Flipping through a stack of snapshots, Andrew Pietowski stops on one taken at a recent award ceremony in Warsaw. It captures him with his eyes closed, a little off balance, his arms wrapped around a large trophy shaped like an Easter Island monolith. “Look at this moment of reflection,” he jokes. “Twenty years ago they didn’t want me in Poland. Now I am back.”
But it couldn’t last forever. Graduation would mean a government posting to a dreary factory, so Pietowski and nine of his comrades began planning a final adventure–on the Andean rivers of Argentina. They spent a year preparing for the trip: studying maps, securing sponsorships, building their own kayaks, and scrounging supplies and gear. In June 1978 they were ready to weigh anchor with 21 kayaks, tons of equipment, and a three-axle all-terrain military truck, when border tensions with Chile delayed the trip. Later the Argentine government denied their visas–possibly, Pietowski says, it feared ten communist subversives destabilizing their rivers. The destination shifted to Peru, but the excursion was postponed a third time when the Baltic ports froze and yet again when Peru entered its own period of political instability. After a year’s delay, the group, dubbed “Canoandes ’79,” finally set off for Mexico, which seemed the safest alternative.
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The group received word of the crackdown at the Polish embassy by way of an official communique from Warsaw. “The language, the wording, was so communist, so awful,” says Pietowski. “We just exploded, because we were completely free. One day we just woke up and said, let’s do the Mara–on River. And suddenly they are giving such bullshit.” The group denounced the Polish government on Peruvian television. They organized a protest committee with writer Mario Vargas Llosa and marched to the embassy at the head of a throng of 5,000. “We just vented all this stuff,” Pietowski says. “And this way we burned our bridge.” Members of Peru’s communist party were split over the controversy. “We brought up such a clear issue that people said, ‘No, I can’t support this.’ We should have been paid by the CIA good money, but nobody gave us any.” Pietowski says some local communists began harassing them, and fearing for their lives they applied for asylum in the U.S.
“Projects? You cannot abandon them,” he says. “This is what I am trying to tell my students, ‘Your project is to graduate now. Your project is to enter college.’ Kids don’t have this, they don’t try. Kids have low ego, low self-esteem. And parents don’t talk to them like this. I’m trying to insist that really valuable things don’t come easy.”
After the expedition, National Geographic contracted Pietowski to write a book on his experiences. Recently separated from his wife, he moved to Chicago for a fresh start and to be near his mother. But he’s had little time to write, packing up his old house in New York and trying to lose some of the ballast of the last 20 years. “It’s a terrible thing we accumulate so much,” he says. “For God’s sake the people in Peru can put their things on their back and go. I came to this country with one backpack and now I need a huge truck to move my stuff.” He’s donating most of his library and papers to the Polish Museum of America in West Town.
