“Ready to do this thing?” Casey asked. It was the exact same question he’d asked before I took my disastrous first run at the Whitewater Center. I pulled out into the channel and headed down. Casey had told me about a hose that shot a plume of cold water into the middle of the channel. “If it hits you, you’ll know you’re lined up right.”

I felt the spray hit the top of my helmet just before I entered the first series of waves. Then I crashed into Sunset, which punched me hard, and I went over but managed to roll up immediately. Next up was M-Wave. Casey said that we needed to hit it on the left and use the force of the rapid to bump us slightly to the right and into the main flow. It was a turbulent storm of white water, and I entered at the wrong angle. The force drove me hard to the left into a crazy swirling eddy. It happened so fast; Casey missed it entirely, shot past, and was gone. I spun around and around, getting disoriented and slamming off the jetty below me. I almost flipped but managed to recover. Having no voice commands, I paddled as hard as I could toward the roar of M-Wave, which I figured was upriver. The eddy fence grabbed my bow, spun me around, and slammed me sideways into the next rapid, aptly named Shut Down, which flipped me with what felt like a violent shove. My helmet cracked hard against the shallow concrete bottom. I was trapped in a hole. I pushed my paddle up near the surface, and the recirculating hole shot me upright, but I was instantly over again. I rolled and flipped several more times in quick succession. On my fourth rotation, I felt my veneer of confidence wash away. I pulled my spray skirt and swam.

That evening, Rob and I sat on the edge of the channel, feeling the sun sink lower in the sky.

“You’re improving a lot,” he said, “but I still sense a hesitation in you. Think about it like skiing. They tell you to lean down the hill, but that seems so counterintuitive, like the last thing you want to do. But skiers know that if you commit and lean down the mountain, your skis will come around into a beautiful turn. Paddling’s the same. If you paddle like you’re expecting to flip all the time, it makes you timid. You’ll feel it in your paddle strokes, in the way you lean, in the way you turn. It’s a funny thing, because the more defensive you are, the worse you’ll paddle and the more you’ll flip. But if you paddle aggressively, you’ll charge through those waves.”

18

The next morning, I walked out of the changing room and knew something was up. Rob and the head kayak instructor were conspiring in the corner.