Not being a water person, I didn’t have an answer, but I was even more impressed by Harlan. Instead of making a snap judgment one way or the other, he was using this first trip as a laboratory. “Why don’t I be the guinea pig?” I said.

I followed his footsteps over to the shore and got a tour of a ducky. It was the same soft, rugged material as a raft and much longer and wider than Harlan’s kayak. If his hard-shell was a finely tuned sports car, then this was a tank. We pushed off with Harlan in the water in front of me. He yelled, “How about I blow a whistle and you follow me?”

I paddled furiously and managed to stay behind him, more or less, through the next small riffle. It was exciting to be in my own boat, even if it was a tank versus a Porsche, and it was thrilling and scary being bounced around by the waves that came from all directions and crashed over my boat.

3

Besides experiencing the exciting white water, each day we’d pull the rafts over and hike up incredible side canyons with pools of water and rushing waterfalls that you could stand under and get a shower. All the blind kids were given adjustable hiking poles, and I showed them how to lengthen and shorten them according to how tall each person was. We showed the sighted teens how to guide their blind partners by ringing a bear bell in front of them and calling out guiding instructions.

One night, Marieke sat us in a circle and told us about the first expedition down the Grand Canyon. “It was led by Major John Wesley Powell. Like some of you, he had a disability, too. He’d lost an arm in the Civil War. His dream of exploring this canyon became an obsession. Some of his special wooden boats bashed into the rocks and sank. Many of their provisions washed down the river, lost. They almost starved to death along the way. Imagine, for Powell and his crew … they had no idea whether their journey would end in triumph, or whether they’d drop off the face of a massive waterfall and plunge to their deaths.”

The next day, we hiked up to an old tunnel dug into the rock. Marieke said the Grand Canyon was almost lost to a giant dam that was planned for construction there, and it would have drowned the canyon. It was pitch black inside the tunnel, the perfect setting to reverse roles. For the next hour, the blind kids led their sighted partners through the winding passage, and the darkness was pierced by the cries of disoriented teenagers who had gone from being guides to being the guided.