RELATED EXPEDITION: Bio-Bio River, Chile

     Chilean history, in a sense, begins at the Bio-Bio River. Flowing north and west from the Argentine border and cutting Chile into almost equal halves, it is where the fierce Pehuenche Indians stopped the Spanish expansion southward during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Now river and Indians re threatened by a project to build six hydroelectric dams along its course. The dams would flood lands still held by the Pehuenche and turn the free-flowing river into a series of lakes and a dry riverbed. In March, the National Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group, brought twenty-eight Americans, including my brothers Michael and Max, joined by twenty-one Chileans—businessmen, conservationists, and Pehuenche leaders—to the Bio-Bio to see the river, run its famous white-water rapids and discuss how to fight the dam project.

     DAY ONE We drove through the rich vineyards and farms of the lower Bio-Bio valley to the village of Santa Barbara, near the site of the proposed Pangue Dam, and then higher into the Andes. Evergreen aroma thickened the damp air. When the rain paused, we stopped to make lunch and climb through the forest where a waterfall pours 120 feet from a moss-covered cliff into a clear pool.

     The landscape looked more like Europe than Latin America, except for the caracara birds that haunt each field from its fence posts. At five o'clock, we pitched our tents in a broad field at the upstream end of the Nirreco Canyon. As word spread that rafters had come, small groups of Pehuenche Indians began visiting the camp, bringing handwoven socks and raw-wool hats to sell or trade.

     The 5,000 Pehuenche who live in seven communities in the upper Bio-Bio region are the marginalized remnants of the mounted warriors who held back the Spanish conquest. All will be affected by the dam project. Despite ENDESA's extensive studies of the valley since the 1940s, the utility did not acknowledge the presence of the native people until 1986.

     That year, American anthropologist Katherine Bragg exposed the company's omission in testimony before Chile's parliament. ENDESA first officially informed the Pehuenche leaders of its plans in October 1990, well after preliminary construction of the infrastructure had begun.

     After preparing our campsite, I visited Maria Olga Pinaleo in a sturdy cabin of cordillera cypress. "We are accustomed to living here," she says. "This is where we were born and raised. The Pehuenche have always been here, since the beginning of time. We will not let the bodies of our dead people be flooded with water. If we have to move somewhere else because of the dam, who can tell if we will have good firewood? We will never get good land like this with good water, and nowhere else do we have the pine nuts."

     The Pehuenche cultivate wheat and potatoes in the spring and summer. In the winter, they migrate with their animals to the high cordillera to collect araucaria pine nuts, which they eat and feed their animals. The araucaria nuts are the community's primary source of nourishment; in fact, the name Pehuenche means "people of the araucaria.”

     Maria's husband speaks up: "Even in years when the wheat fails, we can go up to the cordillera and fill our houses. We have the araucaria on our ceremonial altar to Ngenechen—God—who is the same as the Catholic God but male and female. We ask him for abundance and enough food to eat and that everyone in the world be well—not just our people.

     "The proposed dam will destroy the community. We will lose our ceremony and our ability to pray to God. The people will lose their language and culture and, of course, their land. We will be like all those Pehuenche who have gone to Santiago and have forgotten how to speak our language."

     DAY TWO From start to finish, the Bio-Bio is a wild ride. White-water enthusiasts regard the Bio-Bio and the Grand Canyon's Colorado River as the world's two best white-water rivers. The Bio-Bio averages about two-thirds of the Colorado's flow but is ten times as steep, dropping fifty feet per mile, versus ten feet per mile for the Colorado. The Bio Bio is rafting on the edge—a tight series of difficult rapids that fall so closely together there is hardly time to note the scenery. The Bio-Bio has few of the long, lazy stretches of flat water that add leisure to a Grand Canyon float trip.

     Our convoy, the largest raft expedition in the Bio-Bio's history, consisted of two small paddle boats, four large rubber rafts, and three kayaks. We lined the rafts around Jug Buster, a narrow gorge framed by Gibraltar-like pinnacles 600 feet high, the proposed site of the Ralco Dam. Yesterday's veil of clouds and fog lifted, revealing a land of stunning beauty. The sky was ozone-depleted blue. Crimp-necked cormorants flew up the canyon as we boarded the rafts. This is friendly country, with a temperate climate, no biting insects, plenty of wood, few thorns or thistles, and abundant rains. We passed through canyons of jagged granite walls and forests of cypress and broad-leafed evergreens.

     My brother Michael and I visited José del Carmen, the leader of the Pehuenche of Quepaca Ralco. Near his traditional log home is one of the prefabricated wooden houses that the Chilean government is now giving to Pehuenche who are willing to subdivide their property from the communal land. This practice helps ENDESA, since it can negotiate land purchases much more easily with private landowners than with the Pehuenche community at large.

     Carmen is one of the few Indian leaders who, according to ENDESA, favor the dam project. "The Ralco Dam condemns us, and the river will be dry from here to the turbine. If we had other sources of work, we would never accept the dams and money. But people are hungry during the winter now. Last year, the harvest was very bad. I don't trust ENDESA because I know clearly that they are going to damage our community. They tell me that this will destroy only the flooded area, but we know this is not true."

