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Sealed With a Kiss
| Article
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19847 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
4,616 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bangs
Richard Bangs is the author of Island Gods, Whitewater
Adventure, and Riding the Dragon's Back, which won the
Lowell Thomas Award for the best travel book of 1989. He
is the founder of SOBEK Expeditions, an international
travel-adventure company, which has become part of Mt.
Travel-SOBEK. |
The primary response is one of exhilaration, the splendid frisson that comes with gliding by the edge. The river is fast here, and the paddles swallow yards with each stroke. We stretch to pull into the small eddy for a breather. We're halfway down Nine-Bar Rapid, named for the nine closely spaced bars on the 1:250,000 scale map indicating a rapid of consequence. Most rapids rated three, maybe four, bars, so this was something special, a class five rapid that spits and fumes continuously for two miles. "Nice!" I yell to Pam in the bow of the canoe, then look behind to see how Ivor and Andy are faring ... not well. Their paddles are wagging like a semaphore. The water is up to the gunwales in their 17-foot Old Town, and the canoe is reeling, like a sailboat in a squall. "They're swamping!" screams Brad, our guide, who is pitching in the eddy in front of me. "Let's go help," I call to Pam while pivoting the canoe downstream. We dig deep, but as we get close, something more distressing occurs ... the white Styrofoam cooler with the last of our fresh meat floats out of the swamped canoe and sails downstream, along with half a dozen different duffles, toward the next set of turbulence in Nine-Bar. "Pam, Ivor, and Andy can manage on their own; let's get the gear." I turn the canoe again and shoot pell-mell into the next set of rapids, steering us toward the various duffles so Pam can pluck them up and toss them in our canoe. One, two, three duffles she hooks like a bear scooping salmon, then the boat strikes a rock, rotates, and slides down a chute backward. Water spills into the bilge, but I still have the boat under control, barely. Pam picks up Ivor's sleeping bag and the tent bag, and then just one piece of flotsam remains .... the cooler. It is out ahead, cruising for the last and worst section of Nine-Bar. One side is shattered... pieces of Styrofoam fleck the surface, but the bulk of the precious eight-dollar container appears intact. If we go for it, we risk running the worst of the rapids blind; if we don't, freeze-dried again for dinner. "Let's go for it, Pam," I scream, and we desperately sink our paddles into the spinning water. At the edge of the rapid, Pam, who heretofore had been loathe to master the art of paddling, executes a perfect one hand draw stroke, pirouetting us into shore as she snags the cooler with the other. We check the contents. A tub of butter and some pepperoni gone. All else is intact. Joy. Real chicken for dinner!
Thirty minutes later all four canoes are collected at the cooler landing, and Pam and I are being lauded as heroes. Even Andy, who had yet to say a word on the trip, says thanks, and Ivor, the closest living being to Bashful of Seven Dwarfs fame, is simply effusive in his praise. "My, you're such good canoeists; it was so wonderful of you to save our
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