by Joe Kane
A post-catharsis peace reigned in camp. Truran cooked, Bzdak read, Durrant and I bathed in the cool Apurimac, here emerald green, fifty yards wide, and running smoothly but so swiftly that to stay abreast of camp I had to swim against the current as hard as I could. Chmielinski, reviewing his hand-drawn maps, looked up and said, “Something is wrong here.” He paused, then concluded, “Ah—François is gone. No one is watching who I am talking to.”
Later, sitting around the fire while Truran dished out beef burgundy, we tried to decide what exactly had happened at Luisiana, and what we would do next. None of us believed the confrontation with Odendaal had been our last, not with almost thirty-eight hundred miles of river still to run. We agreed that one reason Odendaal behaved as he did was his insecurity with his role as the expedition leader and with the river itself. “He hates the river,” Truran said. “He wants to have done it, but not to do it.” He also said that it would be a mistake for us to trust Odendaal’s word. “He’s an Afrikaner, you know, and they have a tendency to destroy anything that doesn’t work according to their terms.”
Chmielinski seconded this, and added that while he had once considered Odendaal a smart man shackled by an inability to control his emotions, he now considered him simply “stupid.” He thought the best thing to do would be to humor Odendaal until we gained control of the remaining expedition supplies.
Durrant ventured that Odendaal might benefit from “positive reinforcement,” but added that “he started this trip in a better position than any of us to get on well, and step by step he has squandered those advantages.”
Bzdak was blunt and succinct: “The river has broken him.”
I did not trust Odendaal, but I did consider my own insecurities similar to his. In fact, that afternoon, just before he left Luisiana, we had sat by ourselves and had a brief talk, an attempt at hatchet burying. He had agreed when I said that we were alike, that we had both arrived in Peru unsure of ourselves. He had been worried about his ability to lead an expedition of such magnitude; I had lacked confidence in my ability to fit in with a group of strangers, and to travel the river and write about the experience.
And deep down in my stomach, the place where, as a child, I had believed my soul could be found, burned the knowledge that what I despised in others was that which I feared in myself. Looking over my notes a little later, I found an entry made during the Cachora-to-Triunfo run, after Odendaal had taken a bad swim. “Admit it—a certain satisfaction watching FO bloodied—this is ugly stuff.” It confirmed that I was capable of exactly what I detested most about Odendaal, the pleasure he seemed to take from the suffering of those with whom he shared a common purpose. As the wise old French admiral says in Lord Jim, “One talks, one talks, but at the end of the reckoning one is no cleverer than the next man, and no more brave.”
11 • The Ene
Chmielinski and Truran insisted that I use the Luisiana-to-Atalaya leg to get in shape to paddle a sea kayak. They designed a regimen that kept me in Truran’s white-water boat for an hour the first day, two hours the second, three the third, and so on. In theory, when we finished the ten-day run to Atalaya I’d be able to sit in the kayak all day. Meanwhile, they, Bzdak, and Durrant paddled the raft and amused themselves by jeering at my efforts, mocking my fear, and fishing me out of the cool brown Apurimac.
The kayak terrified me. It wasn’t much longer than I, and compared to the lumbering raft it seemed a tippy, skittish insect. The raft rode above the river, but the kayak sat right down in it and vibrated with the rumble of distant rapids long before my ear picked them up. Also, I found myself utterly incapable of judging the river’s myriad new currents. The rapids were smaller than the upper Apurimac’s, but the river was pocked with frothy white remolinos, or whirlpools, up to forty feet wide, with outer lips that rose as much as four feet above their vortex eyes. My bladder gauge said these could easily swallow a kayak.
Drowning was my most immediate concern, but I had others. According to Durrant and Truran my most serious problems on the three-thousand-five-hundred-mile haul from Atalaya to the sea would be fatigue and tenisinivitis (a painful, debilitating inflammation of the tendon sheaths in the wrist). The only cures for tenisinivitis are complete rest for six weeks or surgery. To prevent it, one must learn to wield a paddle properly, but as with paddling the raft, proper technique is the opposite of instinct.
