The BrainPort device I’d been testing at home was going to get a trial run in the field. I’d taken it to the local climbing gym, and its helpfulness intrigued me. Normally, I hung from a hold, stepped up as high as I could, and with one arm bent and locked off, I’d scan my free hand across the surface, searching for the next hold. It was a slow process and a race against time, since I only had so much stamina to hang on as I scanned. With the BrainPort, however, I found I could locate handholds on the wall a few feet above me. It was disconcerting at first to spot a hold on my tongue, step up, and reach for it in space. I was actually surprised how hard it was to rewire my visual connection with the world, which had been extinguished long ago. It took a lot of focus, but with practice, I was beginning to speed up and save energy. So when a producer from the BBC called me to ask if I was willing to try the BrainPort on a climb up Castleton Tower, near Moab, Utah, I agreed, interested to test the unit in natural light conditions on a real rock face. Because of Rob Raker’s experience working on climbing productions, I was thrilled when the BBC hired him to film.
In early spring, I stood on a ledge in the morning chill of the Moab desert in the Canyonlands region, feeling the sun creeping up the cliff and warming me. Looming above was the four hundred–foot vertical sandstone face of Castleton Tower, considered one of the fifty classic climbs in North America. We had already ascended to the base, a steep cone that jutted dramatically out of the valley floor, and I geared up, which now included putting on the BrainPort glasses and tucking the control panel into my pocket. As I started to climb, I noticed I could actually detect ledges, pockets, and cracks zigzagging up the smooth rock. In front of the face, I could feel on my tongue display the sharp line of the rope running up to my partner above. As I got higher and rounded a corner, I reached for the crack but only palmed the smooth surface of the rock. Scanning around with my hand, I noticed the crack was actually a foot farther to the right. I climbed on, wondering if the BrainPort had been damaged. But then I noticed the morning sun on my right shoulder. I had a vague memory of playing all day in the forest as a kid, when I could see, and watching the trees cast shadows that lengthened and shortened with the angle of the sun. I realized then that I was reaching into the shadow of the crack. As the sun rose and came around behind me, I could see the shadows shorten and merge with the features on the face.
At the next belay ledge, I pointed the camera at the rock and felt an oblong blob on my tongue. But when I touched it, there was nothing but blank rock. As I swayed my head side to side, the shape moved along with me. How the heck can an object move like that? I again thought the device was playing tricks on me. Now the sun was directly behind me, and I laughed at myself, as it became obvious that I was watching the shadow of my own head. The last time I’d seen myself, I’d been almost thirty years younger, and it was sort of trippy as I bounced up and down, back and forth, and watched my shadow partner stay perfectly in step. I was completely absorbed by this entertainment, when I heard my climbing partner yell from far above, “If you’re finished with your dance routine, you can climb anytime!”
I got to lead the last pitch to the top. The afternoon sun had gone behind the tower, eliminating the deceiving shadows and glare that made objects shimmer and disappear. In this perfect light, the face came alive, and the features popped out on my tongue. I could see the metal gear I used for protection as my hand slid them into the cracks. I could see the carabiners as I clipped them onto my rope. As a blind person, I’d almost forgotten about these nuances of vision, but the BrainPort had reintroduced me to this language of sun and light and shadow. Even though I was only glimpsing a tiny portion of what real eyeballs could see, it was still so beautiful.
The top of the tower was a flat plateau surrounded by sky, windy and exposed on all sides. After getting all the film shots he needed, Rob grabbed my hand and pointed in a sweeping panorama for 360 degrees, describing features as my arm swung clockwise. “Adobe Mesa, a fresh dusting of snow on the La Sal Mountains way in the distance, the Colorado River to the west, cutting a wide swath to my right,” he said.
I’d loved this area from my first visit, and I asked Rob, “Where are the Fisher Towers and Ancient Art? Can you see them?”
Rob took a minute to get his bearings, looking through the telephoto lens on his camera. Then he grabbed my hand again and pointed to my two o’clock. “Right there. About, oh, six miles to the northeast. The towers are casting long shadows in the evening light. Ancient Art is the most distinctive, with its narrow, corkscrew summit. It looks like the swirly tip of a soft-serve ice cream cone.”
I thought of Hugh Herr and Mark Wellman, and that amazing “all-gimp climb” Mark had organized. It dawned on me that much of the present journey I was on—testing new technologies, reaching into the unknown, and trying to find new ways to break through my barriers—had been born across the desert on those very spires ten years before. I thought of how far I’d come, but the uncertainty of what lay ahead on the Colorado River loomed even larger. I heard the thwop thwop thwop of the production helicopter that had been filming, and as it neared and circled, I tried to locate it on my tongue and follow it through the air, like a little buzzing insect pasted against the wide-open skyline. Feeling for the chopper’s image on my tongue, I knew that Hugh and Mark would approve.
The next morning, we awoke in our motel to gale-force winds scouring the Canyonlands. The weather window that had allowed us a brilliant climb on Castleton had slammed shut, replaced with a violent spring squall, armed with percussive wind gusts and lashing rain. Rob and I had planned to do some climbing before heading back to Colorado, but hammering rains on slick vertical sandstone created a bad combination, so we drank coffee and waited it out. We were tired and sore from the previous long day of climbing and filming, and Rob had scouted out a pool and hot tub in the back that looked inviting.
“Gate’s locked on it, though; I checked,” he said. “Also, the sign says it’s closed due to weather.”
“How high is the fence?” I asked.
“Big E, no fence is too high for you and me,” Rob replied, his voice rising with mischief. “I see steam rising from the hot tub, and I think it’s calling our name. And with the weather out there, trust me, no one will expect anyone to be getting in the water.”
We threw on our suits, slung towels over our shoulders, and slunk down a cement path leading to the pool area. Something sharp scraped against my leg as it bounced along the ground. “Tumbleweed,” Rob said. “Fence is only about six feet high!” he yelled over the wind buffeting us. I could hear the grating feet of the patio furniture scraping along the cement, pushed by the gusts.
