Lonnie took a deep breath and then said, “My best friend shot me in the face with a twelve gauge. We were turkey hunting in thick bushes, and something moved above me. My friend just whirled around and shot me from nine paces away. I still have lead shot pellets in my face that you can feel under my skin.”

Lonnie took my hand, and he had me feel a bead just under his eye that I could make roll around under his skin.

“Now, I’m not saying I don’t have bad days,” he went on, “but I practice what I used to preach to my daughters when I tucked them in at night. ‘When you wake up in the morning,’ I’d say, ‘when your feet hit the floor, if you decide right then it’s going to be a good day, 99 percent of the time, it will be.’

“And on the rare occasion sometimes when there might be something come up to change that, I would take them back to their bedroom and ask, ‘Which side of the bed did you get out on?’ I’d make them tell me, and I’d say, ‘Now get back in bed and get out again on the other side.’ It’d always make them laugh. That’s the mind-set I try to live by.”

Pre-Lonnie, I had been the only blind kayaker, and being first had fed my sense of importance, my pride and ego; but now, I had to admit, there was another feeling washing over me, and it felt good. Of course, it was fun to compare our different approaches as well as the experiences that united us, but there was something even deeper going on. I’d read about an old tortoise who lived on the Galapagos Islands in a pen all by himself. He was the last of his species. Appropriately, they’d named him Lonesome George. As empathetic as Rob and my other guides were, they could never totally relate to what it was like to kayak blind, to the shock of being knocked over by a wave that you had no clue was coming, no time even to take a breath, or the uncertainty of rolling up again and not knowing what direction you were facing, and whether you were about to be clobbered again. And when it came right down to it, there was just one blind guy, alone and scared, pinned upside down against a rock, being washing-machined in a hole fighting for a breath.

During all my training, I had an inkling how that tortoise may have felt. But now, I had a partner to share experiences with, to flail and bleed with. It was comforting and made me feel a little bolder—like what we were trying to do wasn’t so insane after all.