Since Rob’s cancer diagnosis, he’d been learning how dairy and animal fats could accelerate the spread of prostate cancer, and he’d been trying to eliminate them. But he also knew that, unlike sparse mountain provisions, a river trip was full of temptation: chicken alfredo, steak fajitas with sour cream and shredded cheese, bread doused with garlic butter, and carrot cake and berry crumble. So Rob had made it his No Barriers pledge to restrict his diet to fruit, veggies, and fish during the entire trip. However, various team members had already been catching him break his vow, sneaking chunks of salami and cheddar. At breakfast, I was right behind him. He had just loaded a pile of bacon on his plate when Steven Mace—burly, bearded, and barrel-chested—cut in front of me, leaned into Rob, and said, “Hey, Rob, I have something for you.”
Rob’s eyes must have been preoccupied by the display of food on the table, because he asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s a river rock, and I want you to keep it in your pocket at all times. It’ll be a reminder of your pledge. When you’re feeling weak and about to break, grab it and hold it. Squeeze it tight, and it will help summon up your inner strength, your inner resolve.”
“Cool,” I said, “like the challenge coins they give out in the military.”
“Or in AA,” Timmy added.
“Yeah,” Steven said, “your Grand Canyon challenge rock.”
“Thanks, Steven. That’s thoughtful,” Rob said, sliding it into his pocket. “I’ll start it at lunch.” Then he reached for the bacon on his plate, but before Rob’s hand landed on a piece, Steven snatched the entire pile off the plate and stuffed it into his mouth. Then he squeezed Rob’s shoulder firmly and, between the smacking and chewing, managed to say, “Rob, you stay strong now.”
I didn’t laugh long, because Harlan sat down next to me and said, “It’s a big day ahead, E. We’ve got Horn Creek, Granite, and Hermit, all rated 9s and all within a five-mile stretch.” As I listened, I was barely managing to choke down my breakfast, leaving the bacon on my plate half-eaten. “We’re just gonna take them one at a time. Horn Creek is up first, just a couple of miles downriver. It’s got the steepest drop in the Grand Canyon. At this water level, these two big rocks jut out side by side. Some people say they look like horns, but, with the water pouring over them, I think they look more like big glassy domes or camels’ humps; they are some of the most beautiful water features in the river. We’ll shoot the gauntlet between them and take a few sizeable hits. We want to avoid what’s below, if possible: a labyrinth of big waves, rocks, and holes. So we’re going to be making a hard cut to the left; I’ll call it out, guiding us away from those powerful, tricky hydraulics. But if we can’t make the left move, we’ll pivot and then just take those big crashers head-on.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, unable to take another bite. My eggs rumbled in my belly and were about to turn into a vomit omelet.
Once on the water, we passed under the Kaibab Bridge, leading to Phantom Ranch, and pulled over. There was news to celebrate. The Neptune BlueWave radios from the U.K. had arrived. Harlan’s mom had found a courier to drive them from Phoenix halfway to Flagstaff, where Marieke, Harlan’s sister, met the driver on the side of the road. Marieke then relayed them to a good friend of Harlan’s who drove to the South Rim and hiked them down the steep, nine-mile Bright Angel Trail and hand delivered them to us, just in time. Skyler opened the box to check that everything was there. I just hoped they worked. I was going to need them.
Sooner than expected, I heard the distant rush of Horn Creek ahead. “We’re gonna angle in from right center,” Harlan said, “and split the horns.”
I could hear him fairly clearly in my earpiece, which helped me with my ritual of trying to stay calm. I floated tentatively down a perfectly smooth tongue, like riding a moving sidewalk that you knew was leading you into a category-five hurricane. Then the bow of my boat dipped, and I dropped off the edge of the earth, accelerating into the storm. I paddled harder, leaning forward and squaring off against the big hits. As I continued to find myself upright, I felt some confidence rising. When Harlan gave the word, I edged left, leaning downriver and bracing my paddle against the surging waves. Then water exploded on top of me, and it hurled me over. Upside down, I waited for it to release me, and when I felt its energy subsiding, I rolled up, bracing for more action. Instead, I was surprised to hear the cheers of the team and Harlan. I was through it, through Horn, a rapid with a reputation so fearsome it had made it into the lyrics of Timmy’s song, “Erik of the River.”
