Question 7, page 16
I was trapped.
My only hope now was other people but there was no hope there. I was the only guide. The rafters were friends but none had any white-water experience or would know how to mount some sort of rescue in the middle of a raging rapid. Only one, P—, an accomplished rock climber, had outdoor experience. But P— was not a river person.
I was alone.
No way out meant—and the knowledge was slow in forming because it was so extraordinary that for a time I could not frame it—it meant I could die. And the idea of dying was astonishing to me. It made no sense.
And yet it did.
I knew my entrapment was exactly how white-water kayakers of that era died—one had just the previous week on the Franklin, on a rapid a few days further downriver called the Pig Trough. When shooting steep drops the sharp pointed bows of the long fibreglass kayaks of the 1970s and ’80s would wedge under submerged rocks, the kayak collapsing in on the kayaker, leaving their legs pinned into the flattened front by the tiny cockpits of the period. And the trapped kayaker, in the middle of a rapid or fall, beyond the reach of human help, would quickly or slowly drown.
4
After what felt the longest time, what felt an hour or more but was perhaps only minutes or perhaps was hours, a face miraculously shaped out of the river and burst into the air pocket next to me.
It was P—!
I was overjoyed. He was somehow dangling from a rope in the drop, suspended in the river’s violent flow by the others who, he now told me, were on a small island upstream anchoring the rope. He had organised them and contrived this way to reach me.
I explained the need to free the boat. But after he found a precarious footing and tried, he couldn’t shift it a centimetre. Nor could he free my body. What had seemed straightforward no longer was. How P— would now rescue me was not clear to either him or me. The force of water on us both, the difficulty of him getting a solid footing, everything conspired against a rescue. In those days there was nothing in the way of rescue tools or equipment or knowledge. There was nothing in our kit that P— could have used to saw me out of the fibreglass kayak. Nor, though he tried, could he break it.
He tried to free the kayak with me in it. With his considerable strength and a fierce determination he tried to prise the kayak loose of the boulder shelf in which it was wedged. He tried to drag the kayak back and out. He tried to drag me out of the kayak. Over and over, he would disappear under water and try to lift the kayak from beneath in order that I somehow might be able to free my trapped legs, a feat, were it possible, that would have required superhuman strength. But he refused to stop trying. When one method failed yet again P— would return to another, sometimes with a calculated variation, sometimes in a desperate fury. I really don’t remember the many ways and methods he tried. I only remember that none worked. He was a strong man, but the force of the river violently bearing down on us made his task impossible if not farcical.
I could not be freed.
Between these efforts he would sometimes leave the air pocket and somehow disappear upriver. I am not sure how he did that, whether he pulled himself up on a secured rope or had them pull him back up. But each time he returned it was clear to me that he was losing strength. Over the hours of his increasingly desperate efforts, the cold took its toll on even his determined courage. He was wearing only a thin long-john wetsuit, rendered irrelevant by the way the rapid would force open gaps around his neck and shoulders and cold water pour in, negating the neoprene’s insulating effect and chilling his body.
So it went for several hours.
5
I say several, but I have no idea. I grew weaker. I began to struggle holding myself upright against the force of the river. At some point P— returned with some ropes which he tied around my chest and shoulders. In my memory these were cheap, thin cords, but perhaps P— had brought a climbing rope and used that as well, I no longer remember. In any case, in this way my torso was lashed in place, trussing me up like a chicken, with the rafters upriver holding the ropes firm to ensure I wouldn’t flop forward to my death. There was nothing they could do to stop me flopping backwards.
P— disappeared again.
After an indeterminate time, he returned with another rope and another idea. The rafters upstream on the island would drag me out of the boat with the rope, pulling me back up the drop and out of the kayak.
The rope was tied around me. P— disappeared, the rope abruptly tensed and tightened as those far upstream tried to wrench my body out of the kayak with sheer brute force. But I was anchored by my trapped legs.
The effect was excruciating. When they began pulling hard the ropes ripped at my immovable shoulders and chest. As my body was violently stretched by several people my torso and head were pulled backwards and under the water plume. There I had to keep my mouth shut or the water would force its way in and drown me. I had to hold my breath and hope they would not go pulling so long that I ran out. But rather than pulling me free, my rescuers served only to jam my legs further by pulling my thighs and knees hard up against the kayak’s collapsed cockpit coaming. My legs felt as if they were being torn apart in a merciless, one-sided tug-of-war. My frame could only extend but not move. Agonising pain shot through me, my arms, my shoulders, my hips and knees. When the ropes went slack, I had to fight desperately to pull my torso and head out of the river’s pour and back upright into the air pocket.
There were more attempts. After each failed in turn, P— would again try securing my body with a different system of roping, seeking to flatten the angle of my body, to get better purchase, to ease my pain, to somehow render the impossible possible. I imagine now his knots, how beautiful they must have been, beautiful rock climber knots, brocaded and elegant and so definite. But I have no memory of them. I only remember the agony repeating itself, over and over. Even with P—’s beautiful knots my legs were too tightly trapped, nothing worked, the pain was worsening, and I grew colder and weaker.
