BIG READ: Row, tip, crash your boat wildly down the ‘stream’

Never make a life-or-death decision on the morning your breakfast comes from a brewery.

Meet Barry Tuscano, author of one of the finest stories written about running a furious whitewater river. No, you don’t know him. But, like me, you might admire his Dutch foolishness.

I’m reading his story again as the rain thrums on the roof, as it has done all night.

Wind, thunder and lightning have disturbed my sleep. A cut-off-low cell is sweeping across the country. WhatsApp groups are full of flood warnings. Don’t drive across bridges if the water comes up over your ankles ... and if your car gets trapped, get out quickly “and head to higher ground”.

We awake to dark skies and still more rain.

Today we’re supposed to be heading to Parys for a day of rafting on the Vaal river. The trip leader, a whitewater rafting instructor, says the rapids are going to be “big”. The rapids are famous, at least among river runners. They have names like Gatsien, Big Daddy, Looksharp, Knuckle Crusher and Jaws.

Lying in the velvet predawn darkness I’m suddenly scared. Listening to the rain on the roof, I think of the river rising, fed by gushing stormwater drains and by the sheets of water flowing downhill from the ridge on which I live.

Today may be one of those days to be at home wishing I was on the river instead being on the river, wishing I was at home. There’s a reason for this. I’ve had a few nasty swims in churning whitewater in a patchy career as a river runner.

Today might be day for reading about rivers, instead of running them. So, I read, again Tuscano’s story, The New At Thirty Feet. It begins with Tuscano waking up on the banks of the New River in Virginia after a night of heavy rain.

He has somehow persuaded his girlfriend, his sister and her fiancé to come rafting on the New. They’ve never been in a boat before, let alone gone rafting on a whitewater river. Their boats are a pair of inflatable pool toys. Tuscano’s not worried that pool toys have no business being on any river, let alone the New, one of the holy rivers of American kayaking.

His theory of running big rivers is simple: “it’s only water”. Meaning it’s hard to get hurt.

Apart from drowning, of course, in a massive recirculating hydraulic, where the river folds in on itself in a maelstrom of water, foam, fury, logs, and whatever other detritus the river has in its grip. Which can, of course, include river runners, their boats and broken paddles.

The New has come up to 10m during the night, as measured by the flood gauge at the old railroad bridge where the kayakers and rafters start their trips. Most have decided not to run.

But Tuscano’s had a couple of Rolling Rocks for breakfast. Not the most potent of beers, but still, like the pool toys, a poor decision.

“It’s only water,” he says, leading his lambs to the slaughter.

The party launch from the put-in under the bridge and are instantly gripped by the current and swept downstream. The river is so high that the rapids have mostly disappeared. The New is now just a brown, churning, foam-flecked freight train.

There is no point in trying to paddle. They just hold tight to the little boats and hurtle downriver.

Then comes the sound of thunder. For half a heartbeat Tuscano thinks it’s the storm. Then, just downstream, he sees a curtain of spray rising into the sky and how the river somehow ... disappears.

Seconds later the two boats are at the edge of what in river speak is known as a “hole”. And, for the split, endless second before he, his girlfriend and their boat drop into its maw, Tuscano thinks “now I know what a hole is”.

The old river guides had a unique way of teaching the new guides what a “hole” was.

Some of them used to take the unblooded hopefuls who wanted to be river gods themselves, and strap them into a life jacket and a rock climbing harness, tie them to a rope and throw them into a “hydraulic”, where water flowing over a submerged obstacle changes direction and heads back upstream.

Depending on the size of the hydraulic and the rate of flow, they would learn what is was like to be in the grip of a river, the terrifying body blow of tumbling water, the flashes of sunlight as they reach the surface, then almost as quickly the crushing, tumbling darkness.

When I started training as a whitewater guide on the Vaal river in the spring of 1998, no-one threw me into hydraulic, at least not with a rope attached. A rope around the neck will kill you faster than drowning.

