|
Paddling in the void
By
Graeme Addison
Bill was exactly the kind of client we
needed at that stage in the development of the Rivermen,
South Africa’s first commercial river-running outfit. He was
adventurous, keen to learn, strong if not physically
superfit, and best of all, an American who promised to bring
us more international customers. We were a small, amateurish
enterprise little different from a casual group of canoeists
who did this sort of thing for fun. But, of course, we did
it for money. The year was 1984, the season full summer, the
river up – and rising more. The day couldn’t have been
better.
The Umko had that creamy brown colour it gets when there’s
been steady rain upstream and the grassy foothills of the
Drakensberg have been wrung out like a wet towel. It was
turning darker, though, which meant that somewhere a heavy
downpour from the night before was eroding the hillsides.
This is the country near Ixopo that Alan Paton described so
memorably in Cry, the Beloved Country – a land
bleeding to death in red gullies of erosion. It was also a
land of mayhem and murder, cloaked under a solemn green
mantle of bushland and forest. Richmond, perched at the top
of the river gorge, was fast becoming a killing field where
rival Inkatha kaZulu and ANC underground factions fought to
the death over control of political turf. Whiteys travelling
in this area were relatively safe, because irrelevant. But
one shouldn’t count on it.
The Mkomazi River – meaning “place of the cows” in Zulu, and
usually pronounced Umkomaas or just Umko by mlungus (whites)
– carves a series of spectacular gorges in the landscape.
Down below, the surging rapids fill with caramel-coloured
warm water during the summer rains from October to March,
and in the sweltering heat it’s easy to imagine you are in
darkest Borneo or Central America instead of a mere 130km
from Durban on Africa’s southeast coast.
On the trip that day were 20 paddlers including the two
guides – Marco and myself, and three assistants, Lynn, Brian
and Basil. Most of the clients were either in two 4-seater
RiverRider inflatables or four kayak inflatables, but Bill
had chosen a hard-shelled tupperware kayak like those of the
guides. This was one Rivermen’s biggest excursions so far
and we counted on good feedback to bring in more clients for
the future. But operations were pretty rudimentary, and
guiding even more so.
The fleet of inflatables included 2-seater supermarket
specials, literally bought the day before from the OK
Bazaars. Red and grey, with pointed snout and tail, a lilo-like
inflated floor and fairly narrow tubes that buckled in big
water, they cost about R750 each and we had four of them.
Here was a boat that could scrape through rocky channels or
bounce wildly over big wave trains. Little did we know it
then but these “Softies”, as we called them, though they
turned out to rip easily and seldom lasted more than a trip
or two, were to be the inception of the universally loved
Croc inflatable. By the next season we were experimenting
with our own proto-Crocs in PVC – but that’s another story.
Bill wasn’t having any of it. No Softy for him, he demanded
a real kayak, so he got a yellow Dancer from our prized
collection of these new plastics. They were imported from
America and bought from the profits the house I sold when I
gave up my job as a journalism lecturer in Grahamstown to go
on the river. For me it was a sort of internal exile because
I was disgusted with self-censorship by the media under
apartheid. But politics was far from my mind that day. I
felt, like all river-runners then and now, that we were part
of an international fraternity of whitewater, where society
and all its stupid injustices was beside the point. What
counted was the Zen spirit of the stream, going with the
flow, seeking to unravel the paradox that nature lived in us
and yet it could kill us too. The trick was to live on the
edge. Commercial operations were just a means to this end –
for the guides.
The lesson we were destined to learn that day was that it
was rather different for those we paid to lead them.
Dancers were the new big thing in paddling. We had 12. They
were outrageously expensive, but boy were they short, nippy
and durable, unlike the fragile and rotten glass fibre
whitewater kayaks we’d been paddling until then. Nowadays,
20 years later, the Dancer itself looks like an archaic
remnant of some previous time when kayaks were long, roomy
and unplayable; but it didn’t seem so then. Everything we
knew about surfing, endering, hot-dogging and doing
three-sixties in small holes came from paddling the Dancer.
