The Exceptional Inconvenience of Two Goats on a Single Piece of Timber

It is an ancient and widely documented fact across the galaxy that bridges are fundamentally unreasonable places to host an argument.

In the The Municipal Authority’s Very Honest Pocket Dictionary of Civics a bridge is defined as: “A clever, engineering-based solution to getting over something damp, which is almost immediately ruined by two idiots who encounter each other in the middle.”

The bridge in question was extraordinarily narrow, spanned a chasm of terrifying proportions, and was designed to hold exactly one medium-sized goat at a time. It was not designed to hold two ego-driven, aggressively opinionated mammalian heavyweights experiencing simultaneous, acute delusions of absolute omnipotence.

From the Western side of the chasm trotted the Orange Goat.

The Orange Goat had a magnificent, sweeping tuft of golden hair that looked like it had been spun by a confused silk-moth experiencing a panic attack. He was very loud, very proud of his past exploits, most of which were completely fabricated, and had spent the last twenty minutes shouting at a passing cloud for failing to acknowledge his superior size.

From the Eastern side of the chasm slunk the Bear-Riding Goat.

The Bear-Riding Goat was colder, paler, and possessed a shirtless, granite-like torso that he insisted on displaying to everyone despite the ambient temperature being minus twelve degrees. He had spent his entire life maintaining an expression that suggested he had just personally invented suffering, and he was currently holding a ledger containing the home addresses of every creature that had ever made a joke about his height.

They met precisely in the middle.

The gap between them was roughly four inches wide; roughly the width of a very thin sandwich, or the collective diplomatic patience of the rest of the forest.

“Get out of my way,” said the Orange Goat, puffing out his chest until his waistcoat buttons strained like rivets on a sinking submarine. “I am the greatest goat that has ever existed in the history of goats. People come up to me, big goats, strong goats, tears in their eyes, and they say, ‘Sir, nobody stands on a log quite like you.’It’s a tremendous log. Huge log. I’m going across.”

“I do not recognise the existence of this log,” replied the Bear-Riding Goat softly, his eyes narrowing into two tiny, icy slits. “Historically, according to ancient maps drawn on sheepskin in 1142, this entire side of the bridge is part of my ancestral pasture. In fact, you are currently standing on sovereign territory that requires immediate demilitarisation.”

“Fake maps!” bellowed the Orange Goat. “Total disaster! Everybody knows I built this bridge! I made the river pay for it!”

“I am simply conducting a Special Crossing Operation,” said the Bear-Riding Goat calmly, placing one cloven hoof firmly on the Orange Goat’s front left leg. “If you resist, I will be forced to cut off your supply of strategic berries.”

Now, logic dictates that when two goats meet in the middle of a log suspended over an abyss of certain death,there are three sensible options available:

1. One goat backs up.
   
   
2. The other goat backs up.
   
   
3. They politely squeeze past one another while making mild, British-style noises of apology.
   
   

However, neither goat possessed the biological capacity for backing up. In their respective brainpans, the concept of “backing up” was listed right next to “listening to advice” and “admitting a mistake” in the dictionary under THINGS THAT CAUSE INSTANT PHYSICAL DISSOLUTION.

“If you don't move,” warned the Orange Goat, “I will unleash a wave of tariffs on your horns so severe you’ll be eating bark for a decade! Total devastation, like no one has ever seen!”

“If you do not move,” whispered the Bear-Riding Goat, “I will accidentally drop a very heavy rock onto your barn, and then deny the existence of gravity.”

They locked horns.

CRACK.

It was not a dignified sound. It was the sound of two extraordinarily stubborn, wildly insecure egos grinding together like rusty machinery inside a clockwork nightmare.

They pushed. They grunted. The Orange Goat attempted to declare the chasm beneath them “a total hoax,” while the Bear-Riding Goat attempted to annex the air molecules directly behind the Orange Goat’s ears.

The log, which was made of old, sensible, apolitical timber, listened to them for approximately three seconds before making an executive decision. It realised that it had been holding up nature for a hundred years without ever having to listen to a press conference or a twenty-page manifesto about historic grievances.

SNAP.

The log broke in two.

For a brief, glorious second, suspended in mid-air above a drop of four hundred meters, the two goats did not fall. They couldn't fall yet, because neither of them had received official approval from their respective legal teams to acknowledge the collapse of the infrastructure.

“This is a Witch Hunt!” screamed the Orange Goat as gravity finally caught up with his golden toupee.

“This is an illegal provocation by foreign agitators!” muttered the Bear-Riding Goat as he tumbled upside down into the mist.

They hit the water together with a massive, undignified SPLASH, ending two very long, very loud, and entirely avoidable careers in crossing-management.

The Observer’s Field Guide to Avoidable Catastrophes appends the following moral to the story:

When two grandstanding autocrats refuse to yield on a narrow bridge, they will almost certainly plummet into the ravine together. The tragedy, however, is that they usually ruin a perfectly good piece of timber on the way down, leaving all the sensible goats on either bank wondering why on Earth nobody just built a ferry.