A muzzle flash lit up my tent. The shotgun erupted again without warning, from just a few feet away. Flattening myself to the ground, I remember three rapid-fire thoughts:
“I don’t want to get shot!”
Then: “I’m the medic. I don’t want anyone to get shot.”
And, as another blast shattered the night, and men shouted and raced across a meadow littered with volcanic boulders: “Someone is at least going to get cut or break a leg on those rocks.”
Not much for praying, I kept it simple: “Please, please, please...”
A few minutes earlier, we had turned in from an evening of fireside stories. The tents were on a promontory that fell steeply on three sides to the Blue Nile, the river Ethiopians call Abay Wenz, or “Grandfather River.”
Only a thin layer of ripstop nylon lay between me and whatever was happening out there. Then, silence draped the timpani of my heart. At last, I heard Mike, our leader, moving cautiously from tent to tent. By my door, a whisper: “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Just go to sleep.”
Right.
I invoked the other half of my simple prayer: “thank you, thank you, thank you...” Eventually, I dropped off. If they needed me, they knew where to find me.
In the morning, we learned that a bandit took one of our donkeys and then tried for another. Remarkably, none of our team was hurt. The animals were all there, nibbling the sparse grass. Even the bandit apparently escaped unharmed. It was a fortunate end to yet another bad moment in this five-week journey.
Our aim was to be the first, ever, to successfully descend the Blue Nile from its source at Lake Tana in north-central Ethiopia to the Sudanese border. A few intrepid souls had negotiated portions of the river, but so far, no one attempting the full 640 miles had made it. Someone on every expedition had drowned or been at the losing end of a human or crocodile attack.
Because the upper river had etched a chasm hundreds of feet deep along the initial 35 miles, we hiked it. “I’ve rafted that section,” Mike said when tapped for the leadership role. A couple of years earlier, the eighteen-year veteran river guide had taken a group down that section of relentless, churning, crazy water.
Clients had been badly hurt when their raft slammed into one of the straight-up walls, and Mike’s Ethiopian assistant had died of malaria. “We don’t need to do it again.”
We started walking at Tississat Falls, a 150-foot high, half-mile wide wall of froth. There was no road, just farm trails through vivid green fields of teff, beans, and maize. Hundreds of square miles rimmed our view as we trudged the immense bowl of watershed feeding the Blue Nile with end-of-rainy-season torrents. Gaining a momentum that impressed even our veteran oarsmen, the river eventually sweeps into Sudan, blending with the White Nile at Khartoum. Most of the water arriving in Cairo, we were told, comes from the Blue Nile side.
The canyon walls carved a cold and narrow channel where they dropped straight down hundreds of feet into almost perpetual shade. The medic in me was glad we weren’t down there.
After the trek, we’d spend twenty-four days in rafts on our way to Sudan. On the first six, we’d encounter mostly male Amharic herders watering their livestock before climbing hours back to their highland villages. Later, after six days in the no-man’s land of the Black Gorge, we’d spend twelve days in “the tribal lands.” There, we’d meet tribes historically plundered by the Amharics for slaves. The people there spoke different languages, prayed to different gods. We were likely to be the first whites many of them had ever seen.
My chance to join this hand-picked crew came at the expense of a physician whose new boss offered her the choice of going on this journey or keeping her job. My name bubbled up when an old friend at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) was chatting with Dr. Bruce Paton from the Wilderness Medical Society. He asked if she knew anyone who could fill in. It was June, 1999, just ten weeks before departure.
There were several points in my favor. I was an experienced paramedic. I had completed two lengthy expeditions in the ‘70s with NOLS. I had wilderness search and rescue experience. And I was well-acquainted with the rigors of traveling in developing nations. Dr. Paton called and dangled the idea of the trip in front of me.
“Is there any chance you could go?” he said.
The offer licked the edges of my incurable wanderlust, then bit. My rational mind fought back. The reality was, it had been awhile since I had actually run emergency calls or been in the backcountry. I was living in the Midwest with my family, our dog, a mortgage. I was a mom. No way, I thought as he talked.
I thanked him, hung up the phone—and made a beeline for the atlas. Where is Ethiopia, exactly? There, on the Horn of Africa. What’s in my planner, exactly? The weeks were uncharacteristically, magically, clear. My pulse quickened. I consulted my family, my finances, and my gumption—and said yes, I’d be the trip medic.
Ten weeks evaporated. I bolstered my medical knowledge, got shot with multiple vaccines, gathered supplies and equipment. I extricated myself from the shackles of everyday routines and obligations, and left gifts wrapped and ready for my daughter’s thirteenth birthday. Not until I eased into my seat on the plane did a memory that had been lurking in the eddies of my mind swirl in. It had to do with a third expedition with NOLS, long ago.
