On my future trips to the kayak center, my heavy anxiety about flipping began to lift. I noticed my energy level rising and my focus sharpening. In the middle of the action, I felt my awareness expanding. I started to hear the rapids and comprehend their shapes, to lean in against the waves that tried to shove me back, to anticipate the jarring currents and fight against them. I was rarely flipping these days, but once I came into M-Wave a little crooked, flipped, and was upside down in the heart of the two crashing waves. As my helmet slammed the concrete bottom, I almost reached for the tab on my spray skirt, but I could feel time slowing down. Hang on, I told myself. Hold on a few seconds longer. I lifted my paddle toward the roiling surface and popped up, riding and dropping through the energy beneath my boat.

Casey began teaching me skills like “boof.” In Shut Down, Casey would yell “Boof!” and I’d reach my paddle over the trough, grab the backside of the wave, and launch myself up and over. He taught me to charge upstream into a crashing wave, and by leaning just right, surf it left and then back right.

I hated the fact that I wasn’t able to hear Casey’s commands in the rapids, so we again started experimenting with different radio systems, different headsets, different microphones. I also began to perfect my ferries, an essential river skill, in which I charged out of the eddy, broke through the eddy line, and—at precisely the right upriver angle—used the current to surge across the channel. It was a science to lean in the right direction while the forces of the river grabbed your boat and tried to flip you. At the end of a long day, we busted through Biscuits and Gravy into the bottom pool. Casey gave me a high five.

“You’re crushing it,” he said, “but you know what the coolest part is? You’ve got a smile on your face.”

19

During our last trip to the Whitewater Center, Rob talked me into going down the Grand Canyon—just on a scouting mission, to check it out. “Grand Canyon rapids are orders of magnitude bigger than anything you’ve experienced so far,” he said. “You could probably just go and do it, but that’s a very big leap.

“So why not go down the canyon and kayak a few of the biggies? Then you’ll have more confidence and you’ll know whether this is realistic or not,” he continued. “It’ll still be a leap, but it’s the most incremental leap you can take to move to the next level.”