To simplify gravely, the key to manipulating the quarter-turn, two-bladed paddle is to regard the arms as fulcrums. For example, to execute a left stroke, one does not pull the blade toward the body with the left hand. Rather, one extends the left arm, hand loosely gripping the paddle shaft, pushes with the right hand from the waist forward, and at the end of the stroke retracts the left arm.
Repeatedly, I found myself concentrating so hard on technique that I forgot to look where I was going, only to discover myself hurtling toward a whirlpool, a bank, or a boulder. I then tossed technique to the wind and paddled furiously. Too often the result recalled my first time on ice skates, when my eyes, frozen in fear, had locked on the skating-rink wall even as I slammed into it.
One soggy accident built on another, and I couldn’t help thinking, as I hauled myself back into the kayak: Three thousand five hundred miles of this?
“Tell yourself two things,” an exasperated Truran said to me again and again. “Don’t tighten your fingers on the paddle, and think push, not pull.”
“You will have a lot of time to practice,” Bzdak yelled from his safe perch on the raft, and laughed in his squeaky way. He enjoyed my flailings immensely and teased me without mercy until the day I called him a talking pierogi (a sort of ravioli I had once eaten in a Polish restaurant). He was stupefied: “Where did you learn this word?”
Late in the afternoon that first day out of Luisiana I heard Chmielinski shout. I looked up from my paddling to see the raft about a hundred yards downstream. Chmielinski was standing up, his hands cupped into a megaphone.
“Joe, what is that?” He pointed toward what appeared to be a half-submerged rock in the reeds along the left bank.
I paddled out of the main current, toward the rock. A vulture had perched on it but took flight just before I banged the rock with my paddle. It felt as if I had struck a heap of wet rags. Only then, shocked, did I focus on the blue feet bulging through sandal straps, the swollen gray thighs, the oozing hole that had once been a stomach, the torn gold sweater and crimson chest, the pecked-away face framed by black hair.
Choking back nausea, I turned and paddled downstream as fast as I could.
“It was a body,” I said when I caught up with the raft.
“Anyone we know?” Truran asked.
“I don’t think so. It looked Peruvian.”
Shaking, I tied up the kayak, climbed aboard the raft, and made myself a nest amid the food bags in the center. I lay down and shut my eyes. A couple of hours later we stopped at a marine checkpoint, but the lieutenant greeted the news of the corpse with no more concern than he would that of a dead dog. He did not even ask where we had seen it.
San Francisco, the largest settlement on the Apurimac, consists of a score of one-story buildings of wood and cement and a boxlike marine headquarters. If San Francisco were in the high country it might be quaint, all whitewashed colonial architecture and cobblestone streets, but the jungle eats the quaint, and San Francisco is not so much a town as a slum. The two main streets are mud, the buildings are dank, moldy, and starkly industrial in design, and the people look tired and defeated.
About fifty locals gathered around the raft the afternoon we arrived. They were loud, as if noise could hold back the encroaching jungle rot, but they seemed more bored than mean, their lethargy the weariness of the besieged—San Francisco sits well within the Red Zone, at the end of a jagged dirt road that winds down out of the mountains from Ayacucho, fifty miles southwest.
“Hey, Whitey, you want to buy some marijuana?” a grizzled mestizo yelled out, his T-shirt identifying him as a member of
the “California Yatch Club” [sic]. Another man urged us to sample his “oro blanco” or white gold—cocaine.
Leaving the others to guard the boat, Chmielinski went to register with the base commander, and I investigated the marketplace. Not since Cuzco, a month earlier, had I had the opportunity to shop for fresh food. Now that simple act overwhelmed me. Blindly, without bothering to haggle over prices, I grabbed lentils, tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, parsley, bananas, ginger, chilies, evaporated milk, cooking oil, avena “Quaker,” cinnamon, a plastic pail for water and one for a lunch bucket, a machete, and, with First Mate Bzdak in mind, three bottles of pisco and a case of beer.