“One pull up and over, right here.” He placed my hand near the gate. “Right foot in the crossbar there, and you can sling yourself straight over.”
Rob bounded over after me and grabbed my shoulder. “Duck!” he yelled. I heard the wumpth of something flying over my head and then bouncing off the chain-link fence beyond. “Foam pool noodle.” Rob laughed.
The rain hammered down so hard it hit the patio and splashed back up against my ankles and shins. We were drenched by the time we slid into the hot tub, but the water was just hot enough, a perfect remedy for the plunging spring temperatures. I heard a loud pop, like a firecracker going off. I hoped it wasn’t a lightning strike, but before I could even ask, Rob said, “Huge umbrella just blew inside out.”
“Are we gonna die out here?” I asked, only half joking. “Should we be wearing our climbing helmets?”
“Good news is, all the patio furniture has blown across and is slammed against the fence, pinned there. No more deck grenades. Looks like we’re safe—unless the wind changes direction…”
We soaked neck-deep in the warm water as the wind continued its high-pitched whistle across the valley’s badlands.
“We’ve had a lot of great adventures together,” Rob said after a time, sounding lost in memories.
“And many more to come,” I said. “We’ve got to kick the kayaking into high gear if I have any hopes of making it down the Grand Canyon,” I said. Summer was coming up, and we had a bunch of local trips planned. Plus, we’d tentatively started scheming some big waters outside the U.S. that we could paddle during our winters.
“Erik,” Rob said finally, “I am going to be sidelined for a little while, at least.”
Rob was in great shape, and he hadn’t mentioned any injuries on the climb the day before. For a moment I wondered whether it could have anything to do with his brain injury from long ago.
“What’s going on, Rob?”
“I have prostate cancer, Big E.”
The words buckled me like a gut punch. I had not been prepared for them. Not Uncle Rob. Not the Adventure Glutton. At first, I was too floored to say anything.
“I got diagnosed last month. I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell you.”
I stammered for a minute, still thinking of the right thing to say. Was there a right thing to say? I thought of my dad, who’d been diagnosed two years before. He was in his seventies, and with treatment, his prognosis was good.
“You know Ed’s been getting treatment,” I said finally. “Prostate cancer is slow growing, right? And you caught it early, right?” I was grasping for positives based on the little I knew about the disease.
“Well, yes and no,” Rob clarified. “It can be slow growing. I had a biopsy done, and prostate cancer is classified by what’s called a Gleason score, which rates its aggressiveness, from a low of 2 to a maximum of 10.”
“So, like golf scores, sort of.” I tried keeping it light. “Low is good, high is bad.”
“Exactly. Unfortunately, the biopsy took six samples from each side of my prostate, and all the samples from the left side were positive for cancer. I had a Gleason score of 9, with nearly all cells cancerous. Cases like mine are termed ‘high-grade cancer,’ and they were concerned that it had spread from the prostate.”
The wind died down a little, and Rob hopped out of the water to turn the bubble jets on. My mind was racing, and I didn’t really know what to say. But I knew that Rob would by now have weighed all his options carefully, consulted the best medical experts in the field, and would have constructed a detailed, meticulous, and thorough plan of attack.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“Having surgery next month to remove my prostate and pelvic lymph nodes. In New York, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Then we’ll see. Radiation. Possibly chemotherapy. But one step at a time. At any rate, as I said, I’ll be sidelined for at least a little while, dealing with this and recovering. You might want to consider some other kayaking guides.”
My mind was whirling with his words and the whine of the wind. Radiation, chemotherapy. Cancer. I shouldn’t even think about paddling a kayak with those words floating in the air, and yet here was Rob, thinking beyond his own predicament to what it might mean for my damn kayak training. I slid beneath the water, listening to the low hum of the Jacuzzi jets surging, slow and rhythmically, blowing hot water into the tub. I felt the soothing warm water envelop me, and I held my breath as long as I could, practicing as if I were upside down in my kayak, waiting to get spit out of a keeper hole, readying to stick my roll. Rob had worked with me on how to remain calm below the surface, to relax, to forget about the chaos all around me and just be in the moment.
I surfaced finally and took a huge gasp of air. Rain came down heavily again, pelting my face and cheeks. I licked my lips, and the raindrops tasted salty, like tears.
“Whatever you need,” I said to Rob, reaching out my hand and waiting to find his. “You know I’m there for ya.”
Our hands clenched into one fist.
“I know it, buddy,” he said. “I know.”
* * *
Rob approached his cancer just like he did our climb up the three thousand–foot face of Losar, or a kayaking trip down the Green River: armed with research, information, opinions and second opinions, a plan A and a plan B. And in true Rob fashion, he spent the weeks right before his surgery in New York climbing with his wife, Annette, in the Shawangunks. He even climbed the fabled Skytop, the very section on which Hugh Herr once snapped off a prosthetic foot and named the route “Footloose and Fancy-Free.”
In May of 2010, Rob had his prostate and eighteen surrounding lymph nodes in his pelvis removed. Yet nine hours after landing home in Colorado post-surgery, he called me to announce with pride that he was going climbing. Rob pushed his recovery, maintaining incredibly high activity levels. But as the pathology began to come back from his surgery and tests, the news was grim. Of the eighteen lymph nodes removed, four were positive for cancer, which meant metastasized cancer cells had spread beyond his prostate, into his body, making his cancer Stage IV. When I asked him what the implications were, Rob tried to stay positive.
“Annette says my cancer is an overachiever, just like me!” He laughed. “My high Gleason scores of 9 make it the most aggressive kind. Also, in the prostate cancer world, the time that it takes for your PSA, your prostate specific antigen, to double is one of the factors used to estimate the progress of the disease and how long you are likely to live. Mine is actually doubling every fifty-three days. That’s very fast, and not so good.”
I was a bit overwhelmed by the numbers and by him bringing up his own mortality. “What’s your next move?” I asked.
