I was on a mountain top, looking out over the valley below, a beautiful vista of farms and fields. Even though I would have preferred to see undeveloped land below, from the mountain top even the farms were beautiful.

I was thinking about digging a cave in the side of the mountain and living in it. Right over the edge was an area where I thought could dig. I thought two layers of rock ran in this area, with dirt in between the layers. I could probably dig out the dirt between the rock, thereby giving me one rock as a floor and one rock as the ceiling of my cave home.

Unfortunately going over the side of the mountain was dangerous. If I slipped, the fall would be very far. In fact, it was so far down, it was scary to even look over the precipitous edge. I thought of possibly laying a board over the rim and then crawling out on the board so I could look down. The board would have to be well secured. But that sounded too dangerous.

***

I was in a room talking with my father, who began telling me about how he had once fallen off a high mountain. Apparently he and my brother Chris had been on top of the mountain and when my father had fallen, Chris had hollered out to him that he loved him. My father could hear Chris during the long fall and my father also hollered back to Chris.

In my hand I was holding a magazine which had a story describing my father's fall. When I asked my father how he had survived, he told me that he had landed a certain way on the ground and that he had only been injured for a few days. I wanted to ask him if he had positioned his body to land a certain way while he had been falling.

A second story in the magazine described how the authorities had looked for my father's body for days, but hadn't been able to find it. My father had landed in a jungle area, and he had needed time to make his way out of the jungle.

I wondered if the marvelous-sounding story had also been printed in other magazines. I looked at the cover of the magazine; it was entitled "Plant Physiology" and was dated 1973. Apparently the story had appeared in that magazine because my father had been working with plants when he had been on the mountain and fallen. When I asked my father about the publication of the story, he told me the story hadn't appeared in any other publication. I excitedly told my father that the story ought to be written again and sent to other magazines. I told my father that Reader's Digest paid $10,000 for stories like this. I told him he could tell me the story and I could write it and send it into Reader's Digest for him.