We were waiting to cross the single lane bridge into town when we saw something moving under the bridge. It was big, and as we sat watching, it began to lumber up the embankment. We didn’t have to look around to know there was nowhere for us to go. There were cars front and back of us, steep Rock Wall on one side, cliff down to the valley floor to the other.

There was nothing in the car to defend ourselves either, so don’t go thinking we’ll manage some last minute bit of heroic ass-kickery, or even a bit of blind last minute luck. We’re not the sort anyways. Just ask my uncle Tim. Well, you can’t anymore, but he was faced with a whole stampede of Tortoises and couldn’t manage to bring himself to jump to safety by getting up on the flatbed of the truck. Or my aunt Meryl, she found her belt caught on a door handle and managed to squish herself between the Wall and the door. Or my cousin Bill…

I’d go on, but you get the point. There’s no heroic types in my line. The unusually large figure is right up alongside the car now, casting a shadow across the car and onto the rock wall opposite. Due to its height, not the time of day mind you.

We all felt the car drop a few centimeters when whatever it was put its hand on the roof.

I closed my eyes, I’m sure my family did too. No sense watching the end, we don’t even watch the end of movies, we just stop just as the main conflict is starting, don’t want to create undue stress on ourselves. We haven’t the constitution for it.

I felt a warm, moist breeze pass through the car.

“Excuse me, you wouldn’t happen to have a map of the area I could look at would you? I think I took a wrong turn somewhere on my way to the Yeti Expo and I keep getting all turned around in this gorge. Honestly mountains are so much easier to navigate.”

Well, I’d love to say that we handed over our super-sized deluxe map at that point, but as you’d expect, it’s just not in us. We stayed frozen in place until well after we’d heard it stand back up and move to the next car.

We heard the question again, and the friendly reply “Of course! Sorry about the tourists, out of towners give places such bad reputations!”

I really hoped that the assertiveness training we were heading to would turn out to be run by whoever was in the car behind us.

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