It represented the decisive break with the previous era of
straight downriver tripping.
And Bill wanted in, so there he sat on the pool below the
put-in bridge at Hela Hela, gingerly rocking from side to
side. Wondering whether to try a roll. He had previously
been with me on a kayak school on the lower Tugela at
Mandini, so he had an elementary grasp of the sport and knew
which way was up. Lantern-jawed under a tightfitting helmet
that seemed to make his eyes and neck bulge, he had broad
shoulders and a tapering waist, hairy wrists and a big
sporty grin. He said he skied in the winter. He was aged
about 30, living and working in South Africa as an
engineering consultant, I think. Bill was thoughtful and
inclined to try things on his own. It was to be his undoing.
The pack of boisterous clients with us were all friends from
Durban and Johannesburg companies but they didn’t know Bill,
who had come along independently for a second try. Marco, my
fellow guide, winked at me. We knew each other well, lived
in Marco’s house on the Bluff, and by now had a fair idea of
just how irrational clients could be when let loose in the
wilds. Marco was destined for a legendary career as a
Zambezi whitewater photographer but in those days – before
the Zambezi was commercially run or even thought of – he was
a lowly beach guard at South Beach. He went off to work each
morning and I stayed to sell river trips by phone and fax.
He came back tanned and relaxed in the evenings, with the
occasional story of near-drownings; and I was ragged from
another frustrating day trying to prove that yes, it is
possible to run rivers in this country. No, really. Somehow,
at the end of each week, we had half a dozen or more happy
campers ready to give it a go.
Marco was off weekends. It always struck me as ludicrous
that this professional safety officer paid by the Durban
City Council sat throughout the week on a fairly empty
beach, and then at weekends when the crowds descended, he
took off, leaving the job to volunteers. How’s that for
organisation.
I
was lucky to have him with me though, and by the end of the
day his skills in CPR would be put to use. We launched off,
the river swirling in big dark eddies feathered with a bit
of foam, the muttering whirlies telling us that it was
growing bigger every minute. There was hardly any Safety
Talk because although we knew plenty about what was
dangerous we hadn’t formalised it. We were the pioneers in
this game, feeling our way on African rivers without much
benefit of international models. Trips started with advice
to watch us and do what we said. The formula that today’s
river guides prate like bored airhostesses would come only
after the searing experience of death on the river.
We were running No 1 to No 8, a great Grade 3-4 route with
rapids that deserved better names than mere numbers. The
looming gorge sides hung steeply over the pool-and-drop
rapids which curled around smoothed granite boulders.
Everywhere, massive wild fig trees clung with gnarled roots
to the cliff sides. Our camp had been set up in a field at
No 8 where we spent Friday night, and early this morning we
shuttled in a Land River and bakkie on the winding passes,
about 80km via Richmond and down the steep track to Hela
Hela. The trip on the river was about 15km and would take
only a couple of hours including a lunch-stop at the
spectacular lookout over rapids 5&6.
When we reached No 1 it was all sound and fury, signifying
caution. The current charged up against a solid rock wall
and plunged sideways over a drop, with huge holes developing
on both flanks of the chute. It was easy to run if you
stayed midstream but I didn’t fancy the chances anyone who
flipped against the rock face and dropped into the holes; a
throw line rescue or long chase would certainly follow.
Nothing happened. The whole party coasted through No 1 as if
dodging Joburg traffic in rush-hour; and it went the same
way on No 2, 3 and 4 – easy-peasy, which in retrospect is
why we all became overconfident. One thing you can be sure
about on a river is that overconfidence breeds accidents,
even more so when you are with clients who have little or no
experience of how deep, strong and heavy water really is
when you are tumbling along at the mercy of it. A thrilling
day suddenly darkens with fear – especially for the guides –
when someone falls in above a major hazard.