What originally drew me to NOLS was the chance to learn the skills to manage extreme risks such as we faced on the Blue Nile. My two-week winter mountaineering course in December, 1973, included five nights of temperatures 35 degrees below zero. Our packs weighed more than 80 pounds. I loved it. The following summer I went back to Wyoming for three weeks of horsepacking, then headed north for a sea kayaking course in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. A college kid with time on my hands, I plunged into any chance to be outdoors.
The Alaska expedition came together in the white nights of midsummer Anchorage. The next day, we took the train to Whittier, launched our kayaks, and headed out. Camp was pitched on a summer-green, mossy bank with a vista that promised never to quit.
In the morning, I knew something was terribly wrong. I was light-headed, spacy. A foggy layer of thickness like transparent cotton muffled everything. The shoreline looked too clear, fake, like a museum diorama.
Then it began to undulate, up and down, up and down.
I sought out the course leader, an arrogant tough guy, and tried to explain. He didn’t believe me. He grilled me meanly, and at length. “You’re sick? Why? What’s wrong? What do you mean, nothing seems right?”
How could I explain something I didn’t understand? As the conversation continued, his disgust became palpable. “Maybe you’re just afraid. Maybe you should tough it out a couple of days and see if it just goes away.”
I understood his point of view. By asking to be evacuated, I was committing the worst sin in an era when a certain macho attitude was expected—especially since it was only the first day. I remembered the disdain we’d had for a woman who opted off the winter course, also for vague reasons. We said scornful things about her, that she was a wimp, a crybaby, and worst, a quitter. These things would be said about me, too. I knew this, and still I begged to go.
Within a few hours, I was paddling back to safety. At the emergency department, I was diagnosed with “possible encephalitis”—probably tick-borne disease carried up from Wyoming. I went home and nothing more came of it except I slept a lot for a month.
But the shame of it flared now and then over the years. Wondering if that course leader was right was a vicious whisper in the back of my mind that never fully disappeared. It was a hard memory that nudged a bony finger into my soul: “You’re a quitter. You aren’t cut out for tough stuff. You’ll never be good enough to accomplish anything worthwhile.” The sense of inadequacy came and went, until at last it was forgotten. Almost.
Twenty-seven hours from home, on the evening of September 11, 1999, I finally came to earth in Addis Ababa. A city whose name had fed my map addiction since childhood, whose name I’d rolled over my tongue for years, rose up from the black of night. Pockmarking the night sky were dozens of fires, and the airport—a grimy, dim, chaotic third-world affair—was filled with smoke and clamor.
Through the din outside customs, I heard someone calling my name, and Mauritio, our logistics fixer, waved me over. Through the moldy fuzz of jet lag, I learned that Ethiopia is on a thirteen-month calendar, and September 11 is their New Year’s Eve. By tradition, the people light bonfires at dusk and roast a goat or sheep in celebration.
Our feast was at a small Italian restaurant just outside the airport gates. When the Italians failed to colonize Ethiopia in the 1930's, some of the soldiers stayed on. Now, Addis Ababa boasts a substantial Ethiopian-Italian community, and Mauritio was one of them.
I felt both eager and nervous to meet the team. Most of us had never met and it seemed momentous to come together at last, put faces to the names. Our goal wasn’t just to get down the river. National Geographic also expected us to bring the story home. And the people at the restaurant that night expected me to bring them out alive.
A few days later, I was standing helplessly on the banks of a rough-and-tumble tributary, wondering if I could do that. Three people were struggling for their lives in the intense current, and there was nothing I could do but watch.
Earlier that afternoon, we’d cornered a hill and Mike had gotten his first glimpse of a crossing he’d fretted about since first seeing it on our inadequate maps. Detouring would create a delay we couldn’t afford.
“We can’t get across that,” he said. His career was built on assessing risks accurately, but the donkey drivers hadn’t read the manual—and much of the donkey team was already across. We watched as another animal, loaded with equipment and driven by the shouts and slaps of two men, stepped away from the bank, eyes wide, straining against the current. It may not have been safe by North American standards, but this was Ethiopia.
We went in small groups until just three men remained. Just then, the river suddenly rose a solid eighteen inches. It had been raining upslope all afternoon, and now the runoff reached us. They clambered a few hundred yards upstream. Linking arms, they set out from the far bank on a diagonal path towards us.
Halfway across, a wave bumped them hard and swept them off their feet. Swimming hard, fighting the torrent, they struggled toward us. I willed them on, trying not to glance downstream at the white-frothed rapids below as I whispered my prayer: “Please, please, please...”
We held out branches to them. Finally, they got close enough to grab ahold, and we hauled them in. Soaked and exhausted, they scrabbled to safety. As soon as he was able, one of them tossed a handful of bread into the water, an offering of gratitude to Grandfather River. I added my own: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” And then we turned up the hill into the heat and dust of the trail.
