Avalanche
by Jonathan Saladin
This story takes place in the Colorado Rockies. Bob was skiing down a slope. Bob loved to ski. As he was going down, he saw a steep slope across a ravine. He decided to give it a try. He hiked around and started down the slope.
About halfway down, he heard a loud rumble behind him. He thought, “I must have stirred up a grizzly bear. Lucky for me, I’m on skiis and he can’t catch me.” About three-fourths of the way down, rocks started passing him. He exclaimed, “That grizzly must be throwing rocks at me! I should speed up.”
Bob was almost at the bottom when trees started passing him. Bob looked back in wonder to see how big this bear was. But it wasn’t a bear. It was an avalanche. (Didn’t see that one coming, did you?)
Bob sighed with relief. “Oh, is that it? That’s no problem,” he said.
Bob reached into his backpack and pulled out his foldable, military-grade flamethower. (What else would he be carrying while he was on a skiing expedition?) “I never leave home without it,” he said. He aimed at the avalanche and pulled the trigger. Sputter. Sputter. “Uh oh,” he said. He looked around frantically either for an escape route, or for another foldable, military-grade flamethrower someone had carelessly left laying around. No flamethrower, but there was a bridge over the ravine he had gone around earlier. “How did I miss that?” he said. He skiied as fast as he could toward the bridge, right in front of the avalanche. He made it across just in time. The avalanche crushed the bridge and fell into the ravine below. Bob watched calmly. “Well, back to skiing,” he said, “right after I reload my flamethrower. I want to be ready for the next big white tree-hurtling grizzly bear."
Moral: Most of us have an enormous proclivity to fall over the truth, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and blithely resume our path.