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I need to return Garrett Conover's BEYOND THE PADDLE: A CANOEISTS' GUIDE TO EXPEDITION SKILLS (1991) to the library, so I'm noting here a few paragraphs I enjoyed:
[page x]
Everyone must join me in thanking copyeditor Liz Pierson who with patience and exasperated humor slogged through my original draft, converting the ramblings of someone who writes by ear and invents punctuation and syntax into something sensible and familiar to those with a grasp of grammar and proper usage. Were it not for her consummate skill, I would be destined to perpetual embarrassment and you to eternal befuddlement.
[page 46]
It is nice to have things go as planned. Lining, or any other aspect of canoeing, seems easy then. You begin to believe you are getting pretty good. Fortunately, whenever anyone allows that thought to cross their mind, the river seems to know about it and concocts a little event to reintroduce some humility and caution. I much prefer to make a lot of little mistakes than to save up for a big one. Mistakes teach me far more than a program of always doing things correctly does, and smaller, comprehensible mistakes yield much to be analyzed. If you save up for a major disaster, you might just lose your gear in a manner so complex and complete that you can't really learn too much from it. Push your limits a little bit a lot of the time, and resist the temptation to taking a flying leap at a higher level of accomplishment.
[pages 47 - 48]
When a recovery situation is performed well, we are all tempted to take full credit for success. In truth we can only claim a percentage; the rest belongs to luck. When something is done well, you never know how close you may have been to that fleeting and obscure interface between control and varying degrees of loss of control. At times we cross that line, recognize it, and jump back to the safe side. Other times the leap is too long and we feel that adrenergic surge of impending helplessness. At that point you simply do the best you can; stabilization will come in its own time. For canoeists, this often means that something gets wet.
[page x]
Everyone must join me in thanking copyeditor Liz Pierson who with patience and exasperated humor slogged through my original draft, converting the ramblings of someone who writes by ear and invents punctuation and syntax into something sensible and familiar to those with a grasp of grammar and proper usage. Were it not for her consummate skill, I would be destined to perpetual embarrassment and you to eternal befuddlement.
[page 46]
It is nice to have things go as planned. Lining, or any other aspect of canoeing, seems easy then. You begin to believe you are getting pretty good. Fortunately, whenever anyone allows that thought to cross their mind, the river seems to know about it and concocts a little event to reintroduce some humility and caution. I much prefer to make a lot of little mistakes than to save up for a big one. Mistakes teach me far more than a program of always doing things correctly does, and smaller, comprehensible mistakes yield much to be analyzed. If you save up for a major disaster, you might just lose your gear in a manner so complex and complete that you can't really learn too much from it. Push your limits a little bit a lot of the time, and resist the temptation to taking a flying leap at a higher level of accomplishment.
[pages 47 - 48]
When a recovery situation is performed well, we are all tempted to take full credit for success. In truth we can only claim a percentage; the rest belongs to luck. When something is done well, you never know how close you may have been to that fleeting and obscure interface between control and varying degrees of loss of control. At times we cross that line, recognize it, and jump back to the safe side. Other times the leap is too long and we feel that adrenergic surge of impending helplessness. At that point you simply do the best you can; stabilization will come in its own time. For canoeists, this often means that something gets wet.
