Anytime Rob Raker stopped by the house, Arjun and Emma would grin excitedly, shout out, “Uncle Rob!” and run up to greet him. Rob would take Arjun out in the yard to kick the soccer ball around or play catch. Once he showed up with a Red Raptor Osprey Sport kite, and we all went to the top of a nearby mesa where the wind was gusting hard. He taught Arjun how to play out the kite strings as he ran into the wind, and how to make the kite perform acrobatic moves, climbing and diving and inverting. Often, he’d arrive with little gifts in hand like a feather from a prairie falcon, a chunk of fool’s gold, or the vertebrae he’d found of a small animal. He’d have the kids explore the skeleton and make conjectures based on their observations. “Exactly,” he’d say when they were onto something.
He would also show the kids his various cameras and latest photos of coyote cubs or a family of beavers. Arjun was fascinated with the different buttons, and especially liked to take pictures of himself making funny faces and then viewing them on the monitor. Rob had been an environmental scientist in an earlier career, and in addition to eating and adventuring, he had two loves: nature and science. He was unable to merely skim the surface of any subject. He had to know, to understand. He had the patience, intellect, and curiosity to pursue thoughts and ideas to their absolute end point. When he was showing one of his treasures or explaining something technical to Arjun, he reminded me of Phineas J. Whoopee from a cartoon I loved as a kid. Tennessee Tuxedo and his walrus buddy were constantly being faced with problems they had no idea how to confront. So to get started, they’d consult with “the man with all the answers,” Mr. Whoopee, who would give a joyous lesson on his “fantastic, fantabulous, three-dimensional blackboard,” or “3DBB.”
“Ha ha ha ha, my boy!” I could almost hear Rob saying giddily to Arjun, his bushy eyebrows lifting and falling as he showed him all his different camera lenses. “A telephoto lens is like a telescope, allowing you to look at something from far away. It makes the object appear closer. The focal length of a lens determines how ‘magnified’ the photograph is. The higher the number, the more magnified the image becomes. To take pictures of animals, it’s not always easy to get up close or you will scare them away, so it’s best to have a really big telephoto like this one. It’s 500 mm. Look down there at that magpie. Look at it with the 500 mm lens. See the difference? Ooooh, that’s a black-billed juvenile. His tail will grow even longer.”
While on the Losar ice face in Nepal, Rob and I had spent hours in the tent discussing all the different sports we were looking forward to doing when we were back home in Colorado. Rock climbing, skiing, and hiking in the foothills were Rob’s favorites, but whitewater kayaking was also on the list. I’d told him that kayaking intrigued me and that I’d taken a class in a pool to learn to roll, but I’d never quite gotten it.
“I can teach you to roll in two hours,” Rob declared.
I privately wondered how that would work, but I had learned by now not to doubt Mr. Whoopee. When you flip a hard-shell kayak—either by getting hit by a wave, ramming into a rock, or just by tipping over—you are still sitting in the boat, but now upside down underwater. The “roll,” simply stated, involves going from being upside down to right-side up. But being blind, learning how to pull off the move was complex, nuanced, and turned out to be really difficult. I couldn’t just watch a video, memorize the moves, and emulate them. It was really hard to visualize the big picture. While underwater, I was disoriented, and everything was confused and backward.
“I think this will be an interesting challenge for both of us,” Rob said.
We settled on going to a pond near our cabin at eight thousand feet above sea level, an hour west of Golden. Rob and I pulled the boat from the back of his truck and carried it to the edge of the water. We reviewed the pre-paddling routine, including how to slide into the neoprene spray skirt that would keep water from filling the kayak cockpit once I was upside down. I’d done some paddling in an inflatable kayak during the Grand Canyon trip and also during the Primal Quest Expedition Race, so I understood the basic strokes. I also remembered Harlan Taney on the Grand Canyon, and his sister, Marieke, describing his roll to me, but the move had seemed foreign and incomprehensible.
“I’ve been thinking about why you might have struggled to learn to roll before,” Rob said as he waded waist deep into the water beside me, holding the edge of my boat. “Since you can’t see to visualize the moves, you need to learn them kinesthetically, by feeling them and actually going through the motions. And we are going to keep it simple. The kayak roll can be reduced to three steps once you are upside down: paddle to surface, hip snap, head out last. The head is the last thing to come out of the water.”
A breeze blew through the trees and rippled the water. Rob shivered despite his dry top. He started out at the bow end of my kayak, his hands placed on both sides, as I rocked the boat side to side, from one edge to the other.