     Some 1,800 workers will pour into this valley with earth movers, cranes, and Caterpillars to build the dams. As in the past, these projects will probably bring alcohol, venereal disease, and crime. Lumber companies will follow on the new roads to clear-cut the forests, a process made ever easier as communal property and the sustainable Pehuenche silviculture declines. The Indians, with no long-term economic base, will eventually have to migrate to the slums of Santiago, where they will join other urbanized Indians who form the lowest rung of Chilean society.

     DAY THREE After breakfast we rode two very difficult rapids, Lost Yak and Lava South, named for Lava, the meanest rapid on the Colorado. The bulk of the river channels through a narrow gorge into a vicious hole created by the rush of twelve-foot waves and strikes a jagged lava wall that juts at a right angle into the river. Rafts that can't make the violent turn may flip against the cliff face and languish there between jagged rock and pulverizing hydraulics.

     We traversed the river above the rapid and began a series of precisely timed pirouettes and deft slides through narrow passages in a controlled approach to the savage wave. To slow our descent, we slithered over an insulating layer of water that glistens on the smooth rocks, whirled through the rock garden, highsiding the raft (by throwing all weight to one side) so it could slide through the narrows on one pontoon before the current.

     We lost Michael overboard in the process, but another paddler caught his vest ant hauled him back into the raft as we broke loose and plunged into the hole. There we were stuck timelessly as the raft writhed in the powerful suction. Paddling against the current with time suspended, I watched the torrent ducks hunting mayflies in the oxygenated water. We broke loose from the hole to plummet over the final fall and move, dreamlike, away from the roaring tumult; it was then that we heard the cheering of our companions, who were watching from the cliffs.

     We camped that evening in a magical amphitheater bracketed by stony hills cloaked in a forest of giant beech trees. José Antolín, another Pehuenche cacique, or leader, joined us. He wore a straw hat and sandals of tire rubber. “The dams will not bring any benefit to our community," he said. “Only damage. All of our working lands and our native forests, which are mainly on the banks of the river, will be flooded. We will never find lands like these any where. If we lose our lands, we will lose our traditions.

     "ENDESA will not give us work. It will hire city people who know how to construct ant excavate, not Indians. It is offering work, but this is all deception. In years past, ENDESA just came in and did what it wished without consulting us, building houses without asking permission. Since the World Bank is lending money to ENDESA to build dams, why doesn't it try to lend money to us to develop good things in our community?"

     That night the Indians played their traditional huaynos with flutes and drums around the fire until it died. The stars blazed with such ferocity that they lit our tents inside and threw clear shadows outside.

     DAY FOUR We took the chief on a paddle raft through the rapids, a trip he had never before made. He sat on the thwart and laughed loudly as we tumbled over pillow rocks and frothy ledges. In a pool below two difficult rapids—Half Moon and Full Moon—saturated with spray and adrenaline, he spread his arms and shouted, "This is our Bio-Bio!"

     After lunch and hot baths at sulfur springs near Avallano, we whiled away the afternoon in the salto (waterfall) stretch, a narrow gorge besieged by hundreds of cascades pouring from fissures in rock walls, bounding over piney cliff tops, sprinkling daintily down mossy panels, or crashing through vertical groves of wild rhubarb and cedar. There is not a single place in this country where you can look without being struck by the spectacle.

     DAY FIVE The river channeled through a narrow stretch of polished granite called Royal Flush Gorge. It dropped through a series of constricted fissures and down high steps that form rapids called Suicide King, Queen of Clubs, One-Eyed Jack, and Ace in the Hole. One-Eyed Jack is the worst: four sharp falls, each followed by a vicious hole, two of them large enough to swallow the eighteen-foot rafts.

     As we strapped on our helmets, I asked environmental lawyer and neophyte rafter Jacob Scherr if he was ready. “We're the best friends this river has," he said, smiling confidently. “It's going to take good care of us." We threaded the first narrows sideways, slid down the tongue of the wave created by a giant fin rock, gently kissing the hole created by back-to-back waves, then threw ourselves against the pontoon, forcing the raft's nose to crash through a first gigantic wave. We bounced back to position, paddled hard in measured strokes, and then threw ourselves into the bow to beat the rubber raft through the second wave. We paused in the keeper below the wave before our forward ballast pushed us through. In the same way, we broke loose of the third savage hole and surged over the final drop and flushed out.

     As we climbed the high cliffs to leave the river, I looked up the narrow gorge, with its hanging gardens and roaring falls, and engraved the picture in my mind. I was thinking that a million years have passed since the glacier carved that scenery and feeling like the last person to leave the Grand Canyon before they sealed the Hoover Dam. This dam will alter or destroy the ecology of a watershed that stretches from the Andes to the Pacific. The Pehuenche will lose their culture and livelihood, and the Chileans a vital link to their history and character. After the Bio-Bio is gone, they won't be able to show their children its gorges and oak-clad canyons or feel the river surge. People will never again ride its wild white water to experience its unleashed fury and feel the thrill that unites us with the thousands of human generations that lived before nature was tamed.

     The argument for the project is obvious: power for a growing nation pulling itself up from poverty. One measures the value of the untamed river in different currencies—aesthetic, spiritual, cultural. The American conservationist John Muir said that the wilderness is God's temple, that destroying its most beautiful places is tantamount to tearing pages from the Scriptures. In this sense, the Bio-Bio's destruction will diminish our opportunities to sense the divine. We should think very carefully before we impose that cost on our children.