Running the River Stupid: Swiftwater Rescue Training Proves Relevant to Leading Middle Schoolers, a Teacher Discovers
A Swiftwater Rescue class gathers on a bank of Maine’s Penobscot River to learn techniques for saving people in fast-running water. KRISTINA CANNON
Anna Hager Loome
This article originally appeared in Appalachia, Vol. 74, Summer / Fall 2023: Risks and Adventure. Re-shared here with permission from AMC.
I’m poised to jump from a ledge along the shore of the Penobscot River in early July, my borrowed wetsuit already soaked from earlier trips through the current. In a moment I’ll see a man floating down the channel from upstream. I’ll try to judge just the right moment to leap off the rock into the cold current, swim to the man, grab his life jacket with my forearm, and pull him back to shore against the force of the river, navigating around rocks and wave trains along the way. A throw rope is attached to the back of my Type V personal flotation device. My companion, a woman no larger or more experienced than I, is holding on to that rope as she stands on this same slippery rock. Her task will be to haul me and the floating man to shore.
All of this is new to me: the Type V PFD, the throw rope, my companions. I have the acute sense that something is missing, and I pause briefly to determine what it is: I’m not feeling any anxiety. In a moment when I would expect to feel internal pressure to monitor every variable and execute a plan perfectly, the situation feels manageable even though I don’t yet have much confidence in my skills.
For two days, fellow outdoor educators, raft guides, and I are taking a two-day Level IV Swiftwater Rescue course led by outdoor sports expert Michael (Mike) Smith, a friend I know through the recreation community in the small town of Millinocket, Maine, where I live and work. I signed up for the course to bolster my river rescue skills because I teach an outdoor education elective at the public middle school in town.
The channel where my companions and I are swimming is known as Nature’s Way. It runs river right of a large unnamed island just downstream of a Class V rapids called the Cribworks—allegedly the biggest rapids east of the Mississippi. Most of the flow goes to river left of this island. On river right, the current has fewer cubic feet per second and the channel is narrower, mak- ing it a perfect spot to practice Swiftwater Rescue techniques in a manageable but challenging whitewater environment.
Trying to find the source of my calm the way I often search for the source of my stress, I realize that my confidence doesn’t stem primarily from my own skills. Instead, I’m feeling reassured by confidence in Mike’s judgment, and specifically by the sentiment that Mike wouldn’t put his students into a situation that we lacked the skills to handle. A handful of people in the class have less experience than I do, so I may even have room to make a mistake or two without jeopardizing my safety or risking embarrassment. I also relish the sense that I am in charge of only myself in this moment, an experience I find rare these days. I’ve removed the responsibilities of managing middle schoolers’ decisions from my list of tasks, and even this dynamic environment feels tranquil by comparison.
As a teacher, I’m primed to think about pedagogy and learning whenever I or people around me are trying to absorb new content. I can’t help but notice just how much more receptive I am to learning when I’m not anxious.
Several months have passed, and I still find myself thinking about those two days of Swiftwater Rescue last summer. The model of teaching and learning in Mike’s course was both effective for me as a student and different from my own pedagogy. Although my sense that Mike wouldn’t put me in a situation I couldn’t handle held true throughout my Swiftwater Rescue training last July, he certainly didn’t hold our hands; we learned through errors.
The pedagogical model for the middle school outdoor education course I teach revolves around exploration of our community and the recreational opportunities in our backyard. In the one-semester class, we teach students the basics of kayaking, mountain biking, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing, with units on fire-starting, navigation, and Leave No Trace ethics mixed in. My mindset in teaching this course has always prioritized keeping students safe above all else, both for the students’ benefit and so that the school can continue the program in the future. My experience in Swiftwater Rescue left me wondering how often my emphasis on preventing mishaps today might close a door of opportunity to teaching students to keep themselves safe in the long run—the chance to let experience, and specifically error, be the most effective teacher.
I’ve been reflecting on three questions in particular as I look back at Swiftwater Rescue. How can we empower youth to take on healthy risks and develop their decision-making skills in dynamic circumstances such as Swiftwater paddling, without overexposing them to danger? What conditions and teaching practices can best support teenagers’ development of skills and judgment in dynamic outdoor situations? What is the role of mistakes in this process?
