Death of a River Guide (3 page)

I watch in fascination as this Aljaz Cosini squats down, puts his hands in the creek, lays his body near parallel with the ground, then slowly lowers himself, taking the weight upon his arms as though he is beginning a pushup. His head disappears into the river. Beneath the water's surface Aljaz opens his eyes and looks at the shiny brown and gold river pebbles beneath him. The light falls through the water as it does through the air, in shafts created by openings in the all-encompassing rainforest, falling upon the rocks beneath to give the entire river its red-gold glow. As he looks he opens his mouth and takes a draught of river water into his mouth and lets it feel its cool way down his throat. I watch him think that no water tastes as good as water drunk like this. I watch him wonder what it would feel like to be part of the river. As his thin red hair floats back and forth like kelp in the slow current of the shallows, I watch him think that perhaps it would feel like this. Then think, or perhaps it wouldn't feel like anything at all. Then think perhaps this is what he likes best about being down the Franklin, the ditch, as the guides call it. The way the mountains and the rivers and the rainforest care nothing for him. They feel him to be neither part of them nor separate from them, neither want him to be there nor want him to go, neither love nor hate him, neither envy nor disparage his efforts, see him neither as good nor bad. They have no more opinion of him than of a fallen stick or an entire river. He feels naked, without need, without desire. He feels enclosed by the walls of the mountains and the rainforest. He feels, for the first time in such a long time, good. Perhaps this is what death is, he thinks. A peace at the heart of an emptiness.

Shush, shush, shush
. The large shiny red pontoons of the raft they will use to navigate the river begin to inflate as the doctor from Adelaide with the expensive purple polar-fleece jacket and the white legs like an emu pushes the foot pump up and down.

Shush, shush, shush
. I watch myself encouraging him in his labours and revelling in my insincerity. ‘Great job, Rickie, great job. That's the way.' It's not the way, but Aljaz knows it is better that someone else does some of the work than he do it all, even if they do it badly. ‘Stick with it, Rickie.' I watch Rickie give a purposeful smile, watch him feel wanted and needed and appreciated.

‘To finally be here at the Franklin River,'
shush, shush, shush
, ‘you don't know how much it means,' says Rickie.
Shush, shush, shush
.

‘A stiff back, bad food, and weak bowels, that's what it means,' says Aljaz, and I see that this Aljaz is something of a comedian, that he sees his role as much one of entertaining as of guiding. I see that his customary shyness finds a cover in theatrical exaggeration.

I watch as this Aljaz slowly looks up from the river at the bush that forms around its banks and I watch him smile. I know what he is thinking at this precise moment: he is happy to be back at last upon the river, back upon the lousy leech-ridden ditch. Around him, the myrtles and sassafras and native laurels and leatherwoods mass in walls of seemingly impenetrable rainforest, and in front of him flows the tea-coloured water of the river, daily bronzing and gilding the river rock a little further.

I know he is smiling at the punters, who, despite their protestations to the contrary, despite their assertions that this is the most beautiful country, are already feeling a growing unease with this weird alien environment that seems so alike yet so dissimilar to the wilderness calendars that adorn their lounge-rooms and offices. It smells strongly of an acrid, fecund earth, and its temperate humidity weighs upon them like a straitjacket of the senses. Wherever they turn there is no escape: always more rainforest, and more of it irreducible to a camera shot. No plasterboard walls or coffee tables are to be found to act as borders, to reduce this land to its rightful role of decoration. Not that they don't try, and almost always at the start of a trip there is at least one customer who shoots off a roll or two of film in nervous excitement. But for Aljaz, this place that they feel to be moving behind them, causing them to sometimes give an anxious look over their shoulder, for Aljaz this place is home.

‘What a one we got here,' whispers his fellow guide, the Cockroach, pointing at the large accountant from Melbourne. ‘He looks a real goose.'

‘Like an emu,' I hear Aljaz say.

‘Like a …' says the Cockroach, and I can see him searching for the appropriate animal with which to compare the gauche and arrogant accountant, ‘like a fucken …' But the precise analogy eludes him. ‘What's his name anyway?' whispers the Cockroach.

‘Derek,' Aljaz replies, then further pondering upon Derek's form, says, ‘praying mantis.'