Exhausted, I shouldered my treasure and walked into the street. I heard a loud epithet and turned to find myself face-to-face with a dozen rifle barrels—I had wandered right into a marine flag-raising ceremony. I walked another block and sat down in the shade. A burro stopped and stared at me and unleashed a superb volume of urine, then galloped up the street scattering women and children. A dwarf and a young boy with a deformed right leg chased the beast. The boy wobbled like a bowling pin until he slipped and fell in the urine puddle.
When Chmielinski found me we hauled our supplies down to the river. The crowd had doubled in size and pressed in on the boat. A drunk lunged for Durrant, she whacked him with her paddle, soldiers dragged the man away. We departed as fast as we could.
We lost sole possession of the river at San Francisco, where the Ayacucho road crosses a bridge (the first on the river below Cunyac, and the last until the Atlantic) and slops to a muddy end. At that point the traffic has no choice but to slide into the river itself, where it is serviced by a fleet of ragged boats often called yonsins, or Johnsons, after the Swedish manufacturer of the outboard motors of choice in the area.
The dorylike Johnsons are designed to traverse the broad whirlpools and flat but deceptively strong rapids of the lower Apurimac and the Ene River, which begins thirty-five miles below San Francisco. The typical boat is about forty feet long but only a couple of feet wide, with a shallow draft and low gunwales that rise barely to the hips of the seated and invariably terrified passengers. Studied from a distance, a Johnson beating along the river looks like an enormous motorized pencil.
Near the right bank, where the current was weakest, a Johnson lumbered upstream. It veered toward us. A shirtless man balanced like a bowsprit at the top of the prow, his brown chest bared and thrust into the wind on this bright, suffocatingly humid day. He held a thin pole about twelve feet long and studied the river intently. Behind him, strung along the boat one by one, sat the sort of farrago one expects to see on a Peruvian bus: dark little men in bright straw hats and gaudy shirts, fat women with chickens clutched snugly in the laps of their crisp white-cotton church dresses, children half-naked, goats in harnesses, drums of kerosene and gasoline, bushels of bananas and pineapples.
The Johnson chugged alongside our raft. A second bare-chested man sat at the stern, working twin forty-horse outboards. His nonchalant expression contrasted sharply with the looks of lugubrious determination on the faces of his passengers, who were not happy to be bouncing around in the middle of the river. They were bound for church—this was Sunday—but not at all sure they’d arrive. The boat’s utter lack of life preservers was a matter of economics, not confidence.
“Where are you going?” Bowsprit shouted.
“Brazil!” Chmielinski shouted back. “To where the river ends!”
At this a great cheer erupted from the Johnson, and the worried faces gave way to gap-toothed grins that said, Now there is a ship of fools! We had painted our noses and cheeks white with zinc oxide against the sun, and for insect armor we wore our black-and-gray-striped, chain-gang long underwear. With his loud red bandana tied over his head Bzdak looked like a gypsy, and Truran had fashioned a garish, sun-blocking nose plate from cardboard and silver duct tape. Durrant wore a bathing suit, unheard of on the river, and all four men sported scraggly beards. We were a motley crew, if not a disgusting one, but the locals waved and wished us luck. As we did them, in the sincere belief that at this moment, with the Johnson beginning to climb the rapid we had just descended, their cause was the needier. The men clutched their hats, the women clutched their chickens, and their faces reverted to that mask of hardened resignation.
The pilot attacked the rapid head-on. Water gushed up and over the low gunwales. The propellers jumped out of the water and the pilot gunned all eighty caballos to no avail—the blades caught only air and foam. The boat stalled, the river beat on it, Bowsprit planted his pole and struggled to drive the boat forward. He failed. The frantic pilot maneuvered to keep his nose straight in the rapid—if he went broadside the boat would capsize immediately—and the passengers screamed.
Slowly, however, the prop caught water, gained fragile purchase, held its own. Bowsprit strained mightily. The Johnson earned a foot, four feet, ten feet. Then it burst through the top of the rapid and another great cheer rose up and the boat hurtled toward San Francisco, Bowsprit silhouetted defiantly against the wind.
