Conquerors of the Amazon : Tracing a Wild River, Joe Kane Waded Into Deep Pools of Peril

Admittedly, Joe Kane was no expert on the mysterious Amazon or the characteristics of its source tributary, the Apurimac. But there was no mistaking what the river had in mind when it bumped him from the raft.

It was sucking him into the brutal and deadly Acomamba Abyss. And he could not struggle out.

“In a moment of surprising peace and clarity, I understood that I was drowning,” he recalled. “I grew angry. Then I quit. I knew that it was my time to die.”

How did this happen? How did a regular guy like Kane--a consumer-affairs columnist and occasional magazine writer--wind up on the bottom of one of the world’s worst, man-eating stretches of white water? Why was he not back home, with his bright and beautiful girlfriend? Playing softball? Living the good life in San Francisco?

“I had nothing better to do at the time,” he said, deadpanning a casual, self-mocking bravado while nursing a pint of ale at his neighborhood pub.

Packing for Peru

So, a few weeks after a casual introduction to a South African adventurer in search of a publicist to help him raise money, Kane packed off to Peru to chronicle the first expedition ever to travel the length of the world’s longest river, 4,200 miles from source to sea.

Like a good writer, he intended to make the trip in the safety and relative comfort of a borrowed Land Rover. He wanted to be a detached and objective 4-wheel-drive observer.

But soon, Kane ran out of road. And, to stay with the others, he boarded a four-person raft, an inexperienced and reluctant member of the expedition.

He did not perish in the treacherous Acomamba Abyss--or anywhere else for that matter, though not for lack of opportunity. As he recounts in his swiftly paced account of the expedition, “Running the Amazon” (Knopf, $19.95), the first successful Amazon expedition was chockablock with enough near misses, close calls and lucky breaks to shame Indiana Jones.

Expedition members--an unlikely collection of South Africans and Britons, Poles and Americans--overcame obstacles as transient as altitude sickness at the Andes’ crest and as relentless as miles of murderous river rapids, each one bigger, deeper and deadlier than the one before.

Then trouble began.

Merciless Maoist guerrillas intercepted them at one bend in the river; trigger-happy Peruvian soldiers at the next; armed and very anxious cocaine traffickers waited down river.

All of it might not have been such a problem for a cohesive and disciplined team. But a third of the way down river, personal rivalries boiled into open mutiny and the 11-member party that descended from the icy, high-altitude headwaters dwindled to four before it reached the Atlantic.

Of those four, only two--Kane and Piotr Chmielinski, a Polish expatriate--traveled nearly all of the Amazon by boat, portaging their craft on foot when the river was totally unnavigable. The two others who completed the journey, British doctor Kate Durrant and Polish photographer Zbyszek Bzdak, negotiated much of the territory by land, bringing in supplies.

A grueling challenge for veteran river runners--a Swiss team abandoned its concurrent expedition when a rafter’s leg was crushed in the Acomamba Abyss--the Amazon was a punishing lesson for the novice Kane. His only previous river-running experience, he said, was “tubing,” or slowly gliding in an inner tube, down the lazy Sacramento River near Chico. He spent several years in that quaint university town north of Sacramento writing for the respected alternative weekly, the Chico News & Review.

He had never sat in a kayak, though the bulk of his Amazon trip was in one, and had never been farther south than a vacation in Guatemala, much less set eyes on the Amazon or studied its history or ecology. What little Spanish he knew he had picked up while playing city-league soccer with migrant workers in Chico. He spoke no Portuguese at all for the Brazilian half of the trip.

Kane’s lack of experience did have its advantages. It lets him leaven his tale with his own amusing blunders. He recalls, for example, arriving in Peru with ridiculously inappropriate Banana Republic clothing, then impressing his new colleagues by inadvertently irritating a pack animal--and winding up with “a warm wad of llama goober” dribbling down his chest.

Later, after an especially grueling day, he crawled onshore and vomited out of sheer exhaustion. Five Peruvian peasant women passing by asked where he was going. “Brazil,” he said proudly, convinced of the self-evident nobility of his adventure. The peasants were unimpressed by such folly; one of them simply advised: “You should fly.”

Kane also recalled the surreal ubiquity of satellite-aided Western culture. At one point, upon dragging himself into one remote settlement after weeks in the bush, he was stunned and more than a little disappointed to find the local children watching the Flintstones on television.

As a novice and journalist, Kane was able to strip away the antiseptic National Geographic veneer in which so many classic adventure books wrap their subjects. He makes it clear that running the Amazon’s length was, in many ways, precisely the kind of back-breaking, blister-popping, bug-infested nightmare that confirmed city dwellers fear it would be. Tarantulas turned up in his pack, venomous snakes outside his tent and disease-laden mosquitoes on every patch of exposed skin, regardless of the amount of repellent applied.

Incidentally, Kane said he still suffers a mild form of conjunctivitis that he apparently contracted from an insect, as well as burning tendinitis in his wrists from the endless hours of paddling.

But those hardships are more than balanced, he said, by memories of the Andes’ barren beauty and the jungle’s splendor; the awe of discovering for himself the remarkable remnants of the once glorious Incan culture; and the sheer joy of meeting native Quechuan men and women who magically coax a living from the impossibly rugged landscape.

“Especially in the high Andes, you get an incredible feel for history, a great history, because everything--the people, their towns, the landscape--still feels so ancient,” Kane said.

Elsewhere, modern life was all too evident: in the fetid river cities where irreplaceable resources are processed and transshipped; in the forests stripped to their stumps; in the highlands where dam-builders’ chalked survey marks on sheer canyon walls read like a death sentence for the still-untamed river.