“That’s right, even more than that,” Rob encouraged me. “It’s clear that you don’t disco! You’re very stiff, Big E. Loosen up.”
It felt very tippy, but I noticed I could rock the boat pretty far: right edge, left edge, right edge, left edge. Next, Rob went around and held the side while I leaned over in the opposite direction, until the kayak was tipped perpendicular and my head was actually resting in the water. From this position, he told me to “snap” my hips hard and return to the sitting position with the boat bottom flat against the water. After I repeated a bunch of these, Rob had me flip the boat completely over, and I used his steady hands at the surface of the water to grab on to and hip snap back upright.
“Okay,” Rob said, finally handing me my paddle. “It’s time to put all the steps together. At first, getting two out of the three will be a victory. Say them to me again.”
“Paddle to surface, hip snap, head out last,” I repeated, feeling the apprehension building inside me.
“Exactly!” said Rob, slapping me on the back.
He guided my paddle to the setup position, so that my torso was turned to the left and my paddle ran alongside the boat edge. “Good setup,” he said. “Now, this is going to feel disorienting and a bit suffocating, but relax. I’m right here to flip you upright if something goes wrong … now, ease over and flip upside down.”
Blip. Blurp. I was underwater. It was so icy cold my brain hurt, and, despite inhaling before going over, I felt instantly out of breath. The water pressure crushed in around my face. My eyes bulged. Water hammered up my nostrils. My spray skirt and dry top squeezed tight around my chest and neck, compressing the little oxygen that remained in my lungs. I could hear bubbles floating up toward the surface, and I tried to imagine the orientation of my body and the boat bobbing above me, but it was all inverted and topsy-turvy. I felt Rob’s hands guiding my paddle to the surface and tried to snap my hips as my head lifted out of the water, desperately floundering for air. Taking a gasp of air, I heard Rob’s voice saying, “Head last,” as I plunked back over. Then Rob grabbed the boat and turned me right side up. I gasped, shook my head, and blew water out of my nose.
“Let’s try it again,” Rob said. “Remember, the average human head weighs about ten pounds—it’s really heavy, and it acts like an anchor trying to sink back into the water. And Big E, your head is way bigger.” He cracked up at his own joke.
We practiced over and over, with Rob helping me up. Each time, the motion made a little more sense to me as Rob peppered me with helpful tips. “Your paddle needs to be at a right angle to your boat as you sweep,” and “Your paddle blade needs to be flat against the surface. Otherwise, it’ll slice through the water. When you’re under, bend your wrists from side to side and see if you can feel when the blade’s flat,” and “Your hips are a lot more powerful than your arms, so use your core. Don’t just muscle it with those biceps.”
After a few times, he said excitedly, “That was 90 percent you, Big E.”
On my next try, I forced my paddle up, snapped my hips, drove my knees, tucked my head down, and found my kayak slowly tipping up out of the water. The motion then stalled out as the boat hovered on its edge. I thought it was going to flop back over. I dropped my head even more and strained with my hips and abs. The boat inched over a little more and then plunked down. I was sitting upright, happily breathing air, honestly surprised it had worked. By the end, I’d performed four successful, yet very shaky, rolls.
* * *
In the spring, our neighbors told us that they were going on a rafting trip down the Green River, and they asked if my family and I would like to come along. I immediately called Rob.
“Hey, Rob, we’re doing a family raft trip down the Green River over Fourth of July. Want to come?”
“Most definitely!”
“You want to kayak?” I asked.
“Absolutely!” he fired back.
“I was thinking, I might like to kayak too.”
“One hundred percent.”
“Would you have any interest in guiding me?”
“Sure, why not!”
After we hung up, the idea of kayaking jolted me back to Harlan Taney’s offer when we’d finished that Grand Canyon trip: “You should come back someday and kayak the Grand Canyon.” Harlan’s offhand remark had struck me as so preposterous at the time, and it still did. But now, I thought, maybe it would be worth just dipping my toes into the kayaking waters, just to see what it might be like. The Grand Canyon featured some of the biggest rapids in North America, with thirty-foot waves crashing over you. Rapids range from I to VI, with I being “easy” and VI being “extreme risk of life,” but this section of the Green River was intermediate. It had numerous rapids going up to Class III+.
Many of my mountain expeditions took me away from my family for great lengths of time, sometimes months. I had missed so much with my family. I was on Mount Everest when Emma had taken her first steps. I’d had to learn about it via a crackling, distant-sounding satellite phone. With Arjun new to the family, I especially wanted to be there to navigate all these new family dynamics.
