Years back, when I was still married, my ex-wife and I visited Schlitterbahn, a water park near Dallas, Texas, with her family and our daughter. While our daughter enjoyed various activities with her grandparents, my then-wife and I went on their park-circling raging rapids ride.

The ride puts you on a borrowed inner tube, raft, or a variety of other available floating options as it batters you through artificially-choppy waters, under bridges, through tunnels, around sharp bends, etc. It has only a couple of entry and exit points, and you’re otherwise essentially “locked in” once you get on until you reach one of these points.

My wife was wearing one of her typical black hair band clips. I honestly don’t know what its real name is, but it was long, black, covered with teeth, in a single piece, and went essentially from ear to ear. Anyway, to make this part of the story short, while riding along together on one of the rafts, the band came loose and slipped off her head. She made a desperate grab for it, but it bounced off her hand, off the back of her leg, and into the raging waters behind us. She was pretty disappointed, partially because she was counting on it to hold her hair that day, and partially because she was fond of it (even if it was cheaply-replaced plastic).

As we approached the next entrance/exit point she decided to call an end to our ride after the loss of the hair band, and we climbed off the raft in slightly (though still frothy) waters and walk up the stairs to dry land. For the hell of it, I decided to drag my feed along the ground as I walked toward the stairs and carefully lifted my feet up each step, just in the ridiculous off-chance that I might catch the hair band in this absurdly fast-moving large body of water.

And sure enough, just as my feet broke the surface, there was the hair band, precariously caught around my ankle as I lifted it to safety. My ex and I were both notably startled and considered the situation, and the band, exceptionally lucky.

Within a few months the band was broken and forgotten and never played any important role in our lives beyond this story. If someone was looking out for us, they clearly had strange priorities.