Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  Chmielinski said, “Guys, in the boat.” Either we got right back in or maybe we would never have the nerve to get in it again.

  It was dark when we made camp, on tiny patches of sand hidden among boulders. We managed to eat about half our thin dinner before Truran accidentally upended the cookpot. No one spoke, except Chmielinski, to announce that we had advanced all of one mile that day.

  Cold, hungry, and scared, I doubted whether I, or any of us, would survive the abyss. And though I knew it was self-pity, I resented the fact that everyone in that sad little camp but me had at least one partner with him, someone who would have to face family and friends and say, This is how he died.

  The skies opened up and rain fell hard. We bolted for our tents. I hurried into mine, lit a candle, and stared at it until it had burned almost all the way down. When I blew it out the darkness terrified me—it reminded me of the darkness inside the river. I searched frantically for matches and burned two more candles one after another. I lit a fourth, my last. When it burned out I lay awake in the dark, eyes open, and felt my body tumbling, tumbling, tumbling.

  In the black night I had pitched my tent right behind the big one Odendaal and Van Heerden shared. In the morning I heard them speaking in Afrikaans. They switched to English when Biggs joined them. Odendaal was considering a plan to remove the raft from the river once we were into smoother water. Van Heerden had shot all the film he wanted, and had had his fill of white water. He would depart. Truran, who had a nonrefundable airplane ticket back to South Africa, would also have to leave the river soon. Jourgensen, too, was ready to go home. From Cachora Bzdak and I would go to Lima with Leon and Durrant, and perhaps rejoin the expedition much later, in the jungle. Chmielinski would kayak with Odendaal and Biggs.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Odendaal said to Biggs. “I don’t want a lot of discussion about this, one of those things where everyone gives an opinion.”

  I was stunned and then upset. The river scared me, but I hadn’t decided that I wanted to quit, and I felt that I had earned the right to plead my case. Bzdak and I had put our lives on the line taking supplies through the hardest part of the river, and once, at great risk, had carried Odendaal himself.

  Bzdak was angry when I told him what I had heard. “Why am I trying my life for that guy if he just wants to throw me out?”

  We consulted Chmielinski. He spoke with Odendaal and returned livid. With the rest of us gone, he would be isolated with the two South Africans, and at Odendaal’s mercy.

  Odendaal saw us talking and came over quickly.

  “Piotr,” he said, “I told you not to discuss this with anybody.”

  “You’re taking the raft out,” I said.

  “We’re thinking about some changes,” Odendaal said. “Just discussing them.”

  “I overheard your conversation this morning,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I knew you were listening.”

  If he had known that, of course, he would not have bothered cautioning Biggs to secrecy. But the truth or falsehood of his statement was beside the point. Until that morning Odendaal and I had maintained at least the pretense of shared endeavor. Now, under the pressure of the abyss, we had betrayed one another. He had plotted my removal, and I, in turn, had clearly cast my lot with the men by whom he felt most threatened. All illusions of neutrality had evaporated.

  We stared in silence for a few tense seconds, and then he left.

  Chmielinski was seething. “No matter what happens,” he said, “the raft is going down the river. We make that deal a long time ago. It is stupid to change now.”

  Chmielinski responded to this latest crisis by working the raft with an intensity I had not yet seen. In barely restrained fury, he leaped from boulder to boulder and scrambled up small cliffs, manipulating the short lead line from the most precarious of perches. Often it looked as if the raft would yank him right into the river. Bzdak and I trailed him along the bank, hurrying to keep up, coiling what was left of our line as Chmielinski hauled it in, anchoring him as the raft rocketed downstream and the line whipped through his hands and pulled taut.

  Impatient because Bzdak and I could not match his pace, Chmielinski tried to line the raft through one rapid by himself. I climbed to the top of a boulder in time to see the raft tearing past him, the slack line paying out furiously and about to wrap itself around his right foot. I screamed. Somehow—this took more strength than I could have summoned from my entire body—somehow Chmielinski managed with one hand to arrest the line for a split second, yanking its stampeding half-ton to a halt. In the same moment he flung his foot far in the air as the line tightened around it. The line caught his shoe instead and ripped it off. Seconds later the shoe surfaced fifty yards downstream.

