How the Breede taught a creaky old guy to become a river himself

Armed only with frantic gym training and a great deal of anxiety, an older paddler joins a team of barefoot young river scientists for a multiday expedition. Between scientific pit stops, capsizes, rapids and headwinds, he learns - reluctantly and then gratefully - that rivers reshape more than landscapes. By Don Pinnock

- Don Pinnock

(Photos: Dave Pinnock)

I said yes because it sounded heroic. One doesn't often get invited to paddle the Breede River with young river scientists who talk casually about the Zambezi, the Congo and the Nile like old acquaintances. It felt like an opportunity to briefly “become a river” in the large, mythic sense.

Also, I imagined evenings of beer and repartee while bats stitched the dusk and the tents glowed under the stars. Then I remembered I am in my 70s and my upper body is a museum of good intentions.

The panic arrived in a rush, like a fast channel that looks friendly until the hiss turns into a growl. These people had paddled the Kavango, the Nile, the Zambezi, the Congo. I used to paddle a sea kayak years ago, but not for a long, long time.

Team leader Matt Dooley and research director Dr Rainer von Brandis of the Wilderness Project stopped by to assure me that this was to be a champagne-and-cocktail cruise. “Six hours of paddling a day, max,” Matt said, as if one could measure doom by the hour. “A few little rapids. Bit of wind maybe. Nothing big.”

Their faces were radiantly sincere.

Six hours. I did the mathematics of mortality. What's that do to a shoulder? Does a spine have spare parts? I tried to imagine drowning in a respectable way.

By then it was too late to pull out and save face, so I did the only thing I could think of to survive: I enrolled in a gym - never before having entered one - for four weeks of intensive upper-body work.

There's almost no difference between a gym and a medieval dungeon, except that in a dungeon at least the torture is free.