While not direct Shore or bike context, there are some strong parallels to mtb'ing in the following article. So the thread question; how do you move through life? Do you stumble blindly, expecting others to pick up the pieces of your mishaps? Do you plan diligently, sometimes to the point of being obsessive about every little detail? Or are you usually somewhere in between, taking the experience and knowledge you've gained so far and applying it as best you can while understanding that there may be unseen risks which could cause you some injury? And most importantly, if something does go wrong, how much of it do you own? Where does your own level of responsibility lie?
Some activities it seems to make sense that the provider shoulders a certain level of responsibility and try to mitigate or even eliminate risk, say like at an amusement park for example. However, activities in nature always present risk, some seen and some unseen, even with seemingly low consequence activities. How much responsibility should someone who recreates in wild, untamed nature take on? Should government bodies hold some responsibility if one decides to wander off into the forest where there is no trail? What if you decide to get into the water on a river? Recent court rulings would seem to suggest that governments seem to be responsible for every square centimeter of the land they manage. So if one's spouse goes tubing on a river and they should unfortunately happen to die then the government bears some responsibility and needs to pay up. I don't think it's the government's job to protect me from my own lack of using critical thinking to assess an activity that could potentially kill me.
Decisions such as the one below could potentially have ramifications beyond signage on a river.
We don't know what our limits are, so to start something with the idea of being limited actually ends up limiting us.
Ellen Langer
