Death of a River Guide

  Down the rapid they advance, then back into the rafts to shoot the bottom rapids of the Coruscades, Gaia Head’s raft tied onto the gear frame, Gaia Head taking Derek’s place in a big raft to shoot the big rapids, and although Aljaz partly wraps his raft on a rock, and takes in a lot of water, they keep moving on down the river. They take the easy chutes on the left-hand side of the next two rapids, paddle a few hundred metres then pull into the bank. Down the rocks on the left of the huge Thunderush rapid they advance, their teamwork now a sight to behold in the pouring rain, forming long human chains up and over the rain-darkened and slimy boulders, throwing bags and gear from one to the next. The podgy faces of the punters drip perspiration, though the gorge is chill, and they smack their tongues up beneath their noses, tasting their own moisture, still strong even though diluted by the rainwater running over them. They marvel at the fresh brine of their bodies, a taste unknown to them since childhood. Beneath their stinking wetsuits their pastry-coloured flesh bruises easily, like overripe fruit. Their feet hurt and their backs ache and the air rushes down their throats like a licking flame. Down the bank they race against the rising waters, and who knows who is going faster? Their wetsuits feel slippery with their sweat and though the day is cold the weather has long since ceased to worry them. They know only one thing: that they must get through the gorge before the flood peak reaches and overruns them. Their fear is all-encompassing. The gorge is death, and they want to put it behind them before it claims another one of their number. United in their fear and purpose they now talk little, and their exhilaration at their unity keeps their minds from falling off the tightrope into total fear. And racing back and forth between them, carrying ever greater loads, are their lifelines back to their real world: their gaudily clad guides. Exhorting, running, helping, running, praising, running. And searching, looking everywhere, in every eddy, around each partly submerged rock and every flooded bush, in the hope of finding Derek’s body. And all the time it keeps on raining and the river continues to rise, its brown-foamed edges eating up the sides of the banks.

  Occasionally the punters rest and look up from the rocks and see and hear and smell the massive moving force that is the river. In flood it is no longer the calm, serene, mild watercourse, little more than a creek, they had known until two days ago. It is an extraordinary physical presence that cannot be denied. The entire gorge seems to vibrate with the sound of its rapids. Its low hum is punctuated by the rumble of huge boulders being rolled along, clacking and cracking and groaning in their work of reshaping the riverbed, and by the clump of waterborne trees and logs colliding with low-lying riverbank trees, through which the flood waters now manoeuvre. The whole river is like a huge army on the march, overrunning the countryside, taking all before it, collecting ever greater strength from every dripping moss-lined rock face, from every overexcited stream. And the rafting party are like refugees, seeking to avoid its power, seeking to avoid its wrath and its moments of terrible violence; and their momentum, like that of refugees, is inexorably linked to that of the martial movement of the river. They look down at their next footstep, trying to reorient this cracking, roaring world with their own human scale, back to something they can comprehend and control.

  And Aljaz wonders was one day camped on the bank enough respect? It was his fault. It was he who had failed to listen to the shushing of the bending tea-trees, to read the swirls in the river properly, to read the way they had snaked toward the bank at the campsite, to understand the ebbs and flows of the little boils out in the current. They had all tried to warn Aljaz and he, who knew their language, had ignored them.

  At the bottom of the Thunderush portage they come to a very big rapid which they must shoot. Aljaz and the Cockroach sense that there can be no time for contemplation, or doubts will set in with the punters. And the river guides, in their madness, have no fear of the rapid as they rightly ought. They shout instructions over the roar as they methodically load the portaged gear back into the boats. They get in the boats and Aljaz talks the rapid through with his customers, pointing out the line he wishes to take through the mêlée of huge waves and surging white water. He spins the raft into the current and suddenly feels terribly small. He feels the force of the rapid pick the raft up and start to rush it down toward the big fall. The boat spins around too far and Aljaz is heading into the drop with the raft in the suicide position - sideways to the drop. ‘Hard left! Hard left!’ he yells to his punters, but they are overwhelmed by the force of the water, by the sheer volume of noise, by the spray and waves confusing their senses. They no longer know where they are, whether or not they have shot the drop or are yet to go over it. Their strokes are out of time and ineffectual. Aljaz realises he has lost control of the raft. The punters realise that Aljaz has lost control and stop paddling, some screaming, all futilely turning their bodies sideways to the rapid, averting their faces from the huge waves as though this might save them. Aljaz puts in a massive reverse sweep with his paddle and manages to turn the boat a little around from its sideways position, just as they reach the lip of the fall. ‘Fall into the centre!’ he screams. ‘Fall in!’ he screams as he grabs Marco and throws him onto the floor of the raft and then throws himself over Marco and hangs on to the netting with his left hand. He feels the boat rear up near vertical as it falls over the drop, and looks up to see massive walls of white water crashing on every side, crashing down on their puny craft, to see one side of the raft again rear up almost vertical. His and Marco’s bodies slide from one side of the raft to the other as the raft is rocked and buffeted and thrown hither and thither like a paper bag in a gale.