“Still working out the program and the different points of view on it, but because of the fast-growing cancer, I’m going to start with an aggressive type of androgen deprivation therapy—or ADT—called a double-blockade; it eliminates testosterone from my body, because cancer cell growth is promoted by testosterone.”
“Are there side effects?” I asked.
“Well, they don’t call it ‘chemical castration’ for nothing!” Rob said, now serious. “Loss of libido, general ‘shrinkage’ where guys don’t want shrinkage, hot flashes, mood swings, and what was worse for me, muscle loss. Within a few months, all my women friends will have more testosterone than me.”
“Ellie and Annette already do,” I said, slapping him on the arm.
“If the predictions I’m reading are correct, I’m going to get fat, grow boobs, and lose a lot of stamina. But taking the ADT, followed by an eight-week course of pelvic radiation, potentially followed by chemotherapy, might just keep me around for a while!”
* * *
A little over a year after being diagnosed, in the fall of 2011, Rob was over at the house discussing a possible whitewater guide he’d found through his research. Rob was really excited, though he was a diminished version of the old Rob. His voice had become hoarse and tired sounding, and his normally sinewy and muscular upper body was soft and pudgy. The Hammerhead now needed a two-hour nap each day. Still, we’d managed to keep paddling and training intermittently throughout his cancer treatment, which had been an amazing process to witness. He’d endured three rounds of the ADT, the “chemical castration,” and that, combined with some apprehension and anxiety, made him more emotional; sometimes we’d be getting our boats ready and he’d go unexpectedly quiet. It was the third time before I realized these were episodes of silent tears. He’d also gone through multiple rounds with a state-of-the-art radiation machine he described as “the Varian Clinac iX linear accelerator,” that delivered high-dose beams of radiation to his entire pelvic region, aimed at killing any residual prostate cancer cells. The radiation also ravaged bowel and bladder function, so he’d had to deal with that as well, and he had even been forced to wear diapers under his paddling pants in his kayak.
But now here he was, giddy with excitement about a potential training trip. Just recently, he’d decided to quit taking the ADT and had altered his diet to eliminate all dairy products and animal fat, which he learned could slow the progression of prostate cancer. For Rob, who ate anything and everything in his path like a swarm of locusts, this was particularly challenging and impressive.
“The guy’s name is Rocky Contos,” Rob said, “and he’s probably the most experienced river explorer in all of the Americas. He runs a river conservation organization called SierraRios, created to conserve wild and free-flowing Mexican rivers. And he guides trips down the big, warm-water rivers in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru. These are effectively the Grand Canyons of Central and South America and perfect winter training for you. The absolute best way to replicate what you’ll encounter paddling the Grand Canyon: big water and long, loud rapids with imposing hydraulic features.”
“Sounds like everything I’ve ever dreamed of,” I said. “But how about you? Will you be okay?”
“Just what the doctor ordered,” Rob followed. “A river trip is nonprescription medicine with no side effects.”
* * *
By early January 2012, I was standing next to Rocky Contos on the sodden banks of the raging Usumacinta River, the “Sacred Monkey River,” a name with some controversy and blending of Aztec and Maya origins.
“Sacred Monkey,” Rocky said in his distinctively high-pitched, tightly nasal twang, “refers to the howler monkey’s sacred status in Mayan culture. And also to this jungle area, with the greatest density of primates in all of Central America.”
“Actually, there’s a howler in the tree right above your head!” Rob added.
I could hear its raspy growl and the thrashing branches and leaves as the monkey leaped around. I could also hear the rapid-fire motor drive on Rob’s camera zinging as he clicked away.
Rocky had agreed to take us down through the heart of the Mayan region, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, a densely jungled and vast rain forest wilderness featuring numerous Class II–III rapids, gigantic waves, sprawling beaches, and major archeological sites. The Usumacinta, or Usu for short, had earned a reputation as one of the best river trips in the world but also one of the most dangerous. In the 1970s, the Usu had been a favorite winter destination for Grand Canyon guides and river aficionados, but then in the 1980s and ’90s, spurred by a simmering Guatemalan civil war and the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, the banks of the river teemed with armed militants who routinely robbed boaters. Word of the dangers got out, and rather than be held up by machine gun or machete point, tourists stayed away.
But Rocky tried to explain that the eighty-eight-mile stretch we intended to run, paralleling and partly forming the Mexico-Guatemala border, wasn’t nearly as dangerous as it used to be.
“When I ran it solo two years ago, I was, to my knowledge, the first person to paddle it in a decade,” he said. “I did end up getting pulled over by armed men,” Rocky laughed, “but they were Guatemalan army, not banditos. Guatemalan soldiers actually police the region and help serve as caretakers of all the Mayan ruins along the river.”
Rocky represented a peculiar mix of talents. He possessed a Ph.D. in neuroscience but was clearly more at home on a big, wild, remote river than in a laboratory. In the last decade he’d logged more than two hundred first descents down five thousand miles of Mexican rivers. Some of these were through Mexico’s rugged and dangerous Copper Canyon region, a notorious haven for drug cartels growing marijuana and trading in opium. But for Rocky, the risk was worth it. He was a true crusader, bent on saving these beautiful free-flowing rivers and keeping them from being dammed for hydroelectric power. Rocky spoke fluent Spanish, had an easy and trustworthy manner with strangers, and a demeanor that deflected contentious situations. He never seemed to get rattled, and he never seemed to rattle others. There was no one more experienced to guide us safely into the jungle.
The group I’d organized for this training adventure was not exactly conventional. With us were three guys in their late twenties named Taylor Filasky, Eric Bach, and John Post. They were the team (they called themselves the Modern Gypsies) that Jeff and I had placed second to in that wild TV adventure race across Morocco, and we’d really developed a strong bond with them. I was impressed because they were passionate about international projects for social good. They’d taken their winnings from the show and put it toward projects raising awareness about the needs of people in developing countries, like a clean water project in Ecuador and a partnership with a company creating cleaner-burning stoves to reduce wood consumption and deforestation. I liked their spirit and their hipster style. After Expedition Impossible, they made me an honorary Gypsy by dressing me in black skinny jeans so tight I had to lie on the floor to wriggle them on. They added a gray T-shirt strategically tucked in only one spot, and with a soul patch and appropriate surrounding facial stubble, I could have passed for their older brother.
