I Don't Hear “The Call of the Wild”

     Cathy wants to go to Alaska. Ye gads! I told her we hadn’t seen all of the United States yet! And I quickly pointed out that I took her to Uncle Womack’s in 2004. That was a vacation. We sat on the porch and watched the sun set over the barn. We drank spring water. We listened to the baying hounds in the distance. We smelled the honeysuckle, wisteria and cow manure. She didn’t have to cook. No alarm clocks. No traffic. No time table. And if the creek hadn’t gone down, we’d probably still be there.

You ain’t necessarily got to go half way around the world to enjoy a real vacation!

I don’t think I’m winning her over. Ever since she quit her job she’s come up with the craziest notions. I think she’s watching too much Oprah Winfrey! And those people over at the Methodist Church aren’t helping a bit. A bunch of them went on an Alaskan cruise a couple of years back and they are filling Cathy’s head with grand scenes of giant glaciers, snow covered peaks, whales flipping out of the cold Pacific and rustic gold mining camps set at the foot of majestic mountains.

I told her that’s what the National Geographic channel is for! Shoot, I’ll buy her the video. I will borrow every picture those Methodist folks took. We can rent that John Wayne movie about Alaska. I’ll turn up the air conditioner and paint the back yard white.

There was an old ice house that sat down past the American Legion Hall on the highway going out toward Huntingdon. Daddy liked to get block ice there for our 4th of July watermelons. Us kids liked to slip in there when Mr. Gene wasn’t looking and break off little pieces of ice to suck on on those insufferable hot August days. One time Yogi and I got trapped in the back when Gene locked up and headed over to the City Café. He musta had the double chicken fried steak with all the trimmings, the peach cobbler and about ten cups of coffee! He was gone for a while! I was way past freezing. Yogi’s lips had turned blue. We were yelling like the dickens! Getting caught where you weren’t supposed to be was better than freezing to death! We were piling sawdust on each other in an attempt to warm up. An hour and a half trapped in that old ice house would turn an Eskimo off of Alaska forever!

Me and Diana Morris, Ricky Hale, Squeaky, Ann Carol, Hollis Mayo and anyone else that wasn’t getting ready for Mrs. Carter’s algebra test used to sit in study hall back in high school and dream of places we wanted to visit. Hollywood and the beaches were quickly mentioned. The girls wanted to go to New York. Mount Rushmore and Pickwick Dam came up. We all agreed the Grand Canyon would be a great site. Hollis wanted to see the Boll Weevil statue in Enterprise. We would have settled for an afternoon outing to Memphis….. In four years of study hall “tripping” Alaska never came up once! Not one single solitary time!

That fact bounced off Cathy like a BB hitting Fort Knox.

I quoted every line I could remember of that old Robert Service poem about “Sam Magee” from Tennessee. I threw in an extra emphasis on that part about how cold he was the whole time he was “up there in Alaska” and that he finally reached the point where he asked to be cremated.

I don’t care where the Caribou crawl. I remember how cold Sergeant Preston and King looked in that old television show. They didn’t call it Seward’s Folly for nothing. It killed Will Rogers and Wiley Post. Does “frozen tundra” sound like a place you want to be?

Cathy, undeterred, has gathered up travelogues, maps, “off the beaten path” site seeing adventure booklets, a guide to Nome homes, an Igloo building kit and a book delineating the twenty-three major uses of whale blubber. She bought ear muffs for goodness sakes. And a fleece lined vest!

“You’d better get a flash light,” I hoped my sarcasm came ringing through. “’cause you ain’t going to be able to see many of those homes in the land of the Midnight Sun! It’s dark all day up there!”

“We’ll go in July, silly. There is an average of 18 to 20 hours of sunshine in most of Alaska at that time. If we go far enough north we could actually have 24 hours of daylight.”

Don’t ever marry a school teacher.

“You know, we could drive up and check out the National Cornbread Festival in South Pittsburg, Tennessee.” If I could make her a better offer, I might get out of this. “We would have a great view of the tail end of the Appalachians; we could visit the Nickajack Dam, see Rock City, maybe ride up to Monteagle and have lunch at the Smokehouse Restaurant.”

I reminded her of the great time we had at Uncle Womack’s. I explained that if you took too many “vacations all over the place” it kinda watered down the ones you’d already enjoyed. You can confuse yourself on where you’ve been and what you’ve seen. I reminded her of Aunt Beatrice’s ruttabagers, corn on the cob and mustard greens. “They ain’t going to have that in Alaska!”

She must’a not heard me. She was deep frying some Sockeye Salmon and moving pictures around. I hope she wasn’t clearing a spot for a moose head! This is getting pretty serious. If I don’t put my foot down quickly here I’m going to end up at an Iditarod race six thousand miles from the house!

“Cathy, I’ll take you to a movie. We can go back to your Aunt Jane’s. I’ll go visit your sisters……” Desperate times call for desperate action! 

          Respectfully,

               Kes