Flying Off Everest (18 page)

Lakpa, Babu, and Krishna pulled off to the side of the river. They watched as the raft and Resham floated easily through the small entry waves leading into the meat of the rapid, bobbing gently up and down with the current, gradually gaining momentum. Then they watched them slam into a 6-foot-high wave and get shot clean into the air and disappear, swallowed a moment later by the crashing waves.

“I was scared,” Lakpa admits.

Once in the eddy on river right at the bottom, Shri Hari climbed out of the raft, onto the riverbank, and up to the top of a small rise and
turned on his video camera. He signaled with his arm for Babu and Lakpa to paddle down after them. Krishna peeled out of the eddy first, paddling down toward the immense entrance waves of Jaws alone. The idea was for him to be out of Shri Hari’s shot when Babu and Lakpa came down, but to be in a position near the bottom where he could rescue them before Dead Man’s Eddy, should they need it.

Babu and Lakpa paddled out of the top of the eddy. The current caught the bow, where Lakpa was sitting, and spun them around so they were facing downstream. The boat, being twice as long as the ones Babu was used to paddling, was twice as fast too, and more difficult to maneuver, at least without Lakpa knowing how to help him turn it. The entrance ripples zipped by, and they dropped into the trough of the first wave standing guard over the rest of the rapid before Babu could even get them lined up where they needed to be: farther to the left side of the river, where the raft, Resham, and Krishna had gone. They rose up with the wave and proceeded to drop into the white maw of an enormous recirculating hole. Lakpa, who went in first, closed his eyes, felt the impact of a 6-foot-tall wall of water splash on his face as the boat turned over, and pulled his skirt, as he had been instructed. A few moments later, both Babu and Lakpa were out of the boat and in the water, flushing rapidly downstream toward Dead Man’s Eddy—Babu finding himself unable to roll the 12-foot tandem kayak without his partner when it was half filled with water.

Babu immediately let go of the boat and began swimming toward shore, the left shore being the closest option. He took a deep breath before his body slammed into and through each wave. Krishna paddled out of the eddy above Dead Man’s on the right side of the river as fast as he could. It wasn’t fast enough. He watched in horror as first Lakpa and then his brother flushed directly into the middle of the whirlpool and were sucked beneath the surface of a broiling brown-white chaos.

Without hesitation Krishna paddled in after them.

The water swirled around him, and even while sitting in a seventy-gallon boat, Krishna struggled to stay afloat and upright in the aerated
water. He kept up his momentum, paddling as hard as he could into the fray, to where he saw Lakpa’s head finally pop up. Before he reached him Lakpa’s head disappeared again.

At the same time, Babu kicked with all his strength toward the surface. He felt himself pushed up hard against the cliff wall on river left. He found a crack in the rock with his hands and hauled himself up, so at least his head would be above the water. He took a gasping breath. His feet scratched against the wall beneath the water for a foothold. There was none.

Completely disoriented, Lakpa coughed up brown water and took hurried, frantic breaths whenever the randomness of the whirlpool brought him back up to the surface. He moved his arms and legs, aware of the futility, not knowing how to actually swim. On one of his brief stints above the water, he heard Krishna shouting for him to grab onto his kayak. Lakpa grabbed onto the metal broach loop on the bow of Krishna’s boat, which allowed him to at least keep his head above the water. Krishna paddled frantically, throwing desperate high and low braces with his paddle to keep himself upright amidst the swirling current.

Babu held on to the crack in the rock wall in front of him, able to breathe but unable to do anything else. He watched as their new tandem kayak, which had followed them into Dead Man’s Eddy, turned in violent circles, submerging and then reemerging, flipping end over end, sporadically.