The Gypsies loved adventure but had never been on a big whitewater river expedition. So I invited them along, as well as my brother Eddi and another skilled paddler named Chris Weigand to serve as a second guide. And then there was Rob, low energy, beaten down, overweight, and suffering from osteoporosis and lung-capacity issues from the various drugs, but poised with paddle in hand, ready to help guide me.
At the Frontera put-in, Rob snapped last-minute photos of toucans and scarlet macaws, and he described Mexico’s largest river. From the beginning, we knew the Usu was going to be big water. It normally ran about forty thousand cfs, larger and faster than anything I had ever encountered. But on our arrival, torrential rains had swelled it to almost three times its normal flow. The Usu was now running at over one hundred thousand cfs, and almost eight times the normal flow of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I had flashing memories of our Green River trip when a similar thing had happened. We seemed to have an uncanny knack for arriving at rivers right when they were at record flood levels!
From the moment we got on the river, it was different from any experience I had ever had, like paddling through a real-world Jurassic Park. As we raced along, the slurp and gulp of the enormous hydraulic features sounded alive, like riding the back of a gargantuan, slithering snake disappearing into an endless jungle. The shoreline teemed with the lionlike roars of howler monkeys, the piercing calls of macaws, and the guttural, lengthy drum-croak of giant toads.
The first couple of days were devoid of big rapids, but the immense volume of water coursing downstream created challenging river features even Rob hadn’t experienced before. Giant phantom boils would surge up randomly and explode a couple of feet higher than the river’s surface. The way Rocky described them, the massive energy of the river moving downward wasn’t consistent. The water flowing far beneath the surface would get slowed down by boulders or sped up by drop-offs, and it would create different currents that rose up, sometimes colliding with other currents and erupting at the surface like lava from a volcano. It was disconcerting to be paddling downriver and suddenly realize the bow of my boat was pointing uphill in a boiling upheaval. Even more frightening were the enormous, unpredictable whirlpools—or, as Rocky called them, vortexes.
Like the boils, the vortexes materialized out of nowhere and moved across the water, but instead of pushing up, these sucked you down. Rob could spot them for me, calling out, “Whirlpool on the left! Hard right! Hard right!” But they arose and then vanished, reappearing some arbitrary distance away. It was impossible for Rob to call out all the appearing, shifting, and reappearing features that gave the river a crazy chaotic energy, like tendrils of angry fingers shoving, lifting, spinning, and pulling my boat under. I was suddenly aware of a story one of the soldiers told me about trying to navigate through a field of land mines, the uncertainty of what was beneath his feet, almost as real and shattering as the bombs themselves.
To increase my stress level, the new radios we were trying out provided no improvement. They were muffled and inconsistent, and often I had to guess what Rob was yelling at me to do. I flipped a bunch of times on the upper section, all the while getting hypertense about what lay ahead. Sometimes, the pitching and bucking would get so overwhelming, I’d ask Chris or Rob to link up in a flotilla. I’d grab their boats and desperately latch on. It was strange that even though I couldn’t see, squeezing my eyelids tight somehow helped fight the sense of dizziness.
That afternoon, I got flipped upside down by a boil that rose up right in front of my boat. I tried to hit my roll, but the boil bumped me into a massive whirlpool that spun me around and sucked at my helmet. I worked to get my paddle to the surface, but the vortex yanked the paddle blade downward. After a couple of feeble attempts, I ran out of air, pulled, and exited. As the vortex drew me around and around, tugging at my legs, Rob dropped in beside me, and I grabbed the stern of his boat.
“Hang on!” Rob yelled as the spin accelerated in a tightening circle. As we flushed down the world’s largest toilet bowl, the whirlpool vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Rob paddled me toward shore. “I thought I’d seen it all,” he said, “but being sucked down a ten-foot whirlpool is definitely a new experience. It was so deep, I couldn’t see the horizon.”
The first night at camp, against the chirping backdrop of cicadas, I lay in the sand, trying to calm myself down and recover from the forces of the river. I was just glad to be on stable ground. We built a fire, told stories, and got to know each other. Everyone especially wanted to hear some stories from Rocky, and he told us the improbable way he’d gotten started.
“I bought my first kayak,” he said, “after a UC–Davis outdoors program trip on the American River. It was before I even had a car. I caught a ride from college to Lake Natoma, bought the boat, a paddle, and a spray skirt, and paddled home to Sacramento—about 120 miles down the American River. I hadn’t brought food, but figs and blackberries were in season, so that’s all I ate for four days.”
“Wow, that’s quite a solo journey,” Rob said. “How experienced were you at the time?”
Rocky mused for a moment. “It was only my third time in a hard-shell kayak, but I was hooked.”
That had been the start of two decades of wild and crazy solo adventures, the last fifteen years of which had been devoted to Mexico and Central America.
“For me,” Rocky said, his high voice lilting and gentle against the snap and sputter of the fire, “paddling has always been about adventure. Lots of people love the thrill of the rapids, or going over waterfalls, and sure, I like that aspect too. But even more, I like being in a kayak on the water because it’s the most natural way to travel through a river landscape. Gliding along on the river, at its pace, on its level, and on the river’s terms.”
I really liked what Rocky was saying. Although scary and intense, the rapids themselves comprised quite a small portion of a river trip. There was much more that made them memorable. Spending time with good friends you trust, experiencing amazing places, pushing the boundaries of your abilities, facing down fears. River trips had it all. I also really liked Rocky’s meticulous and inquisitive approach. Rob had told me that Rocky was constantly charting and mapping every drainage, access point, and location where springs flowed for freshwater. In 2010, he had compiled a guidebook of Copper Canyon and the Sierra Madre del Norte, and now he was working on one for the Chiapas region. We’d pass an intriguing side canyon, and he’d remark, “I haven’t hiked up that one yet; maybe next trip,” and he’d scribble notes on his map. It felt really impressive to be in the presence of a modern-day explorer, not simply a river rat or a thrill seeker. Rocky was an anachronism, like he would have been perfectly suited for Powell’s first descent of the Grand Canyon.
