Noah's Travel Journal - South America, Third Entry

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Lessons In Mortality

I've gotten some comments from very concerned parties regarding my previous updates, and how they seem to revolve around escaping the bony clutches of death. In order to not dissapoint, this update will be no different. There is nothing quite like looking into the dark depths of the reaper's hood, to make us reevaluate our time among the living...and to create a large mess in our undergarments.

Where was I? Ahh yes, "Panic." Wonderful for creating adrenaline surges and engaging the fight-or-flight response, but it tends to cloud judgement somewhat. I dropped my paddle and violently clawed for any air that might be hiding nearby. I flashed back to my near-drowning episode when my break from kayaking began, and had a moment of clarity long enough to pull my sprayskirt off and escape from my inverted plastic coffin.

Zan fought to lug me and my baot to the bank, but any eddies we could have rested in had been washed out with the floodwaters. Just as we reached a shallower, shoaly area, the raft filled with wide-eyed tourists arrived at ramming speed. I got sandwiched between a tube and the rocks while my boat was pulled aboard. Thankfully there were only five tourists that day, so we all had space on the pontoons and hunkered down for the first large rapid, 200 feet ahead.

As my fellow guide Patricio jumped in the kayak and launched himself overboard, I wondered what the passengers thought about their captain abandoning ship after recruiting a half-drowned safety kayaker. This thought occupied about two seconds of my time until I looked downstream and focussed on the task at hand. Holes that normally recirculated boats for a short time, were now vertical standing waves that literally created liquid mountains in the river. When my crew charged the hills, the 14 foot boat couldn't even cover the face of the waves that were inviting us to slow down and surf for a while. We battled against such Siren calls of disaster and powered to the take-out like a well-oiled rafting machine. I've only navigated hydraulics with such raw power on the Colorado River in the mighty Grand Canyon.

In the flat water at the take-out, Zan spotted me as I rolled the kayak multiple times without a problem. The ability was there, but the timing had been all wrong. This thought was going through my head as I carried my kayak down initially, but I had disregarded my instincts and taken the power of the river for granted. As soon as respect for the river diminishes, it cries like a neglected child; deafeningly, until it has your undivided attention and love once again.

Around this time, Zan and I felt the strong pull of the road and thought we might investigate the rafting scene in other parts of Ecuador. Our astute boss saw this desire before it was voiced, and quelled it with the suggestion that we move into the loft above the equipment office; carte blanche. As if to solidify the offer, the sun decided to burn through the clouds for days on end. The heat lifted our spirits and conversely lowered the water level.

After a fair amount of time with diminished flow level, we finally rounded up enough tourists daring enough to run the upper class IV section of the Pastaza. I accompanied five tourists as a sixth passenger in the boat, in order to learn the route of descent. Little did we know, the route had disappeared with the water that usually spilled out of the dam.

After a couple of rapids and a hard, yet ineffective bit of paddling, we were perched on a steep, slanted rock shelf above the water channel we needed to be in. The five men in the boat got out and worked it into position for a free-fall down the shelf. We jumped in as the raft plummeted to meet the river just above an unavoidable hole that spanned the entire channel.

Pulling rank I ordered a high-side command and moved everyone to the downstream side of the boat as we dropped in sideways. It was just enough ballist downriver to keep the fast water from grabbing the side in the bottom of the hole. The passengers seemed unworried with Patricio and my shouting about rowing harder as we plowed into a rock just downstream. The boat teatered on edge for a second and then flipped, as did the laid-back mood.

We were like a pack of locusts just entering the boulder garden where water is much more effective than any pesticide. I tried to grab paddles floating by, but just ended up with rocks and bruises. A birds-eye view would have shown something akin to a Pachinko machine with all the tourists getting more spread out and battered the farther through the rock maze they went. The shining light of my brother, the safety kayaker, shone on the righteous path to the shore. Oh, sweet salvation for all.