Watching from the calm eddy above, Madhukar pulled hard on his oars, directing the raft with all of their gear directly into the whirlpool below. The experienced river guide, whom Nim Magar had sent along specifically for his skills at river rescue, figured that even though the raft was bound to get stuck it would at least have enough volume to keep them all afloat, even if they wouldn’t be able to paddle it out of Dead Man’s on their own. It was a quick and only partial fix. But it was the only thing he could think of at the moment to keep three of the members of his crew from drowning.

Once in Dead Man’s the raft began to spin uncontrollably. It seemed content to remain upright, though, able to float above the undertows rather than fall prey to getting pulled beneath them. Madhukar let go of the oars, which weren’t of much use anymore, grabbed ahold of the shoulder straps of Lakpa’s PFD, and hauled him over the edge of the raft, sputtering. When the raft eventually was pushed over to the wall where Babu was, Madhukar then grabbed ahold of his shoulder straps too and pulled Babu into the boat.

Krishna, no longer hindered by the weight of Lakpa latched onto his bow, paddled as hard as he could toward the edge of the eddy, which is referred to in the paddling community (quite accurately in this case) as the eddy fence, the line where the main flow of the current meets the recirculating current of the eddy. In smaller, less powerful eddies, it forms a distinct line, capable of spinning an unsuspecting boat out of control or even flipping it. In larger, stronger eddies, like Dead Man’s, the eddy fence forms a boiling wall of splashing aerated water over 10 feet wide and several feet high. This Krishna somehow managed to paddle through, upright.

Once back on shore on the opposite side of the river, Krishna hopped out of his boat. He grabbed a throw-rope, eyed the still-spinning raft, and guessed where it would be in the next three seconds. One end of the rope, tied in a loop, was clutched in his left hand. The rest was wrapped behind him, running to a small mesh-topped bag, which he picked up with his right hand. With all of his strength, he threw the bag as far as he could, halfway across the river to the raft. Madhukar caught it and attached the rope to a metal broach loop on one end of the raft. Resham and Shri Hari, who had at this point put down his camera, ran to help Krishna pull on the rope. Madhukar rowed as hard as he could. And between the three men on shore pulling on the rope and Madhukar rowing, the raft slowly inched over the eddy fence and into the downstream current.

Lakpa had managed to survive his first rapid.

Back on shore, exhausted, Babu and Lakpa watched without comment as their kayak still churned in the whirlpool. Krishna volunteered to go get it. He got back in his boat and, with one hand holding on to a carabiner tied to the end of a throw-rope, paddled upstream, back toward Dead Man’s. His bow hit the eddy fence, pushed through a few feet, then stalled. Without forward momentum, Krishna’s boat’s stability began to waver in the frothing whitewater. After a few minutes of strenuous paddling and going nowhere, he relaxed and allowed himself to get flushed back downstream, where he rested for a few minutes before trying again. His second attempt to reenter Dead Man’s was successful, but as soon as he approached the empty boat, which was still bobbing uncontrollably in the whirlpool, it dove beneath the surface and disappeared. He couldn’t reach for it, for fear of flipping himself over. So Krishna kept his shoulders square and his body weight over the center of his kayak, no matter how close he came to the tandem, until he was close enough to safely clip the carabiner onto one of the boat’s broach loops. He then paddled once again over the 10-foot-wide eddy fence back to the river right shoreline, where the rest of the expedition members were able to finally pull the tandem out of Dead Man’s. It bobbed back toward shore heavily, like a half-sunk log.

Krishna looked at the watch he keeps on his PFD. The rescue and boat extraction had taken nearly forty-five minutes. “I was really scared. Really, really, really scared,” he says.

According to Lakpa, Babu told him, “It’s not really a river trip until you swallow a little water.” At this, they both laughed and decided to call it a day. Tomorrow they would continue down the river.