When it was time to turn in, I rolled out my pad in my tent and stretched out. We’d camped on a wide beach, halfway between the surging river and the dense, thrumming jungle. It was a warm night, and I could still feel the sand’s heat radiating upward.
Rocky, I noticed, had rolled out a pad nearby but was sleeping right out on the sand, and pretty near the water.
“Aren’t you worried about bugs and critters?” I asked him through the jungle night.
“No, I like sleeping out. I mean, there are crocodiles and jaguars around, but they usually don’t bother you.”
I edged over to the tent doorway and fumbled for the zipper.
“And there are also vampire bats,” Rocky said calmly.
“What the hell? Really?” I asked.
“Yes. They are nocturnal and feed exclusively on blood. They navigate by sonar but also have super heightened vision, with huge, wide eyes. They fly out at night to feed and drink about half their body weight in blood. When they reach their prey, which are usually sleeping, they use their razor-sharp incisor teeth to impale the skin. They have an anticlotting agent in their saliva to keep the wound flowing. Most people think they suck blood, but they really lap it up as it oozes out.”
I found the zipper and closed the tent door a little quicker than I usually would.
“They have plenty of other mammals around to feed on, so they rarely bother humans,” he added as I checked all the inside corners for holes and settled in for a fitful sleep, filled with images of silent, furry, fanged creatures with huge, wide eyes winging silently through the jet-black night.
* * *
At breakfast, Rob’s first words were, “That’s incredible.” I sidled up to him, feeling my neck and face for vampire bat incisions as he described Rocky’s strange breakfast ritual. He was squatting in the sand with a pile of orange peels in front of him, engorging himself on the fruit in rapid succession. “He’s on his seventh orange,” Rob said quietly. Rocky was in his forties yet was still super lean and fit. He told us he fasted a day each week and one full week a year. He did everything at warp speed, but in a comforting, casual way, and I pictured him sucking oranges like a hummingbird drinking sugar water from a bowl. Perhaps his hyperactivity had to do with these megadoses of sugar. Rocky then washed his hands and pulpy face in the river and started breaking down camp in fast motion.
“Makes me hungry for a breakfast burrito,” I said to Rob.
The next day, we stopped along the river and explored the pre-Columbian Mayan ruins of Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras, which sat on the banks of the Usu and had been inhabited in the seventh century B.C. Yaxchilan had been fairly well excavated, but Piedras Negras was like walking into an Indiana Jones adventure. The plazas, temples, and palaces, all constructed of limestone, had only been partially exposed by archeologists, while most of this ancient ruin remained choked with thick jungle vines and vegetation. Rocky pointed out, with concern, that a proposed series of dams threatened to flood this incredible ruin and others throughout this entire region.
We climbed the steep rock stairs to the tops of sacred pyramids once used for human ritual sacrifice and touched the carved depictions of ancient rulers. We found a sundial, still faintly visible despite the ravages of time. It was unnerving and exhilarating to explore the remains of this ancient world, shadowed by giant ceiba trees, crumbling back into the jungle, forgotten by the modern world. In the Mayan culture, nothing was born and nothing ever died. Life and death were cyclical, like the seasons of the year or the rotation of the earth around the sun. In the afterlife, you embarked on a dangerous voyage through nine levels of the underworld, then thirteen levels of the higher world, and ultimately to a paradise—a mystical mountain of eternal happiness. Your journey began, however, in a dark kingdom called Xibalba, translated as “Place of Fear.” As you ascended, you passed through a gauntlet of gods who would just as soon destroy your soul as they would help you: a hunched skeleton with protruding ribs and an owl’s head, a crocodile with a long knobby bill and snapping teeth, and a paddler god in a dugout canoe with a snarling jaguar face. I shuddered as I envisioned that menacing journey, much of it below the surface of the earth and water, beneath our awareness, and even beyond what we perceived as real and unreal.
As Rob ran around snapping photos of the structures and recording the sound of shrieking spider monkeys, he said, “Be happy you weren’t alive then, Big E. I think blind people would have been the first to be sacrificed.” He laughed and slapped me on the back.
Not far downstream, we came to an amazing natural wonder called Cascada Busilja. Here, a tributary entered the Usumacinta and announced its arrival with a spectacular fifty-five-foot waterfall.
The force of this cascade shoved us back as we tried paddling over to the bottom. The sound of a thousand showerheads engulfed my ears and hammered me in the face. Rob noticed that there were actually two waterfalls, one on top of the other, with a big pool between them.
“From a ways off,” he said, “they look like big knuckles, with foamy white spray cascading down over them.”
Rocky said the knuckles were a typical feature found in this area called travertine, a buildup of soft minerals deposited in layers by the water and hardened over time. “I don’t think anyone has ever kayaked over them,” he said, “but I’ve heard of people jumping off the highest one.”
That was all the Gypsies needed to pull their boats out and begin clambering up to try it out. They took turns flinging themselves into the foaming wash more than fifty feet below.
“That looks too fun.” Rob turned to me. “The old guys can’t get left out.”
But when I scrambled out onto the launching point, I found slippery, wet, and exposed roots hung from space. I questioned the sanity of the leap. The landing zone wasn’t that forgiving either. In fact, Rob said I needed to leap out about eight feet to clear some protruding rocks and nail the window of water that spanned about twenty feet. I pointed my trekking pole exactly where I needed to hit, once, twice, and then a third time. I stood for a minute, listening to the crashing waterfall and the open expanse below me. As I jumped, the thought that this might be a really stupid idea flashed through my mind, like those redneck jokes I’d heard: “What’s the last thing a redneck says before dying?”
“Hold my beer.”
