Coerced by her boss and fellow rivers guides, Brenda Smith reluctantly embarks on a rafting trip through a vast Tanzanian game reserve. If she can survive twelve days on the remote jungle rivers, then she must scale Africa’s tallest mountain. After twenty-eight years of a safe and predictable life, Brenda is terrified of what awaits her in these dangerous wildernesses.
She comes face to face with angry hippos, roaring lions and stealthy crocodiles, and struggles with the extremes of unbearable heat and hypothermia.
Despite the harsh external threats she conquers, her greatest challenge is a profound inner journey - a courageous transformation as she uncovers the internal source of her fears and discovers the personal strength to do anything.
Becoming Fearless is an inspirational true story that showcases what is possible when you step out of your comfort zone into the wild.
Coerced by her boss and fellow rivers guides, Brenda Smith reluctantly embarks on a rafting trip through a vast Tanzanian game reserve. If she can survive twelve days on the remote jungle rivers, then she must scale Africa’s tallest mountain. After twenty-eight years of a safe and predictable life, Brenda is terrified of what awaits her in these dangerous wildernesses.
She comes face to face with angry hippos, roaring lions and stealthy crocodiles, and struggles with the extremes of unbearable heat and hypothermia.
Despite the harsh external threats she conquers, her greatest challenge is a profound inner journey - a courageous transformation as she uncovers the internal source of her fears and discovers the personal strength to do anything.
Becoming Fearless is an inspirational true story that showcases what is possible when you step out of your comfort zone into the wild.
I BLAME JIMMY BUFFETT. If I’d never heard the catchy lyrics of his 1977 hit song “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude,” I might never have gone on a rafting trip. And if I’d never gone rafting, I wouldn’t be in Tanzania navigating a river teeming with hippos and crocodiles in an inflatable raft. That song had pierced my soul and excited the playful spirit within me. Jimmy lived in a world where nothing remained the same, and as enticing as that sounded, I never expected I’d have the courage to follow in his footsteps.
Everything about the first 25 years of my life had revolved in a familiar loop of sameness. Same Boston suburbs. Same group of friends. Same ambition to excel in schools and jobs. I’d had no desire to break out of my sensibly molded life. But Jimmy had a different message. His song encouraged us to escape from our routine: go traveling, meet people, and laugh. Buffett had found the key to unlock the good life, and I wanted what he had. It turned out that getting it wasn’t as easy as he promised.
Just three years earlier, I worked as a staff auditor for Arthur Andersen, one of the country’s most prestigious public accounting firms. With the generous salary I earned, I lived comfortably. I could easily afford the stylishly conservative vested business suits required by our dress code. In this job I traveled to corporate client offices spread across New England, where I put in long hours of tedious devil-in-the-details work demanded by our audits. But as a diehard homebody, I especially dreaded the Monday morning rat race to catch planes to out-of-town clients where I’d live out of hotels, sometimes for weeks.
When not reviewing audit work papers in client offices, I worked in an open bullpen on the 26th floor of a financial district skyscraper with a bird’s eye view of Boston. The daily grind of reconciling account balances and documenting variances lacked excitement, but my training had prepared me for auditing’s repetitiveness. I felt in control knowing what to expect.
One day, while poring over work papers with a colleague in the bullpen, we discussed our plans for our summer vacations. As an afterthought, I said, “I wish I had more courage, because someday I’d like to go rafting on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I’d never go by myself, though. If I could ever find a brave soul who would go with me…” As I spoke, it occurred to me that even if I found a fellow traveler, such a rigorous trip would require a boldness I just didn’t have.
My fellow auditors tended not to be outdoorsy sorts, so it astonished me when my colleague replied, “I’ve always wanted to do that trip too.”
“No way! Really?” Out of the blue, in the least likely of places, I’d discovered a daring accomplice. Now I needed to dig deep to find the courage to make a reservation. After a few days of weighing options, we booked a 14-day river trip with an outfitter called OARS, Inc. Jimmy Buffett would have cheered us on.
We both imagined this trip as the greatest adventure of our lifetimes. But the more I read to prepare for the river journey, the more fearful I became of the infamous Lava Falls, mightiest of all rapids on the Colorado. This tumultuous cascade of bank-to-bank thundering, frothing whitewater had the reputation of swallowing rafts whole. Even destroying them.
Months of mounting anxiety about drowning followed, including a few sweat-drenched nightmares that jolted me wide-eyed awake. Three times I picked up the phone to cancel my reservation. But I never actually dialed because backing out on my colleague would have been reprehensible. I tried to console myself with logic. Boatloads of people ran Lava Falls every day during the summer. With the raft’s navigation in the hands of a professionally trained guide, I figured the odds of being a victim had to be extremely low. Still, I had to face it; I was not prepared to die at 25.
