Leadership for a Time of Pandemic by Tod Bolsinger

Author:Tod Bolsinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: resilience;leadership formation;leadership development;leading change;change leadership;adaptive leadership;canoeing the mountains;pandemic;coronavirus
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2020-05-11T10:58:35+00:00

LISTENING: HAMMERING IN ATTUNEMENT

We had just finished hiking twenty miles. The morning had started at Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park and continued through miles of forested trails, up numerous switchbacks, and over hundreds of granite steps. We finally ascended three hundred feet of a granite incline, pulling ourselves up the backside of Half Dome using the installed steel cables. For twelve years, every year I took an incoming high school senior class and a group of leaders on this epic hike. Earlier in the day we had celebrated our accomplishment with lunch, cellphone calls to parents, and a group picture standing on top of Half Dome taking in the vast valley below.

And then we had nine miles to go back to the Yosemite Valley floor. Because one of the girls on the trip strained her knee, I ended up having to drop back from the rest of the group and go super slow. What should have been a three-hour trip down turned into five as we limped into Curry Village late, out of water, and very tired.

But just as I sat down to eat a piece of pizza, someone said, “Isn’t Stan with you?” I was bewildered. Stan was an experienced hiker and had been at the front of the group; he should have come in long before. It didn’t make sense.

“Why would Stan be with me?” I asked.

“He finished the hike with us, but he knew you were bringing the girl down, that it was getting cold and dark, and that you were running out of water. He filled up water bottles and grabbed an extra jacket and headed back up to help you. You didn’t see him on the trail?”

I shook my head and felt a shiver of dread. We were all tired. It was late into the evening and dark. It was pretty dangerous for Stan to be on that trail in these conditions right now. If we had missed each other on the trail, then anything could have gone wrong. One slippery rock could mean a deadly tumble into the cold river or over the falls that roared around us.

Just then, Stan’s wife and daughters walked up. “Where’s Dad?” I explained that we must have missed each other and that he was likely back on the trail. I tried to be reassuring.

“What do you think we should do?” his wife asked me. I could hear in her calm voice the simplest catch in her throat. She looked at me intensely, trying to keep her daughters from noticing the fear that was beginning to flood through her system.

“Don’t worry. We’ll go back to meet him and walk down with him,” I said as calmly as I could.

I grabbed some water bottles, found my college-age son—an experienced hiker who had come along as a leader on the trip—and enlisted one other leader who was a college athlete and trained in wilderness first aid, asking her to grab her bag. We told the rest of the group to head back to camp.

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