Bolts of panic seized me, but I tried to stay focused and keep paddling. I swung my head around to listen and heard the bleat of a distant whistle behind my right shoulder. I cranked my paddle and began to turn, but the rumble of the rapid was subsiding, and I drifted into calm water. Rob paddled up beside me.

“I lost you!” I yelled. “The whistle was bouncing all over, and then it just got washed out by all the river noise,” I said through short breaths.

“Yeah, we got quite separated,” Rob called back. “By the time I turned around, I tried yelling, but you couldn’t hear me because you’d gotten pulled over into an eddy and spun around. Nice job staying upright.”

We floated next to each other, our hulls knocking together.

“Definitely a wake-up call,” Rob went on. “You gave your family and the guides a good show. But ahead we’ve got three pretty straightforward miles of small wave trains, where we can work to improve our system.”

“Yeah,” I said, “let’s not play ‘drown the blind guy’ in front of my whole family.”

6

I was still a little rattled as Rob yelled, “Follow me!”

The wave trains he’d described were continuous gentle rollers, and it was fun bobbing along behind him. I could hear his voice better than the whistle—his voice didn’t seem to reflect off the rock walls as much. The water felt solid beneath me, and I craned forward to interpret the rising, cresting, and falling of the waves. There was almost a discernible pattern to them, but they went by so fast that I was merely reacting to the feel and sounds without comprehension.

That evening at the Kolb campsite, the guides prepared dinner, and my family played and hung out at the river’s edge. Rob and I sat in folding chairs talking about the day. I couldn’t believe how exhausted I felt. I was mentally spent from concentrating and trying to follow directions. My brain actually hurt, and the tension worked through the back of my neck, shoulders, and arms.

We both agreed that our current guiding system needed some tweaking. “It’s really difficult to turn around and look back upstream to see where you are,” Rob said, “and what direction you are facing.”

“Maybe you need a rearview mirror,” I joked.

“Actually, that’s a sound idea, in theory,” said Rob. “They make small rearview mirrors for bike helmets, but it would never really work, as I’m too jumpy to be able to watch carefully. And it’s also really tricky doing the reverse-image calculations.

“Another flaw with our system,” he continued, “is that when I detour around a rock or hole, I can’t just blow the whistle. That will draw you right into the obstacle, precisely what we need to avoid.”