Last of the Macho Men

ON THE PITILESS SCALE OF MACHISMO Kayaking rates

BILL PAUL FLOATED on a placid backwater of the rainswollen Verde River and patiently watched me struggle into the second kayak, which was as tight and claustrophobic as a pointed coffin. Legs extended, I inched into the canoe like a wine-swollen cork squeezing itself into the neck of a bottle. Finally inserted, I was ready to determine whether kayaking is as hard as it looks. Things started easily enough. My kayak glided across the water, and I actually felt graceful, flicking through the current like a fish with a single effortless contraction. Paul, who was with Arizona Game and Fish, demonstrated some moves, pivoting like a ballet dancer with a deft bite of the blade. He let his kayak roll over, then righted it with a twist of the hips and a pull of the paddle. "If you tip, don't let go of your paddle," he said. "Just grab this little strap on the splash skirt, and kick out of the kayak." "No problem," said I, no longer young but still foolish. I zipped along the surface for a while. I don't remember precisely what happened next, except that I was suddenly floating upside down, paddleless, trapped in my kayak. Like a desperate snapping turtle, I tried to stretch my neck to reach the surface. I had nearly reconciled myself to drowning when I remembered the rip cord.

Groping blindly, I grasped the strap and yanked. The skirt came away effortlessly. With a final panic-stricken wiggle, I pushed free of the gaily colored little coffin. Paul waited patiently on the surface. “You all right?” he asked politely. “Fine,” I spluttered, the spot of light toward which I'd been moving in my recreational near-death experience resolving itself into the sun glancing off the waters of the Verde. “I dropped my paddle,” I confessed, deeply ashamed. I insisted on remounting the kayak, but I'll confess that I had just changed the thrust of my plans. Rather than learning to kayak the hard way, why not benefit from the expertise of an experienced kayaker? I joined Paul in a two-person inflatable kayak so I could watch him playing in the modest rapids of the Verde. He told me kayaker war stories as we floated along, watching for bald eagles, startling gigantic herons, and attracting the attention of a sleek-headed beaver that quickly vanished to seek its burrow in the riverbank. Paul recounted his run down Oak Creek Canyon during a record flood. The river engulfed him several times, but he bobbed to the surface without serious difficulty. An experienced kayaker can laugh crazily through bone-crushing stretches of river. But the Verde outing was just a warm-up for an intrepid individual like me. Its rapids barely rise above Class 2 on the five-class scale of such features. So I next tackled the Salt River below U.S. Route 60 between Globe and Show Low. The Salt runs wild through this stony, untrammeled canyon crammed with Class 4 rapids. Proud and unpredictable, the Salt's flow here fluctuates from 60 cubic feet per second during dry summers to record-breaking peaks above 60,000 cfs. The flows mostly range from 600 to 4,000 cfs during the popular river-running months between February and May. I put myself into the hands of a group of professional river rats, impassioned kayakers who spend most of their time running the lower Salt in rafts packed with tourists, organized by the Cimarron River Company in Scottsdale. Little did I suspect that I was about to confront my ambiguous standing on the pitiless scale of machismo. In most of our long history as a species, we've depended on the risk takers among us to rush into the jaws of the saber-toothed tigers. Born with an unreasonable belief in their indestructibility, they've been our trailblazers. But we've killed all the sabertooths, mapped all the deep canyons, and explored the darkest jungles. So what are I spilled over a boulder, leaned sharply downstream, and tipped into the icy spring runoff.

the risk takers to do in a world of time clocks and gridlock? Take up kayaking. Consider Mike Beres, the most skilled kayaker in the Salt River group. A squarejawed fellow with the lithe grace of a cat and the self-deprecating incoherence of a real man, Beres melds seamlessly into his kayak. He finds the biggest pile of water on the river, pivots into the heart of the maelstrom, and surfs happily in place. He nonchalantly recalls assorted death-defying experiences, including the Class 5 rapid that swirled him over a huge rock, sucked him down 10 feet beneath the surface, and trapped him in a great subsurface eddy. He recalls watching the light of the surface approach and then recede, utterly helpless. The river finally released him a few moments before he ran out of air. That story sobered me. So I bobbed down the Salt River in a big six-man raft piloted by Dave Insley. I watched Beres and his buddies cavort and contemplated my lack of the right stuff. I wasn't even momentarily tempted to borrow one of their hard-shelled kayaks. But some small scrap of male pride still stirred within my life-jacketed breast. So I imposed on Insley to fill the inflatable one-man kayak he'd stowed on the floor of the big raft. He I spilled over a boulder, leaned sharply downstream, and tipped into the icy spring runoff. We repeated this sequence several times. I found things on which I could tip that no one else could even see, like a sloshed dancer stumbling across a smooth ballroom floor. I felt like a blind cow in a herd of antelope. Finally Insley rowed over and noted: "We've got Exhibition coming up." They had been talking about this particular Class 4 rapid all day. "Want to take out now?" he asked. "Nah," I said after a longish pause. Insley gave me a dubious look, then said, "We'll go down first and wait for you." Wait for my body, he meant. They departed. Beres and I waited. "It's time," he said, gliding past me and heading for the head of the rapids. I paddled along behind. It was a great day to be alive.

In one sense, running Exhibition turned out to be a bit like capsizing on the Verde: The sequence of events isn't clear in my memory. I remember paddling like a wild man, pointed straight into the heart of the rapids. I climbed a succession of standing waves and plunged down the slope of each one into the trough of water on the other side, then on to another one. Great thrusts of water broke over my head, blinding me. Almost before any of it had time to register, I was through the white water. When I returned to shore, Dave Insley heaped praise on my sodden head, mostly because my previous performance had inspired such minimal expectations. Then I stood happily on the bank and watched the kayakers play with the river, like dolphins leaping joyously across the bow of a hurtling ship. I still can't say that I'd run, laughing, into the jaws of a sabertoothed tiger with Mike Beres and the lads. But I do remember the damp, thrilling smell of its fur.

Phoenix-based Peter Aleshire is now considering hands-on research for stories about people who hang glide, bungee jump, and wrestle alligators. He also wrote the "Along the Way" column and the "Focus on Nature" story in this issue.

Fred Griffin, who also lives in Phoenix, doesn't mind getting wet on an exciting assignment.