Pigpen
I never really understood the character Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip.
Was Pigpen perpetually dirty or did he somehow just attract dirt and dust? It seemed that no matter what Pigpen did or where he went, that cloud of dirt followed him.
I just spent the last ten days in Alaska. For the second time.
As many of my kind readers who follow this weekly dribble know, I went to Alaska two years ago.
That little journey through the Great White North didn’t go so well.
On the second day of our trip, someone rear-ended me and my daughter in our rental car. And let’s just say that the collision put a couple scratches on the back of that poor car.
That didn’t stop it us, though. Nope. We’re from Georgia. We’re tough. When life gives us lemons, we build a fire and melt down our gold teeth to make goblets to drink our lemonade out it.
So, we bought us a roll of duct tape and some zip ties and put that poor little car back together and, as they say, the show went on.
Needless to say, when my beautiful wife told me that she had booked us a cruise to Alaska this summer, there was no shortage of snide remarks from
friends and family warning her to be careful.
Apparently, the consensus was that I am a curse.
Well, neither of us believed that balderdash so we booked our flights and I went looking for my old rabbit’s foot.
No reason to completely throw caution into the wind, right?
We boarded our cruise ship on Tuesday in San Francisco and I felt pretty good. I mean, what are the odds of getting rear ended in a 950-foot ship?
Seeing some of my fellow travelers, however, did concern me a little. About half of them were in wheelchairs with oxygen tanks and the other half were so pale and sickly that they were obviously taking this trip so they could be buried at sea.
That wasn’t my problem, though. The ‘curse’ only affected those in my traveling party.
Or so I thought.
At some point on Wednesday, the ship’s captain came over the PA system to announce that we were altering course and heading towards land because one of the passengers was gravely ill and needed to be airlifted to shore.
Upon hearing this, my wife looked at me and said, “What have you done?”
It took two attempts but eventually the Coast Guard was finally able to find an opening in the fog and took our shipmate away to the hospital.
My wife said the person was dead so we will go with that. It just makes this tale sound better.
As the helicopter was hovering over the ship, lowering its basket to pick up the sick (or dead) passenger, my wife turned to me with a worried look on her face.
“And so it begins.”
Wait. Did she really think I caused this? I didn’t even know that person. How could I have cursed them enough to cause an emergency air lift off the ship.
But she wouldn’t listen. It was my fault. Somehow I had come in contact with this poor person and it had caused their premature death.
End of story.
Well, at least it would end with this one incident. It was just a fluke. The curse had been satiated. We could stop holding our breath now.
Later that afternoon, as we were lounging in our room, the PA system cracked to life again. It was the captain.
This time he sounded a little more frantic.
“Medical Emergency! Medical Emergency! All medical teams respond immediately to stateroom L219!”
I looked at my wife. She looked me. It had happened again.
And this time it could not have been a coincidence.
Stateroom L219 is the room below our’s. Yes, right directly under us.
It’s like that scene from Amytiville Horror when the blood ran down the walls. Only, in this case, the curse leaked down from our cabin to the one below us.
I don’t know if that person lived or died. My wife is convinced I killed that poor soul, too.
Even if that was not the case, so far the body count was only two people out of the more than 4,000 souls on board.
That’s less than .0005% of the ship’s inhabitants. Certainly no cause for worry.
There would be no need for duct tape or zip ties this time.
The next day, we were in one of the ship’s lounges, reading our books. We had just gotten out of the hot tub and were relaxed and enjoying the afternoon.
And it happened again.
The music in the room stopped. There was a hush that came over the crowd as the familiar crackle came from the speakers above our heads.
What would it be this time? Someone had been burned their tongue on a bowl of hot soup and had to be medivaaced ashore? Some geriatric old dude pulled a muscle playing shuffle board and needed an immediate craniotomy?
“Ah, ladies and gentlemen, I hate to tell you this but we have had another medical emergency.”
The captain left the sentence hanging and for a brief moment, I was afraid he was about to tell the ship that thanks to Mr. Lovett in stateroom #R219, someone had choked to death on a pork chop in the dining room.
But he didn’t blame me.
Instead, he said that the passenger’s medical condition was so dire that a helicopter was not an option. We would have to forgo our stop at Juneau and head immediately to an alternative port to get this person to a hospital. Stat.
He didn’t say ‘stat’ but if I we’re captain, I would have. What’s the use in watching Gray’s Anatomy if you’re never going to use the lingo.
Upon hearing this, a collective groan could be heard coming from our fellow passengers. My wife silently slid as far away from me on the couch as she could.
“I didn’t do it,” I said to her.
“Tell it to the judge, Dahmer.”
Two days at sea. Three bodies.
If we didn’t pull into a port soon, I was a afraid this would turn into a ghost ship. We’d coast into Skagway with me as the only survivor and a whole lot explaining to do.
Luckily, we arrived in port the next morning without having to wheel another body into the morgue.
The curse has been broken.
Or so, I thought.
We walked into Skagway to find a t-shirt and some reindeer jerky. We got off the shuttle bus at the Visitor’s Center and as we stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide which cheap t-shirt shop to venture into, I heard something above my head.
I looked up and say a huge black raven perched on the sign hanging above my head. It was looking at me with its little black beady eyes as if to say, “I know what you did.”
The bird opened its beak and cawed loudly, directly in my direction. Then, as if on cue, it closed its beady eyes and a stream of white bird excrement showered down from the sign directly at my head.
I sprang out of the way and the bird droppings missed me which seemed to frustrate the raven, who hopped over to the left a little and launched another white poop stream towards my head.
Missed again.
I figured it was time for us to move so I grabbed my wife’s elbow and hustled her into a nearby store, keeping an eye on the evil bird who was apparently intent on soiling my head before I rejoined my cruise.
We came out of the store a few minutes later and there was the raven. Standing in the street. Just looking at us.
No, not us. Me.
We hurried on down the sidewalk and that little black-beaked devil followed us, hopping along on his skinny little legs, his eyes locked on me.
That bird followed us all over town. I don’t know why he was so intent on ‘marking’ me but he didn’t give up until we were safety back on the ship in our cabin.
With the door closed.
Later in the week, we went to Glacier Bay. There were several substantial icebergs floating in the water and I wondered if this trip was going to end up as a sequel to the Titlanic movie.
Somehow, we managed to dodge all of the floating deathbergs and the captain never came back on the PA system.
Maybe the curse had been broken.
I’m sure every time Pigpen got out of the bath tub and dried off, he thought to himself that this time he would stay clean.
And as soon as he stepped outside, that dirt cloud would appear.
It was just unavoidable.
Like me and Alaska.
Adventure always awaits me there. I just have to step over a few bodies to find it.
P.S. We ended our trip in San Francisco where we met our daughter, Madeleine and her guy, Jack for a couple days. This is is in front of the Golden Gate Bridge- we are SO photogenic!
