Twelve students lined up along the edge of the state highway in a soft drizzle, facing the weathered rock face exposed by an old roadcut. Their professor hopped over the guide rail and waded through waist‑high weeds until he stood before them. Then he spoke, straining his voice to make himself heard over the ceaseless roar of traffic: “You’ll be writing up a full report on this outcrop, and today is the only time we’ll come out here. I expect your report to include a complete and accurate field sketch. Add photos if you want — I know that some of you have brought your cameras — but your grade on this project will depend on the quality of the sketch. It will make or break your report. So don’t waste any time, and don’t omit even the smallest detail. Take notes as if you’ll never come back here, because you probably won’t get a chance.”

I was one of those students standing by the roadside in the rain, and I knew I wouldn’t be coming back. I didn’t have a car or a bike in those years, and the outcrop was thirty miles from my college dorm. I wasn’t worried, though. The prof had been giving us these assignments since the semester began. I knew what to look for — form, proportion, contrast, distinguishing features. My classmates did, too. So for two hours we scrambled over the roadcut, scribbling furiously. By the time we piled into the van for the trip back to the campus our rucksacks were weighed down with rock samples, and stone dust was ground deep into the knees of our jeans. But everyone had a carefully executed sketch of the outcrop in his (or her) journal.

My prof’s voice still rings in my ears today. “Take notes as if you’ll never come back” is also good advice for paddlers, even if we’re not going to be graded on our reports. The prof was trying to get a class of fledgling geologists to understand the difference between seeing and observing. Paddlers need to understand this, too. Reading water is all about observing. We can only see what’s happening on the surface, but we have to look deeper than that to make sense of the hydraulics of a whitewater river, and we need to do more than eyeball the scenery if we want to read the story in the clouds during the buildup to a storm over a big lake. And that’s not all. A paddler who can’t speak the language of the landscape will never succeed in staying found when the batteries in his GPS go dead, even if he did remember to bring a map and compass.

You see where I’m coming from, I’m sure: Observation is key, for both paddlers and geologists. But where am I going? Here’s where there’s more to sketching than making pretty pictures.… Read more…

 
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