Lonnie was next to me and started talking in an exuberant chatter. “I remember Lava Falls when I had my eyesight, seeing it on Wide World of Sports. This raft went in there, hit the Ledge Hole, and flipped. I’ll never forget the image of that big ole raft vertical, then upside down, all the rigging tearing out, coolers coming out, people flying out, and that rubber boat doing end-over-end flips.”

I tried to picture the Ledge Hole, Lava’s most infamous and awe-inspiring feature, a wide rock pour-over producing a wave twelve feet tall and, on the other side, a massive pileup of white water. It was known as the place on the Grand Canyon where you didn’t want to be. “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” I managed to reply, and then I sank down on a rock.

“When I came through here my last time,” Lonnie jumped back in, “I remember standing right here, where we are now, listening to that roar and feeling the vibration through my feet. You feel that? And I’m thinking, Okay, I’m gonna do this. I dropped in, missed the Ledge Hole on the left, got a little squirrelly on the right, flipped and rolled back up, and I’m digging with my paddle like a boll weevil through a tater patch, but I got flipped again, and my spray skirt imploded. I coulda swore it took my legs off. Ripped me right out of my kayak so violently, they told me my boat went flying in the air doing flips, twenty feet in the air. I finally popped up, paddle still in my hands, and one of my guides came and rescued me.”

By the time Lonnie had finished recounting his run, I felt dizzy and listless. I thought I was going to puke. I tried to fight the nausea with the proactive breathing exercises Timmy had taught me, but I couldn’t seem to breathe it away. I wasn’t sure if it was Lonnie’s story, the temperature that had topped one hundred degrees, the fourteen-mile paddle that morning, the exhaustion of the last two weeks, or all the pressure and buildup to this moment; maybe it was all of it, but I felt my confidence slipping away and the debris pouring in, constricting the current of my mind, strangling the flow. I could feel the weight of it all, like those obstructions lurking deep below Lava yet profoundly affecting what I would experience on the surface.