There wasn’t much time to celebrate, because the next thing I knew, we were entering the thunder of Granite. It had a strong pull to the wall on river right, with waves coming fast from both directions. I managed to remain upright, staying loose and reacting to the punches striking me from either side. Yet as I bucked and bounced, Harlan’s voice went silent for several seconds. No radios! my brain screamed, but then I heard something faint, almost like static: “Blrglrgshshsh.” Harlan, I realized, was upside down. I sensed I was pointing in the right direction, so just kept charging. Then there was a louder sound, a gasping breath, and Harlan’s voice resumed: “Small left … charge!”
As I paddled into the tail waves that led me out of Granite, I thought, Even Harlan can get rocked by this river.
Up next was Hermit, which Harlan noted had the biggest waves in the canyon. “Think of it as a big, fun wave train,” he said. But that “fun” included about a dozen waves in succession, some of them over twenty feet tall. As I dipped down into the troughs, I tried to keep my kayak pointed straight. Then I felt myself rushing up a wall of water so steep I was certain I would flip over backward. “Hang on!” Harlan yelled. “Lean forward!”
I pressed my torso against the hull of my kayak and managed not to tip. My kayak caught air off of the lip of that three-story wave, and I straightened up for the big drop into the next one. At the bottom eddy, Lonnie and I compared notes. We’d both flipped once, but then Skyler mentioned he’d gone over three times. “Blind guys rule! Sighted people drool!” I shouted to Lonnie, reaching out and finding his hand for a fist bump. We both pumped our fists in the air and cheered to Skyler’s amused chagrin.
At camp, I was stripping off my wet gear and draping it to dry in the sun when I heard Rob and one of the raft guides in a debate on the best layering system to keep you warm and dry in the cold river water. I noticed it was getting pretty intense. “Hydro skins and wet suits are pretty much the same thing,” the guide insisted. “And I never wear either of them under a dry top. They just hold in the moisture and make you feel cold and clammy.”
“Actually,” said Rob, “that’s not exactly correct. Hydro skins are often constructed of materials like nylon, Lycra, and polyurethane, while wet suits are comprised of a blend of neoprene and butyl rubber. And lining the layers of a wet suit are a thin film of heat-reflecting metal oxide, such as titanium, copper, silver, even aluminum…”
At this point I could hear the guide exhale impatiently, and I pictured him wiping his brow in frustration. As I listened, I thought back to the image of Mr. Whoopee in the Tennessee Tuxedo cartoons. Rob had little interest in placating for the sake of avoiding friction. His focus lay in a dogged adherence to truth and accuracy, and that had saved my butt a dozen times, on and off the river. However, no matter the situation, Rob saw no STOP signs. I could hear the guide grumbling as he walked away. Timmy quickly took the opportunity to chime in, “That was an illuminating discourse on the chemical properties of hydro skins and wet suits.” Then he asked, “Have you ever been diagnosed with Factsberger’s syndrome?”
“No,” Rob said. “Do you care to elucidate?”
“Well,” said Timmy, launching into one of his legendary riffs, “it’s a pretty serious condition wherein the patient—in this case, you—cannot refrain from disabusing someone of any utterance not factual, or deemed to be incorrect. It’s the ruthless, unyielding pursuit of the facts at all cost. I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure you are exhibiting a number of the classic symptoms.”
I sat there giggling to myself at the term Factsberger’s. From my teaching days, I knew it was a politically incorrect play on Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, in which people have trouble interpreting social cues and emotions in others.
“And what would be the symptoms of this mysterious disease?” Rob asked, amused.
“Well,” Timmy began, “if you had your own cologne line, it would be called Relentlessly Raker. If you were experiencing bad breath, you wouldn’t use Altoids. You’d use Factoids! If you owned a restaurant, you’d call it Snacks and Facts. And if the periodic table were based on you, it would begin with data at the very top, followed by actually, confrontation, debate, and, last but not least, of course, bacon.”
