I Spent 20 Days In A Raft With A Silent Stranger. I Never Expected The Twist Ending To Our Trip.

I met Doug on a 20-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, where I was randomly assigned to be the sole passenger in his boat. He was a former raft guide and bona fide waterman, soft-spoken and ruggedly handsome. I was a rafting novice who thought rain gear could stand in for a dry suit, and I’d signed on to the trip on a complete whim.

It sounds like the premise of a hit reality dating show, except that neither of us was cut out for reality television. If the cameras had been rolling, they would have had to add a lot of sound effects in postproduction. Like crickets. Or maybe that “womp womp” sad trombone noise.

I’m an introvert, shy around strangers and not very good at small talk, and Doug is quiet around everyone, so the first day in our shared raft was awkward. He asked me what I did for work, where I went to school and where I grew up, and I repeated the questions back. We talked about our hobbies (mine was climbing, his was surfing) and how we’d ended up on this particular trip. But the conversation didn’t flow, and after a bit of chatting we fell back into silence.

Every once in a while he’d identify a teachable moment to explain some intricacy of rafting: how to spot and catch an eddy, how to choose the best line or how to pick a ferry angle. Mostly we just sat quietly and watched the canyon walls float by.

Over the next few days, the grandeur of one of Earth’s largest holes in the ground gave us plenty to look at, but the long, silent stretches made me nervous. The limits of my social skills became painfully obvious when entire days would pass without me being able to come up with a single interesting conversation topic. Doug’s reticence certainly wasn’t helping. But I felt sure that if anyone else were in