‘Yeah,' says Cockroach, then, ‘no', says the Cockroach. ‘No. Almost, but no.' The Cockroach thinks again, then says, ‘Like a locust, that's what he's like, a fucken locust.' And the analogy is entirely correct.

Derek looks like some strange creature that is far too big to be a human, his large pupils at once oddly sensitive and entirely inhuman, capable of suggesting both an emptiness and a certain greed. His nervous hands are rarely from his mouth, to feed it food or cigarettes, and below that bulky body those ludicrous stick legs clad in luminous striped-green thermal underwear.

Aljaz turns and heads up a side track, where in early summer they put bees to harvest the nectar of the leather-wood trees that dapple the rainforest rivers with their white flowers as if it were a wedding and their petals confetti. He feels good. Even his guts, for the first time in such a long time, even his guts don't feel knotted and aching and lurching themselves in readiness for another diarrhoeic discharge. I watch Aljaz change into his rafting gear, dressing in an unhurried fashion, enjoying once more putting on the various bits and pieces. First the bathers, then the long-john neoprene wetsuit with its vivid fluoro-green slashes. Aljaz likes the feel of the wetsuit around his body. It lends him an illusion of strength and purpose. Next layer: the thermal tops, then the bright white and blue nylon outer jacket they call a cag, and finally the lifejacket, bright purple and replete with sheath-knife upon one shoulder, whistle and brightly coloured anodised aluminium carabiners and prussic loops upon the other. Ah, the old carabiners. The customers ask their guides why they wear them on their bodies, and in a condescending tone the guides explain their high and serious purpose; how it is that the carabiner might save all if they become caught in the middle of a flooded river and the guides have to set up pulley and rope systems to get to shore. But the truth is they look dramatic, they lend the necessary sense of danger that instils both fear and respect among the punters - fear of what is to come, respect for the guides on whom they must now depend. It is a visual lesson that talks of life and its smallness. The guides wear the carabiners everywhere, like Mexican revolutionaries with bandoliers, bit players in an extravagant theatre of death. It is all part of the joke. Around his waist Aljaz wraps his flip line, three and a half metres of rainbow-coloured climbers' tape, buckled with yet another carabiner. Upon the side of the flip line he crabs a throw bag. And upon his head goes the crash helmet. Like some luminous and savage tropical insect he returns to his customers.

As they ferry the gear down to the river Aljaz notices that Sheena, the dental asistant, takes and gives things only with her left arm. Her right arm seems to move not at all, seems to hang there like a hinged stick. ‘Excuse me,' asks Aljaz, ‘but have you hurt your arm?'

‘No. No, it's fine.'

Aljaz looks at the arm. He is not persuaded.

‘It's withered.' Sheena says nothing. ‘Your arm.'

‘So what?'

‘This is a very physical trip, Sheena. You have to paddle a raft for ten days, carry heavy loads …'

‘I am strong.'

‘I am not saying you ain't.' Aljaz halts. What is there to say? She is there. It is his job to get her down the river. Somehow.

‘Look,' says Sheena, but before she can go on Aljaz interrupts, saying what he has to say.

‘It's fine. Don't worry. You'll have a great trip. Just let me know if ever things seem a bit hard.'

Afterwards he goes over to the Cockroach, who is tying gear frames into the rafts, and tells him the story.

‘He's not supposed to take people who don't meet the necessary physical requirements,' says the Cockroach, referring to Pig's Breath.

‘Fit enough to sign the cheque. That's Pig's Breath's sole physical requirement.'

They look down at the river's edge where Sheena is working, ferrying gear with her left arm from the trailer to the raft. There is about her something so determined that it makes Aljaz mad.

‘Why the hell did she decide to come on the trip? She ought to have had the sense …' He shakes his head.

‘I had a polio victim once,' says the Cockroach. And laughs. ‘Nice bloke, actually.'

‘I'll take her in my boat,' says Aljaz without enthusiasm. ‘I suppose she's my responsibility.'

