Musing of one thinking about the guy hiking through the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest who encountered Bigfoot, challenged him to a game of...

...hopscotch and lost.

A Fable
One bright Saturday, when Congress had adjourned for the weekend, two Congressmen were sitting in a bar trying to decide what to do for the day. One of them said, "let's go down to the river and rent a boat and paddle down a ways and back." The other guy said, "good idea." So they went to the river, found a boat rental place, and rented a canoe. Since they were both big city boys, neither one of them knew how to paddle a canoe. So the owner gave them a rudimentary lesson, then shoved the canoe out into the current. They were paddling away when a piece of floating debris hit the paddle of the one in the bow, knocking it from his grasp. It floated away and the one in the stern paddled furiously trying to keep up with it. However, as a novice, he kept paddling on one side of the canoe, with the result that it went in circles. Shortly afterwards, his hands got so sweaty that his paddle slipped from his grasp to go find the other one. They drifted helplessly down the river until it disgorged them in a small branch of the river that went off to somewhere. They drifted down the branch until the canoe struck a sunken log and lodged there. One of them said, "Here we are...up a creek without a paddle. What do we do now?" The other one happened to glance towards the shore and saw an elderly man standing there. "Hey Pops," he yelled, "could you help us figure out how to get to shore?" The elderly man said, "Well, if I were you, I'd wade because it's only 2 feet deep. But I would take off my shoes and trousers first." So they removed all their clothing below the waist, rolled it into a ball, and managed to fall out of the canoe and wade to land. The elderly man led them to a clearing where the sun was shining brightly so they could dry off. After they dressed, he took them to his car, which was only a couple hundred yards away, and drove them back to the boat place. He refused any kind of payment, and drove off after giving them a parting admonition, "when you don't know what you're doing, sometimes it's wise not to do it." They paid the boat owner for the lost paddles plus the cost of retrieving the canoe and headed back to the city.

The next week when Congress was in session again, they introduced a bill requiring every rental boat to be equipped with an extra set of oars or paddles plus a battery-driven flashing red light as an emergency signal.

The bill passed 433-2. The 2 nay votes were from 2 Congressmen who happen to own interest in boat rental businesses.

The moral of this fable is in the mind of the reader.