“My favorite thesis is that an adventure is a sign of incompetence. If everything is well managed, if there are no miscalculations or mistakes, then the things that happen are only the things you expected to happen, and for which you are ready and with which you can therefore deal. Being thoroughly alive to the truth of this principle, I am also thoroughly ashamed of owning up to such adventures as we have had.”
— Vilhjalmur Stefansson
If Stefansson’s postulation from his 1913 My Life with the Eskimo is right, and my own experience indicates it surely seems to be so, well I too must fess up to being thoroughly ashamed. For I have encountered my good share of adventures, and therefore I freely admit to having been most incompetent! The only redeeming factor, which comforts me, is that the last twenty years have been fairly monotonous. I suppose all of the close calls of my first four decades, and the wisdom thus gained, naturally culminated in a slightly droning and adventure-deficient outdoor education career. But my job at that point was to let others live the excitement by bringing them into what Jean Brunelle calls their “zone of delicious uncertainty,” albeit in a controlled setting. In this I have been mostly successful, thankfully; neither I nor any of my students have suffered a serious mishap since. How boring.
Indeed, life was more exciting when I dared let my students rappel down cliffs on our homemade grass ropes. Even if I tested the rope by going first, as I always did, I would today be crucified in a public place for such an act. Risk management has overcome our world, and I myself am responsible for this to a certain extent, having written Quebec’s outdoor risk management reference manual. Saving lives and preventing accidents is good, I suppose, but I still pine for a canoe trip without maps, where you get hopelessly lost while looking for a non-existent portage to a non-existent lake. I still long for the right to plan a trip poorly, secretly yearning to scavenge cattail roots and wild mushrooms for a few days.
Well, this book will send us back into an era when risks were less scrutinized. Yes, Mr. Stefansson, I am guilty as charged of incompetence. At least I had fun.
An unusual rappel.