Showing Off in Capri.

     I’d read one evening in November that the next morning was to be a foggy one in Bucks County. In the hope of some nice photos I got up around six, left my worked-the-night-before spouse peacefully snoring, and headed for a familiar spot on the Tohickon Creek about twenty minutes from our home. The water level of the creek depends almost solely on how much recent rain there’s been; sometimes the water is right up to the bank, and sometimes you can walk from one side to the other on the exposed rocks. This day was somewhere in the middle, and I was scrambling up and down the bank and jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock while shooting pictures up, down, across, and into the water. Unfortunately, speaking of into the water…

     Usually when you slip and fall there’s a feeling that you have the time to throw up your arms, or reach for a support if there’s one around, or at least realize that you’re going down and the time has come to scream and brace yourself. It didn’t happen that way. I went down like a sack of hammers, completely submerged in only two feet of water: shoes, socks, jeans, days-of-the-week underwear, shirt, sweatshirt, jacket, watch, wallet, eyeglasses, keys, and, worst of all, camera. One second I was standing on an algae-covered rock, the next second I was coming up for air, coughing up a tiny fish and realizing what had happened, and coming to the further realization that I was, well, kinda wet. AND kinda cold, from the forty-degree water and the forty-degree air. Ouch!

     I stumbled soaking wet the fifty yards or so to my car only to realize my keys were not in my jacket. I guessed they’d gone flying when I went behind-over-toupee and I’d find them in the creek bed. Uh, no. I searched the path I’d just taken from the car, and checked to see if I’d left the keys in the car when I first drove up. Uh, no. Back to the water and onto the same rock I’d just somersaulted off, where I finally saw just the tip of one key sticking from the mud. As I was already wet, I simply stepped into the water, picked up my keys, and drove home.
  I post the picture not because it’s in any way special but because it’s the last one I took before my little "Tohickon Adventure" Needless to say, the camera gave up the ghost.

     I admit that committing embarrassing acts without witnesses helps the recovery process. It’s likely to have taken so much longer for my friend Barb (yes, the Barb of Feb 2) to recover from her own embarrassing “Italian Adventure”, wherein she, in a very public waterfront park in Capri, tripped gracefully over a small rise in the stones and face planted in front of a couple hundred people, all of whom abundantly enjoyed the spectacle of her panicked belly-crawl after her skittering camera, which had a perfectly understandable desire, given the clear, blue, sparkling sea, to scuba dive for the first and only time. Here’s her first “checking to see if the camera still works” picture after rising to her feet and acknowledging the applause of her public. The foamy spot in the bottom left quadrant of the photo is where her mother—who uncharacteristically, unwisely, and, as it turns out, tragically, laughed hysterically at her daughter—had just gone under.*

Barb's lesson to us all: if you insist on going butt-over-hairline, do it when you're alone.


*Okay, I'm joking. Got a little carried away. It was her sister she threw in.

P.S. After a week, I put batteries back into the camera and it worked again!