Relinquishing Comforts

I think women are more risk averse, in general. Sarah Hueniken.

My fifth - sixth if you count the Solstice weekend as two separate trips - NSW Sea Kayak Club Sunday Paddle. Again, the weather was really good: light winds, a swell around 1.5 metres, and even sun! It was considerably warmer than the previous Sunday when Robbie had kept me out until way past my lunch time, but I was still out way past lunch time. Doug and I paddled down to Wimbie Beach to meet Robbie and Dave, and then out to Black Rock, straight south to Burrewarra Point and then a tour of all the beaches and bays until we got back to Wimbie Beach where we dropped off Robbie and Dave before returning to our home beach where the swell was washing far up the beach. Thirty kilometres because my 20 kilometre winters day limit seems to have been washed away along with all the sand on our local beach.

This film is a couple of years old but Hueniken’s kind of badassery is timeless. The back story of Hueniken’s link up is the tragic and completely unexpected avalanche that resulted in the death of one of her best friends along with the partial burial of one of the clients. In the small world that is the climbing community, one of the other women on the course is an aspiring mountain guide and daughter of a friend of mine back in Canada, so I knew of the accident and also knew how tough the situation was for the women who survived.

These kinds of accidents are as titillating to the public as they are rare, and, also, frequently deeply misunderstood. Everyday the average person engages in a dozen activities (eating processed food, driving, drinking alcohol, smoking, sitting on the couch all day, taking 6 or 7 clot shots, doom scrolling ABC fear porn, and so on) which will slowly but surely shorten their life span and/or health span yet these risks are accepted, or more perhaps more accurately, under-rated and ignored.

Situations that are immediately life threatening are so rare in the modern world that the average person has no good metric with which to deal with such events. The normative response, as life gets more regulated and society as a whole becomes more risk averse, is to find someone to blame. That blame frequently lies with the guide, but this has always seemed like sloppy thinking to me as any accident that occurs in a mountain environment is as risky to the guide as it is to the client. There’s not a mountain guide alive who goes out to work in the morning thinking “This is a good day to die. I think I’ll take all the clients with me.”

When the inevitable survivor begins the seemingly vengeful search for blame, it’s hard not to think: “There is no adventure without risk. You signed up for this willingly, if not eagerly.” I sometimes wonder if the only people who understand real risk are the people who have lost friends to mountain accidents or been involved in too many incidents and close calls of their own to maintain any semblance of deniability.

Beyond Hueniken being a total badass, the lesson I got from the movie was that great rewards do incur great risk but more importantly great sacrifice. On the day of the link-up Hueniken is up at 2:30 am after a sleepless “night” and setting off an an adventure which will entail four hours of driving, 24 kilometres of skiing, and 15 pitches (Hueniken led every pitch) of some of the hardest climbing the Rockies has on offer. No-one does that without giving up an awful lot of comforts that the rest of us find impossible to relinquish.