by Joe Kane
“Good, guys,” Chmielinski said after a while. “Excellent. We almost made a bad turnover, but we did not.” He shook our hands, and, exulting in the afterglow, Leon, Durrant, and I flashed the adrenaline-laced grins of fledgling river rats.
“The idea is not to beat the river,” Chmielinski said. “The river always wins. It does not care. We try the river because we must try. White water is, how do you say it, like you are bleeding …”
“It gets in your blood.”
“Yes. It is in your blood. It is a thing you are never forgetting.”
With Chmielinski guiding us and then, for the hardest rapids, clambering back upstream to captain the Avon as well, we made the Cunyac bridge on schedule, four days after first putting in the river. The bridge, a sturdy wooden affair, is the most vulnerable section of the Lima-Cuzco road. We celebrated with a dinner of fried eggs and rice at a smoky, dirt-floored cantina tucked behind a military checkpoint. When we had finished, Odendaal asked me to step outside. We stood on the back porch, next to a sleeping pig.
“Piotr wants to take only the Riken from here on down,” he said. “With Zbyszek, Pierre, and Jack. And you.”
“Who will paddle?”
“You, Pierre, Zbyszek, except when Pierre is filming, then we let Jack use a paddle. I will kayak.”
“What do you think?”
“It will be bigger water now. Bad rapids. Long portages. A strong chance you will swim. A chance you could die.”
“Piotr is a good captain.”
“Piotr is very ambitious. If he runs this section of the river on a raft he will be the first man to do it. He will be a hero in Peru once again. Tim and Jerome do not want to take a raft. They do not think it will be safe.”
He said that Sergio Leon would go to Lima to try to extend our visas, most of which were about to expire. Leon did not enjoy rafting—he could barely swim—and had requested other duty. Odendaal said Durrant would go with him.
“You may have trouble separating her from Zbyszek,” I said.
“That is not an expedition consideration,” Odendaal said. “If there is a problem, they will be off the expedition.” Relations between Durrant and Odendaal had not been smooth, which Durrant suspected had to do with her romance with Bzdak. The closer she had become to Bzdak, the cooler Odendaal had acted toward her. Nor had the situation been helped by the badgering Durrant had suffered from the Afrikaner film crew.
A soft rain fell. A roar from inside the cantina indicated that a bottle was making the rounds.
“Think about it,” Odendaal said. “Let me know soon.” He lit the homemade pipe he had taken to smoking. As he turned to reenter the cantina, he said, “This is starting to feel like an adventure again. Enough of this tourist crap.”
I went to my tent, lit a candle, and tried to read The Nigger of the Narcissus: “… the solidarity in uncertain fate, which brings all men to each other.…” I soon put the book down. My mind was reeling. Before my taste of rafting, I had pushed hard to be included on the raft all the way down the white-water river. Now that I was being given that opportunity, I was not at all sure I wanted to take advantage of it. The river genuinely scared me.
I walked naked to the Apurimac and dove in. She ran broad and smooth there beneath the Cunyac bridge, her current strong but even. There were no rapids—that side of her was hidden around a bend, as if it were too rude a thing to be seen from the bridge—and the water was pleasantly cool.
In the dark night I swam across the river at an angle upstream (what the kayakers called “ferry-gliding”), and paddled just hard enough to hold even in the current, to prevent it from carrying me downstream. I was trying, I suppose, to feel the Apurimac, to test her, to see if I could trust her. I enjoyed the river life after the grime and sweat of hiking the high country—no dirt under the fingernails, a wonderful clean tiredness in arms and chest and shoulders after a day at the paddle. I had slept well those last few nights, except for the nightmares, in which I seemed to drown forever without actually dying.
Chmielinski was waiting at my tent, wearing, as always, a serious expression.
“What do you think about the raft?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Tim does not want it. I think it is a personal thing against me, he is protecting François. I think it is important to have the raft. This is a chance to record history, Pierre with his filming, Zbyszek with his camera, and you with the book.”
“Do you think it will be safe?”
“No problem. I will ask you to paddle in the back again, next to me.”