To a significant degree, the scale of mistake Mike allowed Swiftwater Rescue participants to make correlated with the level of skill we brought to the training. More experienced participants had more slack on their proverbial throw ropes than did those of us with less refined skills or even less physical strength. In this way, Mike worked to make his class equally challenging for each participant regardless of his or her baseline.
A participant tries tossing a rope attached to a personal flotation device, hoping that a classmate posing as a stranded swimmer might be able to grab it. KRISTINA CANNON
One participant, Ben Koehler—dubbed “Scuba Ben” by local raft guides— regularly scuba dives whitewater on the Penobscot River while shooting videos underwater. Needless to say, his ability to navigate whitewater without a boat far exceeded that of his classmates. During a challenge on day one of the course, groups of participants raced to string a throw rope across the river six feet above the surface. Scuba Ben tied his team’s rope to a non-removable feature on his PFD rather than to a built-in releasable loop, making it more labor-intensive and physically exhausting for him to disconnect himself once he had swum across. The move did not fundamentally compromise his safety, and Ben’s scuba-swimming maneuvers easily won his team the race. Mike watched Ben closely but did not intervene. Later, he debriefed with Ben publicly when the whole group was discussing the scenario. We all benefited from Ben’s mistake in a way we would not have if Mike had proactively corrected it. Mike took a different tack when we were practicing “human throw-bagging,” in which a rescuer ties himself or herself into a throw rope that someone else is holding on the shore. The rescuer then leaps into the water to assist someone in trouble out of the water. Mike assiduously checked the connection between the Type V PFD and the throw rope before each rescuer leapt into the current, regardless of his or her level of expertise. In this situation, an incorrectly attached rope could put both the rescue swimmer and the patient at grave risk by trapping them underwater or entangling a limb or neck. In retrospect, I realize just how closely Mike must have been monitoring students’ baseline skills, the errors we made in class, and the level of exposure to risk in each class activity.
Another intentional choice on Mike’s part was his creation of pods of stu- dents. Grouping students heterogeneously such that each group contained someone larger or someone especially skilled set us all up to succeed with a margin for error. For example, early in our on-the-water section of the course we practiced individual, partner, and group wading strategies, the type of tool you’d like to have in your toolbox if you needed to fetch a stranded paddler off a rock in a shallow section of rapids or cross a channel to more thoroughly scout a route downstream. My group for this activity consisted of myself, a fit but not particularly brawny 5-foot, 5-inch 32-year-old; J. P. Smith, a tough 65-year-old female earth science teacher from a nearby town; and Tyler, a brawny young raft guide for a local whitewater company. When we practiced group wading, having someone bigger and more experienced in each group made all the difference. Tyler was able to block some of the current by positioning his 6-foot, 4-inch frame upstream of 5-foot, 1-inch J. P. and me, and provide us with the physical stability that allowed us to get a handle on the new skills before we got too far out into the channel. By putting a strong team member in each group of three, Mike made it more practical to monitor all groups at once. He could call out directions and adjustments without worrying that a whole group might wash downriver or get hurt. We could make little mistakes without losing grasp of the skills we were practicing.
But when we acted out scenarios, our mistakes proliferated, and we could see their consequences more easily. In a scenario, each student played a role: rescuer or patient. Especially as rescuers, we had to select appropriate strategies and think on the fly.
In the final scenario of the training, I was in a group of patients. Mike positioned our rescuers along a rapids and walked my group upstream to direct our behavior for the scenario. In the situation he laid out, a handful of paddlers (two other students and I) would be washed through the rapids past a group of potential rescuers who had paused on shore to eat lunch or scout their next drop. Every twenty seconds or so, Mike had one of us enter the water so that we were spaced evenly; each new floater came as a surprise to our rescuers. He directed the first floater to respond to rescuers’ questions and follow any directions they gave, but remain as passive as possible. “If they tell you to swim to shore, do it. But don’t self-rescue unless they prompt you to.” This patient would simply continue floating through the rapids unless she received clear direction or assistance from the rescue team.
