I was always second-guessing his commands, and it began throwing off my rhythm and filling me with anxiety. We also noticed the voice activation had a half-second delay from the time Rob said something to the time it was received in my ear. Half a second seems minuscule, but in a rapid, when the timing of Rob’s directions was everything, it felt like an eternity. A few times I was late on a call and found myself bouncing over a submerged rock and flipping in the circulating hole beneath it. My roll was still shaky, and I was still getting panicky underwater. I really wanted to take Rob’s advice to keep trying two, three, even four times before I pulled the skirt. But when I was under, I’d try once, maybe twice, and then pull it. I was finding it almost impossible to break my brain’s fight-or-flight mechanism, built up over thousands of years of human evolution. Instinct took over, and I was no longer consciously making decisions.

The one rapid we were concerned about was called Joe Hutch Canyon Rapid, which came at mile fifty-five. When we arrived a couple of hundred yards above it, we pulled over river right and went ashore to scout. With the river running this high, it was the loudest white water I’d ever stood next to, and Rob and I had to yell pretty loud to hear each other over the roar. Rob grabbed my hand and pointed my finger at the river. “Definitely big water. Gotta be Class IV. There’s a strainer river right, a big hole river center, and a huge wave train river left. We’ll want to enter the center tongue, then make a hard right as soon as we pass the big hole to miss the giant wave train. After the wave train there’s a large rock wall river left we’ll want to stay well clear of…”

My ears heard the words, but my brain was shutting off. All of a sudden, this didn’t seem like a very good idea. I imagined flipping and getting slammed into the rock wall at the bottom.

I half mumbled to Rob that I might want to skip this one, that this was a family trip, and Ellie probably wouldn’t want me to try it, but Rob was already off discussing the safety plan with the raft guides.

A little while later, a hollow pit lodged in my stomach as we floated down toward the overwhelming noise. “Are you ready for this, Big E?” Rob asked over the radio.

“I guess so,” I replied, fighting down nausea.

“Okay,” his voice crackled, “here we go.”