FLYING BLIND
The climber atop Aconcagua mountain in Argentina.
One day in January 2012, a few days into a two-week kayaking trip down the jungle-flanked Usumacinta River in southeastern Mexico, Erik Weihenmayer, a relative novice to the sport and a blind man, found himself in a bad spot. The kayak for that stretch of the rapids, a rubber model known as a “ducky,” had just been sucked into a vicious whirlpool, tacoing the vessel. Hanging desperately off the side, feeling his shoes being pulled off by the vortex, Weihenmayer thought, I might die here. But he was fortunate that day; he and the ducky survived, relatively unscathed. It was another close call in a life full of them.
People say that seeing is believing, but for Weihenmayer it is something
