Wait, she said what?
Picture this, it’s the blazing hot summer of 2013 and a lifted, white Chevy Silverado parks in a campground in the northeast corner of Utah. Out of the cab jumps a five-foot two blonde with a ponytail tighter than the Hoover Dam. She is wearing starched green shorts and a collared Forest Service shirt tucked in and cinched in place with a belt.
Her march around the campground begins. A nasty scratching of a pen pressed into copy paper is heard as she notes “noncompliance” down her checklist. A seventy-nine-year-old veteran hobbles after her. The man uses a walking stick in place of a cane.
“It’s a campground in the woods, of course there is supposed to be unmown grass over there.”
The red pen draws blood every time she slashes another line.
Bathrooms uncleaned, trash cans full, widow-maker branches in the trees unpruned, and horror of horrors! She spots hot coals steaming in a vacated campsite pit.
Her boots clobber the ground as she searches for more breaches of the Forest Service permit. The veteran, Ian, has given up placating her. He resigns to his campground’s fate. The two both stop short at a Forest Service issued dumpster plastered with one large sticker.
I ♥ BJs
The forest is so silent, even the birds have stopped twittering and the chipmunks hold their munching. Everyone waits to see what the young woman will do.
With absolute clarity, she realizes that this moment could be a defining point in her career. Four counts and then she and Ian look at each other and burst into belly-aching laughter. They laugh so hard tears spring from their eyes. The globular heart and cartoonish bubble letters tease onlookers from the dumpster.
“I’d left it up there because it just made this place a little jollier for all the old folks who come through this way,” Ian had blushed the color red of candy apple. Much like the ink of the heart on the bumper sticker.
It took the better part of an hour, but we managed to pivot the dumpster away from the road. Visitors could still see the sticker from their campers, while the Forest Service Rangers could only see the official emblem from the road. There was a great amount of pride when I found the sticker still there, tucked behind a bramble, the last time I passed through the Ashley National Forest to vacation with my husband.
I told this story, about my early career, to my team at work the other night. We had a rough week of high delivery demands, uncomfy peer interactions, and the nasty lies of anxiety whispering over our shoulders. The lab was too serious. Anyone could tell by the grunge metal music blaring through the lab speakers.
Being reminded to laugh is not as weak a suggestion as some might take it be. Laying down our defenses and chuckling in the tight spaces we navigate ourselves into will flood our lungs with air. I think the worst part about a panic attack is not having the air needed to clear my own head. Through our body’s physiological fight-or-flight response, we actually starve ourselves of fresh oxygen.
And there is so much more to not taking oneself so seriously. I was a twenty-year-old with a badge and a uniform nearly about to be unwilling to listen to a seventy-nine-year-old who had been to war, and back. I came to learn that Ian was loved by hundreds of campers he’d met over the years. Ian had also found his essential purpose in ushering people into nature. He was hospitable and happy and gracious. I had so much to learn from Ian.
I loved the way my coworkers’ faces split into glowing smiles when they heard me drop the punchline of the story. One of them whispered to another, about the sticker, “Wait, what did she just say?” Not one of them ever imagined me speaking those words out loud because they do take me seriously. And they know I take myself seriously. Now I hope they know, not so seriously that a raunchy bumper sticker can’t get me to laugh out loud.
Drop me a comment about something that made you laugh this week. Have you shared your story with anyone else in your life? Hoping with you that you get to laugh long and loud this week!