If a man digs a pit, he will fall into it; if a man rolls a stone, it will roll back on him (Proverbs 26:27).

I used to love playing in the woods.  Growing up, it was only a hundred meters or so from my home to the edge of the woods, so just about any time that it wasn't raining (and sometimes even when it was raining) my brother and I would go outside and create our own adventures among the trees, vines, hills, ditches, streams, and rivers of the area behind our house.  We forged our own kingdoms out in the woods, marked out by natural boundaries.  We minted our own currencies; my brother's kingdom used buckeye nuts, and my kingdom used small coins of leather cut from an old deflated football.  We honed our skills in warfare, working with stick-swords and sling-shots, preparing ourselves to defend our territory should outside aggressors ever threaten us.  And we developed a rather elaborate network of booby traps to protect our wooded dominion from any unexpected ambush.

As far as I can remember, we never discovered any natives with whom to trade.  We never went to war with outside aggressors.  And I can only recall one occasion when our booby traps were ever activated... and as fate would have it, I was the one who turned out to be the booby.

It was winter time, and a thick layer of snow covered the woods.  One of our favorite tricks with snow was to create a surface which had the appearance of solidity, but once the surface was stepped upon it would cave in immediately and trap the unsuspecting victim in a natural pit in the earth or in a rope noose laid on the ground or whatever.  One day, my brother and I had made the perfect trap right along the edge of the river, where two sharp rises in the ground were spanned with a snow-bridge concealing the drop-off down and away towards the river.  But that night, after we had gone back inside, more snowfall concealed the booby trap a step further, building up a very natural-looking drift that made our pitfall all the more invisible.  So when we returned to the woods the following morning and started running around to scout out our territory, I ended up completely forgetting about the booby trap -- and sure enough, while I was running along the ridge next to the river at top speed, my foot hit the trap at just the right spot and I crashed hard, to the ground and started rolling immediately towards the river.  A thin layer of ice concealed the river, and when I came to a stop out on the ice, I had to start laughing.  I was winded by the fall, but not seriously hurt.  And the accident actually allowed me to make the serrendipitous discovery that the ice was thick enough to support my weight.  So I called out for my brother, and just as he was coming up to the ridge I started standing up on the ice to demonstrate my discovery.  Apparently, the ice had been strong enough to support my weight when it was distributed over a wider area, but when I rose up to my two feet I pushed the ice to its breaking point.  In a moment, a sharp cracking sound shot out beneath me, and instantly I was submerged to my chest in ice-cold river water, right before my brother's eyes.  Fortunately, he was able to help fish me out of the water, and we made it back to the warmth of our house before any serious consequences were suffered.

Even so, I learned a lesson that day:  "If a man digs a pit, he will fall into it; if a man rolls a stone, it will roll back on him."  Like Wile E. Coyote, trying to set traps for the Roadrunner, even the most ingenious, elaborate, creative traps that seem poised for perfection never seem to work out like they're supposed to.  For whatever reason, the schemer ends up as the victims of his own traps.  Wile E. Coyote would get smashed under rocks, blasted by dynamite, dropped from towering buttes, and crushed by speeding locomotives, even though he was the mastermind, the one seemingly in control of all the elements.  One would think that I'd have picked up some of the wisdom from these 20th Century morality plays in which I regularly soaked myself on the Saturday mornings of my childhood.  Yet it took a cold bath in the Black Fork River to really wake me up to this.