Thursday, May 31, 2007

Back on the Urubamba


I thought, for a minute there, that I was on the Urubamba again.
Wednesday, May 30. We spent the night in Columbus surrounded by dire weather predictions. Rain here, rain there, rain everywhere. Mostly rain back in the central and western part of the state, where previous rainfall records were being smashed. Flooding, roads out, stranded families. Just so everyone knows, I have NOT been praying for rain.
As we drove to the Platte, we crossed the Loup and saw that it was churning brown, unlike the quiet, shallow river we’d been over the afternoon before. But when we got to the Platte, it was just as we had left it, wide and shallow. I was disappointed, having hoped for at least some of the upriver rain to speed me along.
I had been warned that when the Loup and a big canal came into the Platte a couple of miles down, there would be a lot of turbulence on the north side of the river. “We had a drowning down there last week,” a reporter told me. “Stay on the south side.” With Tammy’s additional carefully modulated advice (something along the lines of, “This might be a good time to wear your PFD”) I headed off down a small rivulet and into a better channel, then worked my way across to the south side of the river. This is no small feat when the channels are strung like spider webs, but I eventually got over there.
Suddenly I noticed that the water was as brown as chocolate milk. “Hmmm,” I thought to myself. “How did this happen?” I looked behind me and saw that the Loup had gushed in, its swollen water running sort of parallel to mine for a ways. And then the turbulence did come as they mixed, so that although I didn’t feel in any great danger, it was like riding the surface of a blender making a milkshake. Yes, I was wearing my PFD.
The feeling was exhilarating, repeated a short time later when the canal water came in, also muddy and carrying a full load of logs and sticks. Burbles, whirlpools, waves. Memories flooded in with the muddy waters. For a while there, I was an eight-year-old on a huge balsa raft in December of ‘59 on Peru’s Urubamba River, racing along with the foam and the debris, feeling intensely alive. In a common twist of perspective, obstacles stuck in the river bottom looked as if they were racing past me upriver, leaving waves and backwaters in their wakes. I called my parents, knowing that they could picture it, and said, “This is going to be a great day!” Indeed, for about two hours I sped along at over 6 miles an hour, twice the best speed I had attained the first week of my journey. I started revising time and mileage estimates. No longer did I have to work back and forth across channels—now I could go point to point instead of back and forth with the current. Sixty miles today? Seventy? Eighty? I saw a huge log drifting beside me and briefly toyed with the idea of hopping on it, as Terry and I had done all those years ago.
Two and a half hours into this blast from the past, I blew through a crazy jumble of sticks and logs and it occurred to me that this looked an awful lot like the front edge of a flood. Surely I could not have outraced the raging waters, could I? Indeed I had. Within a few miles I was seeing sandbars again, the water was getting clearer and my speed was dropping. I reduced my expectations of the day and settled into a now-familiar rhythm of actual work.
Fortunately, the powerful wind has been at my back, scooting me along even when my shoulders ache me into temporary rests. I have been seeing more and more houses, including a high percentage of mobile homes, on the banks of the river. Wildlife has all but disappeared. And wonder of wonders, about an hour before I reached Fremont I actually saw high, tree-covered banks on the south side of the river, giving it a very different feel.
One more full day to go, if all goes well, and then around Friday noon I should hit the Missouri.

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