Sweet Mother of God At Sweet Tomatoes (Or How Shane Tells Diana She Could End Up Dead! Dead! Dead!)

Shane and Donald and I are having dinner at Sweet Tomatoes.
I've never been before but as I've spent every free moment lately hiking, weight-lifting and doing yoga, an eatery with unlimited servings where you can go mussed and sweaty seems like a good venue to me.
I mention the dead thing.
I mean, I'm sure it's just a coincidence, or one of those things that were there all along that I just didn't notice until it applied to me. (Like Botox. Until this little crease showed up by my right eyebrow I never noticed a botox ad, but now botulism injections are being touted from every magazine and television show, chiding me for my continued creasing. )
So it must be just that I am now planning to backpack the John Muir Trail.
But, lately, it seems that people keep going to the mountains and turning up dead.
Like every day, a couple is stumbling into the camp of a hiker who died and they would die too except they use his matches, or an experienced peak bagger stumbles and slides thousands of feet to her demise in front of her friend. The stories always include the phrase "set off" . They become dead after setting off. I am determined not to "set off" on my hike. I shall simply begin it.
I run into Judge Frank Jones at the high school while walking our dogs and he tells me stories about the high Sierra which he has been hiking since 1962. He starts to get me excited about my upcoming adventure. But he winds up our talk with remembering long-faced boy scouts:
"Comes to turn out their leader had died. He was thirty-eight. Tried making it up that mountain and had a heart attack".
I can't tell you the number of boy scout deaths with which people have regaled me. Apparently boy scouts are dropping like flies up there, victim to lightening strikes, starvation, and faulty trail maps.
I expect Shane and Donald to laugh at my paranoia.
"I mean it's not like there's any real risk..."I say.
"Yes there is. Diana you could die! That's what makes the story sexy!!!" says Shane. "Would you rather be like Amelia Earheart and just never be found or would you rather have them bring us back the gory bits?
I don't even have to think about it.
"Never found. I don't want the words "gory bits" to apply to my person, living or dead. I'd rather you just imagined me deciding to shake the shackles of civilization, frolicking in mountain streams, never to be heard of again" I say.
"And we could catch glimpses of a redhead here and there and wonder if we caught site of you, but you'd always disappear again," says Shane.
Then he and I are off and running, spinning a 1980's soap opera arc involving my mysterious mountain disappearance, as we eat 14 different kinds of salad, before he says:
"But really. How long will you be up there?"
"Eight days," I say.
"Sweet Mother of God! Josephine and Jesus!" says Shane. "This is serious. Your really could end up dead. Dead!Dead!Dead! I am serious!"
I comfort myself that this is Shane. He wore an Easter egg lavender dress shirt when we went to Sequoia National Park last winter to play in the snow. With slacks.
I look at the far more judicious and even-handed Donald. (Who wears hiking boots to the mountains.)
"Seriously, " I say. "It's not like there's any real risk?"
"Weeell. There is soooome risk," Donald says judiciously and even-handedly stretching out his vowels. "Just what are the fatality rates for this trail, anyway?"
Sweet Mother of God. Josephine and Jesus.