They finish tying the gear frames into the middle of the inflated rafts and begin to load up. I watch as Aljaz stands in the boat and calls for the gear in its correct order. First the big black plastic barrels full of food, each weighing in excess of sixty kilograms. It takes two punters to carry a barrel, but a guide must be able to carry one by himself. Aljaz grabs a barrel and feels its immense weight and wonders how he will ever be able to lift it. I can see that Aljaz is badly out of condition. But such things are simply matters of will. The customers believe they are weak and in this instance must act prudently. Aljaz, to the contrary, must look strong and fearless, whatever he knows himself to be, however weak and frightened he might feel inside. It is a charade that is necessary to sustain the whole trip. It is the antidote to fear that spreads like a contagion if it is admitted by a guide. There is a sad lesson in this: people must believe, even, if it must be so, in a lie. Without belief all is lost. And yet, like all blind faiths that seem to go so much against the evidence of reality, they in turn foster their own truths. As long as no fear is acknowledged, great things are possible and the punters are capable of feats of endurance and courage of which they never believed themselves capable. And so Aljaz lifts the barrel onto his shoulder, swings it around and gently deposits it in the cradle formed by the gear-frame netting. Beneath the load I can see his face smiling and laughing at the absurdity of it all.

The beginning of the trip takes on something of a carnival atmosphere. A bottle of cheap rum is produced and passed around. All have a swig, some giggling at their boldness, others affecting a nonchalant air, pretending it is something they do regularly in their daily lives as accountant or nurse or merchant banker or public servant. The bottle comes to the Cockroach. He has already had a joint with Nino the busdriver in the dusty solitude of the empty microbus and is half stoned. The Cockroach drains the bottle, gives a yelp, and grabs Sheena and begins dancing with her on the river rocks. He lifts her up in the air and sweeps her through the air, carrying her into the river, in which he gently lets her down. She staggers to her feet and with her good arm slaps the Cockroach on the face. The Cockroach hasn't anticipated such a response and falls backward.

Aljaz goes back to loading the rafts. On go the waterproof personal gearbags, brightly coloured in blues and greens and reds. On go the additional bags with tents and tarps and cooking equipment. On goes the hard vegetable bag, allowed to swill around at the bottom of the gear frame. On go the ammunition boxes full of first-aid kits and repair kits and punters' cameras. On go the ropes and spare carabiners and carabiner pulleys and rescue throw-bags and bailing buckets, all clipped on at various points to the frame. On goes everything ten people need to survive for ten days in the wilderness.

I can see that Aljaz likes the beginning of the trip - it gives him certainty, it brings order to the chaos of his thoughts. It gives him tangible fears, real fears. Will the food stay dry for ten days? Will the customers get through safely? Will none burn themselves? Or drown? That is always a great, Aljaz's greatest, abiding fear. That he will lose a customer on the ditch. It is so easy, it happens so
smoothly
. Violent death can come with a deceptive grace; so quick, so effortless, so silent, that it is not immediately apparent what has taken place. People turn around thinking that the person is perhaps standing behind their back about to surprise them, whereas they are not playing an elaborate joke, they are dead. Simply dead. A revealing phrase in itself - death is not the complex matter life is. At least not for the dead.

‘I once saw a woman who had drowned in the Zambezi,' says the Cockroach. He is back out of the river, wet, still smiling, and is standing next to me in the raft, helping to buckle the netting down over the gear. ‘She was with another company, not ours, and she had fallen in and got tangled up with the rescue rope. By the time we turned up they had fished her out, but it was too late. She was already blue and they were giving her CPR. But they knew she was gone, you could tell the way they went through the CPR routine so calmly and efficiently, like they were preparing the corpse for embalming rather than trying to keep her alive. This punter on my raft turns around and says, as if he's just seen a fish jump, he says, “She just drowned, is that what it is?” A stupid bald Pom he was. Of course she
just
drowned, her lungs
just
filled with water, I felt like shouting at him.'

But Aljaz hardly hears this story. His mind is elsewhere and I am with it. He is thinking how without the trip his thoughts take on a darkness he cannot overcome. Upon the ditch he can meet his fears, name them - Nasty Notch, the Great Ravine, the Churn, Thunderush, the Cauldron, the Pig Trough - and having met them, bid goodbye to them all. Without the trip his thoughts are beyond his control, and wander toward a divide that he can never see, the presence of which chills him to the bone. At such times he feels the workings of his mind hang by a few slender threads, and if they break he will be unable to do anything, unable even to get up in the morning, unable to do the simplest of things that people take for granted. Unable to say hello without bursting into tears, unable to talk to people without feeling his bowels being gripped by the most terrible fear, unable to meet with friends without experiencing the most horrifying sense of vertigo, that he might suddenly tumble and fall into the abyss.