Hatching A Plot
Matt (my older brother) and his family live in Alaska. Ever since I had traveled there to help him build a cabin, I wanted to live there too. I bought land there and set my plans in motion. Then I married Janice.
Janice seemed opposed to it. I'm not good at picking up non-verbal cues but when your wife starts swinging pots and pans at your head every time you mention frontier life in Alaska, you get the hint. "Alaska is cold!" she would argue. Anyone wielding a skillet is very persuasive. Still, I wanted to move to Alaska.
Matt and I hatched a plot to help Janice change her mind about Alaska. Or, at the very least, maybe soften her violent reaction to it.
A critical part of the plan was to bring Janice to Alaska so she could experience the "wow" factor for herself. There's something so impressive about seeing Alaska in person. The scale of the wilderness is breathtaking. The beauty and brutality of it is separated only by five minutes of indecisive weather.
Of course getting there isn't an easy endeavor since Alaska is over 4,000 miles from where we currently live in Indiana. So our plans were on hold.
That is until Matt told me he was planning to drive to Alaska from Pennsylvania with an RV he had purchased.
"You can buy a piece of junk here, drive it to Alaska, and resell it for enough to pay for all your fuel costs. We'll be driving through Indiana. Wanna hop onboard and go along?"
I said yes. Then, once Janice was in a good mood and I was out of her reach, I carefully brought up the idea, gently, like you do with a forkful of sloppy spaghetti when you're wearing nice khaki pants. She seemed mildly amused by the idea.
"You actually wanna go?" I asked.
"Visiting Alaska is different than living there," she said.
"Awesome!" The plan was in motion.
Setting A Fleece
I immediately set a fleece before God. Setting a fleece is something that Gideon did in Bible times to test whether he was understanding God correctly. It worked for him, why not for me?
God, If Janice loves Alaska, we'll move there. If not, then I'll stop bugging you about Alaska and we'll get on with our lives.
Oops!
Two weeks before we were to leave on our journey, we found out Janice was pregnant. I never had a pregnant wife before or else I would've known better than to wander even several inches outside of our comfort zone. Pregnancy is a tumultuous event. No need to rock the boat more than necessary. Being it was so early, we had decided not to tell anyone we were expecting just yet and so we hadn't mentioned it to Matt.
No big deal. It shouldn't affect the trip at all, I thought.
We were to be traveling with Matt, his wife Marlene, and seven of his children. That's not a problem when you're traveling in a fifty foot monument to modern excess.
The RV
When Matt arrived I learned that unfortunately I had assumed incorrectly about the size of the RV. Also the quality. Matt's RV looked like somebody arrived at a mobile home park after a tornado, picked through the rubble, and assembled a crude rectangular box from sections of walls, carpet, and aluminum roofing. It was set on the back of a Ford Econo-van. It was labeled "Sprinter, by Mallard." It looked like it had been awhile since it had sprinted. And it was only 30' long.
"Where's the other 20 feet?" I asked.
"That fell off in Ohio," Matt replied.
Now, in my younger years I was willing to become a galley servant in the steerage of a cargo ship if it got me cheap transportation to an exotic location. I've learned now that when I have a pregnant wife, I should never travel anywhere - no matter how tempting the offer! As the saying goes, "Happy wife, happy life." The inverse is also true: "Miserable wife, miserable life." Nothing makes a wife miserable like locking her up in a small box with her in-laws.
One thing I learned about pregnant women is that they have superhuman smelling. A bloodhound could have his nose down to the ground, inhaling twigs, leaves, and small insects, and yet failing to find any evidence of a scent trail. My pregnant wife would come along, take one light sniff, and point the bloodhound in the right direction, "That way, stupid."
This might seem like a good ability to have but it's definitely not when you're trapped in a box for a week with mold, old McDonald's bags, and mysterious liquids soaked into carpets. Janice was clawing the walls, quietly retching every time the bathroom door swung open (it happened a lot), and using our duffle bag full of clothes as a makeshift respirator. She would also spend large amounts of time with her head out the window, letting her tongue flap in the wind. If anyone noticed the strange behavior, they never mentioned it.
And it's not like we were driving to Wal-Mart across town. When we crossed from North Dakota into Canada, we had the startling realization that we were only halfway to Alaska. A whole lot of nothing was still between us. Janice wasn't having a good time.
