Go with what you’re good at
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- June 17, 2018
- 1646
There’s a scene in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” that contains one of my favorite lines in cinematic history.
Our anti-heroes have been chased, pursued and otherwise hounded to the literal end of the earth, and find themselves facing a difficult choice. They’re stuck on the edge of a mesa, in Wile E. Coyote country, hunkered down on a ledge with the posse closing in. There’s no escape, well, unless they jump into a raging river hundreds of feet below.
So it’s at this moment that Robert Redford, as the taciturn and deadly Sundance, confesses that he can’t swim. Paul Newman laughs like that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
“The fall will probably kill you,” says the affable Butch.
And of course they take a leap of faith and live to die another day.
“The fall will probably kill you.” Fantastic line. Right up there with “You’re going to need a bigger boat” from “Jaws” and this one from “The Graduate:” “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you?”
All are fatalistic with a sense of ironic humor that works just right.
But let’s get back to that lonely ledge overhanging that cascading river and put ourselves in Butch and Sundance’s boots.
So let’s concede they’ve made a questionable career choice. Robbing banks isn’t exactly a risk-free way to make a living, but it’s what they do best, and they’ve made peace with it.
You go with what you’re good at. So when the hour of reckoning is near and they face two possible choices — neither of them optimal, let alone appetizing — they don’t bemoan the path they’ve chosen.
No, they do not. Instead, they try to find the funny. Life is like that: finding the funny.
Absurd as it sounds, I think Rod Stewart has it about right when in “Every Picture Tells a Story,” he rasps these words: “Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off. You didn’t ask to come here, anyway.”
Life is a gift, and like most of them, it is filled with unexpected consequences. But you don’t get do-overs. You live with the heartbreak or the job loss or medical bad news until, well, you just can’t.
That’s when you find yourself with Butch and Sundance, smiling grimly and thinking, “The fall will probably kill me.”
Because it’s not the river that’s the problem. It’s how you came to find yourself on that ledge in the first place.
There was a time when I jumped off so many cliffs. I’m almost embarrassed to count them, let alone list them.
About the only thing they had in common was that they engendered in me a furious sense of self-preservation; hence, I made decisions that I’m not particularly fond of, especially when it came to love lost and found.
And if there really is a hell, which I’m tempted to believe, I’d better start making amends.
Tout suite.
It’s never been a priority with me though, since I’ve gotten as good — and as bad — as I’ve given. There’s probably a scoreboard in heaven, tucked away in some isolated cloud bank, one that has a His and Hers tally.
I’m always comforted by the last line the priest always said after I’d made a confession: “Go and sin no more.”
If only it were that easy.
And since I can’t even remember the last time my shadow darkened a confessional, I have a feeling I ought to get on that too.
My wife and I hit the beach again last weekend, and you’ll be pleased to know that up until the last few minutes, the ocean behaved rather benignly, sending nothing but rolling waves our way as we floated in the salty goodness.
And then, as if to remind me of something I already knew, I felt the first nasty pull of a rip current.
That’s what the Atlantic does when the tide’s coming in: sandbars shift, waves intensify and the water deepens … quickly.
“Hey,” I said to my wife, floating just beyond my reach, “let’s head back in, OK?”
She took my hand, and we splashed to the shore as I noticed that we had been the only two older people out that far.
Nothing is better than figuring a way off life’s little ledges.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.