Currents
A L CH E M Y
A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING
IN ITS PLACE. PHOTO: ROB FAUBERT
WHY YOU SHOULD ALWAYS SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF
I got a good scare last fall on a late October multi-day trip when a loaded oar rig flipped and not everyone came out from underneath it. Flipping a loaded oar rig is always bad news—something to be avoided
at all cost. Once upside down, they become giant, heavy, out-of-control entrapment devices. So it was with this one. I spent several years river guiding in the desert southwest, and days off
were all about rock climbing. Big walls were my thing then—long, techni- cal, gear-intensive and sometimes multi-day tests on a massive cliff face. I wasn’t athletic enough to climb the good sport routes, and there was
something more appealing about the slow, methodical pace of aid climb- ing.
A single pitch can take hours—hours of intense concentration and fo-
cus on the minute details. Aid climbing requires every movement to be planned, precise and methodical. Big wall climbing narrows the universe down to just gravity, arm’s-reach imperfections in the rock face, your belay partner and whatever goes on in your head. The saying “don’t sweat the small stuff ” doesn’t apply to big wall climbing. Nor to running stiff white- water in oar rigs. Social psychologists tell us certain people are better at details than oth-
ers. It’s accounted for in our personality traits, which science has nar- rowed down to the five-factor model of personality. As the anchor of the ‘big five’ traits, conscientiousness measures one’s tendency towards detail, organization and diligence. (The other factors are agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion). There are reams of research on this, and it all points towards conscientiousness as a reliable predic- tor of almost any form of human performance—more predictive than any other of the big five traits. The more details matter to an activity, the more predictive conscientiousness is. I often pull out this quote when teaching my outdoor students: “Show me a person who cannot bother to do little things, and I’ll show you a person who cannot be trusted to do big things.” Aspects of conscientiousness are learned skills—one can improve their ability to take care of details. Here I hope I am stating the obvi- ous: safety critical activities like rock climbing and running oar rigs are detail intensive.
26 PADDLING MAGAZINE
DEVIL IN THE DETAILS This brings us back to the upside down entrapment device, the one out
from under which too few helmets emerged. Standing on the river left shore, I watched the 15-foot oar rig line up for the steep, shallow rapid. We’d taken our time setting up the run perfectly, taking care of all the potential details and settling on the most conservative plan given our options. The first raft patiently drifted through the shallow entry and
locked into the crux slot just a raft-width wide. The second raft scrubbed a rock on entry and turned a little sideways. Not ideal. Then it did one of those slow slide-up-the-edge-of-the-slot-and-tip-over moves—not unexpected, but when one helmet did not emerge it was rescue 911 time. Two guides were in the water with their hands on the boat in a flash,
slowing it down and getting it out of the current. I bashed my way through the bush to get downstream where we corralled the raft to shore. Thirty seconds had passed. Just as we got control of it, the trapped guide-in- training emerged, knife in hand, having successfully cut himself free. Too close for comfort. The bow line, which in this case was a clipped throwbag, had trailed out
after the flip even though the bag itself stayed in place. The rope found its way around the passenger’s ankle. A tightly coiled bow line or slip-knotted throwbag is just one of a hundred details it takes to put together an efficient oar rig. Getting behind the oars and adding moving water introduc- es hundreds more. Add some clients and multiply the details by a thousand. How does one decide which details matter and which ones are less
important? The answer is simple: they all matter. In this whitewater gig, whether rigging a half-ton oar rig or just wedging your feet into a play- boat, every little detail matters. Our safety-critical environment means that the detail overlooked or left undone may be the one that makes all the difference. Jeff Jackson is a professor with Algonquin College’s Outdoor Adventure guide
training diploma and is the co-author of Managing Risk: Systems Planning for Outdoor Adventure Programs.
This article first appeared in the 2015 Spring issue of Rapid.
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