Rock to the Eye: What I Learned From a Territorial Dispute Over a Tractor Bridge

Since the cryptocurrency markets haven’t got much of interest going on (other than being semi-permanently lodged in the jaws of the bear) I thought I’d favor you with life lessons extracted from my not-particularly checkered past. Once, when I was little, during a break in a school event hosted at the church my family attended, a girl hit me in the eye with a rock.

***

When the break started, my friends and I went outside, located the drainage ditch that ran behind the church building, and not content with discovering a real, live body of water, had more impressively discovered two rusting metal I-beams laid from bank to bank. I'd seen this weird double-I-beam structure before, after church with my dad, who had explained that it was a bridge of sorts for the metal-wheeled tractors the local farmers had used sixty years before.

Anyway as discoverers of the bridge, we judged ourselves its rightful owners, and took possession. You might think that there's literally no point in staking claim on a rusty, outdated bridge across a drainage ditch, due mainly to lack of competition, but if you did think that, you’d be wrong. In almost no time, our territory was threatened. This girl A that we knew from church and fought with all the time, and her friend M, whom we didn't know but were resolved to fight with also, approached us in a warlike posture. Actually, scratch that--for all I can remember, they may have approached in peace, and we started the saber-rattling. Hard to say from two decades later, but anyway, verbal sabers were given a healthy rattle.

Under a brilliant midmorning sun, we drew our lines of battle. They standing shin-deep in the long grass where the last of the dew still glistened, we balancing on our rusty six-inch wide artifact of years bygone. Memory--as I mentioned earlier--grows hazy with time, but I believe that in addition to vile and unloving words going back and forth, the hostilities hotted up to the extent that an actual stick got brandished by one party or the other.

After a good bit of this, the girls retreated, and we, shortsighted fools, luxuriated not only in our possession of the ancient bridge, but in our victory over the forces of evil.

***

But that was not the final break of the day, and in the afternoon, the girls returned with rocks, and not small ones either; girthy fist-sized chunks of the sedimentary that they flung at us with minimal preamble, with all the passion and energy of major-leaguers trying to break the radar gun.

That's what it felt like, at least. In retrospect, I'm guessing that the girls lobbed the stones in our general direction more as visual accompaniment to the ongoing exchange of venomous language than anything. But then I bent down to...I honestly no longer remember why I bent down, but anyway, I did, and one of M’s fist-sized boulders came spinning out of the sky and made itself uncomfortably cozy with my eye socket, accompanied by a sound and feeling like the end of the world.

The war was canceled on the spot. Eyes widened in all directions. Presumably--though I have no way of knowing--those other stones slated for the fusilade dropped from nerveless fingers. I threw a hand to my face and kept it held against the pain. M and A retreated numbly, relinquishing their claims to both the bridge and the moral high ground. One of my fellow bridge-squatters walked with me to the church with the somber expression of men rowing Alexander Hamilton home in the pre-dawn.

Staggering through the glass double doors, I stunned the chaperoning mothers with the liberal flow of my gore. They came hurrying at me mouths agape and hands outstretched. Even before the bandage was on, the pain was replaced with the sweet ecstacy that belongs only to those who are rescued from the ethical wasteland of war by the unexpected bliss of martyrdom, and yet somehow live to watch the downfall of their enemies.

***

M’s mom, in a delicious twist of irony, was one of the first to rush to my aid, and the next day, M was forced to apologize. She caught up to me in a basement stairwell after I couldn’t avoid her anymore, and we stared at the ground for a bit, and then she mumbled an apology, and I mumbled an acceptance, and then we stared at the ground some more just in case there was something less horrible there than was going on above it. There wasn’t. The carpet in the stairwell, as it happened, was pretty horrible, and so eventually we just wandered away.

***

You should feel free to do the same, but if you've waded through that whole story, and you’re still waiting for a moral at the end of it, I’m impressed, so I’ll give you two.

First life lesson: in-group bias/tribal instinct is really dumb, and if we're not careful, it ends up making us do stuff like take control of antique bridges, or throw rocks at people who've decided to take control of antique bridges. Over the years, I’ve been a little perturbed to discover that getting rocks thrown in your eye during a dispute over a steel-tractor bridge is actually pretty low-key when it comes to the things humans will do as a result of our tribal instincts.

Second life lesson: even if you manage to achieve the moral high ground and your enemies get trounced and go slinking away into the underbrush with their tails between their legs, the satisfaction is pretty likely to be short lived, and you'll find yourself in the equivalent of a basement stairwell, muttering about faults on all sides, and don't mention it, and so on. You’ll probably all be happier if you just avoid the war.