Then I heard silence—utter and complete radio silence. For a moment, I worried something had happened to Rob. My boat started bobbing and rolling in massive entry waves, and I heard Rob’s voice from at least a hundred feet behind me, completely unintelligible, but unmistakably back there somewhere.

As I rode the back of a slippery liquid serpent, I tried to rotate my body and raised my paddle over my head in the sign of distress. “Rob, no radios!” I yelled, and it came out like an animal’s dying scream. “No radios!”

There was nothing to do but try to point into the massive waves that were crashing over my head. I braced and tried to stay upright, lifting skyward and riding down the other sides. Water exploded all around me, and the pulse of the river drew me forward. I wondered if I were about to crash into the canyon wall or be pulled into a hole.

After what felt like a lifetime, but was probably only a minute, I finally heard his call behind me, and I was relieved. The radio was dead, and Rob had figured it out and hurried down to me, now hollering, “Plan B!”

In kayaking, your first plan often doesn’t happen, so Rob always insisted on a plan B. In this instance, it was to shout at the top of his lungs, like the old days.

“Left, hard left! Charge! Charge!” A huge wave pummeled me from the side, and I went over, but I kept it together and popped back up on my second try.

As the waves diminished and the roaring subsided, Rob yelled, “Nice combat roll! You nailed it, Big E!”

I panted hard and collapsed over the front of my boat. Finally, I said, “I’m done with those radios.”

10

I hadn’t been home long and was still thinking about kayaking and how to solve our radio problem when I got a call from Richard Hogle, the head of product development at Wicab, Inc., a company I’d been working with for a few years. They’d loaned me the newest version of their BrainPort device, and Rich wanted to know how my testing was going. Although it wouldn’t help me with my radio search, the BrainPort was a remarkable piece of technology that had far-reaching implications well beyond kayaking. In fact, it seemed more like science fiction than reality. The device, comprised of a digital camera, microprocessor, and tongue display, was allowing me, and other blind people, to “see”—with our tongues. This technology allows me to connect with the world, to be more active, and to achieve the seemingly impossible.