“That explains it quite well,” Rob replied, “but I would simply like to clarify that the biggest difference between hydro skins and wet suits is in the varying composites. Wet suits are designed using a sponge rubber technology, with nitrogen gas trapped within the cellular structure—”
“This is when I respectfully disengage from further discussion,” Timmy said, and I could hear him slowly backing away.
When everyone was gone, Rob sidled up next to me. “I wasn’t actually finished,” he said. A pile of kayaks and dry bags were behind me. Rocks and bushes blocked me from the sides. Rob stood between me and the only escape trail. There was nowhere for this blind man to run. As he went on, further explaining the difference between closed-cell versus open-cell foam rubber and the importance of the specific thickness in millimeters, I realized that sometimes, you just couldn’t escape the facts.
Heading out of camp, we immediately encountered a six-mile stretch called the Gems: six rapids, spaced one per mile—Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Emerald, Ruby, Serpentine. Although they were giant, they retained a feeling of friendliness. There were no monster holes or complex navigation to twist my gut. I just had to point ’er straight and ride the bucking river serpent.
After the excitement, Harlan had us pull over to a spot he’d discovered on one of his previous trips. He told us that the heavy thunderstorms early in the expedition might just awaken something special. We hiked along the beach, through some tamarisk bushes, and came to an alcove with a giant bedrock pothole that had been filled in with rainwater.
“Shhhhh,” Harlan instructed. “Sit down and await the surprise.” Within seconds, on cue, a cacophony of croaks emanated from the pond, as if Harlan, the conductor, had just waved his baton. We laughed hard, and then someone stupidly chucked a rock in the pond, probably thinking the frogs would respond by croaking again. Instead, they went totally silent, and I feared that had ended our encounter. Then Timmy let out his own frog song: “Err err err err, err err err err. BREEDEET.” He simultaneously screeched and rolled out a clear click in the back of his throat. It was a near-perfect impression, and the frogs all belched right back at him, like they had a new leader.
Lonnie whispered, “Timmy, I’d be careful. I think they’re in love with you.”
“That’s right,” Harlan said. “That’s their mating call, and looks like Timmy’s got a few hundred admirers over there.”
“Frog legs, and frog love,” Timmy said in a husky baritone. “My two favorite things. I’m going to live here forever and be the Frog King—with my sexy, slimy harem.”
As he continued to croak, and his groupies continued to call back in rapture, I began losing track of who was who. The analogy of the chorus was totally accurate. For a blind person, this was a symphonic masterpiece of nature, and we sat back enjoying the show for over an hour.
I heard wings flapping, and Harlan said, “A couple of mallards just landed over there.”
Rob had been bouldering on the steep wall behind the pond, trying to get a better look at the frogs, and now he returned. “They’re actually common mergansers,” he corrected.
Timmy could not contain himself. “Factsberger’s never sleeps, my friends,” he announced. He then croaked, and his minions responded in kind.
Just before camp that evening, we reached a beautiful side canyon called Elves Chasm that Harlan wanted us to experience. We hiked up a damp, lush creek bed with several small waterfalls created by boulders that choked the channel. Several shelves up, we came to a deep pool with a tall waterfall pouring down. We all took turns swimming over and letting the clear freshwater pour over our heads, washing the sand out of our hair and faces. Behind the waterfall was an actual chasm, cool and damp from the water spray. We scrambled inside, and tucked ten feet back was a climb through a small, body-wide window that popped you into the sun again. From there, we carefully walked out on ledges to stand fifteen feet above the pool. As Lonnie and I hovered, toes curled over the lip, Timmy would shout directions, playing on our kayak commands: “Small left, gun sites on me. Now charge!” And then we’d leap into the air, plunging toward the pool.
Afterward, Lonnie and I sat in the back of the cave behind the waterfall. I tapped the rock ceiling right above my head and said, “It’s kind of claustrophobic in here. Anything like the inside of a submarine?”
