At the bottom of each rapid, we’d pull over in our rafts and she’d describe her brother still upriver, in the middle of the rapid, playing on the biggest, steepest waves. I learned it was called surfing. Like ocean waves that roll toward shore, river waves move as well, but some, called “standing waves,” recirculate over and over, building up and then collapsing on themselves. A few of the standing waves were giant curlers that were glassy and smooth. Harlan would ride them like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco and use their energy to execute superhuman maneuvers like cartwheels and flips. Even from a long way away and in the midst of the roar of the river, I could hear Harlan whooping with joy as he rode these giant liquid beasts. His kayak was an extension of his body, working with him in perfect sync.

That evening, Harlan gave me a tour of his kayak. The smooth plastic felt like Tupperware, but it was banged up in a few places where he had hit obstacles. It had a blunt point in front and sharp edges on the sides for dipping in and catching waves. I felt the inside seat and the knee braces he used to steer and the neoprene skirt that he stretched over the opening of the cockpit to stop the water from pouring in when he was upside down. Finally, I felt his paddle, with its straight shaft and wide scooping paddle blades, all impossibly light and constructed from carbon fiber.

“Try it out if you want,” he said. We were beached on the edge of a huge calm eddy, which I’d recently learned was a section on the side of a river that recirculated upstream. Sometimes they were flat and calm like this one.

I squeezed into the cockpit. It felt cramped and claustrophobic. Harlan pushed me out into waist-deep water. I tried to paddle, but the kayak was so squirrelly it kept going back and forth, left and right, like an overly sensitive steering wheel. I leaned over to take a next paddle and immediately tipped over, slapping face-first into the cold water. I didn’t have Harlan’s spray skirt around me and immediately came out of the boat and was swimming. Harlan was right there to grab me and yank me to shore, along with his kayak, now upside down and filled with fifty gallons of water. I shivered.

“It takes a little to get used to,” he said gently.

The next morning, Harlan approached me with a question. “We have these inflatable rubber kayaks on the trip. They’re called ‘duckies.’ They’re way more forgiving than a hard-shell kayak. They’re pretty stable in a rapid. Normally, we let folks paddle them through some of the easy stuff, but I don’t have enough experience with blindness to know. Should we let the blind kids paddle them?”