I could feel the energy under the Colorado sky as I began to speak: “It was while climbing a desert tower years ago with Mark Wellman and Hugh Herr,” I started, “that I first asked myself, is there something that unites our experience? Whether you’re blind, missing legs, or unable to walk—like the three of us—or whether you’re a veteran who comes home feeling alienated and depressed, or a parent struggling to lead her family, or a kid whose barrier is that he’s never been more than a mile from his house, or a teen in the suburbs who has no idea how to impact her world, or someone trying to grow a new idea into something magnificent. What is the glue that binds all of us together, every human who lives and breathes? Are there tools, ideas … is there a mind-set, a light inside that we can all access—to equip us for that journey?

“The answer has led us all here, to this movement that we are building. And what is the fundamental message of this movement? I wish it were as simple as a motivational slogan like, ‘If you believe it, you can achieve it,’ but life is not a storybook, and its lessons can seem shifting and contradictory. Our paths can lead us toward suffering, yet sometimes, toward the beginnings of change.”

The wind picked up and blew down from the mountain slopes and through the village. I could hear the No Barriers flags, hung from the stage, fluttering in the breeze.

“When I first started paddling into whitewater rapids, they appeared to me as utter chaos, but I found that if you pay close attention, and listen very carefully, you can discover a hidden map. Kayakers call this the line. It’s hard to read and decipher. It’s even harder to navigate. But if you manage to follow it, or even to get close, you can find a way through. That map, that line, that discovery, is what we call ‘No Barriers.’”

GLOSSARY

anaerobic    when the body doesn’t have enough oxygen

basalt    dense metamorphic rock dark gray to black in color

bioluminescence    the light made by some deep-sea creatures

bow    the forward part of a boat

bulkhead    a wall that creates a storage area in a kayak

canyon    a deep and narrow valley with steep sides and often with a body of water running through it

cascade    falling, rushing water

cfs    cubic feet per second, a unit used to measure the flow of water

chasm    a deep opening in the surface of the earth

cleft    an opening

cockpit    the part of a kayak where someone sits

conquistadors    Spanish soldiers out to conquer lands and people

contrail    streaks created in the sky by airplanes or rockets

deforestation    the process of forests being cut down

ducky    an inflatable kayak

eddy    a current of water running differently—often circular—from the main current of water

erode    to wear away by water