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Mr. Walker is himself an Olympic level paddler, having represented the United States in the World Championships of 1965 (he would have just been out of high school), 1967, and 1971. He was the U.S. National Champion in Men’s Slalom in 1968 and finished eleventh in the C-1 event at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
(To the untrained eye a C-1 might look like a kayak, but, instead of sitting in the boat and having a double bladed paddle, a C-boater kneels in the boat and uses a single bladed paddle, maneuvering the craft much like a canoe or open boat. Kayaks and C-1s are called “decked boats.”) The hard boats in Mr. Walker’s accounts are all kayaks. As support, in many of these trips, inflatable rafts are used. While they are harder to flip, they are also harder to maneuver, and take several skilled paddlers to manage.
To add to the challenge of navigating unexplored rivers with no knowledge about what was beyond the next bend or over the next drop, many of these early descents were made in kayaks that hadn’t been engineered and designed for the rigors of pounding waters and rocky collisions. The earliest were fiberglass kayaks made without consideration for quick turns and fast maneuvering in whitewater. They could be put out of commission with just one mishap in a technical, boulder-strewn rapid. Mid-trip repairs had to be made with self-made kits of cloth and resin or trusty duct tape. It was not until the 1970s that plastic roto-molded decked boats were introduced. The evolution of hard boats and safety gear is ongoing, built to some degree on the demands these early river explorers put on the boat building industry.
Mr. Walker is an engaging storyteller. Most of these trips were compiled from interviews he did with the participants, yet with careful research he tells their stories with authority.
His descriptive passages of the action on the river comes from his own muscle memory of the feel of the river, the boat, and the paddle. Muscles that know what to do from the pressure and tumult of the water as it flows against kayak and stick before the brain can react.
The stories told, though, are not just about man and the river. There are the logistics of putting an expedition together. There is the negotiation with foreign governments, sometimes hostile, many times suspicious about outsiders and their potential influence.
There was the plight of Czech and Polish expeditioners on their separate trips from behind the Iron Curtain. One trip was to South America, the other to the Himalayas. Both had to convince their communist bureaucrats to let them leave the country in the first place. The Poles had to skirt Honduras because of its right-wing government of the day. The Czechs had a monthslong trip east to the base of Mt. Everest.
Both had the handicap of substandard vehicles and equipment and no Capitalist backing for commercial reasons.
Mr. Walker describes and explains the geography and geology of each region.
He pays great respect to the people, including the histories and religions of those who have for centuries inhabited the region his protagonists are visiting.
And why they do these inaccessible and dangerous canyons? I’m reminded of a line in Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” “To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
What I took away most from this book was the shared feeling of what challenges a person to attempt something so difficult. It’s not a satisfaction of competing with the river and succeeding.
It is the satisfaction of competing with oneself and overcoming one’s own doubts and fears, the progenitor of every worthwhile human endeavor.
Wickliffe Walker is also the author of ‘Paddling the Frontier: Guide to Pakistan’s Whitewater,” “Courting the Diamond Sow: A Whitewater Expedition on Tibet’s Forbidden River,” and “Goat Game: Thirteen Tales from the Afghan Frontier.”
Walker is a National Geographic Society Explorer and a Fellow of The Explorers Club and a resident of Kendal at Lexington. He will be giving a talk on the book followed by a book signing at Kendal at 4 pm on Wednesday, Nov. 8.
