Oof. By the time I had made it through all the storms of south central Missouri in my leaky old Comet ragtop ("Dodger, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!"), I was very happy to have gotten two last Davidson invitations for lodging on my way homeward. Thanks to Curtis Bickers '93, for a redux of my westbound visit to his gracious Memphis home. And big thanks to my dear, fun and funny classmate Linda Cassens Laforest '85, who had called me up on a rainy, Motel 6 kind of a day earlier in the week to ask when I was coming through Oak Ridge. O, happiness! Dodger and I were plumb tired of Motel 6 by now: Kingman, Ariz., Gallup, N.M., Goodland, Kan., Lawrence, Kan., St. Robert, Missouri... Nice as it is to see that dog-friendly sign from the interstate, it's not home. For instance, I would never have such a thing as that bedspread in my home. Please. Come to think of it, I would never have that bed, either. Ah, well. Motel 6 is, like WalMart, what it is: When you need it, it's exactly what you need, but when you're done, you don't want to just hang out there. So anyway.
Dodger was excited to see Linda again, too, even if she is a vet. I mean, it's not like she's his vet, with all the shots and the pills and that dreadful back-end business and the inhalant bordatella vaccines sprayed all up in his everso delicate Pointer nostrils. No, today, good Linda was just a happy friend to man and beast, and especially to this man and this beast.
Linda and I kept ourselves so generally cracked up over nothing during our 24-hour visit that I, like, totally forgot to get out my camera. So here she is grinning studiously in E.H. Little Library back in the day. We loved rock and roll. Still do. So, in fact, does my Davidson colleague, campus news guy and photographer Bill Giduz '74, who took this picture when he was new on the job at alma mater in the early '80s.
Linda Joan---yes, as in Joan "I Love Rock and Roll!" Jett, which I always thought was cool ever since Linda and I got pennied in the base Belk lounge as freshman and discovered a mutual admiration for Ms. Jett---Linda Joan got off work a little early the day I visited. So, once we got my Dodger the black-and-white Pointer settled in with her Diamond the black-and-white Border Collie, and the two of them more or less settled in with the household's two four-month-old kittens, then we went and jumped in Linda's boyfriend's truck with a couple of kayaks and headed for one of the many nearby put-ins along the Clinch River.
The river was one of the natural features that led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make a "declaration of taking" of land in the area and begin in October 1942 to build from scratch what would almost overnight become the walled and secretive town of Oak Ridge. It was home to the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb. Today, science, industry, and government are all still big players, though the wall is gone. Street names are after states and universities and even Tennyson. Vintage houses are of five basic floor plans designated, in true government fashion, by letters of the alphabet. Linda and her kids live in a D house.
I missed seeing Linda's kids, Warren and Marian. Other people's kids sometimes do it for me and sometimes don't, but these two grabbed me at hello, a fine young lady and young man, and they make me laugh and love my dog. What else do you want in a person, hmm? I'll have to go back for more kayaking when they are back in town.
Our cellphone pictures of kingfishers, ospreys, and herons (oh my!) didn't turn out too hot, so here's little me with my driver's arm tan, instead.
Linda and I saw a heron and a kingfisher and even paddled within 30 feet of an osprey nest and watched mama osprey tearing apart strips of fish. I romanticized that she was feeding her young, but Linda, the vet, gently pointed out that the mama bird was, in fact, having the fish for herself. Truth be told, I don't even know that there were any young in that nest, and between us, turned out we didn't even know if it was the right season for hatching osprey eggs. Somehow, in the way that only old friends can make it, that was hilarious. But we agreed that the mama osprey was quite a sight, and so we hushed for a few minutes to take in the sight of her, living her little life large, exactly as nature intended.
Rock and roll.
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