AMC Outdoors, November 2006
In AMC’s Guide to Outdoor Leadership, author Alex Kosseff defines risk as “…the potential for suffering some harm or loss.” Unfortunately, in terms of suffering and loss, it’s often the people who love risk-takers that end up bearing the brunt for their activities. In her groundbreaking and vividly written book, Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow, the Personal Costs of Climbing, Maria Coffey broaches the touchy subject of those people who love risk-takers. Coffey, who lost boyfriend Joe Tasker in an accident on Everest, determines that people in these relationships are risk-takers-by-proxy and receive a residual hit—a high-by-association—and are not always the passive victims that the media plays them to be when tragedy strikes.
Powter says psychology, for the longest time, failed to identify what risk-taking is all about. The thinking began to change in the last 10 to 15 years, he says, when researchers looked at the concept of mastery, a primary factor in risk-taking. “It’s why people do what they do and push further; it’s about the sense of mastery. You change your cognitive perception of what the risk is, because when you build your skills, you also think you’re more able to handle or control these risks now.”
But can you really handle bigger risks? No, explains Powter, “except that maybe you’ll make a choice to go down one side of a glacier over another. The more experience that you have, the more control you feel. You can see this when you take an absolute beginner rock climbing, even in a very safe controlled sport climbing environment, and they can be very terrified. But let that person gain some experience and soon they feel like they can handle it.”
Mastery is a bit more complicated than the most often cited reason for risk-taking. In most modern societies, natural risks (disease, wild animals, starvation, and war) have only been recently removed from our daily lives, replaced by extreme activities like mountain biking or rock climbing, which call on those same survival skills. Maybe this is why my father, who flew bombers in WWII, never understood my need to “pursue ridiculous stunts while wearing clown clothes” in my thirties, an age when his riskiest endeavor was adding Tabasco to his barbecue sauce.
Prior to the first ascent of Mount Blanc in 1765, people saw absolutely no gain in pushing the limits, as everyday life was fraught with sufficient real dangers. The exceptions to this rule were the idle rich of the growing leisure class in Europe, who were looking to prove themselves in some way. In Mountains of the Mind, author Robert MacFarlane links together the convergence of economy, science, philosophy, and art that arose during the mid-1700s to explain the birth of risk for risk’s sake in the form of modern mountaineering. MacFarlane points to the fact that advancements in the new field of geology gave people a reason to explore the rocky heights. Even philosophers weren’t immune to questioning the lure of risky environments, as MacFarlane points out by quoting Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.
For Burke, sublime sights were those things that were too big to comprehend, and left a person with a mixture of terror and pleasure. The key for Burke was that the sublime “always produces delight when it doesn’t press too close,” and as such he seems to be describing our modern pursuits of selfconstructed risk. He also sets out one of the addictive hooks of risk–the high of a close call.
“Not surprisingly, there was always a euphoria associated with a risk taken and safety attained,” says writer Tim Cahill, who has chronicled his adventures from the raggedy edge of risk. He looks back on exploits that run the gamut from diving with sharks to facing machine guns in troubled lands, and wonders if he was drawn to risk by “the resultant sense of euphoria that could be achieved in no other way.”
There are easier ways to catch a buzz. But if risk is dangerous, a school of thought is emerging that playing it safe is even riskier. Dr. Ute Navidi of the London-based child advocacy group London Play, expresses concern over the lack of challenging play opportunities for children in most playgrounds and homes. According to Dr. Navidi, the risk is that by making their world too safe, we are actually creating a generation of kids who are ill-prepared, less capable, less self-reliant, and therefore actually more prone to harm, in all its forms later in life. I shared this study with Geoff Powter and asked, “Is risk good?”
“I think that risk is incredibly enlivening and helpful in people’s lives,” he affirmed before adding, “…the further we get away from those actual risks, the less authentic lives that we live.” Aaron Gorban has been helping people find their authentic selves for more than a decade. Gorban, AMC’s Leadership Training and Risk Management Manager, espouses the idea of “challenge by choice,” an à-la-carte approach to risk-taking that encourages participants to explore their limits without straying too far from their comfort zones.
Gorban also teaches trip leaders how to handle people whose actions bring them too close to the edge. “It’s a relatively common scenario in the field,” he says. “That one participant who gets summit fever and wants to go off on their own. We try to strongly discourage it but we make it clear we can’t be responsible for them if they leave the group.”
Gorban recalls a trip he led to Katahdin earlier this year. The plan had been to summit via the Knife Edge, but with clouds rolling in and thunderstorms in the forecast, they decided as a group to call it a day. “One of the participants and their son wanted to go on. They said they could beat the thunderstorms [up to the summit],” says Gorban, who successfully lobbied for the pair to stay with the group. “Later, he said if he was alone, he would have gone for it.”
AFTER A RESPITE FROM THE RAIN, THE STORM returns to the ridge with added intensity. Having gained the highpoint, I dig out my jacket and turn my front wheel down the single-track that disappears into the gray/white curtain. Hail is pinging off my helmet as I pick up speed along the descending ridgeline. I’m blinded by the water in my eyes and the fog that obscures the landscape. There is no horizon until the ghostly visages of trees come into view. I drop into them at top speed; the bad voice prevents my right hand from squeezing the brake handle to slow my descent. After 200 yards of slaloming between the trees I escape into another glade. The world falls away on both sides of me. The wind is pushing tendrils of mist across my wheels, and looking down I see my speedometer climbing past 40 miles-per-hour. I’m flowing with the trail—my wheels are in the clouds, and I feel as if I am becoming liquid, or at least acting like water being pulled by gravity.
Moments…seconds…minutes…later—I’ve lost touch with time—I drop beneath the cloud and spot the entrance in the trees to the lower trail that will bring me back down to my car. Again I resist the brakes, trying to coax a bit more juice out of the remaining mile of ridge. The good voice returns. “It’s been a great ride,” he says. “You have to be satisfied. So why ruin the day with a wipeout?” The good voice is correct; the bad voice strangely silent. I grab the brakes and slowly apply friction to bring myself to a stop before the trees. In the silence all I can hear is the sound of my heart in my head.
- Bruce Ramsay
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