6
I became aware that something was leaving me. It was a very concrete sensation, as real as this book. It was leaving me and it was also me that was leaving, rising, leaving the river, rising into the gorge, into the sky. It was exquisitely peaceful and calm there. There was no pain. There was no fear.
Looking down I noticed the rescuers far below, haplessly perched on a rock midriver, upstream of the fall in which a coloured helmet could be made out beneath the rushing river water. I knew, of course, that it was me. But it was also not me, because I was in the sky. And with that, I was suddenly aware that I was leaving my body.
Below, they were now straining on the ropes that held me aloft, a still-living marionette, preventing me from flopping forward and drowning, but only for so long, only until with my strength spent my head lolled back and unable to pull it upright my mouth filled with the river and my throat filled and my lungs filled and I drowned. Something was leaving the me far below that was no longer me. Something was happening that had already happened and would forever after continue happening.
And then with a rush I abruptly fell back into the pain, the excruciating struggle to hold my head at the correct angle. I fought to hold it just so. I fought to hold me. So it began, the struggle between my body and me. But I was breaking, leaving, and each time I left it became that much harder to return.
7
I used the weight of existence to return. The crushing, punitive gravity of living, the impossible heaviness of reality, I used the all-consuming pain that I had somehow left to come back and hold me to the wet black rocks inside the roar of the rapid, the heightened, alive smell of heavily oxygenated air to try to stop that something that was not me and was me from rising and leaving. It had an inescapable lightness and my heaviness, the heaviness of the world and the heaviness of my pain, seemed ugly and stupid in comparison. It kept rising and rising and why should it and me with it not rise? The lightness of death seemed an irrefutable reproach to such weight.
8
I tried not to think of my mother and father. I felt shame, unspeakable shame, as if the fact of my dying was a betrayal of them in some fundamental, inescapable way. I found myself summoning the image of J—’s face to fill the water in front of my eyes, even though J— and I were finished, even though there really hadn’t been that much between us in the first place, it was J—’s sweet face that was now everywhere in the water pouring over me.
To see them, my parents, to call for my mother would have been the end, and so instead I called J—’s name, saw her face fill the sky, the world, and called J—’s name over and over so that I would not call for my mother and die. To call for my mother would have so seemed like the end it would have been the end, I was sure of it then and I am sure now, decades later, that I could not admit it was the end, that I could not call for my mother, that this river, these rocks, this gorge and the narrow cliffs bounding it were to be my grave.
And yet I knew I would, and soon.
9
A subsonic thudding from above shuddered the water and throbbed through me. I realised there must be a helicopter hovering just above the gorge. I knew without knowing that I was being filmed for the evening news. Or perhaps P— told me. The thuds came and went and later returned. I knew without seeing it the story they were creating. I had seen it too many times before. A supper-time snuff story.
I am not sure if that’s when I began screaming or if that was not possible with the water. I think I did or must have. I was so frightened. I feared people would know it and think less of me. I wasn’t the man I wanted them to think I was, nor even the man I pretended myself to be. I felt seen by the world and in the eyes of the world I was a frightened worm, nothing. Given no one could see or hear my humiliation except P—, it is strange that I would care. But I did. Perhaps we never stop caring.
10
As the river coursed over me panic began unravelling me. I had built myself up from a child into an absurd idea that went by my name but the river washed all that away. I was a hollow lie. What remained was just flesh. I wasn’t human. I was a terrified animal, alone in its man trap awaiting death. It was not possible to me that I might die. I did not wish to die. I was twenty-one. At twenty-one you choose things. You control them. But I was not in control. Death was. Death was choosing me. I was tormented by the knowledge I was to die in this way, I was very conscious that I would never see the people I loved again and that they would never see me. The wrongness of this tormented me, as if I were responsible. I understood now, after all P—’s ever more desperate efforts, that any attempt to be freed was futile. I wasn’t brave or stoic. I gave in to the pain which I had fought to keep at bay. The river washed away any dignity. Fear ate me. It was a fear such as I had never known, a fear that was both physical and spiritual, a desolation as large as the universe into which I was now vanishing.
The river was washing me away.
P— was close to spent. I could sense him weakening, his efforts lacking the brute animal power of his first attempts. He would have been in the early stages of hypothermia. His initial optimism that he could free me had thinned to a dour refusal to give up. Beyond, I sensed a chilling of the wet air and a darkening of the water. The light was leaving the gorge and it was passing into late afternoon. All I could think was that soon it would be night. I wanted it over.
11
I kept drifting up into the sky where I was safe and not in pain or fear, and each time it was that much harder to find a way back into my tormented body. I told P— to have them pull him upriver and then to swim back down and as he plunged over the drop to grab my torso and roll me forward with enough force to break both my legs. That way then, with my legs broken, he might be able to pull my trapped body free.