I was the second floater, and Mike directed me to appear conscious but not to respond verbally to any directions or questions from rescuers on the shore. “If they throw a throw rope across your face, you can grab hold of it, but otherwise you’re just floating through.” Mike told the floater behind me to do his best to imitate an unconscious person floating downstream, completely unresponsive to rescuers.
The rescue didn’t go well. Theoretically, knowing a rescue was about to ensue put my classmates ahead of real-life rescuers who wouldn’t literally have their throw ropes in their hands while they waited onshore to see what was coming. However, these skills were new to most of us; synthesizing them came with a steep learning curve.
When the first floater came in sight, my classmates onshore immediately initiated a rescue, tossing ropes her way without directing her to swim to shore or aid in her own rescue. They succeeded in getting her out of the water but used more of their resources than necessary because they didn’t empower her to assist them in a way that she was fully capable of doing. Had they only told her to swim to shore, they would have saved precious energy and still had throw ropes available to help other patients.
When I came into sight, they shouted questions to me: “Are you OK? Tap on your head if you’re all right.” My lack of response seemed to concern them, but because they had already thrown most of their ropes at my group member, they weren’t poised to rescue me as I floated by. Throwing a rope to someone in the water requires a stable position onshore with clear access to the water. For a while, rescuers ran along shore shouting more questions, which I did not answer because I was playing someone who could not respond. Downstream, one of them threw a rope that landed six inches from me; I grabbed it, and she started hauling me into shore. A moment later, though, she caught sight of my unconscious group mate upstream, panicked, and dropped her end of my throw rope, as she rushed to help her teammates aid the unresponsive patient.
I floated the rest of the rapids to see what would happen, holding on to the slack rope to ensure it didn’t drift away and create a safety hazard downstream. In the final pool, a classmate from the rescuer team nervously asked, “Are you dead? Did we kill you?”
Our debrief about the incident was one of the biggest lessons of the course for all of us. We thought through our approaches to emergency situations and discussed the need for clear plans of action and structured roles for each rescuer, even in moments when we felt we lacked the time or context to fully develop them. The experience of failing was more valuable than any one theory in the course.
Another category of mistake Mike wanted us to experience was using complex skills when simpler strategies would work just as well or better. When teaching Swiftwater Rescue, Mike often plants a grating, vociferous character who insists that rescuers build a complex Z-drag to pull a trapped boat from a rock or other obstacle. Using a long line and a series of pulleys and short prusik cords (attached to the main line with a hitch knot), a Z-drag creates a three-to-one mechanical advantage, improving rescuers’ chance of fighting the force of the current and the weight of the boat to free it. In a scenario during day two of our training, a stranded kayaker holding forth on the necessity of a Z-drag added chaos and debate into a rescue that would otherwise have taken mere moments. Even though our group did not fall for Mike’s Z-drag ploy, we did find it difficult to resist building one. The Z-drag is certainly a handy strategy to have in your arsenal, and an impressive one. The latter characteristic is likely what makes it so tempting to use, even when simpler strategies would be more efficient and leave less room for error. Who can resist putting their fanciest skills to the test, whether in a class scenario or a “real-life” situation on the water?
Mike framed our use of our Swiftwater Rescue training with two questions we should ask ourselves in a given situation: “Can I do this?” and “Should I?” Simply put, just because we have the theoretical ability to perform a task or were able to perform it when we had practiced it regularly, doesn’t make it the best strategy for a given situation. A related category of mistakes stems from a tendency to overestimate our own competence or usefulness in a given situation. This differs from the first in that it’s not about involving the most complex or advanced strategies in our rescue; it’s about involving ourselves in the rescue in the first place. More broadly and beyond the context of rescue, this mistake reflects potential rescuers’ tendency to put ourselves in over our heads. I can certainly think of times when I’ve made this kind of hubristic mistake in my personal recreation; I suppose most of us can. Middle schoolers, with their longing to put themselves to the test, their eagerness to help others in sticky situations, and of course the room for growth in their frontal lobes, make this kind of error all too easily.
