the frisbee and the thorns: an allegory

“Just three more throws,” she said, “and then we’ll go in.”  One, two, and the third, with an accidental overflick, sent the frisbee careening high, over, and across the creek, crashing down in the tangled brush on the opposite bank.  They could barely discern its smooth whiteness peeking through the thorns already tightening around it.

No problem, he thought as he stepped into the brush, angling his body between the branches and vines – but half-inch thorns scratched his skin, making him step back and reconsider.  On the second attempt, thorns caught his sweatpants, snagged his shirt, bit into his flesh.  Twenty feet away the frisbee beckoned, but he couldn’t find a way through.

It should be a simple matter of charging forward, he thought.  What are thorns?  Determined to let the barbs do their worst, he tromped straight ahead until so many had punctured and twisted their way into so many parts of his body that he stopped.  This isn’t worth it, he thought.  What is a frisbee?

He’d taken only three steps and had leaned forward enough against the straining vines that he couldn’t pull back without holding onto something – but nothing thorn-free was within reach.  I can get out of this, he thought.  It took a minute of wiggling and rolling, and another of rocking his weight, before his wife hauled him out by the waistband, long cords of spikes trailing after him.

“We’ll buy you another frisbee,” she reassured, picking barbs out of his clothes, but it wasn’t necessary – he could live without a frisbee.  From the open field they looked at the little white glimmer peeking through the brush.  Nature wins, he thought, and he acknowledged a sense of justice in it.  Nature should be bigger than a man.

He reminded himself of that the next few days, eyeing his frisbee whenever he passed the narrow creek.  He’d worried someone might take it, but those razor-sharp tangles were more secure than the trunk of a car.  As he considered alternate entry points, small birds darted freely among the vines, mocking him.  Even traveling up the creek would be no better, since a dense skein of thorns choked the air over the water’s surface.

Over the next weeks it rained, making it increasingly difficult to spot his frisbee through the brush.  Finally the day came when he could see it no longer, but it was still in there, somewhere.  It would always be in there, held within those coiled thorns.  It was ridiculous.

It’s my frisbee, he thought.  What are thorns?  He would buy a machete and hack his way in.

Lowe’s didn’t carry machetes, he found.  Neither did Home Depot or Wal*Mart.  Finally he drove to the surplus store in the next town, where machetes were stored behind a glass cabinet.  The clerk handed one across the counter: fine, solid yet well-balanced, the grip firm and the steel edge long and glinting.  The middle-aged woman behind him in line eyed him warily as he handled it.  Since the machete didn’t come with a case, the cashier tried to poke it into a plastic bag.  He told her not to bother.  As he carried the bare machete toward the door the woman in line called after him, “You be careful with that,” and he smiled.

At home he bundled himself in jeans and a tough flannel jacket, workman’s gloves and thick socks and beat-up shoes.  His wife, eyeing the black steel wedge, asked, “Have you even seen the frisbee lately?”  He hadn’t.  “It’s rained so much, it probably washed away,” she said, but he could always hack down the creek until he found it.  “Why don’t you call Joe to help you?” she said, but he had only one machete – what help would a second person be?  “Don’t kill yourself out there,” she implored, and he smiled.

Through the backyard, past the playground and across the open field he carried the machete wrapped in his flannel jacket so passersby wouldn’t think him an axe murderer.  He still couldn’t see his frisbee through the brush.  He walked down to the bridge, crossed over, and made his way back up to about where it used to lay.  Fifteen feet of barbed branches and vines bristled when he dropped the black steel of the machete on the grass and donned his jacket.

The first branch split with a clean, satisfying swish, but he wasn’t confident about his grip in gloves.  He let the blade sink point-first into the ground to wait as he bared his hands, and then he began the onslaught.  From over his head he drew the machete out, across and down, careful to follow through far from his ankles.  Thorn-coiled branches bit into his fingers as he cleared them away.  Even worse were the vines, thin and loose, that resisted all but the purest, most perpendicular strokes.  As he cocked his shoulder back at varying angles and swung, their thorns lashed at the flesh of his right hand.  Within minutes he was sweating profusely in his jacket. Both of his hands were bleeding.  He’d moved forward two steps.

Jacket off and gloves back on, he resumed the assault.  The vines, however, kept springing away, recoiling to tear angrily at his bare arms.  Each blow caused the entire snarled mass to jounce, inspiring one curled vine to smack him in the face with its spikes.  Bleeding now from the forehead and the cheek just under his left eye, he decided upward strokes were needed against vines anchored into the ground, and began to sweep the machete up from his right ankle with an impassioned vengeance.  Several vines fell away beneath this new attack until, at the peak of one stroke, the glove caused his grip to falter and the machete leapt upward, freely, high into the air.

He crouched, covering his head with his arms in the frozen hope the weighted blade wouldn’t cleave through both arms and skull.  Three silent seconds later, a whunk told him the machete had landed in the open grass eight feet back.

No glove on the right hand, then.  The cautionary words of his wife and the other customer rang in his ears as he retrieved the weapon.  When he recommenced he was more cautious, not minding the thorns that ripped at his bare hand.  He made fewer strokes, relying more on his left glove to drag out knots of twisted vine, muscling his weight against their interwoven groans.  In this way he managed, eventually, to forge a path to where the barbed brush was only waist-high.  Eagerly he stepped forward to look down the bank and saw, five feet away, his gleaming white frisbee, almost exactly where it had first fallen.

Rather than struggle through the remaining thorns, he extended the machete, caught his frisbee under the lip, and slowly lifted it, precarious, out of the prickly mesh.

But at the last second a malevolent vine slapped it loose.  It dropped to the ground vertically, rolled downward past tuft and root and stone, and stopped, one edge submerged in the flowing creek.

In a moment the current would pull it downstream, and then he’d have to battle more of the vicious skein.  With a desperate grunt he dropped the machete and lunged forward, plowing heedless through a web of thorns, and leaned down, stretching arm, hand, and fingers inches and inches forward and down until his middle fingertip caught the frisbee lip and pulled it up so he could welcome the cold, familiar plastic with a firm grip.

Stretched out in a jumble of barbs, head downward toward the creek, he began to wiggle his way back up the bank.  This time, with no wife to pull him out, he could extricate himself only by crawling backward and up, protecting his bare right hand with his frisbee, and pulling with his left at vines that gladly sank their fangs through his glove.  When he regained his feet and tried to stomp forward, two vines yanked at his shoulder as another pressed its thorns into the right side of his crotch like the strap of a flight suit.  Angrily he grabbed the machete, cut himself free, and marched out through the tunnel he had carved in the brush, back out into the flat grassy field.

He retrieved the jacket and wrapped his machete in it.  His arms and face were bleeding in a dozen places, and he felt more wetness where the thorns had bitten through his clothes.  His wife would laugh at him when he got home; he would probably laugh, too.  Still, the smooth plastic of his frisbee was in one hand, glimmering white, and with his jacket-wrapped machete in the other he made his way home, looking with satisfaction across the creek at the fifteen-foot long, four-foot wide tunnel that marked his penetration of the brush.