Then I was soaring through the air, longer than I would have expected or intended, my stomach flip-flopping, my arms flailing in windmills, and then my body slapping hard into the roiling pool. As my head emerged, I heard whoops and hollering from the onlookers, but I immediately knew something was wrong. Like a bonehead, I’d left on my helmet, and upon entry, the visor snapped my head back. My neck felt rubbery, with the tendons firing, like I had been whiplashed.
As I clung to a rock on the side of the pool trying to stretch my neck, Rob leaped. Eddi and the gang described his jump; he got leaning backward too far in the air and hit the water at a bad angle, like he was reclining too far in a chair. The impact lurched his upper body abruptly forward, and when he reemerged, he flailed and groaned, barely able to swim to shore. The boys immediately swam in and pulled him out, but as he lay on his back in the sun, Rob continued to grimace in pain. Immediately he knew he’d made a big mistake. The ADT treatment had stripped Rob of his testosterone, the body’s primary mechanism of rebuilding and repairing. His bones were weakened from osteoporosis, and he feared he’d ruptured a disc or caused a compression fracture in one of his vertebrae. For the rest of the day, Rob couldn’t get comfortable. He couldn’t rotate to look from side to side without excruciating pain; sitting in a kayak was out of the question. He took some muscle relaxants and a dose of anti-inflammatory meds, and to his chagrin and disappointment, he was reduced to lying on his back on one of the rafts for the rest of the day. The Hammerhead never liked being sidelined.
He did manage to sit up to report, as we pulled in to camp that evening, that a ten-foot-long crocodile was entering the water, slithering away from the exact spot we intended to set up camp. “That should make you want to hit your roll, Big E,” he said weakly.
I liked hearing him joke around, but it was torture to see Rob so reduced. He had been hands down the toughest guy I knew, unbreakable, indestructible, like a superhero. He’d led me up many spectacular rock and ice climbs, patiently taught me to kayak, and rescued me in rivers and dragged me to shore countless times, and here he was, now as fallible as the rest of us, like Superman having just encountered kryptonite.
That night at camp, while Rob nursed his ailing back with cervezas and pain meds, we ate chorizo and a Chiapas favorite called chayote, a cross between a cucumber and a squash. As we crammed the food in, everyone pushed Rocky for more stories. The Gypsies, who were on their first big river trip and new to white water, wanted to know if he’d ever had any close calls.
“Well, I’ve lost my boat while kayaking a couple of times, and I don’t recommend that,” he said.
Their interest piqued, they waited, and he went on.
“On a remote river in Peru, it was getting late in the day when we entered a narrow gorge section. At sunset, we weren’t finding any good camp spots, so we just kept going. The river was running high, and I drifted into a very big hole. It was river-wide and no way really to avoid it. I tried to charge hard and bust through, but I didn’t make it and got tossed back and thrashed around for … oh, maybe two minutes. I was popping up long enough to get air a few times, but eventually I had no choice but to exit. It was just about dark at that point, and my dry suit had filled with water, and I was so out of oxygen I was about to black out. My paddling partner had been behind me about ten yards and got through the hole. He towed me to some rocks, but by the time he’d gotten me there, my boat was long gone downstream. I’d been carrying a lot of important things in the boat like my laptop, my GPS, my river notes, and all the maps of where we had been, plus my food, camping gear, and all my warm clothes. I slept on the side of the river that night and then climbed out of the canyon the next morning. I had to cross a really dangerous cable bridge hand over hand because the wooden slats were all rotted, then hike about six miles or so. It was about one hundred degrees out. Meanwhile, my buddy went looking for my boat downstream. Miraculously, he found it. It was pretty mangled, but amazingly the laptop still worked, and most important, I recovered my river notes!”
Rob, who’d done his homework on Rocky and had read a bunch of articles about him in paddling magazines, chimed in from his prone position in the sand, “Tell them about the Kern, Rocky.”
Rocky was normally understated, more about action than words, but he perked up at this recollection.
“Ah, the Kern. In California. There’s a nasty rapid called Royal Flush, which is a legit class V/VI. About 99 percent of paddlers portage around it. It’s narrow and bouldery and has a monster hole and a dangerous left wall undercut. I had run it a few times before, but this one day I got sideways, offline, and after the main drop, my boat drifted far left and into the large wall there. I flipped and couldn’t roll back up. Underwater, I could feel the boat moving down and underneath the ledge wall, and after waiting about five seconds, I pulled my skirt and exited.”
I heard John, one of the Gypsies, crack a beer. “Damn good story,” he said.
Rob laughed. “You gotta wait for it! That’s just the beginning!”
Rocky continued, “I got pushed into an underwater alcove, and I hoped I’d be flushed out, but ten more seconds went by, then twenty at least, and I realized I was stuck. Powerful water was pushing me against a rock wall. It was dark; I had no bearings, and I was running out of air. Surprisingly, I could actually think rationally, and I speculated my PFD was holding me in the pocket where I couldn’t flush out, so I frantically started removing it over my head. Luckily, a few of my tightening straps were broken, so it came off pretty easily and floated away. Within a few seconds I felt myself moving with the current, banging around on the rocks of the final drops, slamming my head. Still submerged, I was being rag-dolled downriver, and was so oxygen deprived that I was about to pass out when my head finally popped out of the water after about ninety seconds under. My friends fished me out after I’d swam about a third of a mile and deposited me on shore. I’d lost my paddle, my PFD, and one of my Teva sandals. I lay on a warm rock like a dead lizard for at least a half an hour, reviving and reliving my experience. I realized it was the closest I’ve ever come to dying.”
Everyone was quiet as they contemplated themselves shoved against that undercut. I knew I didn’t have the wherewithal to think my way out after thirty seconds of near drowning. Thankfully, Rob broke the dead silence.
“Big E,” he said, “as I keep saying, you can hold your breath a lot longer than you think.”
“Hope I never have to learn,” I said softly.
