BY: CORRAN ADDISON
PHOTOS:
CORRAN ADDISON
Bio
Corran Addison is a regular contributor to the Paddler magazine and owns Soul Waterman
Fear and loving
Foreword by Graeme Addison
Today, Corran is a vastly experienced paddler and altogether an outdoor risk-taker. His son Kailix is lucky to have him still around at all. Brushes with oblivion are the stuff of family legend, and we could describe ourselves as fate’s escapees.
The tale Corran tells is primarily about conscience, about the fear of losing a child due to one’s recklessness. Thankfully, the tale has no end, but it’s a little masterpiece worthy of a Jack London essay on doom.
Even readers who’ve never seen the frozen north are gripped by London’s icy narratives presaging a lonely death. Just so here. With his much greater experience than mine, Corran stitches together near-fatal episodes that are deeply chilling yet, mostly, are lucky escapes – bar one.
We contended with sucking undercuts, a sun that fried the skin (to produce cancerous lesions decades later), and uncharted gorges that harboured disaster far from help. Oddly, I never worried, as Corran does, that one or other of us might meet an untimely end. That’s because we were equally caught up in the thrill of pioneering under African skies. Here nature is casually murderous while seemingly offering a warm welcome to adventurers. Limbs and lives vanish into the maw of crocodiles or succumb to the numbing surprise of a mamba bite.
Despite our age differences (Corran as a teenager and me as a 30-something), we were truly partners. Looking back from age 75, I understand the utter folly of what we sometimes tackled out of ignorance: running unseen drops without scouting; no rescue skills, equipment or setups; crazy ventures in leaky, rotten fibreglass boats. I’m aghast, not at the facts but at the blithe escapist spirit of those far-off days on the Orange River, Tugela, Doring and Mkomazi.
Nothing we did comes close to the daredevil antics of today. The danger is always relative to the know-how and tools of those who dare.
Begins:
This spring, a friend lost his 17-year-old son to a kayaking accident. The group did everything right. They scouted, they set up safety, and nobody was in over their head. It was just one of those unfortunate events where things went wrong, and nobody could do anything fast enough to avoid the tragic ending. Thankfully he was not present to witness the accident.
As a father who has introduced my son to a slew of potentially dangerous activities, like kayaking, snowboarding, motorcycling and more, I’d be amiss if I didn’t say this is on my mind, perhaps more than it should be. The bond I am establishing with my son, the memories he’s forming, the ones I’m forming, and the deep bond that’s growing between us is partly thanks to these activities we do together.
My most precious childhood memories are paddling with my father in sun-kissed South Africa. He introduced me to paddling when I was just six years old, and while we had no kid-specific equipment (we didn’t have any equipment – he and his friends built the equipment we needed as we went), I still could participate.
Gavin
Gavin had a deep love for kayaking and the people he paddled with.
Baked to a crisp
We’d spend months planning each trip because it was truly an expedition. The river we ran was a 10-12 day trip, with everything we needed to be carried with us in the fragile fibreglass kayaks. It was more than a day’s drive; the shuttle was a day round trip. The sun was so harsh and unforgiving that we’d leave the river baked to a crisp, lips and nose bleeding from excessive sunburn, hands seemingly permanently covered with resin from repairing boats on the go, fibreglass rash on our butts (seats hadn’t occurred to us, so we sat directly on the fibreglass hull in speedos).
It was utterly miserable.
Those are my most cherished childhood memories. As I grew into a teenager, and all my school friends avoided their parents, regarding them as old fuddy-duddies, my father was my best friend. What teenager thinks his father is his best buddy, seriously?
I did. Because we had established such a deep bond on these expeditions, the most exciting and cherished things I could do were always with him. I hope to have this relationship with my son, and we write our new story on the palimpsest of the one my father and I created.
But it is not without its dangers. As I grew in skill and our equipment improved, we began pushing our limits. One day, when I was about 14, a small group of us decided to make the second-ever run of the Gariep Gorge on the Orange River, running through the Kalahari and Namib deserts. This boulder-strewn canyon is rife with undercuts; indeed, the entire gorge consists of massive boulders that have rolled into the river, choking the flow and creating the rapids that run around and under them.
