On our last night, we sat around the campfire, eating long silvery fish caught with spearguns made by the locals. Harlan seemed quiet and peaceful most of the time, happy to listen to the river stories, laugh at the jokes, and strum the guitar he’d picked up in a local market. But besides the recounting of his speed run, I realized, after our first Grand Canyon trip and a week of him guiding me, I still knew practically nothing about his life. That night, after the others had gone to bed, we stayed up talking, and I peppered him with questions.

Harlan described growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona, before it became a yuppie tourist destination, full of coffee shops and yoga studios. His father, Guerin Taney, had made a living as a blacksmith, but his true passion was working with metal, fashioning pieces like a deer’s head out of an old car bumper or an abstract design made with coat hangers and fire pokers, all fused and twisted together. “He was very talented,” Harlan said, “but it always remained a hobby. He didn’t have the business savvy to show his work or sell anything.”

Harlan’s family didn’t own much. Their prized possessions were three old beater vehicles: a pickup truck, a Volkswagen Bug, and an old school bus. “Except,” Harlan said, “we only had one engine between all of them. It actually hung from chains in our living room.” His dad would switch the engine from one to the other, depending on the activities: in the truck if he was going to shoe horses or do some forging, in the Bug for a trip out to Lake Powell, or in the bus if they were heading up into the San Francisco Peaks. They’d spend a lot of weekends up in the mountains picking mushrooms, watching the aspens turn to gold, and shooting an old black powder rifle. Harlan said, back then, all the mountain roads were dirt, and there was not a soul around for miles.

When Harlan was nine, his mom took him out of fourth grade for eighteen days on his first rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. “It was as poorly organized as a trip could be,” Harlan said, but out of his 160 subsequent trips, it was still his most vivid. He said, “It was like my eyes were opened.”

On our last day of the Usu, Harlan guided me through the biggest rapid, San José. As we rode the shifting, bucking line through the minefield of boils and whirlpools, Harlan’s voice had a calming effect. Through his commands, both his competence and confidence were loud and clear, but it was never bravado. Instead, it felt like a deeply learned appreciation of the river, a Zen-like acceptance. When we reached our take-out in Boca del Cerro, I’d paddled every mile.