“Sure is,” he agreed. “I was stationed on those attack subs for five years of my military career. Talk about confined spaces—on one of those deployments, the sub was diving, and I was cleaning the frame bay; that’s like the ribs of the sub, underneath the main sump. Well, I screwed up and stayed in there too long. Don’t know how I missed that dive alarm. Problem is that submarines compress with the water pressure. In other words, as the sub descends, the chamber gets smaller, and I mean mighty small. I was in a bad place, between one of those metal ribs and the sump, about to turn into Flatbread Lonnie. So I rolled on my back and got in a spot with just enough room where I wasn’t going to get squashed. I was stuck there, lying on my back.”
“How long?” I dared to ask.
“Quite some time,” he said, laughing at the recollection. “I suspect, fifteen or sixteen hours.”
I shuddered, thinking that being flipped upside down in a kayak was nothing compared to being practically compressed to death in a submarine. “Some of the guys brought me some blankets,” he said, “and reached in to hand me a pee bottle and some food. I told them that pancakes would fit the occasion.” He guffawed again. “I just had to wait long enough for us to surface again and for the hull space to expand.”
“How’d you get through it?” I asked. “Did you meditate or something?”
“Every now and then, one of the crew would holler down at me to see that I was okay, but other than that, I didn’t meditate; I didn’t count sheep. I just lay there sort of daydreaming. It was great training how to stay calm in tight spaces and not panic—like, upside down and out of air in a big ole keeper hole!” He cackled.
The story was vintage Lonnie. While most people would have been so rattled, they would have found their sanity slipping away, Lonnie was eating pancakes and cracking jokes with the crew. I didn’t think that mind-set was anything he had learned. I suspected, when it came right down to it, he was just hardwired that way. He was a blind man who worked as a roofer, drove a mower, and ran a chain saw. Earlier on the trip, he’d told me more details about the day he got shot in the face. While his friend ran for help, Lonnie lay on the ground totally blind. He could feel blood running down his throat and beginning to clot there and knew that he might very well pass out due to the blood loss. If he did, that blood would coagulate in his throat and choke him. So he’d clawed around, eventually finding a tree limb lying in the dirt. He snapped a branch off and shoved it down his throat, the only way to clear his airway. Turns out, he lay there for hours and did wind up passing out. His clear presence of mind had saved his life. Whether being squeezed in the hull of a submarine or being blinded by shotgun pellets, Lonnie just took action and did what needed to be done, and that ability had made him ideally suited for kayaking. In fact, Lonnie’s new trick was to go ahead of his guides through some of the more moderate rapids, without commands. He called it “blind freestyle.”
I, on the other hand, was more methodical, pensive, and cautious. It took me six years to achieve what Lonnie had done in two. His guiding technique reflected that attitude; it was less precise than my system, but it achieved at a high level by charging straight ahead into the meat, reacting instinctively to the chaos that confronted him, flipping multiple times, and inevitably rolling up again at the bottom with a big “Yee-haw!”
I had to admit, I was a little jealous. Like it or not, I just didn’t have Lonnie “the LonDart” boldness inside me. However, I still wanted to understand the nature of fear, how to stop it from paralyzing me, turning my belly sour with its chemical by-product, weighing me down, like struggling through an atmosphere with a massive gravity.
I often thought about all I had to lose by making a dumb or reckless mistake. I loved my family, my life; I loved growing the No Barriers movement; I loved waking up, stepping outside my front door, and feeling the cool fresh Colorado morning air combined with that touch of warm sun as it climbed higher in the sky. The thought of leaving it all behind continually consumed me. Most importantly, I remembered that day five years ago at the take-out on the Gates of Lodore when I had turned Arjun’s small face toward mine and promised him that we would always be there for him. I couldn’t break that promise.
That afternoon, we laid over at Dune Camp, around mile 120, a tiny spit of sand so sun scorched you had to wear booties so you didn’t burn your feet. The arrival of the new radios had brought such promise, but now, to my intense frustration, they were also beginning to degrade. Harlan’s voice was scratchy and distant—just like the previous sets. Skyler and Steven tinkered with them, trying out different headsets with different manpacks, but they were stumped. Sky was starting to call the radio situation his nemesis. The wind was picking up as Timmy dragged out the instruments, and as he started thumping on the bongos, it hit for real: hot, powerful gusts that kicked up sand.
