Who is Responsible?

Abstract

On a continent crazed with litigation, it is sometimes easy to get carried away. This is a plea for taking responsibility in the outdoors. One of the great beauties of the so called 'pure' outdoor adventure experience is that it provides us with clear successes in a simplified world; a world over which we can exercise a higher than usual degree of control. Here the connection between actions and consequences are unmistakable. You reach for a handhold on a rock wall, or pick a break in the surf to make your landing and the feedback is immediate. Either you continue with confidence or you take a hit and hopefully learn something. This dynamic is a big part of wilderness adventure and it sets it apart from the experience of the tourist on a railed broad-walk at a roadside park where the most serious risk is likely to be an accidental slip or getting mugged. The 'pure' outdoor experience is probably an unattainable ideal, but a solo rock-climber approaches it when climbing without protection on a challenging wall. For the sea kayaker it may be the solo crossing in marginal conditions while for the back country skier, the moment likely comes from being utterly committed in the sort of conditions that stretch every nerve and sinew to survive. This moment may not last long, but it feeds the soul long after you've returned to civilization. My examples are mostly solo situations. This is because the intensity of the experience frequently has an inverse relationship to the number of people in your group. Also any ambiguity about exactly who is responsible is removed. For sure, group travel provides its own moments of intensity but the elegant simplicity of being alone is absent and often responsibility is passed off to a guide or leader. Solo ventures unfortunately tend to be frowned upon by peers and society in general, often on the basis of safety, but also because people who choose to act alone like that make the rest of us feel just a little bit uncomfortable. "Who are they to think they don't need 'us'?" Between the tourist on the railed broad-walk and the solo rock-climber, the field is graded unevenly and we select our comfort zones according to the situation and our familiarity with the activity. In North American society there are entire industries populated by people who need to be needed, including the medical and legal professions, police, coast guard, search and rescue, regulating bureaucracies, and many more. They are there to share the load, control the masses and catch us when we stumble, and they perform extraordinarily valuable services, for which we willingly pay privately or with our taxes. Each time we buy into one of these services, however, we assign them a little of our own personal responsibility and in exchange we agree to play the game by their rules. This leads in turn to a mind-numbing level of social complexity and an ever increasing sense of individual powerlessness that leads eventually to alienation. Enter the outdoor adventure. Here you get to choose your risk and the level that is manageable for you, and through the process of managing this risk, you regain some of the self-respect and empowerment lost in the social grinder. You look at the weather, check the conditions, then commit to the move. For the first time in months, you are totally responsible for your actions and what's that barely remembered sensation? An exhilarating sense of freedom sweeps over you. You realize there's a link between freedom and being responsible for your actions. As with all freedom, it is seldom handed to you on a plate, and when it is, it can be quickly lost. What was it JFK said about that? Vigilance is the price of freedom, or was freedom the price of vigilance? Of course, both are right in different circumstances. We need a measure of vigilance to maintain the source of freedom we've discovered. Vigilance against what, you may ask? Vigilance against losing our right to take these risks. …