He said that if I went with the raft, I would be assigned Leon’s role as quartermaster. The lowliest work on the team, sticky, fly-ridden, thankless duty. First man up in the morning to outfit the cook of the day, last man to sleep after counting and repacking provisions, all free time spent checking for rot and insects.
My options? Return to Lima with Leon and Durrant and be effectively off the expedition. Or go with the raft and travel country that few if any people had seen.
We left the Cunyac camp under a hot midday sun, the three kayaks ten yards in front of the raft, and bobbed for an hour on the slow, flat river. Then with Jourgensen wedged between Chmielinski and me, Bzdak, Van Heerden, and I put paddles to water and bent our backs to Chmielinski’s “Stroke … stroke … stroke …”
Within a few miles we passed the site of what had been the greatest of the Inca hanging bridges, the key link in the highway between mountain and coast. In 1533 the Inca burned the bridge in a futile attempt to stop the Spanish on their march to Cuzco, and the Spanish later built their own wood-and-stone span on the site (upon which Thornton Wilder based his Bridge of San Luis Rey). In all, the bridge is said to have been in continual use longer than any other in the Americas, but today the chipped white-mortar Spanish abutments, the only significant mark the conquistadores made in the Apurimac canyon, loom like ghostly portals to a dark, forbidding slash in the Cordillera Vilcabamba. The surrounding terrain is hot and stark save an occasional glimpse of a craggy snow-covered peak.
In mid-afternoon the headwind increased, blowing hard upriver as heat rose from the deep canyon below. It blew so hard, in fact, that even as we strained at our paddles it drove us backward, against the current, into an ugly whirlpool from which we extricated ourselves only when Chmielinski counted stroke in a desperate rage. We hid in the lee of a cliff while Biggs and Truran kayaked across the river with our bow line and planted themselves on shore. As they hauled on the line we paddled the raft. To cut wind resistance we knelt on the floor, bent to our task like supplicating monks.
Exhausted, we pitched camp in a thorny clearing near a hot spring presided over by a stout mestizo woman, her frail, toothless husband, and their teenage daughter, a shy, barefoot beauty in a short, tattered cotton dress. A cement pool captured water from the spring, and the crumbling cement buildings nearby, where the family lived, suggested that the place may once have been a kind of resort.
“If you swim naked in the pool,” the matriarch said, “you will have twins.” But she did not want her theory tested—she shooed the girl away.
Biggs was cook of the day. While I helped him set up his kitchen, the old woman rattled about the camp raising dust and shouting advice: “Put more wood on the fire.” “Your pot is too small.” Biggs cut her a slice of cheese. She walked away from us to eat it, returned, and asked, “Where are you going?”
“To where the river ends,” Biggs said.
She considered this. “Europe.”
“No,” Biggs said. “Europe is across the Atlantic Ocean.”
“What is the Atlantic Ocean?”
She left when the rest of the team returned from the pool. We built a fire and ate in silence. Afterwards, Odendaal said, “Without a woman I feel like I am in the land of the dead.” He paused to light his pipe. “Now Zbyszek is one of us. Now he is among the dead.”
If not intentionally cruel, the remark was certainly insensitive. Odendaa
l had dismissed Durrant from the rafting team in a way that she had not considered exceptionally gracious, and he had told Bzdak, in a patronizing tone, “I am sorry to have to break you two up. It is a very nice relationship, and it lends a good feeling to the team.”
“The issue is not the relationship,” Bzdak had replied angrily. “The issue is Kate is part of this expedition. She has earned the right to be on the raft.”
Now Bzdak ignored Odendaal, who, having failed to elicit a response, turned to the rest of us. His favorite activity on the river seemed to be playing the pipe-in-hand storyteller, the sage. “How do you catch an alligator?” he asked. No one spoke. “Well, you take tweezers, field glasses, a boring book …”
“Scorpion!” Bzdak yelled. A three-inch-long bug glowing gold with reflected firelight poised on a rock two feet from his right leg.
