PADDLER 35
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 .
PADDLER 35