The Umko played with us, spinning a story of great
adventurers mastering the forces of nature. Marco and I, of
course, had taken our batterings on rapids like Unicorn and
Four Man Hole in the Tugela Gorge so we knew the
consequences of misjudgement. But today we were not immune
to the mood. We must have forgotten something. Marco, who
relished war stories, liked to describe how, as a newcomer
to kayaking, he decided to show off by paddling into the
hole behind Unicorn on one of his early trips down the
Tugela. He was with Jerome Truran, champion whitewater racer
and pioneer playboater, our mentor in matters of paddling.
It was Jerome who said “You can dance with the river, but
you’ve got to know the steps”. Unicorn is a thick spire of
rock which only produces a nasty hydraulic at near flood
level. For Marco, the fact that Four Man Hole lay just 100
metres downstream of it added a further dash of terror to
the truly masochistic kick he got out of pulling the
Unicorn’s tail. This time, he had such a beating he barely
came out alive, choking up water and gasping for air. Jerome
showed absolutely no sympathy and tore into him with a
lecture on stupid moves.
But now the day was fine, the clients – including Bill who
was handling the twists and turns like a pro – were on top
of it all.
Then came 5&6. This is one long rapid with big rocky
features at beginning and end, which is why, I suppose, it’s
regarded as two rapids. In low water there is a distinct
break between them, but at higher levels there are just some
surging eddies allowing a short breather before the second
plunge. The river has changed somewhat in the more than two
decades since that fateful day. At that time there was a
stony island in river centre with a clear chicken run down
river right. In May 1984 – just weeks after our trip –
Cyclone Demoina dumped 600mm of rain in 24 hours on the
countryside, sending the Umko down its valley like a runaway
bulldozer. At one heave it remade the layout of 5&6, filling
the small right-hand channel with rocks so that the island
joined with the right-hand bank, and the main channel became
deeper. Before Demoina you could beach on the island and
lead clients down the chicken run. We made this our lunch
stop.
It was a good place for people to watch Marco and me perform
a little dance with the river while they munched away,
sitting on a high promontory with a grandstand view of the
thundering water below. In the middle of the river was, and
is, a whalesized granite shelf behind which the converging
currents set up a powerful eddy. Below that lies some
confused, boiling stuff with drops leading directly into two
standing boulders into which the current crashes directly:
you have to make a sudden turn to the right or risk getting
swept into the cleft between the boulders. Nervy, nice! The
rapid ends with one more pourover and you’re home free.
Watched by a group of curious black teenagers – herdboys who
spent their days and nights in the veld with their families’
precious wealth on legs, its cattle – we parked our boats
and walked down to see the rapid. It was big. Basil and
Brian, two other river types with a grasp of what they were
seeing, concurred that this was now a Grade 4 verging on
Grade 5 with its churning holes and currents ploughing into
the almost unavoidable bottom cleft. Clients shouldn’t
chance it. Take the chicken run. Basil and a friend headed
off alone to prepare the camp downriver for our arrival, and
we watched them skitter through the chicken run without
incident. Bill, who by now was looking increasingly
comfortable in his yellow Dancer, agreed with fellow kayaker
Brian that another chicken run on the extreme left of the
big shelf would be an OK route, provided they could dodge a
few toothy rocks and stick close to the bank, out of harm’s
way. Neither Marco nor I really paid any attention to the
conversation between them. We should have: it involved lots
of pointing and head nodding; which just goes to show that
you have to be vigilant.
What none of us noticed was that about 30 metres above 5&6
in the approaches was another shelf, low and flat, with a
strong suck-back, a keeper, growing behind it. It too lay on
river left. Situated under some gloomy fig trees it didn’t
seem like anything at the time; no-one gave it a second
glance. Those trees stick in my mind to this day like
hunched witchdoctors casting a spell on the place.
