As we carried our boats down to the river, I had to consciously will my muscles to fire. Climbing mountains was supposed to have prepared me in some way for all kinds of challenges, but I didn’t feel prepared for this. At forty-one, I felt as vulnerable as a child, like I was starting over. My teeth chattered. My hands shook, and I was a little dizzy. My mouth was so dry I could hardly swallow. Rob patted me on the shoulder, assuring me that it was going to be okay.

Pinball Alley was a series of waves between a scattering of exposed rocks you had to zigzag through, with openings only a little wider than the width of a kayak. Despite Rob doing his best to call commands, my kayak would often bounce off one of those rocks, my knuckles scraping and paddle clacking. That would send me careening and ricocheting downriver, desperately bracing to stay upright. In that crazy spin, it was hard to tell which way I was facing, and I’d get totally disoriented. On one run, I slammed into a rock sideways that shook me up and flipped me. I swam out of my boat, and as Rob hauled me to the bank, he shouted, “You blind guys are sure unpredictable! You don’t always go in the direction I’m expecting you to!”

Rob was joking, but the underlying point was accurate. Every run, even down the same rapid, felt totally different. If I entered angled ten degrees too far left, or Rob was a second late on a command, or I slightly overturned, it would begin a cascading chain of circumstances that would make the run go from bad to worse. The river had its own energy that surged and ebbed unpredictably, so sometimes Rob would yell “Small left!” and I’d make what I thought was the turn, without knowing the river was actually pulling me farther right. “Left! Hard left!” Rob would shout with increasing urgency as I swept toward one of the many hazards.

Tombstone was another rapid that made me sweat, especially under all my layers of clothing. It featured a sharp, pointed rock in the middle of the river, with a large hole and a bunch of rocks just to its right. The line through there was narrow, requiring you to squeak to the left of the rocks, drop down into the meat of the rapid, and just before smacking into the Tombstone, make a hard right to whoosh by.