“I also had a brush with death on the Upper Kern,” Rob kicked in. “It was very early on the learning curve of my kayaking, and I really had no business even being there. It was running at about seven thousand cfs, definitely flood stage, even higher than experienced kayakers would consider. I was with just one other guy, and we were both confident and cocky because each of us had learned really quickly. But we were too stupid and filled with testosterone to carefully consider the consequences. Or to care.”
“I’m glad you’ve grown up so much since then,” I interjected, recalling Rob’s less-than-wise jump off the cliff.
Rob paused for a second, most likely smirking, and then continued, “My friend in front of me got through this big rapid called Fender Bender, a Class V, but he swam at the end. On my run, I hit a boulder at the top, got flipped, yanked out of the boat, and was getting worked in this massive turbulent hole. I thought I’d pop out, but I wasn’t coming to the surface; I was being held down, thrashed, and washing-machined. Somehow, right as I was thinking this might be it—like, the end—I remembered some advice I’d been given early on: If you get stuck and can’t get out, try swimming down. So I did. I swam for my life straight down and got below the powerful recirculation of the hole. In the rocks below, I got the hell banged out of me, but, gasping and floundering, I managed to make it to shore. I had a massive hematoma on my femur and was on crutches for a few weeks.”
“Yes,” Rocky reminisced in his typical mild-mannered voice. “Good to be able to hold your breath. Where we’re going tomorrow, we may need that skill. We’re heading into the Gran Cañon de San José. It’s about twenty miles through a constricted gorge. It possesses, by far, the largest rapids we’ve seen, but with this unusual water flow, it will have some serious hydraulic features, including haystacks—big standing waves that break on their upstream face, back on themselves; powerful and shifting eddy lines; and of course, phantom whirlpools, some so big they may hold you under for more than a minute. I won’t tell each of you what to do. It’s your choice, but if you kayak, some of you will flip and probably swim, and a swim through this canyon will mean a very long one. The vertical walls make it impossible to get to shore, and there’s so much water coursing through the gorge, the waves crash against the sidewalls and push you back into the middle of the river.”
Rocky’s words were followed by an even longer silence than before. Not one Gypsy cracked a beer. I tried to stretch my neck that screamed back at me. And I thought of Rob with a possible fractured spine. This time, I broke the pause: “Rocky, with that lovely description, I think I’m out!”
And as if the tension couldn’t get any thicker, a piercing whine-whistle cracked through the night and shrieked over our heads, exploding in the jungle behind our camp. I instinctively dropped to my belly in the sand. “That’s an RPG,” Rocky said as nonchalantly as announcing that dinner was served.
“Should we extinguish our fire? Hide in the jungle?” one of the Gypsies said urgently.
Rocky just laughed. “No. It’s only the bored Guatemalan army doing some random target practice,” he said as another whistled over our heads and exploded even closer.
* * *
I woke up the next morning groggy and unsettled after a fitful night. Between Rocky’s and Rob’s near-death river stories and the evening fireworks, I felt raw and exposed. The good news was, the day started with some really fun paddling over the waterfalls of the Rio Chocolja, a tributary of the Usu. Rob described deep, turquoise-colored water, with tiers of small waterfalls as far as he could see up the canyon. We hiked our boats upstream and ran five of the drops, including one about eight feet high. Rocky offered to guide me, and he’d call commands, yelling, “Paddle hard!” as I hit the edge, hearing the rush of the water ahead, the open chasm below, and the churning slosh at the bottom. I’d go momentarily airborne, then land nose first, slapping down flat. Sometimes, I flipped, but more often I stayed upright. It was momentarily frightening, then exhilarating, then a relief.
Taylor of the Gypsies had a little mishap when he went over the big waterfall at too steep an angle and too far to the right. He bashed the nose of his kayak against an underwater rock, got stuck, and swam out. Afterward, the snout of his boat was totally dented inward. Eddi in his inflatable duckie was the comic relief. His massive, muscular, 230-pound frame barely fit in his boat, and he came in sideways, hung up on the lip of the drop. He then tottered dubiously and toppled over sideways with his arms flailing, kerplunking into the pool below. When he popped back up to the surface, the yellow duckie came down after him, bonking him on the head.
In the afternoon, we entered the main gorge, and I could hear the limestone walls closing in and soaring thousands of feet straight out of the river. Rob surprised me when he decided to run it in his kayak, even though he had to remain rigid, unable to twist his torso. He wriggled into his kayak slowly and carefully like a ninety-year-old man. It was no surprise that the Gypsies decided to run it too. I hopped into the front of a double inflatable duckie with Eddi, not ready to kayak, but still unwilling to miss the action. Rocky was correct: The power of the water roiling through this constricted canyon sped up the current, intensified the rapids, and magnified the boils, vortexes, and eddy lines. And instead of separated rapids, broken up by calm pools, this stretch seemed to surge and compound into one long, violent maelstrom.
The group carnage began immediately. Taylor of the Gypsies flipped a record of nine times in the first rapid, La Linea, which Rocky had warned would feel “very Grand Canyon–like: big and fast and hard to stay on line.” John fared much worse, however, flipping at the top of La Linea and swimming, emerging, and disappearing as he was carried downriver. As his head appeared, Rob had somehow gotten over to him and yelled, “Grab on!” and the two roared down the turbulent gauntlet together, with Rob paddling furiously, looking for any escape to shore.
There was so much volume, however, the waves rose up the sides of the canyon walls, like a half-pipe, and each time he’d get near the side, the massive waves would collapse over him and shove him back toward the center of the river. The power of the water was so strong, at one point Rob had to yell for John to let go. He was about to flip himself and, with his injury, didn’t want to have two swimmers in jeopardy. As John let go, a massive haystack hit Rob sideways, and he had to test his theory. It knocked him over, but after three tries, he was up again, looking for John’s head bobbing somewhere below. It was a shock when he saw John appear, resurfacing some two hundred feet down the canyon, a very long time to be underwater. Rob raced downstream and got to John again, and the two rode the furious energy, Rob using all he had to avoid the huge whirlpools that were materializing all around him. Out of breath and totally spent, John yelled desperately, “Don’t leave me, Rob! I don’t have much left! I’m done!” He was gurgling, his mouth getting filled with water. After another two miles, the canyon finally widened a bit, and Rob found some rocks where he deposited John, who lay on his belly, gasping, moaning, and spitting out great gobs of brown water. Finally, John pulled himself up to his knees, then his feet. He wrapped his arms around Rob.
