Playing at Tragedy

Men play at tragedy beacuse they do not recognize the tragedy of civilized life.
-From Into Thin Air

So last night I was enraptured with an experience that all Jeep drivers paradoxically dread yet yearn for: my Cherokee was paralyzed in the thick muddy fields of Sam Houston National Forest. What started off as an innocent attempt to crash the Jeep into a fleeing deer (for food naturally-these winters are long and hard up North) had quickly turned into a battle between life and death. With each futile rotation of the arrested tires the impending sense of doom grew within our hearts, and we too were sinking into the depths of the earth.

Wait. That’s a little, oh what’s the word, absurdly melodramatic. John, Andy and I did see a beautiful young buck and perhaps someone (read: me!) might have yelled we must capture the beast to feed ourselves through the winter. What followed was an ill-fated off-roading pursuit that quickly found us knee deep in mud. I know I say this a lot (just ask Corrie!), and it might have lost its meaning, but…I was done before I even started.

While some might consider getting a Jeep stuck, in the middle of the night, in a forest, as a congregation of deer mockingly watches from afar, troublesome, it is the least of worries for three young bucks like ourselves. After all, we are soon to be college graduates and are therefore very smart (read: ignoramus, feebleminded).

Our collective knowledge, it turns out, is just short of pragmatic when it comes to excising vehicles form the clutches of mud. Although Andy (Film major) was able to line up some great foreground framing, and John (English major) retreated to the woods to pen a sonnet, and I was able to analyze the cultural context in an anthropological sense, we were reduced to some more, let’s say, unorthodox tactics. Let’s, for the sake of time (ha!) just say jamming toilet paper rolls beneath the tires does not liberate a vehicle from the shackles of the malleable earth.

Long story, well, incredibly long, the Jeep (after two hours of labor) ultimately pulled through. It was (albeit arguably) the most exciting moment of my twenty two years on this earth! As we stopped down the road (oh sweet pavement!) on the outskirts of a moonlit baseball diamond to admire the mud which painted the Jeep, I sensed the ghost of Norman Rockwell was in the trees admiring the scene of pure Americana unfold.

We spent the remainder of the evening plastered to the floor of my Uncles boat (trying to avoid the biting wind…it was freezing!) drinking Grandpa’s cough medicine, reminiscing about our old fraternity days. And of course, in keeping with tradition, a trip to Waffle House, our poorly lighted sanctuary of sorts.

While any further anecdotal tale from last night is fated to be anticlimactic, let me relay just one more additional happening. In the afternoon, Andy and I lunched at a quaint café a bit north of Conroe. I found myself somewhat bewitched by our waitress Courtney (oh that souther charm), and even got her to invite us over to make a fire at her house later that night. Alas, we told her we’d take a rain check.

Later that evening we regretted our choice and called Miss Courtney up. Andy was to do the talking. I imagine what he meant to say was “Can we come out later tonight to make a fire at your parents house?”

What Mr. Andy actually said, and this is verbatim, was: “Can we come out later tonight to set fire to your parents house?” Her reply, of course, came in the form of a dial tone.

What a great lesson in semantics!