ON OUR TENTH DAY, 179.2 miles into our trip, I finally faced my dreaded nemesis. Our raft had floated to within 10 yards of the gargantuan thundering pour-over at the top of Lava Falls, before our guide, Tom, realized our raft had drifted off course. At least five yards separated our raft from the telltale line of bubbles dancing on the water’s surface that guides used to locate the safest entry point into the rapid. Panicking, he screamed at us to hyperventilate. For a few seconds, I sucked hard to fill my lungs with oxygen. Then our raft plunged into a monstrous, crashing abyss. The force of the water flung our raft backward, flipping it end over end. Instantly, the deafening foaming current ingested me, gulping me helplessly downward into its black depths.
The river clutched and violently flushed me ever deeper. My feet dragged over submerged boulders. Was I scraping along the bottom of the river? Helpless to escape the turbulence holding me under, I felt terrified that I might have only seconds left to live. My lungs burned with the need to inhale. “Don’t breathe!” my brain screamed.
An eerily silent blackness surrounded me, in stark contrast to the sparkling brilliance and deafening roar of seconds before. I realized the darkness meant I’d become trapped under the boat. I frantically tried to recall what Tom’s last-second safety instructions had been. Raising my hands above my head, I felt for the rubbery smoothness of the side tube. Eons passed before I found it.
I shoved hard to drive myself away from it, deeper into the river. Meanwhile, the raft’s side tube floated past over my head. A patch of light appeared far above me. During the eternity it took for my life jacket to buoy me upward toward that light, I struggled against a frantic urge to inhale. The instant I broke the surface, I gulped greedily, sucking in a mixture of air infused with aqueous froth.
Less than a second later, a massive wave curled over me. It pounded my body back below the surface. I coughed violently, trying to rid my lungs of the water I’d just inhaled. The swift current dragged me through the monster wave. My head popped above water again as I choked and gasped for precious oxygen between wave after wave. Our raft bobbed through the waves just an arm’s length in front of me. Suddenly, I felt my shoulder squeezed from behind. “Are you okay?” Tom shouted. I nodded. With the superhuman strength of Clark Kent, he launched himself up out of the river onto the smooth neoprene floor of our overturned raft. Then he hauled me up out of the rapid onto the raft.
Another raft waiting downstream raced to our rescue. It grabbed our raft’s bowline. Tom, another client and I clung to each other for dear life, on the slippery surface, as it towed us through the next rapid, then to shore. Back on land safely, I blurted a foolish comment about wanting to go back upstream to run it all over again, this time the right way. Clearly, I must have been in shock, because no way in hell would I have gone back through that rapid again, now that I knew the real odds. I’d learned the hard way no one should ever take Lava Falls for granted.
Aside from my ongoing phobia of that one disastrous rapid, I’d fallen in love with the majestic Grand Canyon’s solitude, the kaleidoscopic color changes on its walls painted by the rising and setting sun, the hidden waterfalls tucked up in flood-carved side canyons that rained cool massaging showers on our heads and shoulders, and the playful rapids that dared us to “drop” in. Beyond all that, I was utterly in awe of how our multitalented guides not only survived, but thrived in this remote wilderness paradise.
Impressively, saddled with a group of city slickers totally separated from all their life-easing amenities, these boatmen kept us safe and comfortable. They lectured about the ancient geologic formations, some nearly two billion years old, steered us away from rattlesnakes, taught us to rappel down cliff walls, and fed us some of the tastiest food I’d ever eaten, prepared solely on camp stoves and over campfires. Honestly, I idolized these guides.
So it floored me when, the day after Lava Falls, our tanned, muscular, and charming head guide, Dave Shore, impressed by my contrived resilience, proposed that I come to California to work for OARS, both to manage their finances and to become a guide myself. While Dave’s pitch tantalized me, I had to admit these guides belonged to an exclusive league of their own. I felt flattered that he believed there could be a place for me among their ranks, but I knew beyond any doubt I did not have the right stuff to be a river guide. I’d had a delightful detour through Jimmy Buffett’s world, but I was ready to return to my safe, comfortable life, bringing with me enough memories of adventures on the wild side to last a lifetime.
BACK AT MY JOB, I threw myself into work. Deadlines and reports took priority. The solitude I’d experienced in the canyon faded behind the everyday noises of emergency vehicle sirens, taxi cabs’ blaring horns, and the constant chatter of my colleagues. The panoramic vista from our floor mostly offered views of adjacent office buildings. Historic brick structures mingled with newer architecture flaunting entire exteriors of dark tinted glass. I missed the colorful canyon walls and its landscape of tamarisk, cottonwood, and willows. I’d had my eyes opened to a vibrant natural world I didn’t know existed.
