The One Where Emzy Learned about Physics

We were moving from Fairbanks, Alaska to Fort Campbell, Kentucky in the summer of 1996. We had driven down into Canada and back into Alaska to catch a ferry to Bellingham, Washington (a pretty cool town, btw). Anyway, the details might be hazy on this one but I assure you the hilarity is not.

We had checked in and were waiting to board the ship. They had a pretty spacious terminal with televisions all tuned to the same channel. This was during the beginning of the GameBoy craze so Emzy and I were not so interested in what was on TV. We were sitting towards the back of the terminal and almost everyone else in the place was mesmerized by the flashing colors on the tube.

But more to the point. Both Emzy and I were sitting on a bench. One of those where there are four or five chairs but all attached to a single base. I was sitting normally on a chair on one end and Emzy was sitting sideways on the other end with her feet up across several chairs. After a while I guess I got bored with sitting in the chair so I stretched out on the floor. Everything was A-okay for a few minutes until Emzy shifted her weight a little bit.

And I wish I had words to describe what happened next. Basically, it was like how if you have a bunch of people sitting at a picnic table and everyone on one side gets up. Especially if on even a bit of a hill, the whole thing tips up and everyone falls off the back. That's exactly what happened. Except it was just Emzy on a bench. And I swear that thing must have gone five feet in the air. It slammed back down and she was on the floor.

My parents and I cracked up laughing but seeing as though Emzy had just turned 15 and was at that stage where she would rather be invisible, she was absolutely mortified. There was a group of hippy hikers sitting near us and said that that kind of stuff happens to them all the time. Really? And to this day, whenever I have to sit on one of those benches, I laugh inside and quietly choose a middle seat.