EVP/CEO LETTER
PROTECTING WHAT
IS IMPORTANT
Jon R. Roth, MS, CAE
March 2022 • DALLAS MEDICAL JOURNAL | 7
I can recall the day as clearly today as
the moment it happened. My friends
and neighbors, brother Kurt and Erick,
had come over to my childhood home
in Colorado one summer afternoon to
spend the night because their parents were
heading out of town. They had asked my
parents to care for the boys, who were 8 and
10 years old; not an unusual request since
our parents were also good friends, and my
dad and Mr. Stan had done some business
together. My parents were happy to help
and released Kurt, Erick, and myself to set
off to play in the expansive nature area that
was basically our backyard playground like
we had done many times before.
This nature preserve had an endless array
of activities to keep the interest of young
lads such as ourselves. There were areas of
large rocks for climbing, open prairie for digging
fossils, and wooded areas for discovering
all things creepy and crawly. One of the
most intriguing features was an unimproved
drainage ditch that ran for miles throughout
the entire preserve. On most days, it was
pretty dry but served as an important escape
route for the fl ash fl oods that could hit
during a Colorado afternoon thunderstorm.
In minutes ‘the ditch’, as we aff ectionately
called it, could go from a dry riverbed with
fossils and lizards to one that was a torrent
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of fast-moving, muddy water.
Since the nature preserve was literally
in our backyard, all of the neighborhood
parents had properly prepared the local kids
to look for danger signs in and around the
area, and in the ditch in especially. Back in
1979, there was a much greater appetite for
our parents to lock us out of the house to go
play and instruct us not to come back until
we were dirty, tired, and hungry. We would
spend hours upon hours exploring the nature
preserve and knew every square mile of the
property. It was a glorious childhood that I
would yearn for any child to have one-tenth
of that same experience today.
As Kurt, Erick, and I ventured out on that
fateful day it was like any other start to an
adventure into the preserve. We headed out
without any particular agenda in mind and
soon found ourselves making our way across
the prairie toward the ditch. As we romped
along, one of us remembered that the ditch
still had some pools of water in it from the
last rain and that there surely had to be
tadpoles and sundry other interesting critters
in those pockets of standing water.
The ditch was a natural feature that had
become etched in the earth to 15 feet across
and 8 feet deep in most places. It was an
all-natural, unimproved gully so in order to
traverse from one side to the other we had
to navigate up and down the bank looking
for a suitable location to scurry down one
side, cross the boulders at the bottom, then
scramble up the other bank. It was an easy
task for three rambunctious ten-year-old
kids and we had performed this feat many
times before. But to avoid all that labor,
there was one shortcut – the pipe.
The pipe was an old cast-iron section of
water main pipe approximately 14 inches
in diameter that traversed from the top
of one side of the ditch to the other. In our
younger years, we would sit on our bottoms
and ‘scooch’ across the pipe while our older
siblings would treat it like a balance beam
and walk across the pipe, one foot in front of
the other. We always envied the day that we
would be old enough to walk across the pipe.
There were no guidelines or written rules for
when that day would occur, but like with all
other life experiences, we knew that one day
we would be walking across the pipe.
As we grew closer to the ditch on this particular
day, we happened to come upon the
section where the pipe crossed over. As we
walked up to the bank, Erick looked at Kurt
and me and said, “Let’s walk across the pipe
today.” Erick was always the most daring of
the three of us, and as you can imagine, his
younger brother routinely sought to keep
up with him in everything they did together.
After Erick put down the challenge, I looked
at Kurt with a certain trepidation and Kurt
excitedly agreed with his older brother. “Let’s
do it!” he exclaimed.
In a heartbeat, Erick was on the pipe stepping
one foot in front of the other using his
arms to balance. Kurt and I waited until he
completely crossed before beginning our
trek. We agreed that Kurt would go second
and in short order, he was stepping across
the pipe. He was doing
fi ne and everything
seemed like all three of
us would graduate from
bottom-scooching to
grown-up walking across
the pipe this summer. We
were achieving an important
rite of passage.
When Kurt was approximately
halfway
across the pipe he made
a critical mistake, he
looked down. Whether
it was vertigo kicking in
or just plain fear from
seeing how high above
the rocky fl oor of the
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