Our instructor had a better, faster way. Put on your kayak helmet and cinch the straps of your life jacket nice and tight. Now swim the rapid, my children, swim.

That was cool. I liked floating down the Vaal, the current running fast enough to feel but not like a runaway train, tumbling through the aptly named Gatsien Rapid, near Parys. I loved it. I bought all the gear, then a boat.

I liked the ropework too — the knots, the belays, the Z-drags, all the fast-thinking work to pull a trapped boat out of a hydraulic, or saving someone from being recirculated in nature’s equivalent of an industrial washing machine. I loved learning how to read a river, spotting the hazards — holes, pour-overs, eddies, siphons, strainers.

That was the year of living dangerously. We went places, like the Bushman’s River, near Weenen, where we camped a place called Darkest Africa.

I invited a lifelong friend. He came with his girlfriend and they slept in the back of his bakkie. He seemed hard-core but, as it turned out, perhaps not hard enough. As we slept that Saturday night, the river rose. Maybe a sluice had been opened upstream at Wagendrift Dam. Over breakfast of cereal and tea, we watched the Bushman’s sluice past, the colour of a frothy coffee milkshake.

The instructor said we’d run down to the low-water bridge, a jumble of concrete pipes — great for cars, a deathtrap for anyone in a raft. I was too busy worrying about the bridge to think of screaming a warning to my friends to paddle around the hole they dropped into. One second they were there, the next they were gone.

They popped up about 20m downriver, streaming snot and water, eyes as big as truck wheels, flailing to get back into their capsized raft.

Weenen. It’s not called the place of weeping for nothing

I was bold, ticking-off rivers as fast as I could run them. I needed 20 days of river time before I could take my guide’s test. Weekends were spent on the Crocodile River, just outside Joburg, as a trainee guide, paid in hot dogs and signatures in my logbook.

Swaziland’s Usutu River came next. The Usutu is glorious — wide and fast and the colour of dairy milk chocolate, running between green banks and boulders. Timeless, clichéd Africa stuff.

There, in a rapid named Zambezi, I took my first bad swim in whitewater — a few terrified minutes being pummelled by the river, my boat and paddle swept away — just me and the mighty Usutu.

I survived that swim and the others that followed, and thought I had tamed my terrors. It never occurred to me to heed the famous words of one river runner who said “you never tame a river, you just sneak past when it isn’t looking”.

In between paddling I read more books. Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness was a favourite. (She had the distinction of muscling an 18-foot raft down one of the Grand Canyon’s meanest rapids at high water, alone, naked and in the middle of the night — and surviving.)

Then there was Ian Player’s Men, Rivers and Canoes. Player, back from World War 2, still not a game ranger and working a dead-end job, borrowed a heavy wooden kayak and paddled from Pietermaritzburg to the sea, inventing the Dusi canoe marathon. Those first few paddles were epic enough but it is the story of his voyage down the Pongola River in the mid-1950s, with fellow game ranger Ken Tinley, that set my imagination on fire.

There was no whitewater to battle. But there were hippos and many crocodiles.

At one point, their canvas-and-wood kayak slid over on the creatures and for the rest of his life Player remembered the feeling of its scutes on the back of his legs as they paddled over it.

Player, more than most people, understood how travelling on a river puts you in touch with the Earth like nothing else.

“We paddled quietly on, afraid to talk and disturb the stillness that had settled upon us,” he wrote. “We were away from the killing mechanisation of that other world... There was so much to see, to hear, to smell. The pungent odour of rotting leaves, of woodsmoke from the Amatonga huts, of old figs lying in the mud, of mud itself and the river.”

Other books left me in no doubt as to what awaited if I screwed up. Take Peter Stark’s Last Breath, brutal and unforgettable short stories about what happens when adventure goes bad.

In A River of One’s Own, Stark tells the story of a fictional paddler named Matt, attempting a descent of the Tiger’s Leap Gorge on the Yangtze River.

Matt’s theory is that rivers, and the way they move around obstacles, teach you how to live your life. You can’t fight the hydraulics, he says one night round the campfire while the Yangtze roars through the gorge, but you should yield to them until the river tires of you and lets you go.

