“I’m going to live here forever and be the Frog King,” said Timmy. As he continued to croak, and his groupies continued to call back in rapture, I began losing track of who was who. For a blind person, this was a symphonic masterpiece of nature, and we all sat back enjoying the show for over an hour.

28

Just before camp that evening, we reached a beautiful side canyon called Elves Chasm that Harlan wanted us to experience. We hiked up a damp, lush creek bed with several small waterfalls created by boulders that choked the channel. Several shelves up, we came to a deep pool with a tall waterfall pouring down. We all took turns swimming over and letting the clear fresh water pour over our heads, washing the sand out of our hair and faces. Behind the waterfall was an actual chasm, cool and damp from the water spray. We scrambled inside, and tucked ten feet back was a climb through a small, body-wide window that popped you into the sun again. From there, we carefully walked out on ledges to stand fifteen feet above the pool. As Lonnie and I hovered, toes curled over the lip, Timmy shouted directions, playing on our kayak commands: “Small left, gun sites on me. Now charge!” And then we’d leap into the air, plunging toward the pool.

Afterward, Lonnie and I sat in the back of the cave behind the waterfall. I tapped the rock ceiling right above my head and said, “It’s kind of claustrophobic in here. Anything like the inside of a submarine?”

“Sure is,” he agreed. “I was stationed on those attack subs for five years of my military career. Talk about confined spaces—on one of those deployments, the sub was diving, and I was cleaning the frame bay; that’s like the ribs of the sub, underneath the main sump. Well, our tactical situation required us to dive quickly. Problem is that submarines compress with the water pressure. In other words, as the sub descends, the chamber gets smaller, and I mean mighty small. I was in a bad place, between one of those metal ribs and the sump, about to turn into Flatbread Lonnie. So I quickly rolled into the frame bay between the ribs, a spot with just enough room where I wasn’t going to get squashed. I was stuck there, lying on my back.”

“How long?” I dared to ask.

“Quite some time,” he said, laughing at the recollection. “I suspect, fifteen or sixteen hours.”