At first, he didn’t understand what I meant. He thought I was incoherent. Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked. I don’t know if it was even possible physically. It was most likely a ludicrous idea. All I know is that was the only idea, the only hope I had left. There wasn’t much time. We were near the end and snapping my trapped legs was our last hope.
Finally, he said he couldn’t do that.
That’s when I told him.
And only when I heard myself saying it did I know it was true.
I am going, I said.
They were my words. I hadn’t understood what was happening until I heard myself saying them.
I was dying.
But P— didn’t seem to accept what I was saying. It is a very strange feeling when you begin to die, when you find yourself existing between both worlds, suspended between life and death, and death is infinitely attractive, gentle, light, and you are aware of this thing within you leaving.
I am going, I said once more.
And it was true. The power of death was advancing within me and the power of life was rapidly ebbing. Whatever was me kept rising, lifting, and I could no longer fight both the weight of the river, this heaviness of reality and this growing lightness that was taking me to where I was not suffering. Somehow P— finally understood. And once more he disappeared from the air pocket. I realised he was gone, that he could not help, that much as he had tried it was beyond him.
12
I could still see J— and I tried to hold on to her after he disappeared, but then she too was gone and I was alone for the longest time, and beyond, I knew, lay a river, which opened out soon enough into a larger river and then a harbour and then a sea. I saw the river in its entirety and the sea in its infinity. I wanted to go forward into it and join with the sea. It seemed necessary, it seemed welcome. It seemed like hope even if it was despair. I wanted in one way or another to return to the river and flow into the sea. I knew I couldn’t stay where I was. That was intolerable. One further second was beyond human endurance. I was breaking. I was disintegrating. Much longer and I would not be whole. I was ready to return to the sky and the sea.
13
I heard P— next to me say he would try now, he was not gone, he was still there, he hadn’t left at all. But he was very weak. He had done everything that he could and more. Perhaps it is not possible to break legs so easily. Perhaps it is. To this day I have no idea. Something was leaving me now and I felt something starting to rise out of me like an untethered balloon. Try as I might, I couldn’t catch the string, I knew I couldn’t pull that strange thing back. Everything that could be done to save me had been done. I was dying and I knew I was dying. I wanted P— to give up and leave me. I did not want him with his dour determination, his ridiculous hope. I did not want any more pain. I wanted to beg him to leave me alone to die. But he had done so much for me. It felt wrong to tell P— he couldn’t try, given I would be very soon gone.
14
P— reached under the trapped, folded fibreglass kayak. Once more he tried to shift it as he had tried in vain to for so long at the beginning. Only now, his strength was gone. The sheer volume of water pressing down, the angle of the kayak and the way it was jammed, the absence of a good foothold, all had made the task impossible from the moment the kayak collapsed in on my legs. I was too far gone to tell him it was pointless.
But he would not give up.
Ever so slightly the boat shifted. The kayak that had, hours before, been beyond his powers and perhaps anyone’s to lift now, hours later, when he was exhausted, somehow moved. And then it slipped back. My legs remained trapped. I was not disappointed. My senses were dulled, slowed, and I had another destination and it no longer concerned me that it was impossible. It just was. The boat had moved, but not enough. And then P— tried again.
The boat rose a fraction for a second time. But this time P— managed to hold it there, to stop it slipping back, and then, somehow, he lifted it further. To this day I can only think this: there was something miraculous about it. At that very last moment he had found some superhuman strength. Each movement was small, but the boat kept rising. Perhaps he feared if he let the boat slip back he would not be able to repeat what was now happening. Again, he held, again he lifted, and with a power he didn’t have P— kept on.
The boat felt as if it were suddenly floating free but I knew this was an illusion. It was only P— holding it there and we had at best a few moments before it became impossible for him to hold it any longer. The ropes around my shoulders once again tore into my flesh and as I cried out my head was dragged back into the river’s pour-over and my mouth was filling with water and I was drowning and still P— kept lifting and lifting and the boat kept rising. My knees suddenly came loose and my legs with them and the ropes went slack. I still remember vividly as my body twisted and I popped out of the kayak like a cork from a champagne bottle. Hit by the full force of the rapid with nothing to now anchor me I was thrown violently forward.
15
I found myself falling through water, rolling and tumbling as I dropped over boulders with the fury of the rapid tossing my limp body hither and thither, smashing it into rocks, lifting it, dropping it, pulling it deep down into boils, far beneath into the darkness. When I surfaced in a run of waves in the middle of the river, groggy, buffeted, unbelieving, I heard voices yelling out.
16
But when I closed my eyes in relief, to my terror I was still trapped in the kayak in the rapid—and with it the water, the chill, the pain, the terror, the cacophony of the rapid in which I was entombed. When I opened them I was free, floating down the river. I was confused. I could only understand what I saw. I thought it was one final trick of my mind. I didn’t dare close my eyes, terrified that I would return to what I feared was reality. I thought I was dead and this was some final vision, a last, cruel trick of a disintegrating mind.