“Boys, I don’t think there’s going to be any music tonight,” Harlan said, “unless someone brought wind chimes. It’s time to lash stuff down, put your dry bags in your tents, and dive in. It’s about to blow.”
We all scrambled to grab gear that was laid out to dry on boats, hanging over tamarisk branches, and strewn over rocks. Within minutes, everyone was in their tents, zipping up doors and windows and settling in for a hot wind scouring. Without ventilation, the tent was an oven. The wind howled so hard down the canyon that the tent kept lifting up and tugging at the stakes holding it down. I had endured plenty of hours in the mountains, waiting out bad weather, yet never had the storm been inside my tent; somehow, the sand had found its way inside, swirling around in mini-cyclones. I felt grit peppering me all night long, getting into my eyes, ears, and nostrils. I finally put a T-shirt over my face, but it didn’t seem to help much. I could feel sand in my teeth and in my throat. I lay there most of the night, sweating on top of my sleeping bag and listening to the tent rattling and the wind roaring and whining outside.
When I awoke the next morning and crawled outside, Timmy and Harlan started chuckling. “You might want to douse yourself off in the river,” Harlan said. “You’re looking a little crusty.”
“More like the Abominable Sandman,” Timmy added.
I ran my hand over my face and arms. I was caked with sand from head to toe, and my hair felt stiff like straw.
“Hey!” said Harlan, now animated. “I have an idea I want to test.” Apparently he was still looking at me, because he chuckled one more time before he walked over, grabbed the radios that were lying on a tarp, and brought them over to the giant ceramic water filter. He filtered a couple of gallons of river water and filled a big bucket. “This water is super clear now,” he pronounced as he submerged one of the radio sets and let it soak for several seconds.
Rob peered into the bucket and remarked, “That’s amazing,” and he described the clean filtered water turning to the color of café au lait. “The comm systems are waterproof,” Rob said, “but looks like silt and sand have been completely clogging the membranes and getting into the microphones too.” Rob high-fived Harlan and said, “Nice job, Harlan. You should be an engineer.”
After thoroughly soaking and drying all the other systems, the sound quality on the radios seemed to bounce back. They weren’t as good as new, but they were good enough to get me through. For extra protection, Skyler took little latex finger cots from the medical kit, covered the foam microphones, and sealed around the edges with tiny, tightly coiled rubber bands.
At breakfast, I chuckled when I heard Steven’s voice yelling, “Raker, where’s your rock?” And I knew Rob must have been caught reaching for some sausage.
“I think it’s in my tent,” Rob stammered.
Steven sprinted ten feet across the sand and found a rock pile. He swiped one up and replied, “Well, here’s another one. Don’t lose it. Oh, and I’ll take that sausage patty there,” and he snatched it off Rob’s plate.
The next few days were spectacular as we dropped down into the deepest and oldest part of the canyon. As I ran my hands over the ancient schist layer, almost two billion years old, jutting straight up from the river, Harlan said, “Welcome to the basement of the Grand Canyon.” Some of the schist was smooth as marble through weathering and erosion; other sections were fluted and corrugated, and still others were scalloped and rippled from many millennia of being scoured by waves. We also entered Granite Narrows, the tightest section of the canyon at just seventy-five feet across. The walls rose here a mile above us.
Still in the narrows, we passed a feature called Helicopter Eddy. It was a super turbulent, violently recirculating eddy formed by a cutout in the rock wall river left. Harlan said emphatically that we wanted to avoid it. It had a toilet bowl effect and could shove you up against the canyon wall and pin you there, and if you were able to dislodge yourself from the wall, the eddy fence was huge and roiling, making it extremely difficult to get back into the river. However, just above it, Lonnie’s guide, Chris, got slammed in the face by a wave that dislodged his contact lenses and rendered him temporarily blind. In that split second, Lonnie unintentionally paddled over the eddy fence and found himself spinning and smacking into the wall. I could hear his guides yelling from below, unable to help. It was impossible to paddle upriver. But Lonnie yelled back, “I’m good!” as he bounced off the wall and he braced hard, surfing the eddy fence for a moment. Then, luckily, the eddy spit him out the bottom, and he shot out upright, hooting and laughing.