Marco and I gobbled down our sandwiches and pushed off to
give an exhibition of paddling – great for the ego of river
guides – by running the whole rapid in front of the admiring
crowd. The plan was that our assistant guide, Lynn, would
pack up and shepherd the clients on the bypass down the
island, meeting the two of us in the placid pool below. All
the party had to do was float down. Lynn was the only girl
on the trip and a personal friend of mine who had done the
Orange and the Tugela on other trips with The Rivermen.
Although this was a business enterprise it was also a social
thing. The notion that river guides should all be trained
and qualified hadn’t taken root in this country, and mostly
we went by who was most experienced, keen, and showed
presence of mind. Lynn’s role was that of a handlanger. I
knew she would offerto provide a bit of womanly humour and
civilisation on a stag weekend, taking care of the catering
and seeing that dishes and cutlery weren’t used a second
time without washing.
Lynn had been around on rivers and, like us, could read the
signs of a quickly rising level in the clumps of drifting
grasses and sticks that came sailing by.
From the moment we left the party, things began to go
wrong. The little circus act by Marco and I held people’s
attention briefly but as soon as we had zipped niftily past
the bottom boulders and out of sight behind them, the other
two kayakers headed upstream to make their entry on the far
left of the rapids. Brian made it safely down and joined us
below with a huge smile of relief. I was a bit puzzled where
he had come from but assumed he had dragged his boat down
the left bank past the first drop and got in there. While
waiting for the clients to appear I drifted lazily into the
bottom pourover and got thoroughly trashed in pounding
hydraulics I hadn’t been expecting. On the island, Lynn
marshalled the clients – no easy matter when most of them
were feeling sleepy after lunch – and somehow got them to
mosey on down the chicken run to the pool below.
She was still packing the cooler box when the African boys
on the other side of the river, opposite the low rock shelf,
started yelling and jumping up and down. At first she
couldn’t see what they were excitedly pointing at (thinking
maybe a crocodile) but then a flash of yellow and a bobbing
blue helmet alerted her to the worst.
Someone – she wasn’t sure who – was stuck in the hole and
apparently out of his boat, getting recycled in the
suck-back. Lynn started yelling too. But apart from a few of
the departing clients on the chicken run craning their necks
to look at her, nobody could see the personal and lonely
disaster unfolding for the kayaker upstream, out of sight
over the horizon of the river. By now the first few clients
were emerging from the chicken run to float by me: I waved
them into the left bank, to wait under another grove of
sinister overhanging fig trees. Meanwhile Lynn was screaming
my name and Marco’s: no luck, we were hundreds of metres
downstream and couldn’t possibly have heard her above the
water’s din. Although we had developed paddle signals for
“stop”, “go”, and “come this way”, there was no agreed alarm
signal (waving the paddle back and forth) and anyway our
plan meant there could be no cause for alarm.
Until I saw an upside-down yellow kayak come spinning past
the lower boulder. It cartwheeled briefly in the hole that
had trounced me, and plopped down at my elbow. I was amazed.
Where had this come from? Years later, that moment of
recognition keeps resurfacing from my subconscious like the
shock of waking to hear I’d failed crucial exam that I
confidently thought I’d passed. And failure it was. Bill’s
obvious intention when we left him had been to run the rapid
on the extreme left. We had ignored the hints and also
overlooked the keeper at the top which subsequently grabbed
him and rolled him over and over like a sausage in a
griller. Also, we simply hadn’t been in charge of the group.
They went their own ways, with a handlanger busy packing
leftovers. At least Lynn responded by doing everything she
could to attract attention. By the time Bill floated by
where she had dashed up onto the highest rocks to beckon us,
she glimpsed him blue in the face and apparently
unconscious. He soon vanished in the muddy maelstrom, and
did not resurface until Marco spotted a blue helmet adrift
in the pool. He paddled over to fetch it – and discovered a
body hanging underneath.