The knowledge that such everyday heroics, and heroic tragedies, are part of the river’s rhythm should have put my struggles with the tiny kayak in context, but pain has a way of destroying perspective. The day we left San Francisco I managed two hours in the cursed thing, and got out of it in a state of extreme discomfort. The vessel offered no back support, and, with my legs crammed into the hull, I could not move at all. When Durrant said she was not feeling well, and fashioned herself a sickbed atop the food bags, I gladly tied the kayak to the raft’s stern and took her position at left-front paddle.
It was the first time I had worked that part of that boat. I asked Bzdak for advice.
“Best thing,” that veteran long-distance paddler said in a low whisper, “is take it easy.” He had perfected a grandiose, elegantly inefficient paddling technique, one that required almost no work but gave the appearance, to the ever-vigilant Captain Chmielinski, of extraordinary effort.
An hour later I had the Bzdak Stroke down cold, and sat happily on the raft and watched the jungle slip by. As we pulled away from the smoky outlying huts of San Francisco the vibrantly green bush grew dense and thick. The low jungle wall ran unbroken along the banks, but in the sloping hills beyond it were neat squares of a duller, more orderly green—coca plantations and grazing meadows and the odd banana orchard. Every half hour or so, to break the grip of the incessant tropical sun, we dove into the still cool Apurimac, now a hundred yards wide and running slowly, at perhaps four knots.
At high noon (Chmielinski called out the exact time) we shipped our paddles and dug avocados, cheese, and a pineapple out of the plastic pail stored on the raft’s cool floor. After lunch we paddled in shifts, Chmielinski and I working in back while, in front, Bzdak and Truran slept, read, and teased Durrant.
Two hours later we traded places. Chmielinski went immediately to sleep. I, too, started to drift off to the earnest cadence of Truran and Bzdak paddling behind us, their every sharp thrust timed to Truran’s authoritative “Stroke!” But after one particularly strenuous sequence I sneaked a glance from under my hat and saw their paddles lying unused on the raft floor. Each man had a beer in hand, and at each count they gave a little jump on the back tube, which felt enough like a stroke to keep Chmielinski slumbering.
About four o’clock the flat green Mantaro River entered from the left, or west, signaling the beginning of the Ene River. In the late afternoon light, the most beautiful of the day, we waved good-bye to the Apurimac, our home those last two months. Above us, puffy cumulus clouds turned gold and crimson, and the sun, on its downward arc, reflected softly off the jungle wall. In midday the bush had been an indecipherable monochrome, a solid block, but at dusk each tree, each vine, each broad plant leaf glowed with its unique shade of green, and the river, as it ambled through that happy republic of foliage, seemed for the first time a gentle place.
Promptly at five we searched the banks for a campsite, soon found a
broad, sandy island, and quickly enacted our domestic routine—unload the raft, pitch tents, gather firewood. I took a swim, which included my semiweekly shampoo, and stood naked in the setting sun to dry and marvel at the jungle’s fecund splendor. Then into cotton pants and shirt as the mosquitos and blackflies came out, and off to the campfire to marvel again, this time at cook-of-the-day Chmielinski’s impeccable kitchen: utensils laid out to hand, bowls and spoons and cups in careful rows, coffee poured, dinner simmering away in the stew pot.
“Piotr,” Truran asked as we sipped coffee, “have you always been so … neat?”
Chmielinski thought about this while he cut carrots into the stew. “Yes,” he said finally. There had been no choice. He had been raised in a family of nine children, and without order they would have been lost. He added that he had an identical twin brother, and that he had not seen any of his family since he had left Poland in 1979. Then he stopped. “Where is that Zbyszek?” he asked suddenly. “He never misses his coffee.”
It rained hard during the night, a dense, tropical rain, and in the morning fog curled upward in soft plumes toward a patchwork-gray sky. A fine mist hung over the water, then swelled to rain.
Late in the day we drifted into a pongo, where narrow rock walls compressed the Ene and increased her velocity to about six knots. The river rolled and boiled. The locals called this the pongo of the Seven Devils, for the seven furious whirlpools that are said to be capable of swallowing a Johnson. Nervous, flustered, I struggled to master the kayak before meeting the demons. But they were only my fear, and the pongo spit me out unscathed.
