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Outside Magazine December 2001

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Pourover (Cont.)

I OFTEN THINK OF paddling as a dialogue or a dance with the river, like two partners who murmur to each other in the closest moments. After the first few days of rising confidence, then humility, now, on the fourth day, the river and I had come to an easier intimacy. The Cotahuasi had taught me, very simply, to be present. When I beat myself up for missing a line through a rapid, I was not present. When I patted myself on the back, I was not present. Whenever I was not present I got schooled. I'd bang a rock or drop into a sticky hole. On the fourth day, as I paddled, I thought, "There is only this." And the "only this" unfolded into a series of steep, constricted rapids of reverberating beauty.

There was a river-wide hole and a sharp ledge dropping onto an enormous rock, just a thin channel of water running down its side. There was Centimeter Canyon, a complex Class V rapid that squeezed through a five-foot gap at the bottom. At every one of these runs I'd shake my head, decide to portage, then be transfixed by the simple magic of seeing a clean line of current. And I'd hear the question, "What are you here for?" Each time I picked up my boat to walk the rapid, I'd find myself putting it right back in the water. It was perhaps the best day of river running I've ever known.

On the sixth day we paddled out of the canyon into a broad moraine edged with trees. The walls fell back to dry mountain slopes and the river widened and braided through beds of gravel. We could smell the sea. Lining the banks were lime-green vineyards and low adobe houses. At one bend I heard dogs barking and looked up to see two women in bright orange skirts and sweaters waving from the shore, two tiny children in wool hats beside them. Then came a wide side canyon cutting in from the left. Iquipi, the take-out.

I'm always amazed at how quickly expeditions end. In less than an hour the rafts were rolled, the bus and van were loaded, and we were jouncing down a dusty road past farm fields and shacks made of poles and bound rushes to the Pan American Highway at the coast. We turned south, with the Pacific on our right, and in the first bustling town we piled out at a white-tiled ice cream shop and each came away with a quadruple-dip cone.

THREE NIGHTS AFTER I got back to the States I heard the news that Peru had suffered an 8.4 earthquake. The city of Arequipa, where we had begun the trip and where the Vellutino family lived, was badly damaged. The epicenter was near Oco-a. The name rang a bell. It was the town where we had turned onto the Pan American Highway, at the mouth of the Cotahuasi.

I waited two days out of respect for more urgent emergency business and then called Gian Marco. His wife, Lillian, answered. She said they were all OK. The steeple of the colonial cathedral in Arequipa had fallen literally at her feet. The burro trail we had followed was cut by slides; crews were trying to restore it. At Camana, where we had eaten ice cream, the ocean had abruptly receded 300 yards from the beach and then came thundering back in a 20-foot tidal wave. At least 26 people drowned. They were finding bodies a half-mile into fields.

I thought about the Cotahuasi, the vast, deep, unstable canyon. The condor and the skulls. The two women and the children waving from the bank, the reed huts along the shore built under rockfall. There would be new dead buried among the old. "And Iquipi?" I asked. "And the river?"

"There is no word yet from Iquipi," said Lillian. "The river is all right. No wall has fallen to dam it up, but the water is muddy."

The water was muddy, and wide. It was still flowing. I imagined it emerging from the deep gorge, spilling into gravel beds and braids. The water was brown with dirt and came from a place I remembered as a dream, and it told a story I could not decipher.

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