Since biblical times, it has been said that the eyes are a window to the soul. But听human history is filled with false assumptions.
, which premiered in early November at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival and 听for film, opens with sublime images of a magnificent natural world, where shadows and light sweep across walls rising from a canyon carved by the Colorado River eons ago. The water continues its course, and soon we see a person in a kayak, riding the tumbling rapids. His blank eyes stare outward. Something looks off. His face reacts with slight delays, out of sync with the waves hitting his tiny boat.
鈥淚鈥檝e climbed Mount听Everest, so why am I so fucking scared?鈥 we later hear听听asking himself. Given that he is blind, it strikes me as a fairly easy question to answer.
Emmy Award鈥搘inning director Michael Brown鈥檚 new documentary takes us into Weihenmayer鈥檚 journey as he paddles, in a solo kayak, the 277 miles of the Grand Canyon. Weihenmayer is joined by Lonnie Bedwell, who is also blind, and a crew of river guides and camera operators. Weihenmayer, now 50, didn鈥檛 start kayaking until he was nearly 40. The technical crux looms large in the film鈥攖he boat-flipping rapids of the notorious Lava Falls, a chaotic stretch with holes that can swallow kayaks and drown people.
Life probably would have been easier for Weihenmayer if he were born blind. In a heartbreaking early segment of the film, we learn that young Weihenmayer lost his eyesight slowly, the result of a rare condition called retinoschisis, in which one鈥檚 retinas gradually split apart. His mother, Ellen,听was ferocious in advocating for her son, going into schools and demanding that he be taught alongside the other kids. Weihenmayer has described her as the dustpan that swept him up when he was broken. When he was 13, as the remnants of his eyesight were abandoning him, his听mother was killed in a car accident, leaving him completely shattered. Soon after, he went totally听blind. He describes blindness initially as a prison.听His father, Ed, a former U.S. Marine, still has a crew cut and sits bolt upright, using direct language to describe that time in his son鈥檚 life. Ed even recites an old saying he had drilled into the boy, imploring him to never quit. But Ed鈥檚 voice cracks and his eyes grow damp when he says that he鈥檚 never figured out how, at that age, his son wasn鈥檛 destroyed by losing both his mother and his eyesight.
鈥淚鈥檝e climbed Mt. Everest, so why am I so fucking scared?鈥 we later hear Erik Weihenmayer asking himself. Given that he is blind, it strikes me as a fairly easy question to answer.
In high school,听Weihenmayer discovered rock climbing, a slow and methodical activity where his hands and feet provided him a tactile map of his environment. Soon his internal prison opened into a new world. 鈥淭his is the opposite of what I thought blindness would be like,鈥 he says.听He鈥檚 climbed the Seven Summits, the Nose on Yosemite鈥檚 El Capitan, the 2,300-foot ice route Losar in Nepal, and completed the Leadville 100 bicycle race.听
And still, blindness presents very real obstacles鈥攏o matter our feel-good clich茅 of barriers existing only in the mind.
鈥淚 hate it when people tell me anything is possible,鈥 he says.
We see him at home听with his family, preparing for the Grand Canyon trip. He can鈥檛 seem to sit still. His teenage daughter helps him sort gear. He tries to not bump into things.听He鈥檚 good-natured when told that he put his shirt on inside-out.
On the river he bumps into thunderous rapids as his friend and river guide, Harlan Taney, shouts on-the-fly instructions via wireless headset: 鈥淟eft, hard right, hold that听line, hold that line, charge charge 肠丑补谤驳别!鈥听Between Taney鈥檚 directions and the ambient soundscape, such as reverberations from crashing waves and echoes off the walls, in his mind Weihenmayer develops a complex mapping system of the rapids and their deadly traps.
No wonder he鈥檚 scared.
鈥淚 hate it when people tell me anything is possible,鈥 he says.
Throughout the film it becomes apparent that Weihenmayer shares insecurities familiar to most humans, regardless of his superhero list of accomplishments. His inability to see his objective is inconsequential; rather, what matters is the freedom that comes from finding self-control amid the darkness of the world. Like anyone, he grapples with failure, worry, and ego, and the difficulty of being present at critical times, yet something deeper pushes him forward, as if he is incapable of quitting. He says that he wants to be the bravery that others see in him.
We gain glimpses of an inner world perhaps similar to our own, under circumstances incomprehensibly different. How fascinating that a theater full of people watched breathtaking scenes from the life of a man unable to see any of it himself, and who cannot see us watching him. Although I have always been drawn to the natural world, I couldn鈥檛 help but wonder what this says about the limitations of the sighted, who so often need to venture afar to explore the depth that lies within.听
Erik Weihenmayer鈥檚 eyes serve as a naked and beautiful metaphor for the vast potential of the human experience. And while he is correct about some barriers being real, in The Weight of Water, Brown and Weihenmayer also show us that vision is more powerful than sight.