When I’d considered a bunch of different family adventures, backpacking came to mind, but slogging up and down steep mountain trails could feel more like work than play, and you had to carry all your own food and provisions on your back. I wanted the kids, now six and seven years old, and Ellie, to really have fun together. I remembered a line that PV (Pasquale), the leader of my Mount Everest team, once said when we were coming down off a big mountain after an epic fifteen-hour death march: “The worst day on the river still beats the best day in the mountains.” It sounded good—exciting rapids, short scenic hikes, fun beach camping, river baths, and all the great food and beer you wanted. What a perfect way to show the family the beauty of the natural world, while still enjoying some creature comforts.
To prepare, Rob and I went to Bear Creek Lake, just fifteen minutes from my house. We paddled around for a while, and Rob suggested I try to paddle in a straight line, keeping the boat going in one direction. The wind pushed against my bow, and I felt the boat turning. I tried to adjust by paddling harder on one side or the other.
“Big E, you’re turned around backwards now,” Rob shouted, “and paddling in the opposite direction!”
A bit later, “Ah, now you’re heading sideways towards the shore…” And I felt my hull scraping against gravel and rocks.
“Now, you’ve veered right … and now you’ve done a 180 and you’re heading back to shore.” More rocks scraping under my boat.
Next, we decided to have me follow Rob as he paddled just ahead, blowing a whistle he had tethered to his neck. I’d experimented with following Harlan’s whistle on the Grand Canyon and in other sports like skiing and trekking, I was accustomed to following sound. But even the flat water of Bear Creek Lake proved difficult, as the kayak turned sharply with each hard paddle stroke, and once it began veering, it was difficult to get it to track in a straight line. We zigzagged around the lake, and I was constantly making adjustments and recalibrating to try to follow Rob, still unable to tell exactly which way I was going.
“We’ll continue to hone our system,” Rob said, “but the most important skill for whitewater kayaking is having a bomber roll.”
“Can we settle for decent?” I asked.
At the put-in to the Gates of Lodore—a forty-four-mile stretch of the Green River—we stood cooling off in knee-deep water and splashing ourselves. It was a hot July and the temperature had broken one hundred degrees. The river guides went through a pre-trip safety talk and showed everyone how to properly put on their PFDs. I remembered Marieke Taney’s words from the Grand Canyon: “These aren’t life vests. They won’t save your life. They only help you float.” I helped Ellie make sure that hers, Emma’s, and Arjun’s were cinched down tight.
We had a pretty big gang—my dad, my brother Eddi, and his two oldest children, Edwin and Brooklyn, who conveniently matched the ages of my two kids, plus Rob and another family. Rob and I would descend in hard-shell whitewater kayaks, while the rest of the group would ride in rafts. We’d also brought a couple of inflatable kayaks—duckies—just like the ones I’d tried out on the Grand Canyon.
As everyone loaded into the rafts, Rob guided me over to the kayaks on the shore, their bows just touching the river’s edge.
“You ready?” Rob asked.
My mind conjured all the life-threatening river hazards I’d learned about on the Grand Canyon: boulders you can ram into or get pinned between; undercut ledges you can get sucked beneath; fallen trees and floating logs; churning hydraulic features called “holes” that can submerge you and hold you under.
“I’m good,” I said. Sweat was pouring down my temples, and I splashed some cold river water on my face, trying to convince myself that it was from the scorching heat and not my active imagination.
The rafts cast off downstream. I could hear the kids’ happy voices chattering excitedly, bouncing off the river’s surface. “Bon voyage, brave, strong kayakers!” Ellie yelled. I stood next to my boat, kicked as much sand off my feet as I could, and slid inside. I stretched my neoprene spray skirt down tight over the lip of the cockpit, tightened the strap on my paddling helmet, and followed Rob’s voice and the screech of the whistle out into the easy current. The river felt languid as a lake, just a mellow flow drifting the boat downstream. Staying close to Rob, I flipped intentionally a few times to practice my roll, popping back up like a cork each time. We cruised along comfortably for a while, with me working to follow Rob as best I could. Sometimes the bow of the boat wouldn’t track properly, or I overpaddled—and once it started going in a direction it just kept going, and Rob would correct me, saying, “Right, right! You’re not actually turning right … more right!” and eventually I’d straggle back on course. Our boats collided a few times, the hard hollow hulls making a loud, drumlike thump. I slammed into a rock, bounced off, flipped over, and managed to roll up on my second attempt. As I floundered around trying to stay on course, I heard one of the guides say, “I don’t like the looks of this.”