  Bzdak and I scouted the next rapid. It was bad news, most of the current veering left into a deep whirlpool.

  “We get sucked to the left, we’re dead,” Bzdak said.

  Chmielinski did not need long to decipher our thoughts. “Okay,” he said with resignation, “we line it.”

  From his tone of voice it was clear that Chmielinski wanted badly to run the rapid. Bzdak and I knew that the raft’s speed absolutely could not be an issue when the showdown with Odendaal came, but just when Chmielinski needed us most we were losing what nerve we had left.

  “Look, Piotr,” I said. “You say go, I’ll go. It’s up to you.”

  “Me, too,” Bzdak said.

  “No,” Chmielinski said. “We took a big swim yesterday. Better to learn to run small water again and feel good.”

  We lined the raft through the whirlpool’s left side. It flipped. When we righted it, we looked downstream. Two tiny figures waved to us: Durrant and Leon.

  9 • The Middle Apurimac

  They were camped on the bank opposite us, five hundred yards downstream, but the Apurimac thundered and roared as if mocking that fact. At least once in the abyss we had spent a full day traveling five hundred yards. It would not be safe to join our teammates until morning. We could see Durrant picking her way nimbly from boulder to boulder along the left bank. Truran kayaked across the river, spoke with her, and returned to huddle with Bzdak. Then the photographer hurried to where Chmielinski and I were setting up our tents.

  “Piotr,” he said, “may I have permission to go across?”

  Chmielinski yelled to Truran, waiting in an eddy: “You can make it with him?”

  “Maybe,” Truran yelled back.

  “Zbyszek,” Chmielinski said, “go there. Do not come back. We will meet you tomorrow.”

  As nervous as I could remember seeing him, Bzdak thrust his camera case at me, which was something like a mother giving up a child. He waded into the eddy, hugged Truran about the waist, and arrayed his bulk along the kayak’s spine.

  They danced slowly into the current, edging in and out of boils and small whirlpools. When they hit the heart of the current Truran turned directly upstream. The boat’s plastic nose jumped in the air like a rearing horse, and the stern went under. Bzdak disappeared with it.

  The river tossed him back up, he gulped for air, and, still clutching Truran, went back down.

  Truran struggled to a faint midstream eddy, the river howling and gushing to either side. Bzdak bobbed and went underwater. Only his yellow helmet, bursting through the froth every few seconds, indicated that he was still aboard the kayak.

  Finally, they gained the far bank. Bzdak and the doctor embraced.

  “Look at that Zbyszek,” Chmielinski said.

  That night, Chmielinski, Biggs, Jourgensen, Truran, Van Heerden, and I gathered around the campfire and listened to Odendaal make his proposal: Remove the raft now. It was too slow. Biggs endorsed the idea, as did Jourgensen, which made the raft’s demise almost a certainty. Jourgensen represented the expedition’s fiscal salvation. He had seventeen one-hundred-dollar bills pinned inside his parka, and would give the expedition more when he could get to Lima. No decisions would be made without his approval.

  B
ut even Biggs, an Odendaal loyalist, did not accept Jourgensen’s subsequent argument. Jourgensen suggested that we could predict the raft’s future speed based on how fast it had come through the abyss. (At that pace, we would arrive at the Atlantic sometime in the next century.) His stand appeared to be an excuse to leave the river without seeming to quit. An honorable Viking stayed with his boat. Unless, of course, there was no boat.

  When his first argument didn’t float, Jourgensen said, “The raft is unsafe. Piotr is taking too many risks.”

  “Let’s ask the crew,” Truran said. He turned to me. On one level I agreed with Jourgensen. For him, at least, the raft was unsafe. He did not belong on the water. But I didn’t believe that the raft was unsafe per se. Risky, yes, but if there were no risk to running the Apurimac, we would not have been there.

  “I want to keep going,” I said. “So does Zbyszek. We’ll take our chances. I think the raft would be safer with fewer people and less weight. I’m sure Kate will join us if we need another paddle.”

