A woman more ancient than old waddled up to us. She was hunched over and dressed in filthy rags and her gray hair hung to below her waist in a sloppy braid. She had one tooth, in the center of her upper gum. She yelled and shoved a pitcher of brown chicha in our faces. It looked as vile as the effluent running through the clay canal.

  Bzdak, Durrant, and I refused it, but Leon, ever polite, drained the horn.

  “You must stay here tonight,” the woman said.

  Leon pointed to me. “He will stay if he can sleep with any woman he wants.”

  Bzdak said, “Are there any girls in the village who would like gringo babies?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding seriously. “Some young ones.”

  This frightened me. The young Quechua women had a tranquil beauty that broke one’s heart with a glance. But the idea of a sexual liaison on the dirt floor of a flea-ridden hut, while Mom boiled corn over the open fire and Dad sharpened his machete—that was not my idea of romance, especially given the mercurial and at times violent moods we had seen among the locals.

  I left quickly, and let the others catch up.

  On the trail out of town we met men and women returning from their fields, carrying wooden foot plows and drinking from bottles of aguardiente and cañazo. Two hours from town they were still coming, spilling down out of the mountainside like rainwater. For a mile above and below us sweeping rows of terraced fields cut the mountains like lines on a topographic map. I could not see a single patch of uncultivated land.