I got back on course and followed the whistle. Rob reminded me of the T-rescue, which I could use if I failed to make my roll. From upside down, I was to beat my hands on the hull and then run my hands back and forth along the sides to give him a target. He’d then ease the nose of his boat into the side of mine, and I’d grab his bow and use it to leverage upright. If this failed, I knew to pull my spray skirt, slide out of the boat, and swim. But swimming was a last resort. Your kayak partner then had to fish you out of the water and get you to shore, and then chase down your boat, which would be filled with a hundred gallons of water that had to be drained. It was a debacle that was unsafe and best to avoid.
I could feel and hear the terrain ahead narrowing, constricting as sound began to patter off rimrock walls. Also, I felt a cooling temperature change as a shadow slid across me, and I sensed we’d tucked in next to a rock wall.
“We’re heading down into the canyon now, with towering walls of red and beige sandstone rising from the river,” Rob said. “Oh, and that’s Winnie’s Rapid up ahead. The first real rapid. There’s a big boulder in the middle of the run that we need to stay right of. Try to lock on to the sound of the whistle.”
My boat picked up speed. The whistle blasts bounced around—ricocheting off the walls as the water rushed and rumbled under my boat. I paddled hard forward, but the whistling had vanished. Waves poured over the bow and hit me in the chest and face. Water splashed me from the left, then the right. My upper body bobbled as something seemed to grab me from below. I almost went over, but somehow recovered. Which way was I pointing? Maybe to the left? Maybe upriver? I felt alone. Bolts of panic seized me, but I tried to stay focused and keep paddling. I swung my head around to listen and heard the bleat of a distant whistle behind my right shoulder. I cranked my paddle and began to turn, but the rumble of the rapid was subsiding, and I drifted into calm water. Rob paddled up beside me.
“I lost you!” I yelled. “The whistle was bouncing all over, and then it just got washed out by all the river noise,” I said through short breaths.
“Yeah, we got quite separated,” Rob called back. “By the time I turned around, I tried yelling, but you couldn’t hear me because you’d gotten pulled over into an eddy and spun around. Nice job staying upright.”
We floated next to each other, our hulls knocking together.
“Definitely a wake-up call,” Rob went on. “You gave your family and the guides a good show. But ahead we’ve got three pretty straightforward miles of small wave trains, where we can work to improve our system.”
“Yeah, let’s not play ‘drown the blind guy’ in front of my whole family.”
I was still a little rattled as Rob yelled, “Follow me!”
The wave trains he’d described were continuous gentle rollers, and it was fun bobbing along behind him. I could hear his voice better than the whistle—his voice didn’t seem to reflect off the rock walls as much. The water felt solid beneath me, and I craned forward to interpret the rising, cresting, and falling of the waves. There was almost a discernible pattern to them, but they went by so fast that I was merely reacting to the feel and sounds without comprehension.
That evening at Kolb campsite, the guides prepared dinner, and my family played and hung out at the river’s edge. Rob and I sat in folding chairs talking about the day. I couldn’t believe how exhausted I felt. I was mentally spent from concentrating and trying to follow directions. My brain actually hurt, and the tension worked through the back of my neck, shoulders, and arms. We both agreed that our current guiding system needed some tweaking.
“It’s really difficult to turn around and look back upstream to see where you are,” Rob said, “and what direction you are facing.”
“Maybe you need a rearview mirror,” I joked.
“Actually, that’s a sound idea, in theory,” said Rob. “They make small rearview mirrors for bike helmets, but it would never really work, as I’m too jumpy to be able to watch carefully. And it’s also really tricky doing the reverse-image calculations.
“Another flaw with our system,” he continued, “is that when I detour around a rock or hole, I can’t just blow the whistle. That will draw you right into the obstacle, precisely what we need to avoid.”
That made sense, since I couldn’t see the danger that lay between us, and, in the moment, there was no time for detailed explanations.
“Also,” I added, “when you did manage to stay right in front of me so I could hear, our boats rammed into each other a few times, and I almost flipped.”
“It’s a conundrum,” said Rob. “There must be a better way for me to convey the necessary information to get you safely and confidently down these rapids. Let me think on it.”
Rob headed out to photograph birds, and I went over to check out what the family was up to. Eddi had challenged the kids to a rock-skipping competition, and he was waxing philosophical about the perfect skipping stone, showing one to Arjun.
“Not too big,” he was saying. “And smooth, round edges like this, that won’t catch on the water. Now throw it sidearm, like this.” I heard the whirr, and pop pop pop of a sweetly skipped stone.
