years as a park ranger, my first commercially guided expedition under my own company name wasn’t until 1984. My bush skills were adequate but my ability to knit people together in a group trip dynamic was deficient. I was eager to lift my new outfitting company off the ground and I took bookings for guided trips with insufficient client scrutiny. I was elated that I could book ten guys on a river trip in May, just after ice-out; any bookings in the pre-season was a commercial boon. Cash flow was paramount.
Bill was the client group-leader and he assured me that everyone who signed up had the required whitewater canoeing skills. The Makobe River in spring flood was a tempestuous little river and there was little room for error. John Kilbridge, canoe builder and former trail ranger, would be my assistant. Within the mélange of clients was a heart surgeon, company CEO’s, and one blind man. Terry was a musician, legally blind but could make out some vague outlines of rocks and trees. We were air-dropped to Banks Lake at the headwater of the river for a four-day flush downriver in ice-cold water with little time for instruction.
Let me tell you about stress.
Everyone paired off, the insurance man and the heart surgeon together in one canoe but sitting backwards in their seats, the bowman’s feet crammed into the tiny space behind what was supposed to be the stern seat. He complained about the lack of space for his legs until I corrected him as to which end of the canoe was to point forward. As it turned out, none of the ten men had ever run any moving water and only four had any experience at all.
“How hard can it be?” Bill the leader pleaded. John and I looked at each other in quiet consternation. It began to snow. We managed to nurse the first four client-canoes down the initial rapids, an easy class 1, but with one boulder in mid-channel to manoeuvre around. The doctor and the insurance man weren’t so lucky. Their canoe broached the only rock in the rapids, tipped upstream, and filled with water. The two men were able to step up onto the boulder but were now twenty-five metres from shore, stranded, cold, and wet. John and I beached our canoe and ran back up the shore. My new Kevlar canoe was wrapped around the boulder. John reminded me that the clients were more important than the state of the canoe — we’ d worry about the boat after we got the men safely to shore.
The two men were soaked to the bone, shivering in the cold, but we managed to walk them through the rapids back to shore, rescued their packs and instructed them to change into dry clothes. Extricating the wrapped canoe from the boulder would not be easy. It had to be done quickly as everybody was starting to feel the effects of the cold and we needed to get to our campsite before dark. I waded out to the canoe with a stout spruce pole and began levering the canoe off the boulder while John spotted from shore. Canoe rescue techniques had not yet been developed, such as the Z-drag rope method, and some broached canoes just won’t budge under that amount of hydraulic pressure. But I was lucky. The broken canoe slid off the boulder, taking me with it and down the rapids. John jumped into the river and grabbed my arm and helped me to shore and the two of us managed to haul the swamped canoe into shallow water. John took the clients ahead to the campsite downriver while I tried to patch the wrecked canoe as best as I could with duct-tape. By the time I reached camp it was dark but the group was in good spirits.
We were fortunate back then; it could have turned out differently. I made several mistakes, none of which were attributed to particular bush skills. My capacity to analyze the client, to judge their inherent capabilities, needed work — a lot of work. It was a harsh wake-up call. I was responsible for all these people, legally liable and potentially at risk from lawsuit if anything happened. I was relying on skill alone … and that was only a modicum of the talent that was required to be a good guide.
Everybody has their own brand of idiosyncratic weaknesses — baggage they carry with them — some more than others. But for the adventure-seeking client, it’s likely to spill out while under duress three hundred kilometres from the nearest road. And it happens for various reasons: exhaustion, isolation, fear, inability to cope, biting insects, weather, cold, incessant wind, and even personality conflicts with other clients. Put eight or ten individuals together in a tight social troupe, outside their familiar parameters, and vault them into the wilderness, and you have the making of one of two things; hopefully, what you get is unadulterated adventure but, if things go awry and the guide doesn’t have his or her shit together, you can stir up a dangerous mix of anarchy and mutiny, not to mention the potential lawsuits from gross fuck-ups.
Since my first commercial expedition in 1984, I’ve learned a lot about the human psyche and how it functions, or dysfunctions, under stressful conditions. Guiding skills, the hard-skills, like making a fire, setting up camp, negotiating rapids, are only a small part of what is required to be a proficient guide. A qualified guide (beyond the first-aid or other accreditations) needs to be a facilitator, a backwoods bon-vivant chef, an entertainer, and a teacher. But what about the remaining 75 percent of skill requirements? Basic skills are easy to learn, over time, but the most difficult facet of guiding (and the most underrated), is the ability to “read” personality traits. One learns to “read” weather or “read” rapids, but to adequately justify taking a group of neophytes into the wilderness and assaulting them with all manner of environmental conditions, the guide needs to be able to sense what’s going on inside everybody’s head.
When I book a full compliment for an expedition, say eight individuals, I know that at least two people will have sociopathic tendencies — it’s a given statistic and product of our social makeup in an aggressive, self-indulgent, consumer-based world. Two others in this group will have recently suffered through some kind of personal trauma — a death in the family or of a close friend, a break-up with a partner, trouble at work perhaps. An additional two clients will be rife with self-doubt, unable to make spontaneous decisions. The last two people will be well-rounded and competent, reliable and helpful but possibly short on patience because of the other clients’ ineptitude. The guide then has to make an assessment of each and all of these personalities before the client is even accepted onto the roster of participants. The guide, as booking agent, is often responsible for selecting the group participants, scrutinizing their abilities, and the general compatibility in a group function.
Before establishing a more rigorous screening process, I once booked four hardcore Marines from California and teamed them up, by chance, with four gay men from Toronto. Sexual persuasion is not something you ask about when signing up individuals for a wilderness expedition. Not that I would have turned either the Marines or the gays away from participating. I would have made more effort to match up such disparately different personalities with likeminded people. Composing a workable and companionable group of clients from the get-go ultimately makes the guide’s job easier. Unfortunately, some maladjusted and neurotic client may sneak through the selection process and the guide then has to meld this potentially explosive personality into the group. And it has to be done quickly. It’s like a foot blister. If it’s not dealt with at the onset, it could grow into a debilitating problem; and this will have a deleterious affect on the group.
Ben signed on to one of my two-week whitewater trips, a late arrival and a friend of a friend who met through an internet dating company. He was a lawyer. In all respects he seemed appropriate to fit into this group; he had experience in moving water, correctly answered all the pre-trip questions — there was no reason to deny his participation. I now had a full complement of clients to round out this expedition.
Ben was a Type-A personality — like many of my clients — like the majority of the more ardent adventure-seekers. These people can be described as impatient, excessively time-conscious, highly competitive, and incapable of relaxation; a lot of these people have free-floating hostilities that can be triggered by minor incidents; some may exhibit sociopathic tendencies, or dissocial personality disorder. Ben was a classic example. People with DPD generally have callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack the capacity for empathy, disregard social norms, seldom profit from experience,