  Chmielinski, for his part, believed that Odendaal knew nothing about the logistics of running such a steep, nearly inaccessible canyon. Without the raft to carry supplies, the kayakers would have to paddle fully loaded boats, and this would greatly decrease their maneuverability in the water. Even then they would have to depend on the countryside for sustenance, but the canyon was nearly uninhabited. Further, the river had to open up soon, had to level out. When it did, raft support would increase the team’s speed.

  And then Truran, as was his wont, dropped a bombshell: “This expedition is not going to reach the sea according to its schedule. I suggest we just give up that idea right now. Slow down. Accept the pace. Or else get completely into racing trim. Go as fast as possible. And that means getting rid of François. He’s the slowest man here. He cannot possibly keep up.”

  Startled, Odendaal looked up from the fire. This was not an argument easily dismissed—Truran was the team’s most respected riverman. “Okay,” Odendaal said. “Let us talk about that.”

  “If it’s a question of speed, you must remove yourself,” Truran said. “If you do not remove yourself, then you cannot remove the raft, either. Zbyszek and Joe have earned the right to stay on this river if they so choose.”

  “We agreed long ago that the raft was going on the river,” Chmielinski said. “People have risked their lives because they believed what we said. They have worked hard. There is no question here. The raft is going.”

  If Odendaal forced his hand, he had a mutiny, and perhaps a race to the sea—he and Biggs against Chmielinski and whoever went on the raft. On the other hand, if Odendaal consented to keeping the raft on the river, he had lost the showdown. What authority he still retained aside from Jourgensen’s financial backing would evaporate.

  We agreed to discuss it again the next day.

  I picked my way back to my tent by the light of the waning moon and listened to the rapids thunder in the cold night. In my mind I ran them again and again. Each run ended in a violent, suffocating tumble through water and rock and darkness.

  In the morning, shivering from the cold, I walked downstream, searching for the source of all that aquatic thunder. I climbed a low cliff, looked down, and studied my nemesis: chute, drop, hole, stopper wave. It terrified me.

  I returned to camp, packed my gear, and loaded it onto the raft. Biggs had breakfast ready, but I couldn’t eat. I walked back to the rapid and studied it again.

  Truran had followed me. He knew what I was thinking. “See that hole?” he said. “It’s turning left. If you swim, try to make yourself relax. You’ll go around that thing a couple of times. You’ll be helpless. Then it will spit you out. See it?”

  There: The river dumped into the hole and erupted in a wave, an explosion of white and silver. I looked closer. That swirl, running off the wave and into flat water—would that save me?

  I hurried back to camp. I double-checked the raft’s lines and netting, pumped up a soft side tube, strapped on helmet and life jacket. I sat on my tube impatiently. I wanted to get this over with. Finally, Chmielinski arrived, and Jourgensen and Van Heerden finished their morning smoke. They said nothing as they boarded the raft.

  We splashed ourselves to wake up. Chmielinski barked orders. We turned upstream, into a back eddy, then into the current. The raft’s nose swung into the rushing river. Something grabbed it. We rose up. The river spread below us as if we were poised at the top of a rollercoaster.

  Chmielinski screamed “OUTOUTOUT!” I yanked hard on my paddle to correct and get us straight in the chute—

  —and boom-boom we were through, into the flat water.

  Only then did I realize how small the rapid actually was, a dinky thing that my imagination had amplified into a monster. My fear had fooled me completely.

  When we reached the opposite bank we learned that although Leon and Durrant had managed to bring our supplies to Cachora in Edwin Goycochea’s truck, and from there had packed them on hired burros down the precipitous trail into the canyon, one of the animals, piled high with provisions that were to last us for the next few weeks, had misstepped and bounced a hundred yards down the canyon wall. The beast had landed on the supplies mounted on its back, saving its life but scattering our provisions. Fortunately, Durrant had managed to retrieve some of the staples. We would breakfast on oatmeal flecked with dirt, leaves, and an occasional tooth-jarring pebble.

