"Are you really going up the Alaskan Highway? With your sidecar, kid, and all?"
Frank stood in my office door. He was our ninth grade science teacher, and not a particularly good one. He had begun teaching at age 22; had taught in the same room for nearly thirty years; had no interests outside his job; and lived with a nagging wife and a daughter with problems. He was deathly afraid of retirement. He also rode a little 350 Kawasaki belt-drive twin to school. I was surprised, both by the fact that he was standing in my doorway, and by the question he'd just asked.
"Yessir! Sure are! Next spring.... why?"
He gazed out my window. "I've always wanted to go up there....ever since high school. Be a great trip......"
A sudden compulsion came over me.
"Frank, why don't you go with us? Your little Kawi will handle those roads....with Josh and Red and the sidecar, I probably won't be going much over 50 miles an hour.... Hell, buddy, just tie a tent on the back of that thing and let's go!"
"Really? Your family wouldn't mind?"
"Hell, no!" I laughed. "The more the merrier I always say! Trip like that would do you good.... won't recognize yourself when you get back!"
That night over dinner I told Red. "Hey, guess what! Frank is coming with us to Alaska!"
Red stared at me thoughtfully. "No, no, he isn't. He'll never go....."
"Yes, he will." I said, slightly irritated. "He told me so!"
"No," she said again. "He won't go."
For the rest of the school year, Frank and I studied maps, camping gear catalogs, and ride reports. We had the trip planned to the mile, and Frank began accumulating the camping equipment that I had already owned for years. He was very excited, and could talk of nothing else but Alaska. "I'm so grateful you invited me," he would say, over and over.
But Red kept saying, over and over, "no.... he won't go."
I really should learn to trust my wife's instincts regarding people. She's never wrong. Days before we were to leave, Frank was standing in my door again.
"Hey, Frankie! What's up?"
"Well, I'm not going."
I was shocked to the core. "Not going! What do you mean, not going?"
"Well," he said reluctantly. "My wife doesn't think I should spend the summer in a tent." And that was it. No argument, no discussion... no further story. Frank got a job teaching summer school that year to angry, unhappy adolescents -- while my wife and child and I rode up to Alaska.... Rain, mud, bears, mosquitoes, and some of the most awe-inspiring scenery we had ever experienced were characteristics of a tour we talked about for years.
"I told you Frank wouldn't go," grinned my wife. "Yeah...how'd you know that about him, anyway?" She just smiled.
When we returned, however, Frank was openly hostile and went out of his way to ridicule me and our trip, and to constantly try to make my wife and me out as irresponsible parents and very foolish people. It got so bad I had to admonish him publicly during a faculty meeting. Never close friends, we grew further apart.
Several years after I retired, a colleague ran into me in the street and said, "have you heard about Frank?" I slowly shook my head. "Cancer... prostrate....but they think they can get it all....."
One morning several weeks later my wife woke me up and said gently. "Hey, Hun ... Frank died Thursday night, 65 years old.... his obit's in the Yakima paper." I went on to take a morning shower, where unaccountably.... I wept for old Frank, who wasn't a good teacher, who never became my friend, and who never went up to Alaska. I hope he rests in peace.... but I have my doubts.
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