It was a hot summer day, so we had planned ahead and brought along plenty of water bottles to keep us properly hydrated. But the girls perhaps ended up taking too many of them for themselves, inadvertently leaving a pitifully diminished supply for the menfolk.
What happened next is the stuff of which legends are made – not to mention, chas veshalom, those roadside (or mountainside) makeshift memorials.
While the women and girls were happily chatting, eating snacks and sipping soft drinks, the men were getting hopelessly lost finding their way down the mountain. Their cellphones had virtually no reception, and eventually no power either, and they soon ran out of drinking water as well. They ultimately began having semi-hallucinatory visions of being stuck on that mountaintop forever, or worse.
Meanwhile, the day was beginning to wane and the females were slowly starting to panic. They had not heard from their men and boys for hours already, and repeated phone calls yielded no results.
Finally, a group of bone-weary, haggard bikers rode into their line of vision. The sorry-looking guys had returned at long last. And what a tale they had to tell.
Our wounded, dehydrated, limping contingent practically crawled over to the rental office to return their bikes. Then, following a brief albeit refreshing visit to the concession stand, we all piled into our vans for the winding drive back home.
Epilogue:
Our soon-to-be new daughter-in-law joined us for Shabbos dinner, and we spent hours, both during and after the meal, reminiscing about favorite family memories and sharing anecdotes. These Big Bear recollections were retold with obvious relish by a chorus of voices, and they eventually had us all laughing uproariously and gasping for breath.
Later, after the house quieted down again, I had a belated epiphany. Although my reference to Big Bear was meant purely as a geographic location, perhaps we actually have more in common with those much-maligned, and to my mind foolhardy, live-in-the-wild environmentalists than we care to admit.
In fact, it was only by virtue of pure chasdei Hakadosh Baruch Hu, or more accurately, shomer pesa’im Hashem (Hashem watched over fools), that all of us not only lived to tell the tale, but could actually laugh wholeheartedly while doing so.
