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TwitThisSwirling Maelstrom
In time, he learned to channel his rage into sports. He joined a rugby team, established a reputation as a fearless player and eventually was elected captain. He became a medal-winning Paralympic skier, a marathon runner and a triathlete, even an Ironman competitor (he's done seven of them). Stewart discovered that his intensity and tremendous stamina made him a natural for endurance competition.His days of rage long gone, he found peace and purpose in his life. As he explains, "Sports makes me whole."
The trip was still about four months off and Stewart figured he had time to master the needed skills for white-water kayaking. As for the arm, he had a friend who could hook him up. Michael Davidson runs the prosthetics lab at Loma Linda University Medical Center, where Stewart coordinates a sports program for the disabled called PossAbilities. Davidson's team built Stewart a prototype prosthesis, basically a length of plastic pipe laminated with carbon fiber. After watching Stewart practice with it, they crafted a second, shorter carbon-fiber-and-resin limb with an extratight shoulder strap to hold it on in the punishing rapids of the Colorado.
Stewart spent hours practicing in the university pool and in a creek down the road from his house. Over and over, he flipped himself upside down so he could work on his Eskimo roll -- a self-rescue technique in which he uses his paddle and a little hip action to flip himself upright. Finally, figuring he was as ready as he'd ever be, Stewart headed for the Grand Canyon.
Even with all his training, he was barely prepared for the adventure. At the first significant rapids, a middling run of white water called Badger Creek, Stewart was thrown out of his boat. He recalls how demoralized he felt as he swam to shore. Farther downriver at a place called House Rock, he was knocked over four times. He made it through mostly because he'd mastered one good move: the Eskimo roll.
At another set of rapids, Horn Creek, he got sucked into a violent implosion of water that held him in a swirling maelstrom for several terrifying seconds. At the next, Hance, which was full of rocks, Stewart says, "I was upside down, backward -- basically, I was bounced down the river like a rubber ball." He was figuratively, and literally, in over his head.
Stewart decided that to even pretend he knew what he was doing would be pure suicide. From then on, he followed more experienced paddlers through the thundering waters and relied on his Eskimo roll for emergencies. "I can't tell you how many times I was saying, 'Guys, I'm not really good at this.' " The rugged outdoorsmen who had watched Stewart battle his way through figured he was just being modest.
Up until now, even after his injury, Stewart had dominated just about every competition he entered. Here in the canyon, he realized, he might have met his match.
The Colorado can be a brutal adversary. It flows at the rate of anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 cubic feet -- that's as much as 950 tons of water -- every second. It has roughly 100 named, or significant, rapids and a dozen smaller ones, all more than capable of trashing Stewart and his little plastic boat. And then there is the cold. Water temperature seldom gets above the high 40s. Some stretches are so chilly, hikers and boaters are warned not to swim in them at all. The shock of immersion can cause muscle exhaustion and drowning, even a heart attack.
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