“No, Arjun. Not toward shore!” Eddi reprimanded. “Only in the water, and away from people. Yes, like that.”
Eddi whispered to me, “He’s thrown a couple at the girls, but dang, he’s got a really good arm.”
The kids abandoned rock skipping to build a fort on the sand with rocks and driftwood. I sat in the warm sand and listened to their construction project. Dressed just in swim suits, their bodies became caked with sand and river mud as they played for hours. It was great to be away from electronic entertainment, instead using only their imaginations and these objects provided by nature; sticks and deer antlers became swords, and raven feathers their warrior headdresses. But the activity wasn’t totally free from conflict. Arjun wanted to name the fort “the Tower of Doom,” and Emma wanted to name it “Fort Yippy-Ki-Yay.” They argued back and forth, and the boys finally stormed away to build their own exclusive clubhouse.
Ellie came up and sat down next to me. “Arjun’s as dirty as when we gave him that first bath.” She laughed.
Rob returned from his sojourn around sunset. I could hear him snapping pictures around camp, then he took a seat in one of the folding chairs.
“Arjun, come check out my notebook,” he said.
Arjun sat down next to Uncle Rob. I hung over to the side, listening.
“I photographed five different bird species on that walk,” Rob said, “including a spotted towhee, formerly called the rufous-sided towhee. Check him out.” Rob handed Arjun his camera.
“He’s got red eyes,” Arjun said.
“There are 914 wild bird species in North America. I’ve spotted about 750 of them. Arjun, do you know what the fastest animal in the world is?”
Arjun paused for a minute and then said, “Cheetah?”
“How about you, Big E?”
“Yes, I think it’s the rufous-sided Raker as he sprints for the buffet table,” I said, very pleased with myself.
“Actually, you’re both incorrect,” Rob said, not acknowledging my insult. “It’s the peregrine falcon. During its high-speed dive—called a stoop—the peregrine reaches two hundred miles per hour. It is by far the fastest. So keep your eyes open. We might spot one.”
* * *
As our flotilla left camp the next morning, I could hear Ellie talking to Arjun in the raft in front of me. “This is the third time you’ve forgotten something on the beach,” she said. “You were playing instead of packing.”
Emma and Brooklyn called out, “Bye-bye, flip-flops.” Uncle Rob was nice enough to paddle upriver and snag them, adding them to the list of caps, sunglasses, water bottles, and sunscreen he’d already rescued. Arjun had to sit next to Ellie for the next hour instead of playing with the other kids.
On the flat water, I floated along between the lead raft and a caboose raft. Rob and I ducked beneath the water fights that broke out between the different factions. Eddi had brought along an arsenal of high-powered water guns—a Stream Machine, an Aqua Blaster, and his secret weapon, the dreaded Hydro Stick.
Arjun, finally released from his time-out, would lead the charge, followed by Eddi and Edwin. They would paddle their inflatable duckie quietly into position and ambush the girls relaxing on the raft. I loved hearing Emma and Brooklyn shriek as they were drenched with water. That would always begin the water-war games that lasted for hours. As our flotilla moved easily downriver in the rising heat of the day, I practiced my roll and would have the kids count how long I could stay under. Upside down, time tends to speed up as your instincts scream to get upright again. My goal was to reach five seconds, but on my first try, I popped up and proclaimed, “I did it. Five seconds,” and lifted my paddle in the air. Everyone was laughing.
“Dad, try two seconds,” Arjun said, smiling. I couldn’t help laughing along with them. They were having so much fun at my expense as I stressed out underwater.
“This time, I’m definitely making five seconds,” I vowed. I flipped again. This time, I made a couple attempts to roll up but, for some reason, couldn’t pull it off. Each time my head came partway out of the water, I could hear the kids on the rafts counting, “One, two, three, four, five…” but I missed my third attempt and started worrying about my air. I reached my hands out of the water to get a T-rescue from Rob, but I missed his boat as I groped around, and I panicked, quickly reaching for the grab loop and releasing my spray skirt with a hard yank. I swam to the surface, hyperventilating as the kids cracked up even harder than before.
Above Harp Falls, the day’s first rapid, Rob slid up next to me. “I have a new plan,” he said. “I’ll paddle slightly behind and to your side and call out signals ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ as needed. When you are headed in the correct direction, I’ll say, ‘Hold that line.’ And I’ll make adjustments as the waves and swirling eddies alter your course. How does that sound?”
The idea ran counter to my standard following technique in most other sports, but as there was no manual for blind kayaking—and we were figuring it out on the fly—I agreed to try it.
