Thursday, 13 Jun 2002

SPILLIMACHEEN, British Columbia.

Nine days into the big swim and it’s time for an inventory.

First, my body. Three days ago, I pushed my sunburned skin too far, and my nose began to peel off in sheets. My lips cracked, and my nose bled during the night. Now a cold sore has sprouted through the cracks like a weed and my whole upper lip throbs while I swim. The beginnings of a blister appeared on the lateral side of my right ankle where my boot rubs against my fin strap. The skin is scraping off the top of the fourth toe on my right foot. There are the raised red dots of a heat rash behind my knees where my suit bunches up, and more chafing on the insides of my thighs, again from the folds of the suit. The little nicks and gashes on my hands and arms from wrangling gear and swatting riverside briars don’t look like they’ll amount to much, but I’ll have to watch them. My neck has been tightening up at night. A massage might do me good tomorrow if I knew where to get one.

The river. After a low of 44 degrees on day two in Tatley Slough, temperatures have been climbing steadily. Yesterday 52 degrees, today 56, except when we passed cold creeks. When the surge of meltwater catches up to me, though, the bottom will fall out and I’ll be swimming in close to 40 degree water again. Tempted as I was to put on the wet suit today, I thought better of it. I was a bit run down, but the current was good and I made seven miles in three hours in the dry (damp) suit, doing a modified breast stoke with a dolphin kick most of the way.

Yesterday and today, I saw the first signs of sewage and farm waste in the river. Tufts of brown foam and bubbles clung to me like iron filings to a magnet. And so, 200 miles short of where I thought I might, I began the ritual of gargling with hydrogen peroxide before I ate or drank. Even when I smell the familiar odor of human waste, it is hard to convince myself that anything is wrong with this river. Today as I stroked through islands of gray-brown swirling foam, the air was thick with birds, crowds of fish scattered from beneath my shadow, and the river nudged its way past mountain ranges slathered with old growth. How could it be polluted? I thought. This river is too beautiful for its own good.

The gear. Everything we cram into a Zodiac and a Nissan is animated by the dream of reaching the Pacific and becomes the trappings of an expedition. The five-kilogram bags of oatmeal, the tarps, the dry bags, the cook stoves, the spare goggles, the 750 Ibuprofen caplets, the mosquito netting, the maps, the polypropylene underwear, the cell phone, all somehow lend themselves to this effort. So far the equipment is holding up. We are going through lots of food, but mostly because of my odd cravings for Goldfish crackers and tea with too much honey. Before we hit the wilderness in two weeks, we need to go through all the camping gear, pick out what we like, and stash the rest. We’ll never fit everything we have into the Zodiac without sinking it and we’ll be out of touch in Kinbasket Lake for a few weeks. So by the time we head up there, we better have things sorted out.

One of our Portland crew people, Nicole, is bringing us a load of supplies this weekend, and that’ll be our last chance to get anything special. I’ll spend an hour or two tomorrow putting together a list for her, and two hours marveling at her generosity. Nicole has not only agreed to run supplies up to us every two weeks for six months — she pays for the supplies herself and covers her own transport costs. When people ask me what Nicole’s title is, I tell them “Angel.”

On the financial side, a searching inventory reveals that we have about $300 in cash, enough to keep things going for another week or two. Luckily, Nicole will be bringing up T-shirts (first she’ll need a special cotton-importing permit from the Canadian government), which we will sell to raise the money we need to provision ourselves as we move down river. Of course, the T-shirts won’t do us much good in the wilderness. They also won’t be enough to keep me from spending rest days on the donated phone, trying to scrape together the money to get the word out about the river.

On the home front, the finances look a little scary. My savings have melted. I’ve still got the stack of bills I brought up to Canada with me, and there’s another batch due in July. Some of this pressure will ease when T-shirt revenue and other donation money starts to roll in, and I start reimbursing myself for a lot of the equipment I purchased up front. But I worry that the revenue won’t catch up to me in time.

I knew that I would be running this race against time — there is only so much money one can raise before one actually starts swimming — but I don’t enjoy it. The only thing worse would have been not getting in the water at all. So I have faith, I work the phones, I pray, I hope for a coin drive at every school along the way. I know there are people out there who will help me to put the river in the public eye, and rally around to jump-start the cleanup. I just need to meet more of them. Soon.

Time for bed. Thanks for reading.