****1909 words****Published in River magazine, May 1999
The lure of numbers
If you think about it, one of the stranger things our culture does is to specify every aspect of our lives in terms of numbers. We’ve got digital clocks, speed limits and - for god’s sake - minimum daily requirements for every vitamin and trace element identified by science. There are part numbers for the chip that controls the timing in your Izuzu’s fuel injector, and hundreds of psychological tests that supposedly describe your personality, intelligence, and self-esteem. Computers ensure that everything about you will eventually be bar-coded or encrypted into long strings of zeros and ones. If you like numbers, western culture on the threshold of the millenium is a very good place to be. And given all these, I guess it’s inevitable that we also would try to stick numbers on even the most changeable and emphemeral part of our world - flowing water.
River-rating as art and artiface
The sport of river running has grown rapidly over the past 10 or 15 years, with equipment and attitudes changing along with the knowledge of what can be survived. As each generation comes along with its own challenges and ideas, the ways that we look at rivers and rapids evolve. This holds for the pleasures we seek on the river as well as for our views of difficulty.
In kayaking and rafting, our measure of difficulty is the river rating scale. It has done yoeman’s service the last 30 or so years but has lagged behind the changes in the sport, and is beginning - at least in some people’s minds - to show a little wear around the edges. It is a deceptively simple system, just a number from one to six that characterizes whitewater in terms of the difficulty you might expect if you try to run it. Class I is flat moving water, while Class II includes waves and rocks and requires some maneuvering. As one moves up through class III and IV, each step involves a large increase in difficulty and a coincident development of skills, until at Class IV+, the rapids you are dealing with are complex and often powerful. They require advanced maneuvering and a certain roll on both sides. A distinct jump then gets you to Class V, which in many ways is the outpost of the scale. These rapids nearly always need to be scouted, are at the upper end of difficulty, and involve possible injury or death. Even though only a relatively small number of kayakers run Class V, the main problems of the rating scale reside there.
A novice might ask a simple but profound question of this scale: how do entire rivers fit into these numbers? Of course, the honest answer is that they don’t. The ratings can say quite a lot to you if you know how to listen and don’t expect too much. But in the end, the impossible job of any such rating is using a static number to describe a complex and changing reality. Within this paradox lies the art and the artiface of river rating.
When we speak of an art, we normally think of a skill that is intuitive, nurtured by long practice into a kind of deep, fluid and spontaneous understanding. It is a word that we generally reserve for mature painters, sculptors, or musicians. In contrast, an artiface is a clever trick, strategy, or device that accomplishes some goal, such as a stage setting for a play that is so well crafted it gives the appearance of reality.
The art in river rating comes from experience and allows you to read the important subtleties of a river in a simple number. In contrast, the artiface in rating is the clever trick of capturing the river within that number, or a set of numbers and symbols. Clearly the person interested in art would prefer to develop his intution through experience, although this is an uncertain struggle that will take many years. The one interested in artiface would like to construct a more complete rating in hopes that he can capture some of the intuition of the expert and communicate it to others.
The upper end of difficulty is where the problems lie. For the life of the old scale an odd taboo has existed which reserves Class VI for "unrun" rapids. By this logic, as soon as a rapid is run it is downrated to Class V. As ever more difficult rivers are run, an ever-larger range of rapids are stuffed into this grade. As a result, the Class V rating contains a bizarre mixture of different types of rapids which range drastically in difficulty and danger, because all of the many innovations leading to harder runs get compressed into a single grade. Clearly, if you’re a little out of sync with the cutting edge, you may get in over your head by mistaking somebody else’s rating of Class V for your own.
At present, there is a huge difference between "easy" and "hard" Class V. In fact, within this one class a highly experienced kayaker probably includes a range of rapids equivalent to the difference in the entire rest of the scale from Class I to Class IV. If this seems far-fetched, that is because the rapids done over the last 6 or 8 years are astonishing and include such things as huge waterfalls, intimidatingly long sequences of large drops, banking and ricocheting lines through congested chutes, and big water lines into long series of exploding waves and closeout holes. Needless to say, the general consensus is that if you make a mistake while doing such rapids, you probably will die. And although you might think that Darwinian selection would eventually put an end to this foolishiness, there are those who thrive on it and seek to push it further.