Not even a minute after launching into the current, the force of the river sweeps him over a massive rock and into the hole on the other side.

“He is instantly ripped out of his kayak,” Stark writes. “The water snaps his paddle shaft in two and tears it from his grip, strips the contact lenses from his cones, pulls the helmet from his head, and yanks at the straps of his life vest as if some great animal were shaking him in its teeth.”

What follows is a graphic account of the physiology of drowning, the lungs filling with fluid and the light fading from Matt’s consciousness as he’s driven into the river bed and into the cone of silence. He never surfaces again.

Tuscano, and his party on the New River are luckier, though luck is a relative term in white water.

The river destroys their boats, tries its best to maim, smash and drown them and then spits them out miles downstream. Tuscano finds his girlfriend on the riverbank, terrified, half-drowned but otherwise unhurt. His sister and her beau make it to the shore and find God. Only Tuscano ever gets in a boat again.

The stories were scary but I kept paddling until one day a friend phoned from KwaZulu-Natal. He was offering a little jaunt down a stream called the Ngangwane, which joins the lovely Umkomaas at a place called Riverside.

Looking back later, trouble began long before we launched onto the bubbling Ngangwane.

First, the paddlers arrived late to the river, which meant the safety briefing was rushed. When we pushed off, no-one knew who the safety kayakers were or even if there were any. It was just a motley party in boats racing downstream under gathering storm clouds.

It was also about to rain. Not just any old rain but a big old fat KwaZulu-Natal thunderstorm. Lightning forked on the hills and the river’s voice was drowned by thunder.

We should be off the river, I said, thinking that drowning was one thing, being fried by a lightning bolt was another. The other kayakers smirked. It’ll hit the hills they said, even as lightning struck a tree downstream.

Meanwhile, the river was rising and we were soon being carried along a runaway train of our own. Discipline vanished. We did not stop to scout rapids. We paddled hard and alone and chose our own lines down the torrent.

At some point I flipped my boat and then found myself circulating in a small but powerful hydraulic, flashes of light and blackness as the river tumbled me over and over.

More than a decade passed before I went near white water again.

Zambezi

It’s June on the Zambezi, downstream from the Victoria Falls bridge. The Zambezi is swollen with the summer rains hundreds of kilometres upstream in Angola.

Here, in the Batoka Gorge, the river’s flowing at 8-million litres a second.

The Batoka may not have the epic scale of the Grand Canyon, but it is undoubtedly more beautiful and its rapids will swallow a full-sized rubber raft and its occupants with exactly the same vigour as Pam Houston’s Lava Falls.

It’s proper high water now and only the lower half of the run — the last 10 rapids — are being run. The upper section is off limits until the water drops in the spring.

Steve “The Terminator” Chuma is bent over the oars of our raft as it slides down the green flume into a rapid named The Washing Machine.

The Washing Machine chomps the boat and its freight of humans cartwheel through the watery air, plunging through the foam and into the crushing grip of the river.

Everyone swims the rapid until Chuma heaves the raft upright and hauls his gasping clients back into the boat. There’s no time to retch up the water they’ve swallowed because the raft is bouncing down another tongue of green-black water into the fury below. Paddle in one hand, the other gripping the safety line, for all the lousy no-good it will do.

Chuma’s screaming “paddle left ... paddle left ... paddle le ...” Boom!

The side of the raft pitches up and bodies, paddles ... a helmet ... tumble back to the river.

One passenger clings to the raft like a tick on a dog as it sweeps down the rapid. Chuma heaves the raft right side up again, hauls the last terrified passenger aboard.

“Next up, Oblivion,” he shouts. “Paddle hard. All forward!”

As they dig-in with their paddles, they see the green tongue of the flume, the water sliding over slick, black basalt, the forested cliffs and a glimpse a blue African sky. They see the white fury of the rapid.

And then they too, like Tuscano, suddenly understand what a “hole” is.