Learning From History

We headed to St. George over this last weekend for Ian's rugby tournament. I'll put up another post about the tournament later. They had some tough matches in terrible weather. Ian played great, but no wins :(

After the tournament, we headed up to the red rocks just north of town to walk around a bit and see the sights. Also, I wanted to show the kids the cliff their mom jumped off on our first date.

Aimee and I went down to St. George with some friends to bum around and hike a bit. After several trips to Zions and some slight exaggerating, Aimee had me convinced that she liked the out of doors. She had not yet specified that her style of outdoors was hanging out in the backyard by the pool with an unlimited supply of Diet Coke, electrical outlets and enough artificial nighttime lighting to suntan under. Turns out, the lighting was an especially important detail...

Incorrectly assuming that Aimee was as happy to be out hiking the day away as I was, we ended up straggling behind and didn't get heading back to the car until dusk. I was now unaware of two important facts: Aimee is has no depth perception in anything less than full sunlight and after hiking around aimlessly for several hours she was more likely to leave me behind for dead than listen to anything I had to say.

The first drop-off we came to was about 4 feet. Angry Aimee was not excited about going around it and insisted we just slide down. I managed to talk her around it and in doing so, used up the last tiny shred of patience she didn't have in the first place.

The second drop off, in the pic below, was slightly higher than the first. I pointed out the fact that the car was parked way down below us and that the path forward meant certain death. All she heard was, "The car is right there and if you get to it first you can leave me for dead."

Thinking I had made clear the imminent peril before her, I turned to head around and down to the car. I will never forget the 'WHOOSH, THUD' sound I heard immediately after turning around, or the absence of Aimee when I turned back around.

After a minute's panic as I ran down the hill and found that she was still alive and mostly unbroken, I decided she was probably just entertaining enough to keep dating.