We learnt later that racing canoeists always gave the flat
shelf a wide berth, having had several near-drownings at the
spot. There’s nothing like knowing where the real risk sites
are. Bill blithely paddled straight over the flat rock – now
underwater in the rising flood – and never even made it into
5&6 except as a limp floating form. Maybe he would have
stood a better chance in a Softy, whose buoyancy and more
forgiving shape might have saved him from falling in.
If we’d needed a lesson in river safety we got it at the
cost one life: fortunately no more. No others tried the same
gamble. But not fortunately for Bill who in all innocence
probably thought that the flat, hissing water (indicating
the weir action or reversal occurring below the rock shelf)
was a safe place to shoot for the chicken run at left.
From that instant, rivers had my attention in a way it had
never been focused and held by anything before. My mind and
imagination became riveted on the deadly forces generated by
liquid in motion. It became an almost unwilling obsession to
visualise fluid dynamics and hungrily question lifesavers
and foreign river guides on their knowledge. Bill haunted me
– especially with the horror of what was to follow that day
– and the whole ghastly train of events imprinted itself on
my mind like scenes from the movie Deliverance. From
all of this sprang the Whitewater School leading to the
foundation of the SA Rivers Association (SARA, now the
African Paddling Association, APA) as well as everything I
have since written about rivers.
Talk about the Zen paradoxes of running rivers. Here was
sudden death in the raw. We were isolated in a steamy
subtropical environment, with birdcalls echoing through the
riverine forest and a pleasant breeze fanning our living
faces. It seemed absurd that an accident like this could
happen at all, but it had. I chased the Dancer, Marco
dragged the body up onto the clay bank under the fig trees;
and both of us realised abruptly that we were paddling in
the void. Beneath the surface of things was the terrible
truth that nature didn’t care one way or the other what
happened out here. Nothing was quite so real, or unreal, as
this place.
Marco felt for a pulse: nothing; gave CPR, pumped and felt
again – still nothing. Bill was dead. At least 15 minutes
must have elapsed between the time that Lynn was first
alerted and when Marco raised Bill’s white face out of the
water. We had no idea how many minutes before that the drama
had begun. In the warm conditions of the Umkomaas the brain
does not slow down as it would in colder water – it
continues to metabolise oxygen until there is none left in
the blood. You die quickly.
When Marco finally gave up and stood up, I knelt beside
Bill’s prone body and muttered: “I’m so sorry.” The rest of
the group stood around in silence, utterly stunned, their
faces almost as white as that of the corpse and their eyes
as expressionless. None of them had met the dead man before
the previous evening’s camp and their reaction was not a
case of shock at the demise of a known colleague: they had
simply retreated into private worlds of wishing they were
someplace else doing normal Saturday afternoon things, like
watching sport or relaxing by the pool. Not this. Little did
we as guides realise it then but the group would split up
and some of them flee into the hills to get away from the
river – and from us. The loss of trust in our leadership was
absolute. For one thing was damn sure, they were not going
back on that water and would rather walk away to oblivion.
Marco and I looked at each other and realised he would have
to accompany the walkers to find a road. Some broke away and
were lost in the hills for days.
“You take the body to the end,” said Marco, indicating one
of the Softies, “I’ll get everyone out of here”. By mutual
consent we felt we couldn’t leave the body where it was in
heat of the valley, even with an overnight guard; short of a
helicopter, which might not be able to land anyway, there
was no way except by river of getting Bill out of there. So
the two of us manhandled the sagging deadweight into the bow
end of the inflatable kayak while I took up a paddle and sat
on the raised stern with only my feet in the boat to steady
the body. There wasn’t room for two of us, with one lying
down. Should we tie him in? – no, it might complicate
matters if the boat capsized and he was dragged along with
it. But we decided to keep Bill’s lifejacket and helmet on
because there were big rapids to come and the chances of
damaging or even losing the body were high. With Marco, Lynn
and Brian promising to bring some of the inflatables down,
tied together, or leave the boats for later collection, once
they had sorted out the hikers, I nodded and backstroked
into the swollen current. It felt like a python writhing
around the boat, and my throat tightened.
