it's always funny

Last night while talking to my sister on the phone I watched a squirrel fall off a telephone wire.

She mentioned, and she was right, the similarity between this and the squirrel sequence from Disney's The Sword in the Stone. Except this squirrel wasn't being chased by anything. It wasn't even moving very fast. It was just sitting there, then it started to move slowly along the wire, and it just...lost its grip. It hung on for dear life by its front paws, its little back feet quivering, and then it fell. Into the tree branches directly below it, which yo-yo'd violently under its plump early summer weight while it scrambled for a hold and retrieved its normal squirrel heartrate and, I imagine, its normal squirrel dignity.

It reminded me of me trying to do a chin-up.

Why is someone falling always, always funny? Why is it even funnier when it's an animal? I always expect animals to be more graceful. They have those animal instincts, and those four paws, and that natural agility that we as humans are supposed to lack, and need all these tools and big cerebrums to compensate for. So when I watch Meg and Phillip's dog trip (with two more legs on the ground than I have), or Simon take a flying leap at the bed and ricochet off my leg, or a squirrel fall off a telephone wire, it's hilarious.

On Memorial Day Meg and Phillip and I saw a human act of amazing stupidity, however, which made the squirrel's internal balance, by contrast, look even and regulated. We headed up to Warren Dunes to watch the sun set, which of course involved climbing Tower Hill (entirely made of sand), which, however much eroded it's become since my friends' childhoods, is still a challenging climb (a good thirty-five degree incline toward the top). We then selected a smaller, isolated dune nearby from which to watch the sun and the water in privacy and peace, and were just settling in when, lo and behold, the evidently drunken driver of a white Jeep decided his automobile could make the climb up Tower Hill.

He made it about ten yards.

And got stuck.

And took about five minutes getting unstuck and back down the hill. Sand was flying in lovely graceful arcs from under his tires while his motor roared, in full view of everyone on the crown of the hill, and on the beach below.

As Phillip said, "It was worth the drive just for this."

As I said, "Do it again!"

But apparently he wasn't that drunk.

God bless America.