“Not so tight.” Rob winced with pain.
“You saved my life,” John said, and he sank down again, hanging his head in exhaustion.
While all of this was going on, Eddi and I were having plenty of drama of our own in the double duckie inflatable. As hard as we paddled, the energy of the river was taking us where it wanted us to go. Several times we rode up one of those crashing waves against the canyon walls, got upended, and spilled into the river with whirlpools forming right below me. A ducky has a lot of buoyancy, so I latched on to the upside-down handle, while the monstrous spin cycle grabbed my feet. If my shoes hadn’t been tied tightly, they would have been sucked right off, and if I hadn’t been holding on with all my strength, my body would have been pulled down with them. When there was finally a break in the action, we took a rest at shore, and I approached Rob, who was sitting quietly on his kayak, taking a drink from his water bottle. “I heard you finally got some exercise on this trip,” I said.
“Exactly, Big E. It was the beginning of my new Gypsy fitness plan. A Gypsy a day keeps the doctor away.”
“Even with a little kryptonite,” I said, putting my hand gently on his shoulder. “I want you to know, you’re still pretty awesome.”
“Not exactly sure what that means,” he replied quizzically, “but I’ll take it as a compliment.”
The next morning, I did force myself back into my kayak. Rocky said that three of the largest rapids still lay ahead, and from the moment I started downriver, I felt so nervous, it translated into a sluggishness. I couldn’t get my muscles to fire, and I felt like I was about to vomit. The first rapid I encountered was appropriately named Whirlpool, and it took every ounce of skill and fitness I possessed to stay upright in the chaos. Rob was doing his best to call out shifting river features, but he shot past me as I caught the edge of a big vortex. It spun me around as I managed to escape, and I wound up paddling upriver. I had no clue where Rob was through the muffled radios. I swept my hand across the earpiece, shoving it away from my ear. Then I heard Rob faintly calling from far behind me and far to my left. I turned but caught a boil that lifted up my bow and spun me again. Where was Rob? I heard his distant call from my right, and turned around again, trying to paddle through the submerged fingers grabbing at my boat.
Suddenly, I felt an enormous whirlpool gurgle up just behind me. Rob was about a hundred feet in front of me, calling, “Paddle, E! Harder! Harder!” I could feel the whirlpool as it reeled me backward. I cranked it up, paddling as hard as I ever had. I could actually feel my consciousness beginning to slip away into some kind of primeval instinct for survival. I was hyperventilating, oxygen no longer absorbing into my lungs and blood vessels. I was going anaerobic. My thinking mind was reduced to a sliver, only enough room for the sound of my ragged breathing, my muscles that felt on fire, and the roar and suck of the swirling cauldron behind me as it hauled me into its mouth. I could feel the stern of my boat hovering over the hole as I dug and churned with my paddle blades, but to no avail. I honestly couldn’t remember whether the vortex simply vanished, or whether I was able to paddle away, but I somehow broke free, made it through more tempest, and busted through a fierce eddy fence, sinking over my boat, safe for a time in the semi-calm pool.
I heaved myself out of my boat and flopped onto a rock, weak and dizzy. I could barely lift my head as I poured sweat and tried to slow my labored breathing. My arms and hands shook uncontrollably. It felt like my nervous system had broken, like a wire that had been frayed and exposed to the elements. I leaned over. Waves of nausea sent me into a series of convulsive dry heaves, and I could taste bitter acid rising in my throat. Rob sat beside me and tried to convince me to get back in and give it another go, but even if I’d wanted to, I knew I couldn’t. No pep talk or motivational speech could get me back in the water. I felt like my brother Mark must have felt going into the ring with Anita. I had gone toe-to-toe with the river, and it had kicked my ass, sending me sprawling into the corner battered and bloody. Yet, unlike me, Mark had been willing to go back in, again and again. Then I thought of Jamie, who had left the S2S expedition. I had pleaded with him not to quit, but he had closed his heart and ridden away down the bumpy mountain road. Like him, I was done!
I rode in a raft for the next day and a half until the take-out and tried not to bring everyone else down, but emotionally, I was shattered.
Then when we got to the airport in Villahermosa and back to the world of e-mail, I got the news that Kyle Maynard had made it to the summit of Kilimanjaro, the tallest peak in Africa. The report didn’t say a lot, only that Kyle had become the first quadruple amputee to climb Kili, crawling to the 19,341-foot summit in ten days.
Outwardly, I was happy for Kyle. His No Barriers dream that had solidified on a mountaintop in Colorado had become real. It was an amazing accomplishment, and I understood the pain, suffering, and bloody stumps he must have gone through to get there. But although I could envision him at the summit, my own dream had become nebulous, like the wispy jungle haze evaporating over the Usumacinta.
* * *
Once I got home, I tried to put on a tough façade for Ellie and the kids, but inside I felt flat and damaged somehow. My only strong emotion seemed to be fear and a vague dread. I often found myself lost in thought, fighting the boils, or lying on that rock trying to convince myself to get back in my boat. The doubt and questioning began to eat at me like roiling tentacles reaching out for me from the dark water. In my typical dreams, I could see the way I did before I went blind, with rudimentary shapes and images. It was pleasant to revisit wonderful places from my childhood like the forest behind my house, the trees blazing with vibrant fall colors. But in my new dreams, I was totally blind. In fact, more than blind. Everything was thick, suffocating blackness with the overwhelming roar of the rapids engulfing all sound. Rob was nowhere to be found. I was totally on my own as I rushed headlong downriver, twisting and turning, into a raging tumult that I knew would drag me under and consume me.