“That was pure frickin’ joy,” he said. “More fun than a tornado in a trailer park! The most fun I’ve had since I went blind.”
I just shook my head.
Just before reaching camp, we pulled into a little side creek that drained out of Matkatamiba Canyon, one of the highlights of the entire journey. We pulled our kayaks up onto a small gravel beach and took a hike that entered a narrowing and twisting slot canyon. Soon the limestone walls were so close I could spread my arms and easily touch both sides. Lonnie and I scrambled together up the smooth, tight groove, which shrunk even more. In places, the bottom was barely a shoe’s width wide, and we had to climb above the tiny stream. To make it easier, I showed Lonnie a climbing technique called “stemming,” in which you spread both legs wide and press your feet against the rocks. The oppositional force keeps you from sliding down. Lonnie caught on to stemming quickly, and we moved upward, splaying our hands and feet. Soon, we arrived at a massive amphitheater that flattened out into a natural rock patio. The entire place was a blind man’s dream, with curves, grooves, and striations to touch and acoustics that seemed perfectly suited to Tarzan yells. The walls were also excellent for bouldering, with distinct extruding holds, deep indentations, and tiny shelves. Rob and I showed Lonnie some bouldering techniques, and I climbed twenty feet up the sidewall, coaxing Lonnie upward behind me. As we ascended, I loudly slapped the good handholds and coached him how to place his toes in the pockets and to stand up, trusting his feet and balance. Getting back down was even more challenging, and I climbed below him, guiding his feet into the right positions. Lonnie said that, with his girls out of the house, he wanted to try all kinds of adventure sports, from ice climbing to tandem mountain biking, but especially rock climbing. I promised him that when we were back home, I’d have him out to Colorado to cut his teeth in the big mountains.
Back on the ground, I said, “I hope this is just the start of many adventures together,” and I squeezed his callused hand.
“Thank you, brother,” he replied. “I can’t tell you what an honor it is to be here with you. It means the world to me!”
That night at Matkat Hotel Camp, most of the team had gone to bed early, but Lonnie, Timmy, Harlan, and I stayed up late trading stories.
“Upset’s got me pretty nervous,” I said. “I think we hit it tomorrow.” Upset was one of the top-five rapids with many adversity stories to its name. I’d been fretting over it for the last few days.
“On one of my trips down here,” Timmy said, “I went through Upset and got the bright idea of trying to punch the big center hole. I was instantly flipped and subbed.”
“Subbed” was kayaker talk for being sucked way down and usually held there.
“I felt my boat being pulled down,” Timmy went on, “and I was getting pummeled. It seemed like an eternity, but it was probably just ten seconds or so. Then I bobbed to the surface, but before I could roll up, I sensed my boat going down deep again for another beating. I thought seriously about pulling my skirt and swimming, but then I remembered all those drives through the Eisenhower Tunnel. Remember those, E? I kept saying to myself, ‘Eisenhower Tunnel … Eisenhower Tunnel … Eisenhower Tunnel.’ And just when I thought I couldn’t hold on a second longer, it released me. I emerged on the other side and rolled up. I was probably under there for twenty-five seconds.”
“I know that hole intimately,” Lonnie said excitedly. “On my first trip here with Team River Runner, my guide said, ‘Lonnie, whatever you do, don’t get squirrely and drop into the big hole in the center.’ So what do I do? Get squirrely and drop right into the big hole center. Took my first swim right there in Upset. Boys, I was plenty upset in Upset!” We all laughed at his joke, corny or not. “But tomorrow’s a new day!” he exclaimed. “And you know what I like to say: ‘Don’t bleed before you’re cut.’”