They also realized they should probably turn on their SPOT locator again, and did so for the first time since the batteries had died nearly a week earlier back in the mountains. Suddenly, the glowing yellow dot reappeared on both the Arrufats’ computer screen in Sidi and Kimberly Phinney’s in San Francisco. Phinney updated the expedition blog:

Lakpa wasn’t the first person Babu had tried to teach how to paddle. Babu’s wife, Susmita, was. A small woman with rich black hair and deep-brown eyes, Susmita is almost a head shorter than Babu. In 2003 she left Rampur-6 to live in Pokhara with Babu at the home of his boss, Charley Gaillard. It was the first time she had been outside their small village on the Sun Kosi. The first time she had seen roads, bicycles, cars, or buses. In 2005 she had another new experience: sitting in a kayak for the first time. They had been married for five years at that point. Their son, Niraj, was sixteen months old. Susmita was eighteen.

It’s not uncommon for girls like her to be married young in Nepal. Forty-one percent of women are married, usually through a family arrangement, before they are eighteen. Ten percent, like Susmita, are married before they turn fifteen. Typically, the child brides are expected to drop out of school, move in with their older husbands, and perform domestic chores for the rest of their lives. The practice has been made illegal by modern Nepali law, but it remains unenforced—proponents of the practice citing local traditions.

Babu had wanted to share his love for kayaking with his young wife, whom he had been married to for half a decade and had had a son with, but hardly knew. He put her in one of Gaillard’s old rental boats on Phewa Lake, across from the Ganesh Kayak Shop—the same exact spot he had first started kayaking. He showed her how to paddle straight, how to turn, how to brace herself with her paddle when she was about to tip over, and how to roll back upright once she had flipped over. The paddle she used was almost as thick as her tiny arms. The water was calm and cool and blue, the same as the sky.

She loved it. So much that she told Babu three years later that she wanted to become a safety kayaker and raft guide too. Just like him.
That she didn’t want to just do house chores for the Gaillards and cook dal bhat anymore.

It didn’t go over well.

Babu, who had been more than happy with his wife kayaking rec-reationally with him when she wasn’t doing house chores, wondered who would take care of Niraj if they were both out guiding multiday trips. He also feared her trying to enter the male-dominated guide industry. He knew women weren’t welcome there, partly because he didn’t welcome them there himself. Susmita persisted, though, so he gave her an ultimatum: “It’s either me or kayaking,” he told her.

Susmita chose kayaking. She divorced Babu, having only recently learned that that was even an option, and took her son, Niraj, who was by then four years old, to live with Babu’s parents along the banks of the Sun Kosi in Rampur-6. She returned to Pokhara to live on her own and find work as a whitewater guide. No one would hire her.

Susmita spent several months washing dishes in a local restaurant and worked on the side as a maid. Her career in whitewater looked bleak at best. She had left her husband to start a career in paddling but now hardly had any time at all to even paddle for fun, let alone have anyone pay her for it. It wasn’t until Susmita met a tall, young blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swedish kayaker named Inka Trollsas that her luck changed. Trollsas had been coming to Nepal for the past decade, trying to inspire young Nepali women to kayak, and thus step out of their traditional subservient roles, through her nonprofit organization, Himalayan River Girls. Susmita fit the bill perfectly, so Trollsas invited her to come train with her and two other local female Nepali kayakers, Sita Thapa and Anu Shrestha.

The training worked. Susmita took first place in 2008 in the women’s division of the Peak UK Himalayan Whitewater Challenge, where she competed with paddlers from over eleven countries for the title. Babu, who had taken second place in the men’s division in both the 2004 and 2005 events but had opted out of competing that year because he had been spending more time
paragliding than paddling, watched her accept a brand-new kayak during the awards ceremony.

Seeing his ex-wife win the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge prompted a change of heart in Babu. Susmita was no longer a rebellious embarrassment but a successful, talented woman. He asked her to take him back. And she did. She also went on to compete in the world freestyle championships in Switzerland and the world slalom championships in Spain, becoming the first female Nepali kayaker to compete on an international level outside of the country. She was eventually hired by Nim and Kelly Magar to work for Paddle Nepal in Pokhara.