Nerves clenched my arms and chest as I thought about heading into a jumble of obstacles with no lead sound in front of me to paddle toward, but I could hear Rob right next to me. He seemed to be able to stay close, and that was a comfort.
“Okay, there are just two main rocks to run between,” Rob called out.
Responding to his calls, I paddled hard into the rapid, feeling spray in my face as my bow plunged and rose on the waves. Even with the rushing noise of the rapid, I heard Rob’s commands, and his voice at the end, “You threaded those rocks!”
For the rest of the day, we continued to tweak the new technique, and I was feeling slightly more confident. Whitewater kayaking was beginning to shift from “terrifying” to “almost fun.”
After a couple of rapids, Rob suggested he reduce the frequency of his voice commands. For one thing—he was losing his voice yelling constant instructions; but he also thought I should be listening to the river sounds and trying to understand and process the information those sounds provided. It felt like learning a new language, and I strained to notice subtleties: the far-off hush-roar that signaled an upcoming rapid; the slurping sound of eddies pooling above a rock; how the narrowing and widening of canyon walls altered sound and signaled the opening or constricting of the river flow. We settled on Rob only giving me information when needed, allowing me to relax some and navigate on my own.
Rob also tested my awareness of body positioning. “Which way are you pointing?” he asked. “Since it’s the afternoon, the sun is to the west. So where do you feel it on your face?”
“On my right cheek,” I said, “so I must be traveling south.”
“And how far are you from shore?” he asked, and I tried to use the echo off the rock walls or trees to gauge my distance. Sometimes he’d say, “The wind is moving directly up-canyon, so paddle into it. If you feel it trailing to your left or right, you’ll know you’re off course.”
* * *
Our system improved steadily. We scouted Triplet Falls, a Class III+, and despite Rob telling me about two huge boulders I needed to avoid (known as “the birth canal”) and another nasty rock section called “the sieve,” I decided to go for it. With Rob’s precise commands, we snaked right through the entire rapid.
At eighteen miles into the Gates of Lodore, the river widened and the skies opened overhead. Near a big buttress called Steamboat Rock, the Yampa River joined the Green, adding considerable flow and creating bigger, toilet-bowl swirling currents that tried to tip me over. I had to fight hard to keep the nose of my boat going where I wanted it to. But after that, it was mostly easy water, and Rob added a few new commands. “Charge!” called for short, powerful strokes to gain quick speed and was needed to accelerate through small holes. “Stop!” required me to back-paddle with a quick burst of two to three strokes to cease forward progress downstream, an important skill for getting properly set up above a rapid. And “Stop paddling!” meant to let my paddle blade trail in the water and coast along, awaiting instructions.
Rob also started yelling out, “Eddy line!” to alert me to upcoming eddies, and on easier flat water, we experimented with him yelling, “Follow me!” and then transitioning back to me in the lead as we entered the next rapid. As Rob tucked in behind me, it felt like we were race cars jockeying for position. In this way, we were starting to perform our own fluid river dance, choreographed by Rob’s voice and our combined actions.
By midafternoon, we made the Jones Hole campsite, where we hiked up a creek to check out pictographs and petroglyphs left by the Fremont people a thousand years ago. Some designs appeared humanlike. Others were antlered animals and lizards, and the kids loved them. But in the intense July heat, our favorite was a section of Jones Hole Creek called Butt Dam Falls. We took turns standing in the cascading waterfall. Directly above our heads was a perfect butt-size depression in the narrow channel in which you could sit and temporarily block the water flow. Arjun couldn’t get enough. He’d sit above us, butt-blocking the stream, tempting his victims to stand below. He’d, of course, promise to hold back the flow, but as soon as we’d take the bait, he’d yell, “Cowabunga!” and lift his cheeks, and the cold water would come pouring down over our heads.
After the hike, Rob disappeared on another bird-watching adventure but returned with an excited voice. “I found something you may be interested in, but we have to be quiet and walk softly.” Rob refused to reveal anything further.
We all followed him up the beach and through the brush, Emma hushing Arjun several times when his voice got loud. Then Rob stopped and pointed up at the cliff. One at a time, he let the kids look through his binoculars. Seventy-five feet up, in a cleft in the rock, was a nest. Emma described three grayish-white fledgling birds.
“Peregrines,” Rob said proudly. “The nests are called eyries.”
Then the kids gasped as one of the birds leaped from the nest, flapping its wings awkwardly. The bird plummeted downward, but thirty feet off the ground, it caught a draft of air, leveled off, and then lifted up into the sky.
“How beautiful,” Ellie said.
