I shuddered, thinking that being flipped upside down in a kayak was nothing compared to being practically compressed to death in a submarine. “Some of the guys brought me some blankets,” he said, “and reached in to hand me a pee bottle and some food. I told them that pancakes would fit the occasion.” He guffawed again. “I just had to wait long enough for us to surface again and for the hull space to expand.”

“How’d you get through it?” I asked. “Did you meditate or something?”

“Every now and then, one of the crew would holler down at me to see that I was okay, but other than that, I didn’t meditate; I didn’t count sheep. I just lay there sort of daydreaming. It was great training on how to stay calm in tight spaces and not panic—like, upside down and out of air in a big ole keeper hole!” He cackled.

The story was vintage Lonnie. While most people would have been so rattled they would have found their sanity slipping away, Lonnie was eating pancakes and cracking jokes with the crew. I didn’t think that mind-set was anything he had learned. I suspected, when it came right down to it, he was just hardwired that way. He was a blind man who worked as a roofer, drove a mower, and ran a chain saw. Earlier on the trip, he’d told me more details about the day he got shot in the face. While his friend ran for help, Lonnie lay on the ground totally blind. He could feel blood running down his throat and beginning to clot there and knew that he might very well pass out due to the blood loss. If he did, that blood would coagulate in his throat and choke him. So he’d clawed around, eventually finding a tree limb lying in the dirt. He snapped a branch off and shoved it down his throat, the only way to clear his airway. Turns out, he lay there for hours and did wind up passing out. His clear presence of mind had saved his life. Whether being squeezed in the hull of a submarine or being blinded by shotgun pellets, Lonnie just took action and did what needed to be done, and that ability had made him ideally suited for kayaking. In fact, Lonnie’s new trick was to go ahead of his guides through some of the more moderate rapids, without commands. He called it “blind freestyle.”

I had to admit, I was a little jealous. Like it or not, I just didn’t have “the LonDart” boldness inside me. However, I still wanted to understand the nature of fear, how to stop it from paralyzing me, turning my belly sour, and weighing me down, like struggling through an atmosphere with massive gravity.