  That night, as I sat against a guava tree and worked on my notes, Odendaal approached me with a proposition. He invited me to leave the expedition at Atalaya and work my way to the sea alone. He said that everyone deserved the chance to reach the sea and implied that in a better world he himself would prefer the sort of trip he was now proposing for me. I pointed out that I was broke, that I had given him the seven thousand dollars I had raised in the States. He said that this was not a problem. He would return two hundred dollars to me. He assured me that he had researched the subject thoroughly and that this was quite enough to cover my trip.

  My first reaction was, Oh, come on. But then I realized that he was not trying to swindle me. He believed what he was saying.

  All at once I understood both the brilliance behind the entire Amazon project and its terrible flaw. No matter how farfetched the words that issued from his lips, Odendaal believed them. He believed that I could travel thirty-five hundred miles of unknown country with two hundred dollars in my pocket. He believed that by cutting me out of the expedition he was selflessly doing me a favor. He believed that he had intended for me to overhear his conversation with Van Heerden and Biggs the day before. He believed, as the river thrashed him, that he was paddling well. And he believed, even now, not only that he could lead an expedition all the way down the Amazon, but that he was actually doing it.

  It was horrifying, and it was wonderful. If Odendaal had not had that extraordinary ability to interpret the ugliest truths in such a self-aggrandizing way, there would have been no Amazon expedition, and none of us would have been in Peru. He was, literally, a visionary. He saw what others did not. He was also the perfect salesman—he could sell dross because he sincerely believed it was gold.

  I refused his offer.

  “Look,” he said angrily, “Piotr has no money, either. If you go with him on the raft, you will never make it.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “What do you know about anything? I have been on twelve expeditions. You have been on none. You know nothing! You and your ridiculous hat. We laugh at you!”

  He was right about the hat. But by now I knew something about his so-called expeditions.

  “Piotr and I have a business disagreement,” he said as he left, “but we are friends. You and I, however, have a serious communication problem. If it gets worse, one of us will have to go.”

  Chmielinski and he were friends? I understood then how completely out of touch Odendaal was. The saddest part was that he really seemed to think that it all came down to a question of money, that as l
ong as he held the purse strings, it was his expedition.

  Our camp, on a hot, cactus-ridden slope a hundred yards off the cool river, was miserable. Away from the water the countryside simmered even in the shade, and our dust and sweat aroused an avaricious insect population. Killing the large blackflies brought a certain satisfaction. They were fat and slow, and once they settled onto a patch of flesh they took time to indulge. Their bite was not bad, and when crushed with a savage open-handed slap they disintegrated with a satisfying squish.

  Far more insidious were the biting, gnat-sized flies Peruvians call mosquito. You didn’t feel the bite, but minutes later a powerful itch set in. The bites infected rapidly. Each of us bore scars about the ankles, wrists, and, among those who preferred to take a full measure of sun, buttocks. (Durrant theorized that the bugs inject an anticoagulant, for the bites bleed and fester but do not harden into scabs for some time.)

  There were other delights. I pulled a parka from the top of my equipment pile and a furry tarantula ambled out, angry but not the least frightened. The sharp, lancelike spines of the desert plants made each footstep an adventure, with or without shoes. And that night, asleep, I felt my knife cord sliding along my neck. I reached for it and in one motion flung into the night the slick, wriggling thing I found. I wanted to dismiss this as a nightmare, but the oath emitted by Truran seconds later when something dark and squirmy flopped onto his mosquito netting suggested it was not. We had that day seen two black-and-yellow snakes that Bzdak had identified as vipers, and there were said to be bushmasters and corals in the area.

  That was the last time I slept without a tent.

  Once we left the Cachora camp, we would have one more possibility of resupply before we entered the restricted Red Zone. According to our map, the only place there might be access to the river on what we estimated would be a ten-day, one-hundred-fifty-mile run from Cachora to the Red Zone was at the village of Triunfo. The next day, after arranging a plan to attempt to meet the river team at Triunfo in five days with new supplies, and after collecting our letters to home, Leon climbed out of the canyon with the mules. Van Heerden went with him. If the raft remained on the river, Durrant would take his place.