Bits & Pieces

Let’s Call It Fate

By Kim J. Harmon

 

What am I to make of fate? Is it just a myth meant to explain away simple luck (good or bad), mere coincidental happenstance? Or is it really a swirling, cosmic force controlled by three old women (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos) spinning golden thread for the express purpose of irritating me?

Fate plays a big part in sports … at least that’s the way we perceive it.

But if not fate, then how else could we explain Steve Bartman being in the right place at the right time to take that foul ball out of the glove of Chicago Cubs outfielder Moises Alou in the 2003 National League championship series? I mean, come on, because of that ill-fated catch, Bartman was persona non grata in Chicago for years and has his own entry on Wikipedia.

But if not fate, then how else could we explain a 12-year-old kid, Jeffrey Maier, being in the right place at the right time to pull a sure out into the rightfield stands at Yankee Stadium during the 1996 American League championship series with the Baltimore Orioles and having it ruled a home run that would eventually lead the Yankees to the World Series?

But it not fate, then how else do we explain Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders and Darryl Stingley of the New England Patriots crossing paths on the football field in such a way that Stingley would end up as a quadriplegic for the rest of his life?

Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Whatever limits us, we call fate,” but when I’m on the golf course and I nail a beautiful recovery shot from the deep rough, only to see it strike – squarely – an overhanging tree branch that occupies one-one hundredth of one percent of the volume of space in front of me, that’s just bad luck.

But I had such an incredible string of bad luck last week that I figured it just had to be fate.

Clotho must have a piece of string that got all twisted and gnarled because I had not other reasonable explanation for the series of events with plagued me and my family as we left for the Catskills on a four-day camping trip.

Now, I hate camping – especially the way we camp. Essentially what we do is set up house in the woods. So, in essence, we are doing everything we do at home, only it’s 100 times more inconvenient. Cooking, cleaning the dishes and taking showers become grueling chores. And when the temperature drops to 40 degrees at night (which is does in the Catskills in August, believe me) you can’t turn up the heat.

Anyway, we left (in two cars) for our trip late on Thursday afternoon (it was a bad omen, as there was some talk of rain in the evening, but it was mostly sunny all the way down I-84 and into New York).

Things started taking a turn for the worse, though, when we pulled onto 17 West and got stuck behind a horrific traffic accident that slowed us by 30 minutes. We got through that and got off 17W in Livingston Manor and it still was sunny as dusk approached.

A moment later, though, as we turned right onto Route 151 the [put necessary expletive here] hit the fan. About a mile down the road I lost my wife in the rearview mirror (it turns out she had stopped so she and the boys, city slickers to the core, could take a look at a porcupine crossing the road).

And as I wondered what had happened to them, the sky, very quickly, turned ominously black.

And then I realized there was no more cell service.

And then it started pouring – buckets.

And as I inched along the road there was no sign of headlights in my rearview mirror.

My daughter and I reached the campsite in the middle of the storm and waited for 10 minutes for my wife to show up. She didn’t. And so, naturally, I assumed the worst – a flat tire, the van sliding off the road into a ditch – especially since I had no way of contacting her.

We got back in the car and heading back the way we came and didn’t find her, but when we returned to the campground about 30 minutes later we discovered she had gotten lost somehow, but had backtracked and found her way.

And though it was now full dark, it had stopped raining.

It should have been a good sign.

But it wasn’t.

We got to our site, put the tarp on the ground and unfolded the tent.

Then it started pouring again … I mean, POURING – a monstrous deluge that included shattering thunder, lightning, and about 10 minutes of hail.

Oh, we waited it out in the vehicles and it eventually ended – about 40 minutes later. And so, at roughly 9 pm, we started to put up the tent and we needed to use the headlights on the car and van to see what we were doing.

Like idiots, we didn’t have the vehicles running.

And so you know what happened then.

We eventually got the tent up and drained the lake that had formed inside, inflated the air mattresses and crawled into our sleeping bags … and then shivered our way through the first of three hellishly cold nights (the fourth night was much better) in the New York mountains.

You might want to call all of that nothing more than an incredible run of bad luck, but bad luck would have been getting slowed by a car accident or one of us getting inexplicably lost or one rainstorm or one rainstorm with hail.

Not all of it.

No, someone is spinning the threads of our lives and having a little fun in the process.

And now that I have a stronger belief in fate, I believe this past weekend the fate were apologizing for that hellish camping trip when, at Fairview Farms Golf Course in Harwinton, I shot the best round of my life.

I hit clubs better than I had ever hit them.

I had two terrific recovery shots that easily saved me three or four strokes.

I sank a near miracle 20-foot putt on a sharply sloping green.

Sure, I’d like to take full credit for all that (I had taken some lessons and was still using relaxation techniques taught to me by Jared Tendler) … but it might be wise to give credit where credit is due.

I mean, there’s no telling what else fate has in store for me.