In the outdoor education class at my school, we paddle with our middle schoolers on Millinocket Stream. Near the school it’s mostly flatwater with a few stretches of quick current. In the late spring a few years ago, my outdoor education colleague Doug Kranich and I pushed the spring paddling season a bit early. That day, we launched our kayaks at a swimming hole a quarter-mile upstream from our school, with the plan that we would take a casual paddle downstream and then take advantage of the high water to explore a small marsh just downstream of our take-out at the school. It was mid-May; the stream was almost overflowing its banks, with the water temperature hovering around 55 degrees.
Quickly after launching, one of our seventh-grade boys—let’s call him Eli—drifted distractedly into the upstream corner of an island. The alder branches along shore quickly ensnared his boat. He was in a stable position, with his kayak fully upright and unlikely to move much if at all in the next few minutes, but a few paddle strokes would not free the boat. He was going to need either specific directions or physical help from a teacher.
I directed other students to steer clear of Eli and gather in a stagnant stretch of water just downstream of the island. I started making my way back upstream toward Eli’s boat. “I’ve got you, Eli,” called another student—we’ll call him Robert—from just upstream of Eli. Before I could intervene, Robert paddled his boat full steam ahead into Eli’s kayak, pushing Eli’s boat up onto the island at a rakish angle. Despite the adults’ directions to the contrary, Robert and Eli continued trying to wrestle their own and one another’s boats free, and quickly swamped both kayaks, soaking themselves in seconds. While I managed the rest of the group, my colleague helped the students get to shore, dump the water from their boats, relaunch, and make their way downstream.
In this situation, Eli’s mistake stemmed from distraction, but Robert’s errors exacerbated it and created the real danger, one rooted in overconfidence. Whether the students overestimated their own abilities, underestimated the force of the water, or some combination of both, their actions represented less than a full picture of the variables at work in the situation they experienced. I’ve seen middle schoolers try to flip their boats out of a misguided sense of adventure, but Eli and Robert didn’t want to get wet on that cold day—they miscalculated. The adult decisions putting the students in this situation in the first place stemmed from a similar mix of overconfidence and under- education. Our plans for the day foolishly assumed predictable behavior and sound decision-making from middle schoolers in conditions that exposed the students to an elevated chance of hypothermia or injury if they erred. Trainings I’ve taken in risk management since this incident would lead me to make a more conservative plan in the same conditions.
Overconfidence stemming from underdeveloped knowledge or skills is an academically documented phenomenon. Cornell University psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger introduced the Dunning-Kruger effect in an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999 (1). Most summaries of their work graph learners’ confidence in their knowledge of a particular field against their level of expertise and experience in that field on an X-Y plot. Not surprisingly, people with no knowledge or training in a given subject also lack confidence in it. But while knowledge creeps up slowly, confidence soars, resulting in an apex on the chart that some psychologists dub Mount Stupid. For my purposes, the term River Stupid refers to the same phenomenon.
In layman’s terms, Psychology Today outlines, “people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area . . . because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.”(2) You don’t know what you don’t know. Once learners progress past the peak of Mount Stupid, their confidence plummets once more into the Valley of Despair before increasing gradually as they gain substantial proficiency and knowledge.
Though recent studies (3) have challenged the legitimacy of Dunning and Kruger’s results, the idea of giving students false confidence and the dangers that can come with it ring true for me as an outdoor educator. Sometimes even before the completion of our course, some students will start applying the skills and sports in which we instruct them to their own independent adventures. Sending them out overconfident can put them at greater risk than not having them in class in the first place.
I make no claim to be an expert outdoor educator, but synthesizing my experiences in Swiftwater Rescue and outdoor education so far does leave me with a few takeaways about the best ways to support student learning in our courses. First, before they can grow through risk-taking, students need a sense of boundaries. Just as my favorite parenting experts advise that parents need to put toddlers in charge of toddler-sized decisions and make the adult- sized decisions themselves, both to prevent all-out chaos and to give toddlers a sense of emotional security, students need adults to set the parameters that will help to keep overall situations under control.
I think back to my own lucky childhood, paddling wilderness whitewater with a father who spent a few years on the U.S. Whitewater Canoe Team. Something about the unsinkable trust I had in my dad’s skills and judgment allowed me to relax into whitewater exhilaration in his boat in a way that was surprising for a child prone to anxiety and self-doubt. I knew that if a rap- ids was too far beyond my skill set or physical strength, especially given the wilderness setting of many of our paddling trips, he would advise me to sit it out and he would paddle the boat through the drop himself. Consequently, in situations where I could easily have let self-doubt paralyze me, my trust in my father gave me confidence to make an attempt. “I guess I really can do this,” I thought, and then I did it, much like in Swiftwater Rescue training with Mike.