It doesn’t do for me to dwell too much on the lonely trip
downriver with Bill, whose head lolled back as if he were
having a glorious time in the sun and surf. He didn’t catch
my eye, but then I studiously avoided his. Ahead lay rapids
7 and 8, the first with more holes than a golf course, the
second a roller-coaster wave train colliding with an earth
embankment at the terminus where boats often flip and
swimmers do big downtime in the murky depths. My destination
was the isolated little camp of green-and-tan tents where
Basil and friend, along with our drivers, would be brewing
sweet tea for the returning heroes. We had left that camp
with such optimism in our hearts in the morning, and Basil
had no idea what had occurred just minutes after his
departure from 5&6. I would have to bring the body home and
break the news.
We rushed along on the accelerating liquid conveyor belt
that took us to took the turn into No 7. Suddenly the Softy,
which was deflating thanks to a leak in the cheap plastic,
yawed, bent and tipped the living and the dead into the
churning water. This had to happen, but I wasn’t ready for
it. Disorientated at first, I tried to remember what the
textbooks said about managing bodies in wildwater and
couldn’t remember anything – probably because nobody had
ever chosen to give that kind of advice, not having much
call for it. We spun around and fell backwards over a drop
into a gnarly hole. If you’ve ever been in a washing machine
with a paddle, a boat, and a body, you’ll know that avoiding
all three isn’t possible. The likelihood is that the boat
will press you down, the paddle will smash you across the
face, and the body reach forward to embrace you with both
arms. The ghoulish scenario galvanised me into frantic
action, and with arms flailing and legs corkscrewing to get
out of the hole I wrenched free and hurled myself across the
upturned lilo floor to get a breather. Where the hell was
Bill? I caught sight of a blue helmet floating off towards
another horrendous spillover and launched myself after it,
catching the lifejacket just as we both went over into the
turbulence.
This time Bill gave me a big hug, as if reluctant to let go.
“Oh well,” I thought, “at least a drowned man can’t drown
any more.” The thought was quickly followed by another:
“Dammit, I can drown!” and with that I kicked
ferociously, got to the surface, retrieved paddle and boat,
and like a maniac yanked the body onboard as if it were the
last thing I would ever do.
From then on the trip was uneventful as I breathed hard,
trying to calm down, cursing the river, the situation, and
myself. Even No 8 with its pounding waves didn’t phase me
and shortly afterwards I pulled into the shallow cove from
which I could see Basil and the others chatting in
deckchairs. I told them what had happened, leaned over, and
vomited. My eyes filmed with tears of rage and shame. Nobody
asked me the details of what must have happened: they seemed
to imagine things for themselves. But anyway they obligingly
carried Bill up to the bakkie and laid him carefully down
for the long haul to the Richmond police station and morgue.
There Bill would rest at Purgatory’s door, lined up with the
victims of political violence, but set apart from their
bloody corpses because he was white and strangely unmarked
by the river’s fury.
All the rest of the story is about dealing with the legal
and emotional aftermath of death in the outdoors and not
worth rehashing except on guide training workshops. Yet it
is those details that tie you up psychologically for weeks
and months until the inquest is over and you can breathe
again. The magistrate at Richmond – his hands full with
death and criminal destruction of all kinds – found nobody
was to blame in this peculiar case.
Months later Bill’s relatives came from New York: a sweet
old mother and a huffing father who both seemed as anxious
to spare my feelings as I was theirs. We drove down to Hela
Hela and stood under the bridge, where Bill’s Mom flung a
single flower out onto the stream.
No arm rose up, Deliverance-like, from the depths.
There was only the whisper of the now wintry-cold, clear
water. If you ever think the river is just a playground,
remember: beneath the sparkling surface lies an appalling
void.
|