“Ki bu la,” I said, remembering the Tibetan phrase for how beautiful.
“He might be flying for the very first time,” Rob whispered with awe in his voice.
With Uncle Rob, a rare sighting of juvenile peregrines was just the start. He next took all the kids on a bouldering adventure. He found a rock about twelve feet high, and he carefully spotted each in turn as they climbed it. Arjun was like a little spider monkey, but while Rob was trying to give all the kids a chance, he refused to wait his turn; he kept cutting in front of Emma and Brooklyn, saying, “My turn! Emma’s always first!”
As I pulled him back, I noticed he was going into one of his sullen moods. I put my arm around his shoulder and steered him away from the bouldering rocks and down to the river’s edge.
“Emma’s not always first,” I said. “That’s not true, and you know it.” We stood with our toes in the river. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s really wrong?”
As he sat next to me, he was breathing hard, and I could tell he was angry.
“You like Emma better,” he finally said.
“What? No, I don’t, Arjun.” Inside I felt terrible, knowing he could think that. But given where he’d come from, he had plenty of reasons to be suspicious. There’d been a lot of disruption in his short life. The trust he was beginning to build with his new family was still fragile, and, I imagined, didn’t yet feel real.
“I’m not really like you,” he said. “I don’t even look like you.”
I knelt down to him, and the hot sand burned my knees, but I hugged him tightly. “What do you mean you don’t look like me? We both have brown eyes,” I said. A year earlier, I’d had my prosthetic eyes replaced. Even though I’d had green eyes as a teenager, the ocularist had painted new eyes that had a tinge of brown to them. At first, I’d been annoyed, but then over the dinner table, I blurted out, “We’re now a perfect family. The girls have blue eyes, and the boys have brown.” It had wound up being one of those mistakes Hugh Herr referred to in his speech at a past summit—a wonderful, glorious mistake that you wouldn’t change for anything.
Arjun plucked up a rock and tossed it into the river and said, “It’s not really true. You used to have green eyes.”
“In my mind, we look exactly alike,” I said. “But even if we don’t, you’re still mine.”
Arjun didn’t say anything, and I felt like I wasn’t getting through to him, so I changed tack, remembering a children’s book I had read to him in Braille. The book had been entitled Guess How Much I Love You. In it, a dad (Big Nutbrown Hare) was talking to his son (Little Nutbrown Hare), trying to describe the magnitude of his love. “Guess how much I love you?” he asked. “Right up to the moon … and back,” he said.
I thought for a moment and said, “Guess how much I love you? If a mountain lion attacked right now, I’d block you with my body and let it gnaw me right down to the bone. That’s how much I love you.”
Arjun was now listening, so I went on, “If we were walking across a street and a Mack truck was barreling toward us, I’d throw you out of the way and get squished myself. That’s how much I love you.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said quietly.
“Yes, I would,” I replied. “If we were in a burning building, I’d tie sheets into a rope and lower you out the window while the flames burned me to a cinder. That’s how much I love you.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Really,” I answered, now on a roll. “If a giant pterodactyl pooped on us right now, I’d lift you up so you could breathe, while I suffocated.”
“Pterodactyls are extinct, Dad!” he said and giggled. The fact that I’d be chewed up, squashed under a tire, burned alive, and drowned in poop—all for him—seemed to make an impression on him. I rubbed his back one last time, and he scurried off to play with Edwin.
That night, we sat around the fire. My dad had brought a book that traced the Green River’s descent from the Wind River Range in Wyoming, south into Utah, then curving over into Colorado. Eventually, it plunged into Canyonlands National Park, then joined the Colorado River, and eventually raced down through the Grand Canyon. He told the kids that in 1869, on this very river, Major John Wesley Powell and his ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on their journey into the unknown. He said we were retracing history. “That makes us explorers too,” Arjun said.
My dad continued, “Powell named this section the Gates of Lodore, after a poem called ‘The Cataract of Lodore’ by English poet Robert Southey,” and he read a portion:
The cataract strong
then plunges along,
striking and raging
As if a war raging
Its caverns and rocks among;
Rising and leaping,
Sinking and creeping,
Swelling and sweeping,
Showering and springing,
Flying and flinging,
Writhing and ringing,
Eddying and whisking,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
Around and around
With endless rebound:
Smiting and fighting,
A sight to delight in;
Confounding, astounding,
Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound.