Since people are not going to quit doing harder runs, the solution to the downrating is simple and generally agreed on. Obviously, the taboo of using Class VI needs to be rejected. One can use Class VI, VII or beyond, or use a decimal system like that in climbing with ratings starting at 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, and going as high as needed. Either gives room for the sport to grow and puts no limit on ratings of difficulty. Both types of ratings are in use now.
Another problem is describing the types of rapids included in Class V, each of which requires distinct skills which largely depend on the size and steepness of the river. Kayakers usually consider flow levels and gradient essential information because these form a natural separation in the type of skills needed. Examples might be a steep creek with 300 cubic feet per second and 200 feet per mile, or a big river with 20,000cfs and 50 fpm. For the cognoscenti these numbers go a surprisingly long way in specifing the kind of rapids you can expect. However, for those with less experience things are not so clear, and so an additional menagerie of descriptions are often tagged on: tight chutes, boney waterslides, congested boulder drops, exploding pourovers, keeper holes, boily eddylines, and so on.
The distinction between types of skills centers around proactive and reactive techniques. On steep creeks and small rivers, the paddler is usually dealing with water features smaller than his kayak and current that he can overpower. Here, he needs more aggressive techniques such as those stressed by slalom: precise forward and turning strokes, greater boat speed, planing the boat over drops, and keeping the bow up. In contrast, on bigger rivers the size of the features he is dealing with are much larger than his kayak, the current so powerful and the speed so great that he cannot overcome them. Here he is forced to use more reactive techniques: using the water’s speed to position himself, "getting small" to penetrate waves, dynamically balancing as he rebounds off turbulant cells and holes or maintains balance on a powerful eddyline. It is possible to include these types of variables in a rating, adding a distinction between steep creek to big water, and by implication, the skills required.
A further variable that has been included in ratings is danger. Running a rapid with a runout into flatwater is less dangerous than one above a 200 foot waterfall. Likewise, running a complex line with possibilities of vertically pinning or wrapping on a log is definitely more dangerous than the same line if it is clean. The difficulty can be the same, but the danger is very different because of the consequences of an error. While rating danger has intuitive appeal, it disappoints when you consider it carefully. The problem is that you never know how close to oblivion you actually are, and fear of some possible consequence isn’t the same thing as knowing what will actually happen.
Other variables sometimes considered are portages, water level, the length of the run, weather, and how far it is to help. A case can be made for each one, however as more variables are added the ratings turn into mere descriptions of the runs. The practical problem is how much information can be distilled into a system and how much should be left up to the experience of the river runner.
About five years ago I constructed a rating including all of these variables and pried reactions out of 50 or more paddling buddies. They were from six countries, primarily top kayakers, but also included rafters and a group of intermediate kayakers. The reactions were fascinating. The intermediates, and especially the people who were starting to work into Class V, couldn’t get enough information. The longer, more elaborate and intricate the ratings, the more they liked them.
In contrast, the most experienced paddlers insisted that no amount of detail in the ratings actually told you what the river was like. Some of them were downright bad-tempered in their opinions, with the gist of the reactions best expressed in the old saying, "there’s no substitute for experience." Perhaps most interesting, they actually enjoyed leaving doubt so that they could discover what lay between the lines. In effect, the ambiguity and confusion of the old rating system were virtues, because their pleasure in running rivers came from finding their own answers. They didn’t want a new and better system, because they knew the art hidden in the old.
The reactions show that certain things we look for on a river will never be fit into a rating no matter how clever or complete the system is. They show that the artiface of the system may blind the newcomer to the art of the river.
There are other gems hidden within the old rating system. Its spareness forces you to realize the core of kayaking is coming to your own personal balance with the river. It denies assertions that a rapid can have a precise difficulty and character, and instead, tells you to make your own decisions and trust your own judgment. Much of the joy in kayaking lies in taking personal responsibility for each moment you flow with the water, and this holds true whether you are in Class I or Class VI. So next time you consider the rating system, don’t believe that a single number or any combination of numbers can tell you what you really want to know. After all, numbers are only numbers, and artifice can never substitute for art.