“Zbyszek,” Odendaal began again, this time in a harder voice, “how do you catch—”
Bzdak jumped up on a boulder and perched above the rest of us, laughing his high, squeaky laugh and jabbing at the scorpion with a stick. The firelight glanced off the underside of his huge red beard and the front of his broad head and threw the rest of him into dark relief. He looked and sounded like some sort of wild Polish wizard.
Dazed from the afternoon’s battle with the wind, we watched his thrusts and the scorpion’s tentative parries. One step back, two forward, stinger cocked …
“Zbyszek!” Odendaal said. “I am not impressed.” When Bzdak continued to ignore him, Odendaal said, “That lady’s daughter is very pretty. Maybe I will ask her to come for a swim with me.” He stood up and left the fire.
When Odendaal was gone Bzdak crushed the scorpion and kicked it into the flames, as if casting a wizard’s spell.
The next morning, fearing the wind would rise by mid-afternoon and end our day, we launched our boats at first light and ran four fast miles, the kayakers in the lead, the raft trailing. Then the river widened to about fifty yards and the rapids began to show not just chutes and turns but waves and troughs. Some of these waves, as high as eight feet, loomed over the raft’s bow like green walls and inhibited our ability to track the kayakers. At one point we ran right over Biggs, trapping him underwater, beneath the raft, and raking him over submerged boulders until Bzdak managed to reach under and yank the kayak free.
Biggs was not happy, to say the least, and claimed that he had heard Chmielinski yelling “Forward! Forward!” as we ran him down. Chmielinski vehemently denied this, and sitting next to him on the raft I had heard no such thing. But we agreed that Biggs and Truran would ride at least fifty yards ahead of the raft, scouting the river and signaling with upraised paddles to stop or come ahead. Odendaal would try to keep up with them.
This system worked well until Odendaal suffered two punishing swims and Biggs and Truran abandoned their scouting duties to rescue him. “He’s shattered,” Truran said when he caught up with us. “Badly fazed. He’ll lose all his skills. Tim’s worried.”
Over the next few hours the river was rough but predictable, and we paddled as hard as we could until the headwind roared up. To either side of us the dark canyon walls rose vertically for hundreds of feet, perhaps more—who could see up that far? They were fragile walls, without vegetation, all boulders and granite slabs tucked into soft dirt and scree and shale. The boulders clotting the river were not the smooth, water-sculpted stone we had seen so far but jagged blades honed by detritus hurtling down from above.
A plume of smoke curled far downriver. When we arrived at the spot hours later it was still rising, but it was dust, not smoke. Hundreds of feet of wall had simply collapsed en masse into the river.
Suddenly the Apurimac narrowed so dramatically that we were all struck silent. It squeezed into a gorge a quarter of its previous width, perhaps forty feet wide, which so concentrated the headwind that paddling our hardest gained us only a standstill. We had to make camp, but we saw no beaches, no flat ground, nothing but the gorge’s sheer vertical walls.
Finally we found a cluster of boulders along the left bank, and in between them small patches of sand just big enough to hold a tent or sleeping bag. Across the river, a waterfall tumbled in four long cascades down five hundred feet of slick rock. Jokingly, but presciently, Chmielinski named this “Last Hope Falls.”
Nerves were short and so was dinner, for no sooner had we begun to eat than it started to rain hard. We ran for our tents. I drifted off to sleep but awoke to a horrible, thunderlike crack. Lightning flashed, but the cracks—I heard several more after I climbed out of my tent to investigate—were rain-loosened boulders tumbling down the wall.
I slinked naked down to the food bags and tucked them beneath overhanging rocks. Lightning flashed again, and I heard amid the cracks the occasional thud of a boulder hitting sand. Jourgensen, Odendaal, and Van Heerden had found shelter in small caves. Chmielinski was next to the river, his tent tied to the raft. With even a slight rain in this narrow gorge the water would rise rapidly and sweep the raft away.
Bzdak was still in his tent.
“I stay in here, maybe I get hit by a rock,” he reasoned from beneath his rain fly. “I go outside, maybe I get hit by a rock there, too, but for sure I will get wet. So I will stay in my tent.”
Truran had made a similar decision, though he tried to sleep up on his side, figuring that limited the possibility of either crushed organs or a crushed spine.