  And then Aljaz realises that he is not flailing desperately in the rapid, not being sucked down deep into the river’s entrails to then be suddenly tossed up to the surface just before his body is swept over another fall, realises they are through the drop and have not been flipped and that they are all still somehow, miraculously, in the raft and not swimming down the rapid. He sits back on the pontoon and sees that they are heading towards the rocks on the left. ‘Paddle!’ he yells and he scruffs and pulls the punters in the back of the boat with all his might into a sitting position. ‘Paddle hard!’ And then as they start to paddle he continues to shout just one word until they are all paddling in rhythm with his cry. ‘Hard! Hard! Hard!’ The boat flops sideways into a small stopper and temporarily stalls its downward descent. The stopper is not big enough to flip the raft. Aljaz uses the moment and the stopper to help him turn the boat to the right.

  As the raft exits from the stopper it slowly, ponderously begins to turn and then they are heading right and they are safe. Aljaz jumps to his feet. He looks from the rear of the raft back up at the enormous rapid they have just descended and throws a defiant fist in the air. ‘Yes!’ he screams. ‘Yes!’ And as he punches the air again and again he feels the excitement, the old excitement back, the feeling of being one with the rapid’s power and the gorge’s passion, the feeling of belonging and living. For a few brief moments everything else is forgotten, even Derek’s death, in the wonder of their achievement. He turns around to face the punters and grins. ‘You dopey bastards - look.’ And he waves his arm around behind his body to encompass the surging white immensity of the rapid that is their backdrop, against which their raft is a bobbing red speck. ‘That was you.’ The punters are unbelieving. Aljaz’s body feels as if it has exploded into the gorge. He feels every slap of water and bead of rain as a caress, feels the warmth blowing down from the rainforest on the back of his neck and the cold rising from the river as a massage of the senses, sees every detail of the gorge as if it has all come into focus from a previous blur, sees every hue of every colour, sees every droplet of the mist rising from the waterfall, distinguishes every sound of the rapid and the boat. He feels as if he is the rainforest and the river and the rapid. It as though time has stopped and he has been given infinity with which to explore and know every aspect, every detail of this wondrous moment. The punters do not move. ‘We are top of t
he wazza,’ says Aljaz to them. ‘I love you. I love you all.’ Aljaz replaces his grin with a brief solemn glance and puts his hand upon Marco’s shoulder. ‘At this moment I even love Marco.’ He knows he looks ridiculous, a soggy Napoleon thanking his troops. So he exaggerates his own absurdity by revelling in it, leaping about the raft, kissing them on their helmets in the manner of a possessed missionary anointing heads, laughing, screaming, ‘Yes!’ repeatedly and, ‘Top of the bloody wazza!’, occasionally throwing his fist in the air. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Then he looks down at the punters and he sees in their faces only terror, only the knowledge that they might follow Derek. There is no ecstasy on their part. They are too frightened of what is to come to acknowledge what has been achieved. And the moment of oneness vanishes. Aljaz feels the weight of Derek’s death fall back upon him, feels his fear rise up to meet it, feels his own failure again and again and again.

  ‘You’re insane,’ says Sheena from the front of the raft. Her voice is sullen. At this moment she speaks for all the punters.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Aljaz. In the face of their terror he feels the remnants of his excitement ebb away. ‘Maybe,’ he says coldly, ‘maybe I am.’ Nobody says anything in reply. He senses they will trust him in so far as they have to, but that he now frightens them. He feels distant, sad, cold, separate, like a moss-etched rock looking down upon the raft that bobs around at the base of the huge rapid. But he does not say it. He says words that he thinks may reassure them, that will join them together rather than pull them apart. ‘One more easy portage around the final waterfall, an hour of easy paddling after that and we’re out of Deception Gorge.’ With buckets they bail out the water they have shipped. ‘What I’m trying to say,’ says Aljaz almost pleadingly, throwing a bucket of water into the river, ‘is that you’re nearly out of the bloody gorge.’

  They watch the Cockroach’s crew shoot the rapid. From so far away the Cockroach’s raft looks like a bobbing toy boat and they fear for him and his crew almost as much as they just feared for themselves. The Cockroach takes his time. He carefully lines his raft up in the top eddy to avoid the mistake that Aljaz made of being swept sideways. Three times they go to break into the rapid then halt at the last moment as the Cockroach stops because the line is not quite correct. Then they disappear into the waves and reappear at the top of the drop in the correct position. They disappear into the fall and reemerge heading right, making it through the remainder of the rapid easily. Now through the big rapids, Gaia Head unties his small raft from the gear frame and flops it into the river. And jumps in. Although it is only a short distance to the next portage he seems keen to establish some small independence. Together the two big rafts with the small yellow raft drift the remaining few hundred metres downriver.

