The Apurimac tested his talents as captain and teacher most severely on the fourth and last day of our shakedown run from the military bridge to Cunyac bridge, when we confronted our worst rapid. We scouted that particular chain of rapids, about a half mile long, for two hours. Finally, Chmielinski picked a line of descent. Two boulder formed a narrow chute at the top of the rapid. As the river forced its way through the chute, it compressed from some fifty feet wide to fifteen.
Someone caught in a keeper makes several mind-altering spins before escaping.
Below all of this lay the kind of roiling mess that you knew, just by looking at it, could send you home in a wheelchair. Then I let fly with an act of urination so wildly out of proportion to my liquid intake for that day that I felt my face begin to pucker. Back at the raft, Durrant asked about the rapid. We backstroked out of the eddy and turned upstream. Then we inched into the quickening water.