The gravity of the situation set in as we counted two paddles missing. We moved the two women to the back to get more ballist and paddle power up front in order to compensate for the dead weight we would now be pulling. Dissent and mutiny are always nightmares, but especially when the din of approaching whitewater drowns out the shouting match. The hefty lad sitting in front of me decided that if his wife couldn't stay in front, he wasn't going to pull his weight (which was already making our side ride low).

We were already entering the tounge of fast water on one of the five worst rapids on the stretch of river. We entered the first hole sideways, still paddling hard to the right. Just as it seemed we might drift over the lip, I saw the wall of water rushing back at me. Our boat slipped down into the hole and I recieved intimate, carnal knowledge of its depths as it ripped me out of the raft like a rag doll.

I swam right and held my breath for a brief bit of recirculation in the next hole. As our Peruvian passenger Victor, and I entered the largest behemoth of them all (and just the start of a monster wave train), I thanked my lucky stars we had made the swim. The left 2/3 of the river was a five foot waterfall above a boxcar-size boulder that narrowed our passage on the right to a maximum of 15 feet. The left passage, in layman's terms, would be known as sure death. "Into the river and through the rocks, back into the raft we go..."

Miraculously we all ended up on the left bank, just above the next rapid. No amount of good humor or chocolate and peanuts that we offered could remedy the battered Californians (mid-honeymoon) or the shell-shocked Peruvian, now rocking back and forth in the dark depths of psychosis. We packed the raft and gear through a little bit of jungle and emerged on the road where our driver was waiting. Victor hopped a bus back to town while we convinced the other four that not going on the class III part would ensure that they never went rafting again.

We raced downriver intime to meet the lost paddles at our next put-in. Following the theme of disaster, the van refused to start when we tried to drive down to the take-out. Zan and I took our combined $5 and hiked out to a bus, bussed down the road to a town to get the essentials (bread, cookies, water and hard alcohol) and call for another van, hitch hiked and ran along back roads and a rock quarry, and arrived at the take-out just as the tourists were looking to offer Patricio up to the River Gods as a sacraficial scapegoat. We passed around oreos and the bottle of sugarcane alcohol until the passengers forgot their problems, injuries and names.

The class IV tourist run had transformed into a solid class IV+ and V at such low water. An already small and narrow boat with insufficient paddle power didn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Another great example of cutting losses and escaping with your life, even if there's pride at stake.

Many good times followed, filled with music and dancing. When we weren't running the river we were sent on complimentary adventures in the Amazon rainforest. I thought the name "Extreme Jungle Tour," was just to draw in tourists, but when I found myself scaling a large rock wall with the aid of a jungle vine, I reevaluated my initial skeptecism. With more varieties of medicinal plants than one can possibly imagine, it's a shame our culture feels eliminating the rainforest in the name of progress is a better policy than sustainability. Damn, there I go again, wearing my bleeding heart on my sleeve.

I had not been involved in any life-threatening ordeals for at least a week. On a day off I decided to go with two kayaking friends to watch one of them drop off a waterfall on the Rio Verde. It is about a 20 foot drop that is 150 yards above a 300+ foot waterfall called, Pailon Del Diablo (Devil's Cauldron). As we waited for John below, throw-bags in hand, some locals explained that nine people had died on the river (none in kayaks).

The picture is snapped as the kayak shoots off the pour over. We wait for the boat to surface, but the flat-bottom design (not appropriate for tackling waterfalls) is squirrely and battered down by the falls. It is finally washed out, but without a passenger. Throw-bags are tossed into the waterfall and at the boat in vain rescue attempts. The borrowed boat has a rapid descent in its short future. Five minutes pass. Words don't come, but the helmet does. Ten minutes pass. The crowds come. Twenty minutes pass, the tears and police come. Thirty minutes pass. The body comes. Cheating death like only a few know how, it grabs the throw-bag line. These are moments of clarity, a reevaluation of our mortality...