Within the boundaries we provide as adults, we must give our students per- mission to practice, think for themselves, and make errors—possibly bigger ones than we are immediately comfortable allowing. We must be willing to give students a little slack in the short term so that they are able to develop the judgment that will serve their safety in the long term. Keith McCabe, an outdoor educator, wrote in 2014 for safetyrisk.net about risk management with students: “Outdoor education activities should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.” Isn’t it every outdoor educator’s hope that our students will continue to practice the sports we help coach them in long after they leave our classrooms? Before we can responsibly send our students out into the outdoor adventure world, we must prioritize helping them develop the judgment, skill sets, and honest self-assessment that will allow them to make safe decisions when we are not looking over their shoulders.
An example of adult boundaries that keep an overall situation safe for students while allowing them to learn from real mistakes comes from a col- league’s high school outdoor education class in the neighboring town of East Millinocket. In his navigation unit, Master Maine Guide Greg Friel likes to include genuine experience using a compass bearing to navigate—something that will give students a chance to test their skills in the woods with real stakes attached to their attempts. Greg takes students on a field trip out the Golden Road, a local logging conduit, away from cell phone service and areas they have likely hiked or hunted in the past. Because of the geographic constraints of the triangular site they visit—it has a river on two sides and a dirt road on the third—students cannot wander too far from Greg in a short period of time. If they err in their attempts to navigate, as many inevitably do, they will have the experience of being lost in the woods. Anyone who has experienced that can speak to how memorable such a situation can be. But, barring truly unusual errors (which, according to Greg, have occurred on exactly one occa- sion), Greg can find his lost students within fifteen minutes of walking. It’s enough of a bumper to prevent panic among students, without incentivizing them to just give up before trying to apply their skills.
The natural consequences of their actions are often the best learning tool that students have in our classes. At Swiftwater Rescue training, Greg mentioned to me that a math teacher at his school envies him the built-in consequences in outdoor education. “There are no natural consequences in math,” the teacher told Greg, especially for students not particularly moti- vated by grades or the traditional academic system, “but if they don’t listen to you, they’re going to flip their boats and get cold and wet.” Though I’m sure every teacher has occasionally wished students could experience the kind of swift and visceral behavioral consequences represented by flipping a boat in cold water, that’s not the point here. The point is the value of allowing students to make genuine, real-life mistakes for the benefit of learning from the experience.
Although students need adults to set the outer limits around risk-taking situations, they also need permission to set their own more conservative boundaries as they see fit. Forced risk-taking isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time or a productive educational experience.
In my experience, a counterintuitive side effect of allowing students to opt out of risky situations, or at least situations they perceive as risky, is that some of them will be more likely to opt in knowing that doing so isn’t mandatory. At the end of day one of Swiftwater Rescue training, my classmates and I were cold and tired. Despite our wetsuits, exertion in chilly water over the preceding hours had worn us out. Our final drill for the day involved practicing various strategies for swimming through a strainer, an obstruction in the current that allows water and small objects to pass through, but entraps larger objects such as boats or people. Mike had crafted an artificial strainer from a six-foot long piece of polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC) pipe strung along a throw rope, which he had in turn secured on both sides of the channel. Mike told us that each student would swim through the strainer three times, in different body positions each time. Our first position would represent the best- case scenario for safety. The second would represent the worst-case but also most likely scenario, given the difficulty of noticing a strainer and positioning one’s body advantageously in advance. Our third position would represent a decent middle ground if someone sees a strainer on very short notice while swimming through a drop.