As we sat around the fire, I found myself a little sad the trip was ending the next day. It had been such a blast doing a family adventure that everyone could enjoy together and challenge themselves in their own way. The whole family had tried their hands at paddling the inflatable duckies. At sixty-nine years old, my dad had paddled through one of the rapids and gotten sucked against an overhanging wall. He’d ducked in the nick of time, squeaked under the rock lip, and narrowly avoided a nasty swim. Arjun had especially loved riding through the rapids, with Edwin in the middle and Eddi at the helm. A couple of times, the waves had lifted up the front of the duckie, catapulting little Arjun up and over Eddi’s head. In the midst of the rodeo action, Eddi would reach out, grab him by the PFD, and toss him back into the boat. While paddling together, both Emma and Ellie had also gone airborne. Emma had swum frantically to the nearest ducky but found herself atop Arjun and Edwin as they dropped and exploded through another series of waves in a tangle of bodies.
The big mountains had kept me away for long stretches of time, but on a river, each night, after the gifts of the day were earned, I got to come home. I’d sit back, surrounded by my loved ones, listening to the stories of waves and whirlpools, tosses and near misses, and the sense of connection felt as deep as the river itself.
Rob and I had just gotten through sharing our highlight of the day, when I’d gotten knocked over in a hole and failed my first two rolls. I was about to pull my skirt when Rob had saved me from swimming with a T-rescue. Throughout the trip, I’d been absorbed in learning to kayak and, in my remaining free moments, was focused on Arjun, but now, I noticed how quiet Ellie was. We took a walk down the beach together, and I said, “I really like having you here.”
“I like being here too,” she replied. “But when you’re upside down like that and struggling to get up, it’s hard to watch. I want to help you, but I can’t. It was like watching Arjun barrel down that hill for the first time on his bike. I have to look away.”
“Now, I’m the crazy taxi driver.” I laughed.
“But I want you to know how proud I am of you,” she said. “Today, I watched you just above a rapid. You took a deep breath, then another, and you paddled forward, right into it. I told myself to remember that face, because that’s what courage looks like. That’s what I want for Emma and Arjun. That’s what I want for myself.”
“It’s a full circle,” I said, “because knowing you’re nearby, it makes me feel a little braver.”
* * *
On the last morning, Rob said we needed to up our game. Ahead, near a place called Split Mountain—where the erosion forces of the Green River had literally cut the mountain in two—we’d encounter a series of six Class III rapids in succession. It was going to be a wild ride, but Rob stayed right next to me. I could hear him well, and I could even hear the hoots and hollers of our flotilla cheering us on. It felt incredible to end on such a high note, nailing all six without a hitch. At the take-out, I high-fived Rob, thanked him, and said, “We gotta keep doing this.”
Before we loaded up into the shuttle vans to head out, I took Arjun aside and down to the river’s edge. The poem my father had read the night before had given me an idea.
“You know how Uncle Rob has been helping me, teaching me how to kayak?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Well, that’s so I can have fun, but it’s also so I can be safe. He’s teaching me to avoid the big rocks and other dangerous places in the river. He’s helping me find my way downstream. I can’t see what’s ahead of me, so I have to trust him.”
I let that sink in, then I grabbed a little piece of driftwood from the shore and knelt down into the wet sand right at the water’s edge.
“A river flows from the mountains down to the sea, Arjun. It’s a long journey—with lots of twists and turns. Like you coming to America. It’s a journey, and you are just at the beginning. Like me, with kayaking, you can’t always see what’s ahead, and there will be lots of boulders and rapids along the way,” I said, taking his hand. I guided his hand to the piece of driftwood, and I threw it out into the water.
“That piece of wood will float downstream, and there is no telling exactly where it’s going to go. There is no one there to help it along the way, to be there if it runs into trouble, or starts to sink.”
“Okay,” Arjun said. He seemed to be watching the driftwood intently, half listening to me.
“But on your new journey here in America,” I said, “Mom and I are here for you. We will be here to help you if you flip over or when you run through the rapids. I promise we will be here, always.” I reached out and touched Arjun’s hair. Then I turned his face toward mine. “Always,” I repeated.
Arjun started giggling. I’d hoped he’d take my analogy more seriously.
“Do you think this is funny?” I asked.
“It’s stuck,” he said, pointing to the edge of the water.
Apparently, the driftwood had hung up on a gravel bar in the shallow, slow-moving eddy.
“Here,” I said. “Help me nudge it along. We’ll knock it free.”
Holding my hand, he led me a step or two into the river, and we bent down together and jarred the driftwood piece loose.
“Is it going downstream?” I asked.
“Yes,” Arjun said. “It’s floating away.”
We turned our backs to the river and headed up the steep bank toward the vans, toward home.