With no excuse to back off, full of apprehension and an adrenaline surge that forced me to piss, shit, and gag with nausea all at the same time, I dropped into my cockpit, sealed my spray skirt, locked my feet and hips, strapped my helmet, clutched my paddle and pushed the kayak off the bank. With one stroke I was sideways to the current, positioned perfectly parallel to the curler wave at the bottom. All I had to do was wait, keep my position, and throw a perfectly aimed, timed and pressured brace into that wave on contact. Meanwhile, refraining from paddling in the rapid felt unnatural, counter-intuitive-and absolutely wrong.
When I hit the curler it grabbed my paddle and Maytagged me halfway to hell, nearly dislocating my shoulder and dislocating me from kayak and paddle. A hundred yards downriver, Chuck helped me to shore and recovered my boat and paddle. "Nice run", was all he said.
It was a perfect time to be on the river. Equinoctial temperatures and torrents of water had transformed the desert into a garden, engorging succulents, and rendering sepia hard pans sensual with velvety green grass shoots. The smell of rain intoxicated and energized. Warm days followed chilly nights so full of stars they turned the skies into bio-luminescent seas. Convivial campfires, fueled with tamarisk, ironwood, cheap Mexican weed and even cheaper Chianti, rendered us both pensive and eloquent, egging us into ever-more unrestrained mendacity.
Our last night on the river turned particularly festive. Joyce pulled out a bottle of rum to accompany dinner. We'd all brought along our own provisions. While Norton relied on cans of Dinty Moore stew, and I supplied Joyce and myself with dehydrated Mountain House meals, Chuck-who would later gain notoriety in Mariah magazine, precursor to Outside magazine, for eating dog food on an expedition-hit new lows in culinary creativity with the fewest funds. He victualed himself with a disposable, expanding aluminum foil frying pan of Jiffy-Pop popcorn kernels for his first night out. For the remainder of the days, he subsisted on onions, potatoes, and a can of butter-flavored Crisco, which he'd fry up in the now-empty, thoroughly mangled, Jiffy-Pop fry pan.
And then everything changed. Like the buzz of an approaching mosquito, Chuck suddenly sensed the hum of a helicopter so far away it wasn't visible. "It's coming here," he declared.
Yeah...right! we all responded, scanning the skies for a sign. Though helicopters didn't frequent the Mazatzal wilderness, the Mexican weed made anything possible.
To call Chuck paranoid is to call Sisyphus conscientious (or the USS Enterprise a boat, or Balmoral Castle a summer cottage).He eschewed credit cards, relying on cash or gold for all purchases. When asked for ID or personal information by a merchant, he'd grumble "What's wrong with an anonymous cash transaction?" If pressed, he was out of there.
Once, when a grocery store clerk asked if he had a loyalty discount card, he responded with, "Hitler would have loved to keep track of who was buying kosher food." He didn't receive mail at home, a log cabin in Alaska built on skids-so he could move it quickly (just "in case")-relying on friends' PO boxes, with the added security of a separate alias for each address. No public utilities penetrated his cabin.