“I don’t know how you do it,” I said to Lonnie. “I guess the fear is still there for me. The consequences feel so real, and I haven’t figured out how to block it out. I wake up in the morning, and there it is.”
“That fear and anxiety only gets in the way,” Harlan said, “clouding your movements and reactions. Then, the next thing you know, you’re surrounded by massive chaos, and it overwhelms you. Instead, I think of it as surrendering everything to the river and channeling your energy into perfect focus, just reacting and becoming a part of what the water is doing.”
I thought about how to achieve that state. For some people, I thought, it just came naturally. For others, it wasn’t so easy. Then Timmy got up to help Lonnie find his tent, and it was just Harlan and me.
“In those first years I guided down here,” Harlan said quietly, “after everybody would go to sleep, I would sit on the back of my boat and watch the river cruising by in the moonlight. I know this must sound crazy, but I’d watch the current, and I’d feel an almost uncontrollable impulse to dive in, to disappear, and to see where it took me. After that experience, it was like I’d formed a relationship with the river. Every trip I’ve paddled since, the last thing I do is to put my hand in the water, and I get that same yearning, the feeling of the current moving through my fingers, moving downstream. It’s like a little conversation. I say, ‘I’ll come back someday, but for now, I’ve got some more life to live.’ This is the place where I’ll return someday, and that feels okay, like the river will take care of me.”
As I retreated to my tent, I was conflicted. I kept mulling over what Harlan had said, and I couldn’t figure out whether the river was an ominous demon or whether it was an entity I could trust, one that was inviting me forward. When did you fight the river with everything you had, and when could you trust it and ride the flow? It seemed like a paradox.
With no answers coming, I tried to relax with some music on my iPhone. On my playlist, I was happy to hear Mandy Harvey singing for me. It was her latest, with the same lilting, soothing feel of her previous work. I’d forgotten I’d downloaded it. As a result of her experience at the No Barriers Summit, Mandy had taken another courageous step and had begun writing original songs. The outcome was “Try,” and I listened to the words:
I don’t feel the way I used to
the sky is gray much more than it is blue
but I know one day I’ll get through
and I’ll take my place again
If I would try
If I would try
I don’t love the way I need to
you need more and I know
that much is true
so I’ll fight for our break through
and I’ll breathe in you again
So I will try
So I will try
There is no one for me to blame
’cause I know the only thing in my way
Is me … so I will try, so I will try …
As I listened to her high, angelic voice, I was astounded. It was impressive enough to sing standards and jazz classics you’d heard in a past life with working ears, but it was another world entirely to compose and perform music as a deaf musician. The irony was that they were songs she would never actually hear. It seemed preposterous, like a boat that purposely gives up its mooring, floating on an ocean with no rudder or anchor or any tools to navigate, yet it still expects to sail toward its destination. That bold act moved beyond logic, into the realm of faith, like giving in to the unknowable, like kayaking a river you would never see, or like plucking up a child, one speck of sand from an endless beach. No matter how hard you tried, you could never truly see the canyon unfolding before you or the impact you made within it. The journey was incomprehensible.
And Harlan had known this too. “We are all in the hands of the river,” he had said. Sitting high up at Nankoweap in the first week of the expedition, Harlan had admitted that, although the goal was to ride the energy of the river, it could only be done for a moment. He was right. It was all temporary. The river, I knew, would take us all back in the end. Perhaps, his confrontation with death and rebirth had enabled him to come to terms with this inevitability, or like Mandy, to give in to the unknowable. That acceptance had made the river go from something perilous to a guiding force, and in the process, it had washed away his fears.
When we reached Upset the next day, Harlan had everyone land and hop out to scout. Upset was already significant, but at this water level, thirteen thousand cfs, he said it got even trickier and more dangerous. He pulled me aside and spoke in a clear, measured voice. “Okay, it’s pretty spicy, but there’s a perfect line to snake it cleanly, although it’ll feel counterintuitive. The setup is everything. You enter left, and you keep pushing left into these lateral waves. They’re actually crashing off of the left cliff wall. Your brain is telling you don’t go over there, but you have to go left. That big hole Lonnie and Timmy were talking about is to your right, and it is violent; it’s a place you don’t want to be. You want to hit the lateral perfectly on the left, catch the current, and sneak by the big hole on your right. Bam. Done. You got this, E!”