That'll change when we get there, I thought, she's gonna love Alaska!
Matt and I had timed the trip so we would end up in Alaska in the warmest time of year - July! This would help convince Janice that Alaskans didn't live in igloos year round. But when we got to Alaska, it was 55 degrees and raining.
"See," I tried to make a point, "Obviously you can't live in an igloo. No igloo could survive 55 degrees and rain."
"This is July!" Janice roared, "It should be hot!"
"No problem," Matt said. "It's just a fluke storm. If you don't like the weather in Alaska, wait five minutes. It'll change."
It didn't change at all that week.
Then Janice started complaining about her jaw hurting. I didn't think much about it because whoever heard of such a thing? Also, Janice is my first wife so I'm still learning to be a husband. But ignoring it didn't make it go away.
It got worse, in fact. We started Googling it and found it was TMJ, which stands for something like: "Temporomandibular Joint." I'm surprised you didn't know that. Basically it's inflammation of the jaw and can be really painful. Apparently pregnancy hormones can trigger it. And trigger it they had.
Janice started popping Tylenol. We were careful with pain medications since she was pregnant. It just kept getting worse.
It got so bad enough that we visited an Urgent Care in Kenai. We were ushered to a room where Janice sat on the exam table. I sat and fidgeted on a chair in the corner. A doctor soon showed up and started to question us. After about five minutes of questioning, I saw him scrolling on his phone, which I thought was a bit rude. I peeked over his shoulder and realized he was Googling symptoms! What a quack!
He did, however, have the power to prescribe pharmaceutical products. I didn't, so I patiently waited until he could come up with something. He prescribed some pretty potent pain killers. We had informed him that Janice was pregnant and so we assumed the the medication was safe to take. If two average people like us knew that you had to be careful with medication when pregnant, surely he knew that too? We filled the prescription. They didn't even help much.
So it kept getting worse. I woke up at 12 am a few nights later to find Janice sobbing in pain, curled up in the fetal position. Enough was enough. I woke my brother up, got the keys to his van, and we headed off to the Emergency Room in Kenai. It was about an hour drive, which gave me lots of time to think about all the things I had to sell to pay for this. Maybe I could sell a gun, the motorcycle, maybe um... at this point I became acutely aware of the fact that I didn't own anything of value.
We got to the ER and waited a long time for the doctor to show up. Later calculations revealed that our boredom cost us $12 per minute. I started to casually fidget with the lamps, claw the walls, and swing around on the TV power cord like Tarzan on a vine. The doctor finally came in and quickly surmised that the joint pain was advanced TMJ.
"It's not a big deal, pregnancy can trigger bad TMJ if you've struggled with it before. Can I see the medication that Urgent Care gave you?" She asked.
We handed her the bottle.
"Oh my," she blinked in shock. "This is a narcotic based pain killer. You should never take these if you're pregnant. If you do, the baby could be born addicted to narcotics."
"We'd like to avoid that." I said, just in case she wasn't sure where we stood on the issue. Goodness knows I could hardly afford the ER visit, let alone a baby with a habit for illegal drugs.
"Take maximum strength Tylenol and alternate heat and cold packs on the joint. I would use mostly cold packs. Heat packs may lead to more inflammation." Up until this point we were using only heat packs. Oops.
She signed some papers and said her goodbyes and wished us good luck. After sitting in the room for a fifty minutes, the actual diagnosis took 10 minutes. Later we got a bill for $740. Maybe it would have been cheaper to have a baby addicted to illegal drugs.
Once we knew how to treat it, the TMJ issue got improved with each passing day, along with Janice's mood. The weather didn't clear until two days before we flew home to Indiana. Janice and I rented a car for the last two days we were in Alaska and drove to Valdez which is about 10 hours east of where Matt lived. That was a bright spot in the trip - literally and metaphorically.
My fleece had been answered.
OK God, I finally admitted, I read you loud and clear. Do not move to Alaska. I thought for a bit, then added, At least not yet.
For many months after the trip Janice would shudder, moan, and curl up into the fetal position anytime anyone mentioned Alaska. It was strange behavior but only if you didn't have context.
We never did move to Alaska, though we visited several more times. In fact, we ended up moving to a tropical island near Australia named Papua New Guinea.
Janice is finally warm.