Two days later, we reached the Broken Bridge, so named because the Ethiopians obliterated its middle span to thwart the Italian invasion. There are just four bridges across the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. This one and another back at Tississat Falls were constructed by Portuguese missionaries in the 1600s, and are wide enough for pedestrians and livestock. A few Ethiopian birr buys a trip over the yawning gap in the Broken Bridge, hauled by men who spend their days maneuvering people across by a rope tied around the waist.
Happily, I didn’t have to submit to being such human cargo. While we were trekking, a secondary team had descended twenty rugged miles from Mota, the nearest town, with three inflatable rafts, metal frames, food, and other supplies. The oarsmen spent the afternoon rigging their rafts and finally rowed across the torrent to the rest of us. We spent the night perched on the steep hill by the bridge, and I dreamed I was sleeping in a washing machine.
While waiting that afternoon, I pondered the upcoming twenty-four days. Entering such a remote area means understanding that help is far away, and, in the worst circumstances, could be too late. We accepted this, relished it. Self-reliance is attractive to adventurers, and I was grateful to NOLS in spite of the lingering insecurities from my evacuation. Thankfully, that emotional baggage was not pressing the morning we pushed off down the river. I’d never done any rafting, and the water was churning, rough, dangerous. The river, swollen by end-of-rainy-season volume, was an equatorial brew as thick, frothy, and brown as hot chocolate.
As we left the shore, I assessed our team. In addition to the three veteran river guides, there were a writer, photographer, and videographer from National Geographic, two interpreters (Zelalem and Ephraim), an armed guard. And me, the medic, the one charged with bringing everyone through thirty days in backcountry Ethiopia.
During the expedition, my intention was be an asset to the team and carry my head high at the end. I was practiced in a NOLS concept called “expedition behavior.” It’s a team-oriented outlook, involving, for me, staying strong and healthy for the good of all, pitching in with camp duties, and helping the others bring home the story. On the rafts, it meant practicing good water safety (and occasionally warding off crocodiles by throwing “croc rocks”). Onshore, it meant helping in camp, pitching more than my fair share of tents so that the journalists could visit villages in the best light of the day, and waiting to cross photogenic stretches of beach until the photographers were done.
We tapped into the outside world just twice in coming days at the two remaining bridges, when Mauritio met us with supplies and news from home. The bridges were built for motorized vehicles, hard to miss. But our final rendezvous lacked such substance. Take-out was planned for 9:30 am, Wednesday, October 13, on the north bank of the river at a vague bend on the map just a couple of miles short of the Sudan border.
A few days before take-out, I was huddled in my raincoat at the river’s edge, hanging on to the rafts. Wind was whipping the river and driving horizontal rain from a dark black sky. We were busy trying to avoid getting arrested—or shot.
The evening before, we’d seen men—militia, judging by their clothing—congregating on the opposite bank. By morning, dozens of them, all armed, summoned us in no uncertain terms. We broke camp and crossed the river. For ninety minutes, Zelalem explained our federal paperwork, but these men didn’t want to trust anything that didn’t come directly from their own superiors. They wanted to march us to the closest town, a six hour walk.
At last, the militia leader said we could go. We hustled to leave before they could change their minds. When everyone else had boarded, I leaned over to heave the rafts offshore. Suddenly, two men sent to smooth our passage with the next militia used me as a human gangplank, pushing me face down in the
shallows.
At the same moment, the current grabbed the rafts, swinging them toward the middle of the river. The riverbed dropped from beneath my feet, and I was pulled in over my head, into the waters of the Blue Nile. It was impossible to see what might be lurking behind me in the churning brown water. Momentum picked up. Clinging to the side of a raft, I had just one overriding thought: “Crocodile breakfast.... I’m gonna be crocodile breakfast...”
“Help me, you guys...Hey!” In the chaos, no one saw me. Please, please, please.
“Help me, damn it!” Finally, Zelalem saw me. Shocked, he quickly hauled me aboard. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
In the end, we brought the story home. We did what we set out to do, escaping, miraculously, with little harm—mostly diarrhea and foot fungus. (Our jubilation was dulled to learn a few months later that malaria had claimed a favorite armed guard.)
The story appeared in the December, 2000, issue of National Geographic. The video won National Geographic Explorer “Best of 2000” honors. The others, all professional adventurers, moved along to their next challenges. I went home and resumed my ordinary life of mortgage, household, family.
Yet I was changed. I had gone to a place where the potential for disaster was relentless, where I met every intense moment with sufficient grace and competence. My colleagues came home, and each remains a friend.
One afternoon after the jet lag had ended and I’d stopped wondering what time it was in Ethiopia, I came across a “NOLS Alumni” bumper sticker. For a few minutes, I held it in my hands, tracing the outlines of the letters, thinking. That was when I realized the sour memories from Prince William Sound had vanished. The whispering doubts about whether I could accomplish hard things were erased. The nagging inner voices were quiet, the emotional baggage gone.
I went out to where my car was parked, pulled the backing off the sticker, and pasted it onto my bumper for the world to see.