Halfway down the run, my father and the third paddler Neil ‘Beetle’ Baily, eddied out unexpectedly, so I decided to join them. But I was late and washed low into the eddy, where it spilt out the back side under a massive undercut. I was so low that the rear of my boat was pushed under the rock, and I felt my life jacket pushing against it as it tried to suck me in. I could reach back and push off it with my paddle and out to safety alongside the other two.
Terrifying
I said nothing, but it was a terrifying moment. I very nearly bought the farm. I’m sure if I’d mentioned this to my father, he would have seriously considered what we were doing (in general), and I’m glad I didn’t. But imagine if…
A couple of years later, as my skill set evolved rapidly, I led my father down a class 5 run in the Western Cape on the Dwaars River. A class 5 creek with waterfalls and undercuts everywhere, you had to always be on your toes. I’d run it the day before with a friend and showed my father down the run. The day before, my friend had gotten pinned on a rock mid-river that was undercut right above a 10m waterfall, and I managed to get him a line to pull him off the rock. I was aware of the danger, and so I was mindful that when we got to the same place, to make sure we kept away from it.
So I let my guard drop on an earlier rapid, and as I sat at the bottom waiting for my father, I wondered what he was doing. He should have been right behind me and was not. I waited a minute and then decided I should get out and go up to see. He appeared as I got to shore and paddled down to join me. He’d gotten pinned under a log jam and, by his testimony, nearly came to an untimely end.
Kayaking was the glue that created my amazing bond with my father, but it was nearly the same thing that almost took me away from him and then him from me.
So I think about this. I use all my experience, and common sense, to create as safe an environment as possible for my son, whether kayaking or snowboarding. Still, both activities innately add an element of danger to life that would otherwise not be present, and they are also the activities that make our lives so rewarding.
When my son was four, he couldn’t swim. It wasn’t a problem because we put him in a good life jacket, and he would float down rapids together all the time, getting him used to the environment. One day, at the put-in of a fun run we would do in the Terrible Two tandem, I was dealing with gear for us, and my wife was organizing this and that at the river’s edge. Kailix was playing in the sand. Suddenly she asks, “Where is Kailix?”. I looked around, and he was nowhere to be seen. After a few seconds, I saw him in the river below the surface. I jumped in and pulled him out. I had not put his life jacket on yet, and him being four simply didn’t make the connection. He’d jumped into the river as we always did to play and had immediately sunk.
He was fine. Not even shaken up at all. A brief wide-eyed gasp and all was OK. But it was a close call. All it would have taken was another minute of us fiddling with our gear, and it would all have been over.
Inherently dangerous
Of course, the argument that life is inherently dangerous is sound. He could fall off his bicycle, slip in the shower, fall down the stairs, or be struck down by an illness. He fell off a schoolyard Jungle Jim and landed on his head once, which could easily have broken his neck. He fell off his skateboard one day and missed hitting the edge of a railing with his neck by millimetres.
There are so many ways to go wrong that I wonder whether we are adding unnecessary danger. Is the prolongation of life worth eliminating the joy of life? It’s easy for me to sit here and say it is, not having lost a son. Would I still think the same thing if I did lose my son because of an accident in an environment I introduced him to? I know I would not handle it well.
Nothing guaranteed
When my friend lost his son, we talked about this. It had only been a few days and he was stricken with grief. He said, “How could I change one thing without changing everything, if the chance were given? There is nothing guaranteed, not one more second with him. Would I steal everything that he had fallen in love with? I can’t answer that and struggle thinking about it.”
He does go on to say that he would continue to live to the fullest with his other child. They would continue their activities and adventures, their memory building and bonding. Despite his clear grief, he felt in his heart of hearts that the short time he’d had with his son was spent in the best way possible.
As I continue this most wonderful adventure with my son, watching him grow more and more confident as a person, with his love for life, and his obvious joy, deep down, I hope to see him grow into a young man full of joy and passion. I take all the precautions I can, creating as safe an environment as possible in the adventure we have embarked on together.
For Gavin. Keep boofing, wherever you are.