  From above, it looks beautiful. Mist rises from the line at which the river abruptly ends and the waterfall they call the Cauldron begins. The two bright red rafts drift together toward the fall in the dimming afternoon light. Around the rafts are the slow-moving long trails of white froth produced by the big rapids upriver, intricate Paisley designs, all swirls within swirls.

  Running down the right-hand side of the Cauldron is a huge sloping rock slab. Only a few metres wide at the top of the waterfall, it is ten or more metres wide at its base, cutting a quarter of the way diagonally across the fall. It is down this slab that the rafts are portaged. Aljaz, knowing the way, goes first. A hundred metres out from the rapid he heads his raft river right, hugging the right-hand cliff face as he approaches the Cauldron. Aljaz only has to be a few metres out from the cliff face, out where the current runs stronger, and his boat will be swept down the waterfall. Rather than steer from the back of the raft as he normally does, Aljaz is steering from the front, holding the furled bow rope between his hand and the paddle shaft. There is a little notch in the rock slab, perhaps a third of the width of the front of the boat, into which Aljaz deftly places the raft. The moment the pontoon touches the rock slab, he is out of the raft scrambling up onto the rock slab with the bow rope. As he anchors the raft, he exhorts his punters to quickly get out. Once the raft is empty of people they drag it up onto the slab so that it cannot be washed down the waterfall, which begins its river-wide cascade less than two metres from where they stand. The punters look across the massive slab and at the huge gorge that seems to close in above and over them. ‘Awesome,’ says Marco, looking up. Aljaz looks down, using his eyes to find a secure foothold in the slimy rock.

  The Cockroach follows Aljaz’s line, choosing to stay in the rear of his raft. He notices a sea eagle sitting halfway up a dead myrtle stag on the opposite side of the river. They hit the rock slab and Aljaz’s seizes their bow rope and heaves the front of the raft up onto the rocks. The punters scramble out like some military landing party.

  And last comes Gaia Head, who, now fed and with the knowledge that the worst is almost over, has regained some of his former ways. He kneels in his raft, surveying the vastness of the gorge around him, as if he is a mad being who has taken possession of this land and who, as property owner, is allowed to do as he pleases. Like a New Age squire he drifts the final distance toward the waterfall, acknowledging the waves of Aljaz and the Cockroach to come in closer to the dead water at the cliff edge with a slight ironic smile but with no action. He allows his raft to drift further into the main current, believing that because there is no rapid there is no power to the water, believing once again in his own capacity to be whatever he wants, to go wherever he wants. As the waves of the guides turn into yells, he nonchalantly dips the eating-bowl blade of his bush paddle into the river to turn the raft toward the river’s edge, to take it toward the notch in the boulder. But the initial stroke has no effect, nor the second, nor even the third nor the more frantic fourth nor the entirely desperate fifth and sixth and seventh strokes. His scrawny arms are flailing the tea-tree connected bowl and enamel plate through the air, the only effect to spin the raft round so that he is being swept ever faster toward the waterfall in a backward rather than a forward position.

  The Cockroach and Aljaz are now screaming and their screams awaken Gaia Head to his only recently forgotten terror. At which point Gaia Head remembers how the guides could not save Derek and, panicking, stands up in his raft and dives into the water. He swims away from the raft toward the rock slab, which, because it is only three metres away, he thinks he will reach easily, whatever the fate of the raft. He makes some progress, but a metre from the rock slab the current grabs Gaia Head’s bobbing body, ungainly freestyling in its kapok life jacket, like a huge hand sweeping a table of crumbs. And drops it over the lip of the waterfall.

  From above, on the rock slab, Aljaz and the punters watch the whole event unfold with a sickening sense of doom. As Gaia Head disappears over the drop, the Cockroach manages to get his raft back into the safe dead waters of the side of the river. Aljaz feels his fear creeping through his body, wanting to paralyse him. Again, thinks Aljaz with dread. Again. And then suddenly, before he has even decided what he will do or if he can do anything, he is shouting out, ‘No,’ and he is running, unclipping a throw-bag from his side as he does so, running down the edge of the wet slippery rock slab, and he knows that this time, whatever it takes, this time he will do it. This time he is terrified but he does not care; this time, for the first time ever, he has said no and will not do nothing and will do something. He is exhilarated and he feels free at last, at long long last, and at that precise moment he feels his left shoe lose its grip on the rock and he feels himself tumbling, falling over the edge, feels his body hit the water as a surprisingly gentle rushing softness, feels himself tumbled by the water, and then feels himself suddenly slam to a halt, feels rocks grip around his hips and his chest like tightening vices, feels the water that was for a few seconds benign, change its character immediately to that of a mad rushing sadist that forces his head and body forward and down and under.