My husband is a mountaineer, a rock climber, a backcountry skier, and a doctor, which makes him equal parts adventure junkie and safety nerd. When we met he was doing a lot of mountain search and rescue, orienteering, and other boy scouty things. We would often go for day hikes in the woods and I would invent epic scenarios, which he would then have to talk us out of, stuff like:

      What would you do if I fell down that ravine and broke my arm?
      I would climb down to get you and then take you to the hospital.
      What if I broke my arm and my ankle?
      I would climb down to get you and then hop with you to the hospital.
      What if I broke my arm and both of my legs and I weighed three hundred pounds and we were ten miles in and I was all mangled and bloody and couldn’t walk or hop and I was losing lots of blood from one of my arteries?
      I would climb down to get you and make sure you were breathing. Then I would fashion a tournequet out of my shirt and a stick…

This became our thing. Whenever we were out in the middle of the woods I would make him explain all the different ways in which he could get us out of danger in the event of some horrific accident. It made me feel safer somehow.

One day we were walking on one of our favorite trails and I tripped over a log and turned my ankle. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t walk on it but I wondered aloud what would’ve happened if it had been worse. We were many miles from the trail head. Josh said he would’ve rigged some crutch-like device for me or made me a little shelter and then run back for help.

Something terrifying occurred to me then, something I had never thought of before. “What if I’d been alone? What if you weren’t here and there was no one else around to help me?”
Joshua turned to me and, without a trace of sarcasm in his voice, said, “I guess you’d just have to rescue yourself.”