While walking in the hills on a gorgeous Santa Barbara Saturday, my friend and I were huffing and puffing up a big incline and in between heavy breathing, we talked about outdoor sports. He comes from a very traditional team sports background, so does not have as much experience being out in nature, and doing sports that would be considered adventure, or "extreme" sports. His big concern was injury. He had fallen pretty badly on his bicycle as a teenager and as a consequence his front two teeth had to be replaced. Another time while skiing his knee gave out on him, and he said that feeling of severe pain and the fear accompanied with it was enough to keep him out of the adventure sports arena.
According to my Mom, I have always been kind of a daredevil. Unafraid when it came to possibly leaving some skin on the asphalt or the dirt, I have always approached opportunities to learn sports like: mountain biking, skateboarding, snowboarding, rock-climbing with reckless abandon. And I have had my share of falls - some harder than others. Some of my worst falls were not necessarily HOW bad the fall was, but how bad the fall COULD have been, as I have caught myself on a few precipices just before going over what would have been very long drops.
Maybe some of it I inherited from my dad. I know one of his famous stories is when he was about fifteen, while hiking in the mountains in Southern California, he slipped and fell off a several hundred-foot mountain. He remembers passing out during the fall, waking up mid-fall and passing out again as his head repeatedly bounced off rocks and brush on his way to the bottom. But he lived!
Is that part of the allure of this genre of sports? Death-defying nature? Testing the limits of your own morality? I wonder sometimes if the daredevil inside of all of us is what draws men and women into places like the one the base jumper in one of the Banff Mountain Film Festival entries found himself. After a malfunction with his parachute, this man was smashed and broken horribly and left on a ledge a thousand feet from anybody or anything. He was in too difficult of a place to be rescued, and he perished on that mountainside.
The reason this blog has such a serious tone is that a recent tragedy at Campus Point surf spot in Santa Barbara has made me reflect on the dangers involved in adventure sports, and more specifically, in the sport of surfing. A twenty-nine year old, somewhat proficient surfer (and new mother) was killed when her leg and leash were trapped on boulders and she was dragged underwater and drowned.
Do people know that, like my friend who I went hiking with, who watched me sprint down a boulder field and jump off rocks in a very precarious manner, you can abstain from putting your life at risk and still enjoy just watching surfers or rock climbers or ice climbers do their thing?
I want people to know the risks involved with these activities before they end up in a situation that they are not comfortable with and not prepared to handle -- and their lives become on the line. Surfing is not just a dangerous sport it goes beyond that. You are in a moving, living, breathing environment that is not friendly to terrestrial creatures. Little mistakes can lead to major injuries or even deaths. I have no problem with people trying new things. But the key is to have a guide, a teacher, and a mentor. Trying to take on the outdoor world without the proper technique and etiquette garnered from observing and listening to an expert is not a good move. Always take the precautions necessary to survive your day in the sun!
ER Harris
