Getting Swamped

You know your shoe will come with you when you walk. You know this intuitively; you don’t think about this. You walk, and your shoe walks with you. This has been established. So when you walk, and your shoe doesn’t come with you, or when you try to walk, and you can’t, because your shoe won’t let you, this, this is startling.

And when you realize that your mid-calf rubber workboots are sturdy, well-built shoes, you will find that when they don’t want you to walk, it can be somewhat difficult to convince them to. You can push, pull, wiggle, and wriggle all you please, but nothing’s gotta give.

And when you realize that your left mid-calf rubber workboot, which, like its right-footed companion, is supposed to be completely waterproof, has a tear in it, you find the mud and water which encase your feet, vacuuming you to the earth, will trickle in, chilling your toes with fear as well as, well, chill.  So, too, will the deluge of mud and water which dredge down both of your boots, when, as you struggle to free yourself, the top of your boots sink below the swampy surface.

You will find it ironic that earlier that day you had smarmy thoughts about how swamped you were with only one other person working on the farm, and having a newborn calf to feed five times a day and a newly nursing mother cow to hand milk twice a day. The irony is that now, you think to yourself, you are literally swamped. You just wanted to run a bit of electric fencing through the swamp to extend the cattle pasture so they’ll stop getting out and trying to browse from the neighbor’s garden because they’re hungry because their pasture is running low on grass and greenery because they ate it all because the herd is larger than it’s supposed to be because the farmer missed a slaughter date earlier in the summer because he, too, was swamped. Not literally.

You will freak out for a minute, because, what if you really are stuck, and the neighbors are away on a trip, and Dom is who knows where, and it’s a good thing the swamp has a bottom, but what if you can’t get out and you’re stuck here for, like, I guess, an inconvenient period of time, until somebody finds you, which will probably not be that long, because if you went missing, work wouldn’t be done, and then Dom would come looking. Oh. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad. Breathe.

Assess. Ooh, you will see a stick, that is promising in its stick-ness. It promises to provide you a third leg, something to push off of to get your feet out of the muddy mud. You will break it. Darn.

Re-assess. You will look around a little more and see a small tree that you could probably use as an actual pushing off point, because, duh, it’s solidly planted in the ground. It will be too far for you to reach. You will wish your stick hadn’t broken because it had a little hook you could have used to reach the tree. You will realize you would have broken the stick trying to pull yourself to the tree anyway. Darn.

Think, think, think. You will remember, or think you remember, something about needing to spread yourself out when stuck in quicksand. You will be confused about what that means now that you’re actually stuck. Hmmm.

You will naturally go back to what you started doing, which was wriggling, pulling, and desperately trying to walk your shoes as you have done so many countless walks before in your life. In the process, you will lose your balance, and fall to the side. Your muddy, cold toes will feel grateful that the rest of your body is joining the fiesta.

You will realize two things from your prone position. THIS IS WHAT THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT WHEN THEY SAID SPREAD YOURSELF OUT. It makes sense now. Your body is spread out, and you can definitely pull your feet out a little bit. Also. THE TREE, THE LITTLE TREE, IS SUDDENLY WITHIN REACH. With these powers combined, you will free you and your faithful shoes from the muddy maw of the swamp.

And when this happens, you will keep going, keep doing, just as you were before.