The Adventurer's Son(29)
Our friends arrived the next afternoon and we headed inland to paddle warm whitewater. We did a day trip down a limey creek that issued full of life from a hillside spring to twist and turn through open woods and pastures where Brahma bulls laid in the shade. Packrafts have come far since Dick Griffith unrolled his pool toy in the first Wilderness Classic. Three decades on, they look more like fat little kayaks than small round life rafts and increasingly imaginative boaters paddle them down whitewater creeks and rivers normally kayaked or never run previously at all. Many experts can even “Eskimo-roll” their packrafts: if a rogue wave or turbulence flips the boat, the paddler rights it and paddles onward, all while still in the boat.
After the lime springs creek, we drove to a town called Jalcomulco, where we hoped to find a local who’d shuttle us to the put-in of the “Grand Canyon” of the Rio Antigua. Unfortunately, all of Jalcomulco’s boating community were busy protesting a proposed dam that would flood the Antigua’s canyons. We’d have to drive ourselves and leave the rental car at the put-in during our overnight trip downstream.
We enjoyed our paddle down the clear, moderate Class III waters set deep in lush, green gorges. We camped in the woods on the river’s banks and warmed up the selection of Mexican foods that Roman had picked out for us to eat around our crackling campfire. Tenting with him was familiar and we fell into an easy routine.
A second full day of bigger water brought us back to the town of Jalcomulco, where we spent the night, then drove to retrieve our car the next day. Returning to the rental parked at the canyon put-in, I was puzzled to see the Volkswagen sagging with a door wide open. Pulling closer it was apparent that all four wheels were gone. So were the battery, the carburetor, the radio and CD player, and the few items we’d left in the trunk, including Roman’s empty backpack. Roman would eventually replace his pack with one he’d buy in Mexico after the rest of us left; until then, he borrowed Brad Meiklejohn’s. As with any theft, we felt violated, frustrated, and hurt. The episode cost us a day or two but soon we were off to Tlapacoyan, the center of the Veracruz whitewater scene. Adrenaline has a way of washing away unpleasant feelings.
The highlight of our two weeks paddling packrafts on rocky streams was an exciting descent of the Rio Alseseca’s “Big Banana,” a steep creek rushing through the jungle.
Even though our friends from Alaska, Todd Tumolo and Gerard Ganey, had completed the committing run down the river before we arrived, I was nervous for Roman. He hadn’t been on the likes of the Alseseca for more than a year, and while we had worked our way up to the Big Banana’s challenging Class IV waterfalls on easier runs over the previous ten days, I was still concerned for his safety. He was, after all, my son.
Ganey, Todd, and other friends all said the Big Banana was the best whitewater run in the state of Veracruz. It sounded thrilling and relatively safe to me. We could easily walk around its biggest, most dangerous waterfalls, thirty and forty feet tall. But I wanted Roman to feel good about it and have fun, too.
Despite our collective experience and our three friends’ run the week before, our descent of the Big Banana nearly ended in its first hundred yards. Ganey, an expert paddler, decided to try a short, messy cascade that poured through a jumble of boulders. The rest of us had already walked past the hazard because it didn’t look very “clean.” Clean rapids don’t trap and potentially drown a swimmer like “chossy” ones can. We positioned ourselves below the drop with safety ropes.
Ganey paddled smoothly into the rapid’s entrance, maneuvered off the lip and prepared for his landing. But instead of plopping smoothly down, he was grabbed by the rapid’s rocky edge and flipped out of his boat. Almost immediately, a whirlpool sucked Ganey underwater into a sieve of boulders where the river’s hydraulics brought him back to the surface, only to shove him under again in a recirculating current.
The chossy drop wouldn’t let him go. He cycled around and around, fighting for air and his life. I threw him a rope but the Alseseca swallowed him again before he could find it. Fortunately, Todd’s throw line followed mine and Ganey grabbed it the next time he resurfaced. Todd dragged him, exhausted, from the current. We all breathed a sigh of relief.
Watching Ganey there, splayed on a rock heaving for air, an unease informed my judgment. Although a practicing scientist and college professor, I’ve learned the hard way never to ignore intuition, either mine or others’, especially when it involves my offspring.
How about the other rapids downstream? How safe are they? I wondered. We were able to walk around this drop, but if we would later be forced to paddle dangerous cascades like the one that grabbed Ganey, then I was ready to pack up and head right out on the dusty trail we’d followed in.
I turned to the others. “What do you think, Roman?” I asked.
He looked cool as a cucumber. But I knew my taciturn son could hold back his emotions. Roman had watched Todd pull Ganey from the water trap. “I don’t know—that drop looks pretty hairy,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “It’s why we’re all putting in below it, right?” Unlike me, he had never been accused of being an adrenaline junkie.
“What’s it like downstream?” I asked Todd. Ganey’s near miss had been on a short, five-foot drop on a big creek. Twenty-foot waterfalls, impossible to portage, waited below.
“Oh, it gets better. Much better. This is the chossiest drop on the whole run. It cleans up.”