“You never feel you are either completely in or out of civilization,” he said. “You can come upon a city like Iquitos and 10 miles from the town, you are out in the middle of the bush again. You feel you are 100 miles from anyone.”

The closer Kane and Chmielinski came to the river’s mouth, the more often they saw the jungle’s magnificent vegetation shaved off the land for a few hundred yards deep on both banks--as far as the valuable hardwood trees could be economically dragged to the river for transport.

That experience persuaded Kane, on returning to America, to volunteer at the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco environmental group working to save that vital resource around the world, from Brazil to Borneo. Besides his other work, Kane now edits the group’s quarterly journal.

‘Debt to the Rain Forest’

“I feel a debt to the rain forests now,” he explained. “Having been down there, I know that it’s going fast and it’s going for all the wrong reasons--simple greed.”

He rejects government arguments that harvesting the rain forest provides the money and clear land to help impoverished Brazilian peasants. Stopovers in the region’s major riverfront logging towns taught him who benefits--and who does not--from jungle deforestation.

“To say, ‘Let’s log the Amazon to help the Brazilian poor’ is like saying, ‘Let’s log Yosemite to help the South Bronx.’ It’s ridiculous,” Kane said.

Such observations were made each night in notebooks and microcassette tapes Kane carried in a waterproof briefcase. Each day’s handwritten notes were read into the tape recorder as insurance against some disaster that might send the written recollections swirling down the river or blowing into the jungle.

It was a wise precaution. At one point, Kane said a tremendous blow in some rapids crushed the briefcase, bursting a can of insect repellent he had inside and letting it smear the ink on several pages. After that, Kane said he made sure to send out his recorded notes with every shipment of motion-picture and still film left at predetermined drop points along the river.

Nevertheless, writing and recording notes became a painful burden after the worst of the 12- and 14-hour days, when Kane said his swollen and bloody hands were frozen in crescents the diameter of the paddle he had been gripping.

“Even if it was just about the amount of dirt under my fingernails, I told myself I had to write every night,” he said. Most of the work was done in the glow of a candle. “A thousand words a night was my goal--not always met.”

He supplemented his own notes with the personal diaries of several other expedition members--Durrant, Chmielinski, world-class South African kayakers Jerome Truran and Tim Biggs, and Wyoming businessman Jack Jourgenson, who ran some of the worst white water before returning to Casper to raise enough money to complete the expedition.

Even during the worst parts of the trip--as when the money ran low, when he became separated from the rest of the team, and when Chmielinski replaced the original expedition leader, South African adventurer Francois Odendaal--Kane said he never doubted that he would complete it.

“When it began, I thought I would be with the truck; I thought I could get in and drive out whenever I wanted,” he said. “Once we got into the abyss, I realized that was not true. We were miles and miles from the nearest road, and at the bottom of a sheer rock canyon. I could not get out.

“Once we were out of the abyss, I could have left, I suppose. But at that point, there was a sense of investment. I realized that I had put so much into it at that point that I could not go without finishing it.”

He still, however, was not sure it was possible to finish. Plowing through the white water in the eastern Andes--by far the hardest part of the journey, with the expedition making as little as 500 yards a day, despite long hours and perilous risks--had taken far longer than anyone anticipated.

After three months, when the adventurers had expected to be finishing their journey, they had, in fact, moved only 600 miles and were still deep in Peru. They still had to cover 1,600 miles just to reach Brazil; from there, they had to traverse another 2,000 miles to dip their paddles in the Atlantic.

36,000 Strokes a Day

Kane said he and Chmielinski labored on anyway--”50 strokes a minute, 36,000 strokes a day” while dodging poisonous Bushmaster snakes and marveling at pink-and-gray fresh-water dolphins--until a most unlikely epiphany.

“We came around this one bend in the river and saw the Iquitos skyline,” he said, recalling the isolated, “vaguely Mediterranean” river outpost deep in the Peruvian jungle. “I thought I was looking at San Francisco and Piotr thought he saw Krakow. At that point, somehow, we both knew that we could make it.”

Three months later, on Feb. 19, 1986, they did, indeed, make it, dipping calloused hands into the suddenly translucent green water, drawing it to their parched lips and tasting salt.

Just as suddenly as the adventurers realized they had reached the sea, the expedition was whisked to the United States by a network morning news program they had reached by phone from Belem.

“One day we were camping in mud at the mouth of the Amazon, and the next day we were in $300-a-night suites at the Plaza Athenee (hotel) in New York,” Kane recalled, still sounding amazed by the alacrity of the change.

Despite the sudden and unceremonious end to the expedition, Kane maintains contact with those who finished the trip. Chmielinski is an environmental consultant in Washington, D.C.; Bzdak is a photographer for the Casper, Wyo., Star-Tribune; Durrant runs a medical clinic for Bolivian peasants.

The end of the trip, of course, marked only the beginning of Kane’s writing process--a challenge he said was nearly as daunting as the expedition itself. It took Kane two years and five complete drafts to find the right tone and set the right pace.

What he discovered as he wrote was that the trip had somehow developed in him the sense to effectively allocate his energy, focus his thoughts and sort out whatever was extraneous to the immediate task at hand--a revelation that also prompted him to propose to his girlfriend, lawyer Elyse Axell, who is now his wife.

“Writing was so much like paddling that raft on that big river: you have the whole enormous task ahead of you,” he said. “You just have to do it one stroke at a time, one word at a time, one page at a time.”