In the distance, the rubber-streaked asphalt runway system of Logan Airport buzzed with an endless stream of planes arriving and departing. The only green thing in our field of vision was an occasional Aer Lingus jet. As time passed, I settled comfortably back into everyday, routine urban life.
Then, five months after returning home, I received an unexpected piece of mail from George Wendt, the owner of OARS, Inc. His letter encouraged me to visit their office in Angels Camp, California. He wanted to meet me and gauge my interest in working for his company. This unexpected opportunity dumbfounded me. Over the next few days, thoughts of George’s invitation repeatedly sabotaged my work. I’d have to be crazy to contemplate such a radical departure from the job I held and the career path I’d chosen. Or would I? Could I really imagine myself working for decades alongside “cream of the crop” CPAs, brilliant but lackluster Brooks-Brothers-suited men to whom money and balance sheets meant everything? After just a taste of adventure in the Grand Canyon wilderness, I wasn’t sure.
THE MORE SERIOUSLY I considered accepting the nontraditional position with OARS, the more my mind drifted westward. I could already hear the patronizing scolding from my parents. “After we’ve spent our hard-earned money on your college education, how dare you throw away your wonderful job… just to paddle a raft down some river out in the boondocks?
Brenda E. Smith’s “Becoming Fearless: Finding Courage in the African Wilderness” is a stunning travelogue/memoir, the account of one woman’s transformation from terrified to fearless. After a colleague in her accounting firm told her that she’d be willing to go down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon with her, Brenda panicked because although (at the time) it was her dream trip, she felt she lacked the courage to actually experience it. Unable to back out, Brenda booked the rafting adventure with a company called OARS, (founded by George Wendt in Angels Camp, CA). On the approach to Lava Falls rapid, the raft capsized and Brenda almost drowned before resurfacing to be hoisted back up by her guide, Tom. Approached afterwards by Dave, the head guide, Brenda was floored to be offered a position at OARS, both as their accountant and to be a trained river guide. Thinking it was not for her, she declined and returned home to her accounting career. However, Brenda reconsidered and later flew to Angels Camp, where she was hired by George as the accountant for both OARS and Sobek Expeditions. “While OARS operated popular rafting trips on accessible whitewater rivers of the Western United States, Sobek’s groundbreaking exploratory rafting expeditions on wild rivers around the globe cemented its reputation as the premier rafting company in the world” (Location 147 of 4199). She found herself in a position (ie, was told) where she was told she must take a rafting trip through the remote Selous Game Reserve down the Kilombero and Rufigi Rivers in the Tanzanian jungle with her new boss, Richard Bangs, one of the top one hundred explorers in history. (After Richard returned home at the end of the rafting trip, Brenda would also attempt to climb Kilimanjaro with the rest of the passengers and crew).
I, for one, could not imagine the personal fortitude it would take to begin an adventure such as this. Brenda jokingly blamed Jimmy Buffett and his song, “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude” (Location 24 of 4199) for considering adventure in the first place, but it is Richard who gave her the taste for wanderlust. Rafting down the river was no easy task, physically or mentally. Dodging angry hippos, wily crocodiles, and herds of elephants while navigating the rivers to choose correct channels to keep them on course is not for the feint of heart. (One furious hippo went as far as to take a bite out of Richard’s inflatable raft). However, in this beautiful land of wild animals, extreme temperatures, and peaceful, lush scenery, there was also time for quiet contemplation, both for the past reasons she feared anything new, and to embrace the new person she was becoming. Brenda learned so much about herself while exploring the wilds of Africa, and tells her story through an unfiltered lens. Her writing is real, raw, evocative, and seemingly effortless. She has the ability to put the reader right in the middle of her experiences, feeling the heightened senses, fatigue, fear, and pride. Her word pictures make the reader feel as though they are on the raft and mountain as well, feeling the rumble of elephant hooves, hearing the deafening roar of the lion and the cry of a wounded animal. We as readers also hack down wild brush to forge a path no human has made before, experience the oppressive heat, river spray, silt-covered skin, potential frostbite, and physical symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness due to altitude. Her ability to place the reader in time and place is uncanny. When Brenda tells of the poaching, big game hunting, disappearance, endangered species, population surge, and tourism that will never be seen again the way she saw them forty-two years ago, it will make your heart ache. If you are a fan of memoir and/or travelogues, please read Brenda’s book; like me, you will undoubtedly love it.
I would like to thank Reedsy Discovery, Brenda E. Smith, Eye Opener Press, LLC, and Paper Raven Books, LLC for the opportunity to read and review this work.Â