A tree with strong roots laughs at storms.
– Malay proverb
I was on a hike last summer with my beloved but ball-obsessed retriever, Sadie, when she suddenly dropped her orange & blue chuck-it ball near the edge of a cliff. Sure enough, over the edge it rolled and eventually came to rest on a rock ledge near the bottom of a small ravine. Judging by the look Sadie gave me (and the fact that she didn’t seem to be in any rush to retrieve it herself), I suspect it was a test of sorts, to see how good MY retrieving skills were.
But I didn’t fall for that trap…oh no! I knew better than to clamber down a steep and slippery embankment in the middle of the woods with no one around (other than Sadie) to pick up the pieces, should things happen to go awry.
So home we went.
But I had hung out with this retriever far too long to be able to actually forget about the ball, so when my big brother came to visit two weeks later, I took him on the hike and showed him the ball…which, of course, was still on the ledge because who in their right mind would go down and get it? I asked him if he thought I would be able to safely navigate my way down the ravine and back up again. Sadie, of course, watched this discussion with great interest.
My brother looked around, did a quick risk assessment then shook his head. “Not worth it,” he said. “Leave it where it is.”
But as I mentioned, by that point I had spent an awful lot of time with this ball-obsessed retriever and, apparently, had become one myself.
I shook my head. “I think I can do it,” I said, then told him my strategy.
He sighed and gave me the big brother look. But before embarking on my descent, I gave him a second orange & blue chuck-it ball and told him to hold it in front of Sadie but not give it to her. That way, she would for sure remain with him and not follow me down.
“Do I need to hold on to her collar?” he asked.
“Oh no,” I said. “If you’ve got a ball in your hand, she’s not going anywhere.”
My brother did exactly as he was told, and all went according to plan. Sadie stayed with him…her eyes fixed on the chuck-it ball in his hand. I made it safely down the embankment, stepped over the creek, retrieved the ball, put it in my back pocket, then made a last-minute decision to go up that side of the riverbed…instead of stepping back over the creek and going back up the same side I went down.
All was going well, until I reached out to grab onto a big rock—instead of a tree—and the next thing I knew, the rock gave way and came crashing down onto my shin. Correction: into my shin. For the rock was a large and pointy slab of shale just waiting to be released from the soil of the eroding riverbank.
Despite the searing pain, I heard my brother call out in alarm, “Are you okay?!”
“Yeah,” I said then began my slow and sheepish crawl back up the embankment.
At the top, my brother looked, wide-eyed, at my bruised and bloody shin—but had the wisdom NOT to say, “I told you so.”
I pulled the ball out of my pocket and held it up in front of Sadie, triumphant. “I got it!”
Sadie looked briefly at the ball in my hand then back at the ball in my brother’s hand, which is where her focus remained. You’ve got to be kidding?
I looked at my brother. “Just out of curiosity,” I said. “What did Sadie do when I fell?”
There was an awkward silence then: “Uh…nothing. She didn’t take her eyes off the ball in my hand. She didn’t even blink. It was extraordinary.”
Not to mention humbling. But at least I knew where I stood in relation to a chuck-it ball.
Now, there are several morals to this story—the most obvious one being to never risk one’s safety for a silly $7 ball. Another is: why worry about an old ball when a new one is right in front of you? Another might be: if you are going to hold onto something for dear life, you best make sure it has roots.
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Previously Published on Pink Gazelle
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Internal image courtesy of author