in the kayaking industry has been a step backward for a sport whose greatest appeal is the simple escape that it offers from an increasingly risk-averse and programmed world. I learned to kayak exactly 20 years ago by walking into a shop and buying one of the boats hanging from the ceiling. Soon I was flailing around in storm waves at the beach, practicing clumsy paddle float self-rescues I’d read about in books like Dowd’s. My discomfort on timid forays into the ocean’s unfamiliar waves and currents quickly taught me how much I had yet to learn. I felt my own way forward, building up to multi-day trips on the open coast, rolling, surfing tidal rapids, an 80-day expedition, working at this kayaking magazine. Then, overnight, it seemed that every advanced paddler I met was some kind of guide or instructor. They’d ask me about my level of certification and I wouldn’t know what to say. The same phenomenon of credential overproduction has
befallen society as a whole. The world is now so full of highly educated people looking for somewhere to sell their expensive knowledge that it’s hard to break into just about any field, even with an advanced degree. It befits those who hold the credentials to convince everybody else that they’re necessary. But—take it from me, a guy with a master’s degree in outdoor recreation and a post-grad diploma in journalism who went on to write stories about kayaking—we don’t have to believe the hype. This phenomenon spills over to everyday life, where it seems
you can’t do anything without expert advice. Most of the people I see working out at the gym are under the direct supervision of a personal trainer with a string of initials after his name. There are professional coaches for everything: organization, nutrition, wellness, even life itself. Last time our kids were being brats, my wife insisted we needed a parenting coach. “What did the cavemen do?” I retorted. Somehow traditional societies managed to raise their own successful, well-adjusted children without experts. They also invented kayaking. Nowadays, society discourages us from thinking for ourselves
and taking risks, and we’ve infected our kids with the same paranoia. Some say this helicopter parenting is producing a generation of pathologically anxious and dependent young adults.
It used to be that youth were the ones with the time to go on
crazy long wilderness expeditions. Now, kayak touring appears too scary for the only generation with the time to do it. Besides, they’re all too busy paying off the student loans for the PhDs on their Starbucks resumes. In my youth, people learned to do things for themselves
because the world was not so populated with experts and coaches. If you wanted to learn to kayak, you just bought the gear and did it, sometimes with a detour to the library for a John Dowd book. If you needed company, you invited a friend. Once you figured it out, you became the expert. The roads to the wilderness were not paved. There were no tolls or gatekeepers. The camping was free. You could land on a remote beach and the guy who wrote the book would be there to welcome you to the club. Today, we spend more time working so we can pay others to
tell us how to spend our time off. Kayaking was supposed to take us away from all that. “I foresee a time when you will need to be certified in order to buy or rent a kayak,” writes Dowd. So get out there and do some escapist adventuring while you still can. Listen to me, your kayaking life coach, before I start billing by the hour. Tim Shuff is a firefighter, freelance writer and former editor of
Adventure Kayak who realized he’d hit middle age when he found himself writing the phrases “in my youth” and “kids these days.”
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