I elected to do the same, and wore my helmet for protection. But the rockfall continued until dawn, and I did not sleep.
In the morning, bug-eyed and mumbling after the exhausting night, we asssessed our situation. Chmielinski guessed that in two days we had run eight to ten miles, and that we were thirty to forty miles from the point where, we hoped, Durrant and Leon would be waiting with supplies. “Could take one day,” he said. “Could take one week.”
To our surprise we ran well that morning, handling three hard rapids without a mistake, and regained some of the confidence lost during the night’s rock bombing. But that memory hung close. Many of the boulders we now saw in the river were freshly fallen, caked with dust and mud hauled down from the walls. Finding a safe campsite now held priority over achieving distance.
Then the river took an abrupt left and entered a gorge so steep and narrow its walls appeared to close overhead. Though it was midday no sun reached the water. The river itself was a mess—fast, mud brown, roiling from the rain and still rising, studded with boulders that towered over our little fleet.
This was the Acobamba Abyss.
8 • The Acobamba Abyss
Below us lay three bad rapids, a short stretch of calm water, and then, where the gorge suddenly narrowed, a single, twenty-foot-wide chute through which the whole frustrated Apurimac poured in unheeding rage. The river was whipped so white over the next half mile that it looked like a snowfield. The thrashing cascades raised a dense mist, rendering the dark canyon cold and clammy. Their roar made my head ache.
“You swim in that,’ ” Bzdak shouted in my ear, “you don’t get out!”
But the gorge walls were nearly vertical. We could not portage, we could not climb out, we could not pitch camp. Even had we found a relatively flat area, as the gorge cooled through the night boulders would pop out of the ramparts. The rock shower would be deadly.
We had no choice but to attempt to “line” the raft, a tedious, nerve-racking procedure in which we sent the raft downriver unmanned at the end of Chmielinski’s one-hundred-fifty-foot climbing rope a length at a time.
While I stood on a boulder on the left bank and held the Riken in place by a short, thin line tied to its stern, the two Poles affixed the heavy climbing rope to the bow and worked downstream with it as far as they could. At Chmielinski’s signal I dropped my line and kicked the raft into the first rapid. Within seconds the boat was hurtling through the rapid at what must have been twenty knots, leaping wildly. I shuddered when I imagined riding it.
In the middle of the second rapid, the raft
flipped. As it passed the Poles, half the bow line snagged underwater, tautened, and though rated with an “impact force” of more than a ton snapped as if it were mere sewing thread.
Unleashed, the raft sped down the river.
Truran, who had run the first rapid in his kayak, was waiting on a boulder near the calm water above the terrible chute. When he saw the raft break free, he dove into the river, swam for the raft as it drifted toward the chute, and managed briefly to deflect it from its course. He scrambled aboard, and as the raft accelerated toward the chute he caught a rescue line thrown like a football by Chmielinski. The Pole arrested the raft as it teetered on the chute’s lip, and slowly hauled Truran back from the edge of disaster. (Chmielinski later described Truran’s effort as one of the bravest he had seen on a river.)
Draining as all that was, we still had to get the boat through the chute, somehow hold it to the wall and board it, and then run the ugly water below. The lower rapid could not be scouted. We could only hope that it held no surprises—no waterfalls, no deadly holes.
Jourgensen and Van Heerden slowly worked their way down to the chute, creeping along the boulders that sat at the foot of the gorge’s left wall. When they arrived, Chmielinski told them to rest. Then he and Truran anchored the raft with the stern line while Bzdak took the bow line, now shorter by some forty feet, and climbed hand over hand up the two-story boulder that formed the chute’s left gate. From the boulder Bzdak then climbed to a foot-wide ledge that ran along the left wall.
At Chmielinski’s command I followed Bzdak. I ascended the boulder easily enough, but negotiating the wet, slick wall was something else. It was so sheer that I couldn’t find a solid grip, and I quickly developed what rock climbers call “sewing-machine legs,” an uncontrollable, fear-induced, pistonlike shaking. I felt cut off and alone. One misstep and I was in the river, which now churned angrily fifteen feet straight below.
