Once I talked to a good friend who had just taken her three year old to see 101 dalmations. Knowing how frightening Disney movies could be for the very young I asked how her daughter had handled the scary parts. She incredibly thought her daughter had not been frightened at all, and pointed out that during the dramatic scenes Emily could be heard saying to herself over and over “Dalmations get home safe. Dalmations get home safe.” The child psychologist in me had a very different understanding of her daughter’s experience, but the primitive tribal woman in me loved the magical “spell casting” part of this incantation. To this day I have been known to repeat it when my luggage is lost, my car won’t start, or when things get otherwise out of hand.

I preface this video with the story in order to tell you “dalmations get home safe” so that you too can be comforted. Whatever fate befell this little beaver, he did not die crossing the snowy highway.

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=sekLEG8xsOs]

I confess this video made me very anxious, and for such an enduring period of time I couldn’t post it until I had written the author and got an answer back. More on that tomorrow in Part 2 of our exciting christmas beaver story. Still, I can’t deny that it made me giggle more than once, so I thought I’d share. In fact, it has now become the thing you say to people when you are trapped in the middle of an inescapable event that is enormously dangerous but impossible to discuss. For example, a visit with your accountant, oncologist or city manager. I highly recommend you try it!

Beyond the obvious social value, it does serve as a fairly irrefutable proof that beavers disperse over land. In this case over four lanes of traffic.

So my parents tell me that they were having lunch in Calistoga and my father was wearing last years Worth A Dam t-shirt when a woman stopped him and said, “Hey, I have one just like that!” They chatted for a while and my dad reminded her not to miss the festival this year (although he couldn’t remember the date). “Never mind,” she assured him. “I’ll look it up on the website”. Unable to resist the parent impulse he explained he was “Heidi’s father” and the woman nodded politely and asked, “Who’s Heidi?”

Ahhhh this is a lovely and affirming story on so many levels. It shows how beaver people can recognize each other, even in far away places. It shows how the website exists in the minds of people who might not regularly check it, but know it’s there if they ever have a question. Best of all it shows how the beavers’ safety does not rest on the shoulders of a single person or even a single organization, but rather on the backs of the many who carry their story with them.