View from the North 40: If you 'can't even imagine' then be prepared

I wish to unread a news article I found this week but, apparently, until my hereditary Alzheimer’s sets in I’m stuck with it in my brain.

The Associated Press reported that a bowling alley owner got stuck in his pin setting machine Sunday and died there. For real.

It’s the kind of tragedy you expect to see in a movie — a dark comedy or a horror movie — not something you expect to happen in real life.

Many years ago, now, two friends and I were watching a video of horse and rider teams competing at Olympic-level cross country jumping. These are serious athletes and they gallop these miles-long grassy courses, leaping solid jumps bigger than a four-door sedan or two-times bigger than your couch. Some jumps are as tall and deep as these, but they are so narrow there’s only, maybe, a foot of clearance between the marker flags and the rider’s knees.

The jumping course is a wide, winding lane defined by a light rope strung between posts, and sometimes snow-fencing is added to make the barrier more substantial. At these bigger events, crowds of spectators line the entire course, most often right up to the rope.

One of my friends was a very experienced cross country jumper and trainer and I was a pretty serious amateur in those days. The third friend knew very little about the sport, so at one point she asked us, in all her naivety, “Do those horses ever jump into the crowd?”

The one friend and I politely stifled our snorts of amusement and said, “Oh, no, not at this level of competition. That’s just — hahaha — no.”

I kid you not, five minutes later, the video showed a horse and rider jump this huge elevated log, but the rider let his reins play out too long and he couldn’t get control of the horse right away. The course took a sharp turn to the left after the jump, but the horse went straight forward and jumped into the crowd.

Actually, no, the horse didn’t just jump into the crowd. He tried to jump over the top of one of the camera operators as if the guy was a skinny jump, but the guy was too tall, so the horse’s chest slammed into the camera, flipped the guy backward over the snow fence, where he hung upside down, knocked out cold, while the rider struggled to get the horse to stop galloping, jumping and hopping around among the spectators.

The one friend and I were, like, “What!? No! Holy cats! I’ve never!”

Some disasters you can’t imagine ... until you do. Like the time I was tossing a toy for my brother’s dog to chase and I said, “Uh, hey, does he ever run into the precarious setup you have with all your fly-tying stuff on that tiny TV tray?”

“Oh, no, he would never,” he said.

Then I threw the toy one more time and ruined that perfect record for the dog.

The one time I saw the back side of the bowling alley and how those pin setting machines work, I said, “Hey, that would be pretty horrible to get caught in one of those.”

Even over the sound of machinery I could hear his scoffing snort, “As if that would ever happen.”

Well, yes sir, yes, that can happen. That businessman in Colorado would tell you all about it and demand you take that scoff back, but he didn’t live to tell the cautionary tale.

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Sometimes an active imagination works against you and your brain’s peace of mind at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.