I nodded, but in reality I just kept thinking about that “violent” hole that had subbed Timmy and where Lonnie had swum, the place where you didn’t want to be.
We got back in our boats. The safety guides paddled into position, and mercifully, as Harlan said, “Check, check,” the radios were working. “E, don’t let your mind get in the way here,” I heard Harlan’s soothing voice. “Your mind can be the barrier between you and the river, between thinking it and just feeling it and being there with it. If your mind gets in the way, then you’re defeating the purpose of what this experience is about.”
I let his words wash over me, nodding, slowing my breathing, pushing the fear to the outside edges of my awareness.
“I want you to try something,” he went on. “Forget that I’m here, that I’m giving you commands to follow. Think of my voice as a line of communication to the water, as a conduit to the river. Allow yourself to feel the intricacies of the rapid. Envision the tongue, like a runway, as we drop in. Imagine the waves, the canyon light glimmering off them, foam and spray igniting in flashes of color and light. Feel the power of the big, green, beautiful waves. Try to truly be here, not fighting against it, not surviving it, but connected to this place. I’ll be right behind you to share everything that we’re doing.”
“Okay,” I said, listening hard to the deep rumble below and trying to feel the surface of the water through the bottom of my boat. I sat up, exhaled, and tried to pull some of the river’s energy into my lungs. Then we were paddling toward Upset.
“Be clear, calm, in the moment,” he said.
I focused on each paddle stroke, each riffle of the water, and the space between each breath. Time seemed to slow down just a bit as I dropped in, turning left and left and left against the massive waves surging off the canyon wall and collapsing over me. I busted through the cold wall of water and heard Harlan yell, “Hold that line!” I felt myself riding on a narrow seam, just between a swirling upheaval to my left, like bombs exploding on a battlefield, and the bottomless hole churning to my right, like a guttural roar coming up from the depths of the river. I rode the chaos, water, spray, and air all merging together, and it didn’t feel as threatening, because I felt like I was a part of it. There was no kayaker, no boat, no paddle, just pure awareness, reacting without conscious thought. Then everything grew calm around me, and I knew the river had allowed me to pass through. I felt gratitude and joy flooding through my body, like current through the canyon.
Then Rob and Harlan paddled over and flanked me, both leaning in, the three of us hugging tightly. No one said a word for a long time. Then Harlan laughed, but not like hearing the punch line of a joke. Instead, it seemed to come from a long way away and carry with it the resonance of deep emotion. “E, I have to admit, most of the time, you and me look like a junk show out there. We’re slingshotting by each other; one of us is often backward or sideways, but today, we were in perfect sync. Today, we found the flow!”
That evening at Tuckup Camp, the blazing sun finally passed behind the canyon rim, and the air grew soft and still. I sat on the sand, alone, at the river’s edge, reflecting on my experience at Upset. It felt like six years of kayaking culminating in one brief but perfect moment, and I wanted to remember, to bask in it for a little longer. Harlan had said the river was too big to fight against. My ongoing dreams had been of the river swallowing me, pulling me down into darkness, into nothingness. Climbing mountains hadn’t really prepared me either, I thought. Climbing was more about bringing yourself forth, asserting your will over an extreme, inhospitable environment. Yet trying to apply that learning to rivers had failed. Perhaps, the secrets of a river were not revealed by trying to exert the ego over it, but rather by letting go and allowing the river to consume you, all the way down to the core, by simply giving in to the unknowable and writing music you would never hear. By surrendering, it allowed the river to erode everything and wash away the crust, until there was nothing left but that inner light, the same one I had felt many years ago within Terry Fox. Unencumbered, that light was free to flow out and fuse with the landscape, with the energy of the unstoppable river. Maybe this was as close as we could ever get to understanding, just a brief mortal flash of that light connecting with something bigger, something mysterious and infinite.