1. At The Boat Ramp
“I saw something last weekend that really scared me,” he said the other day when we were at lunch.
I raised my eyebrows in a do tell way as I took another bite of BBQ sausage.
And so he told me this little story of how he saw a guy at the boat ramp launching his boat. As the guy backed his trailer towards the water, his truck started sliding.
“It was a small truck,” he said. “Something like a Jeep. And the boat was big.”
The truck started sliding, and the guy applied his breaks, but the boat kept pulling him down the ramp towards the water. All four tires were locked up, and the guy was turning his front wheels to try to get the truck to stop — to no avail.
Think what that guy must have been thinking.
It turned out well, though. When the trailer slid into the water, the sliding stopped, and the guy got out of his truck and launched his boat.
That was the end of the story.
2. End of the Day
I woke up last night at 2:00 am.
Bang! I’m awake with my eyes wide open.
As I slept, it struck me that the story wasn’t over.
“I realized something last night that really scared me,” I told him at lunch today.
“Oh?” he said.
And so I told him how there was more to the story about the guy with the Jeep and the boat. It was a holiday weekend, and so the guy was probably out on the lake for a long time. It would have been early evening when he got back to the ramp.
“And it rained in the afternoon, remember?” I asked.
“It did,” he said.
So I pointed out that if the boat and the trailer were so heavy that they dragged the Jeep down the ramp earlier in the day, how on earth was that Jeep going to pull that boat up the ramp while it was raining?
His eyes widened, and he set his hamburger down.
“You’re right,” he said. “That is really scary.”