A Dangerous Summer Vacation

We’re on vacation this week, at a guest ranch in the American west.  The ranch provides a myriad of activities, including horse riding, skeet shooting, hiking, and other recreational activities. We’re here for the fly fishing.  And to write The Great American Novel.  And make world-famous, expensive photographic art.  And read War and Peace.

But, we’re only here for a week, so there isn’t much time.

So you can imagine our distress when we arrived at the guest ranch to begin our week-long sabbatical and were confronted with a four-page, single-spaced, small-printed document entitled “Guest Ranch Participant Release of Liability, Waiver of Claims, Assumption of Risks and Indemnity Agreement.”  Seriously.  That is the thing’s name and it is almost 8000 words long! We were supposed to read it, initial every page, and sign it, before checking in.  And they already had our money.

I suppose the owners of the ranch hired a lawyer to write this document.  That is hardly ever a good idea.  We lawyers always use too many words to say too little.  It’s a way of life.  And the lawyer they hired appears to be one of the worst of the specimens.

Although legally useless, the document is diverting and educational.  For instance, in it I learn that when I am fly fishing on the river that flows through the property, it is possible that I may “slip and fall” while fishing or “wading in the creeks or rivers.”  Since that hasn’t happened to me above 400 times in my life, I was glad to learn of that danger.  I’ll be more careful in the future.  (I never knew that I could sue a guest ranch if I fell in their river but I know now.  Woe betide the next ranch whose water I fall in.)

I learn lots of other stuff too.  For instance, I discover that, “firearms” are “guns” which have “inherent risks” including the danger of being injured or killed when they are “discharged.”  (I assume the lawyer meant “shot” instead of “discharged.”  That is what they teach you at law school.  Never use a four-letter word if you can think of a ten-letter one.)  Actually, according to the lawyer, it is not the gun that is dangerous, it is the ammunition that can “injure or kill” you.  Something else that can kill you is, “. . . another’s’ [sic] use of the firearms.”

That is something else they teach you in law school: If you are not sure where to put an apostrophe, put one in each place where it might belong.  That is an entire law school course: “Promiscuous Apostrophes.”

We are also to be on the outlook while at the ranch for, “reptiles that may run.”  Those, you see, might scare the horses.  They might scare me too.  I thought dinosaurs were extinct.  But perhaps I’ve stumbled into “The Valley that Time Forgot.”  Which, when you think about it, might be a good title for my book.

The ranch also wants me to know that it is not responsible for “acts, occurrences or elements of nature” which include thunder and the dreaded “lightening.” [sic] As Mark Twain once wrote, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.” But they don’t teach you that in law school.

As for “lightening,” there is no danger I’ll suffer from that while here; the food is delicious and copious. And, since it is conspicuously omitted as something I am releasing them from, I conclude that the ranch agrees to be liable to me if I get struck by lightning while I am here.

Large, dangerous prey

But the real value in the document is not legal — as I said, it is useless for that — it’s real value lies in the realm of metaphysics, for in the document we learn the true nature of “humanity.”  But let the thing speak for itself:

I understand and acknowledge that horseback riding is the only sport where one much smaller, weaker predator animal (human) tries to impose its will on, and become a unit of movement with another much larger stronger prey animal with a mind of its own(horse) and each has a limited understanding of the other.

Well.

Never mind that the lawyer puts commas in where they don’t belong and omits them where they do, just feast on the wealth of natural philosophy in that sentence.  We’re small and weak but we’re predators and the ranch horses are our prey. When was the last time you dined on horse meat?  Think of what you are missing.

The ranch has a “complimentary” shooting on Thursday.  I think I’ll shoot a horse and ask the chef to prepare it for my dinner.

If I stay that long.  I had no idea how much there was to be frightened about here in this placid, serene, and untroubled mountain valley.  I may ask for my money back and go somewhere safe.  Like a mountain valley in Afghanistan.