Lining up on the shore to take my first trip through, I overheard one classmate approach Mike and ask, “Do we have to do this drill?” His voice was tense and choppy—whether from cold, anxiety, or some combination, it was difficult to tell. “Nope,” Mike answered. “Every activity in this entire course is optional.” I expected the student to sit the activity out after this con- versation, but instead he walked directly to the back of the line of Swiftwater Rescue students waiting to swim through the strainer. When it was his turn he leaned forward, crossed his arms over his upper chest and face as Mike had taught us, and performed a smooth Swiftwater entry. He swam through the strainer all three times, practicing each strategy Mike had assigned us.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon in middle school outdoor education, mostly when students are choosing cross-country skiing routes. Often, the students who initially balk at a particularly steep downhill, full of anxiety at the prospect of injury or embarrassment, relax when they’re told the hill is optional. After a chance to watch others ski down it, they take multiple attempts at the grade themselves. Taking the pressure off seems to be the key ingredient here.
Additionally, if we’re hoping to create outdoor enthusiasts who go on to apply their skills outside the context of our courses, we have to help them develop robust enough skills and valid enough self-assessment that they do not make mistakes that equate to jumping off the top of Dunning and Kru- ger’s Mount Stupid. Students have to have a clear and accurate sense of their own limits.
The urgency of helping students develop the type of sound judgment that will serve them on independent adventures away from the watchful eyes of adults may initially feel more relevant for educators who work with high school students and older. But in rural communities such as mine, unfettered access to outdoor recreation is a main draw and a hope for sustaining a population into the future. Here, students don’t have to sign up for a formal program or pay much money to access risky recreational opportunities. Innovative and beloved gear-lending programs like our local Katahdin Gear Library, which lends community members everything from mountain bikes and skis to paddleboards and kayaks, make this even more true.
This fall, my colleagues and I paddled several miles down Millinocket Stream from our school to a take-out known as Dead Man’s Curve. Our route took us past the remains of the Northern Paper Company Mill that was our community’s life blood until the past decade or so. Great Northern diverted a substantial part of the Penobscot River through the mill site itself, so paddling past it resembles the confluence with another major waterway, or the area downstream of a small hydroelectric dam.
“Now that I know how to go through this section, I think I’m going to take my little brother down this weekend,” I heard an eighth grader comment to another adult as we passed below the mill. “I’ve always worried that paddling past the mill wasn’t safe, but now I know how to do it.” I held my breath to see how my colleague would respond: delighted with the student’s newfound empowerment or panicked by the idea of two preteens here unsupervised? Happily, my colleague told the student that different water levels create variable conditions, and they talked about how to assess conditions each time one paddles through.
What kept me up that night, though, was the knowledge that most students planning to apply their outdoor education skills to independent adventures wouldn’t voice their plans to adults in advance; this one was just trying to thank us for opening a door for him. How many times have I set students up to embark on risky adventures bolstered by confidence from out- door education?
These reflections on the value of learning through erring—the need for adults to set boundaries, allow teens to make their own mistakes within them and respect their own limitations, and the importance of developing accurate self-assessment in students—would not be earth-shattering to people such as Mike Smith or Greg Friel. But for me, they certainly play an active role as I rethink my priorities for my outdoor education class. I have left liability questions unasked here, as well as questions about balancing the scale of risk to which we can expose our students with the responsibilities we do have to keep them safe in their day-to-day learning experiences. The behavior of Mike’s Swiftwater Rescue students is likely more predictable than that of my middle schoolers, and this allows him more leeway to allow for learning through error. The lessons here are not as simple as just letting go; rather, we must hone our ability to find the moments in which we can afford to let go so that we can safely hand responsibility off to students in the long term.
The opportunity to learn from such experienced outdoor educators as Mike and Greg also makes me realize that I’ve taken a few trips to the summit of Mount Stupid myself in my time teaching outdoor education. After my initial descent into the Valley of Despair that learners reach when they realize just how little they know, I think that contact with educators like these will play a vital role in helping me gradually build both my confidence and my actual skill set from here.
Anna Hager Loome is a public school teacher based in Millinocket, Maine. In her spare time, you can find her paddling, hiking, and cross-country skiing in the North Maine Woods. She is a graduate of Amherst College and the Bread Loaf School of English.
(1) J. Kruger and D. Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6: 1121–1134. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121.
(2) See the explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect at psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-effect.
(3) Jonathan Jarry interviewed researcher David Dunning in an article suggesting the effect could be overstated. See mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real.