For years I have been giving my friends sage advice about screening potential summer visitors. Unfortunately, the only person who constantly ignores this freely proffered wisdom is me.
When summer arrives, every personage in the known cosmos suddenly seems to remember that they have kindred living in Alaska.
My example:
“Whoa, wouldn’t it be cool to see good ol’ Nick again? Wonder if he’s the same annoying a$$#*^+ that he was back in college?”
Or, “I hear yur goin’ to Alaska, Jim-Bob. I have a fifth cousin by marriage up thar and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind showing ya around and put ya up fer a couple of days.”
This from the yammering yap of some distant relative I thought was serving time for rustling night-crawlers outside of a worm ranch in Goatguts, Ala.
Please don’t get me wrong, close family and friends’ visitations are way cool. I just don’t think that anyone should be chilling on our cabin’s deck unless it’s a given that they would still want to spend part of their summer vacation with us if we were living in Death Valley, slow roasting in a steel Quonset hut while sucking barrel cactus cubes for moisture.
Point: Several years ago, I met a rather unique gentleman piloting a motorhome the size of New Jersey accompanied by his wife Gert and what looked to be a two-and-a-half-ton Rottweiler named Cannibal.
According to John Billy Joe Bob Langtree, they were from some place that sounded like Moot Point, Arkansas, and were in search of the excellent fishing they heard about in the Homer area.
Turk, Willie, and I demonstrated a couple of different techniques for taking silvers in the Spit lagoon after he assured us that Cannibal’s stare didn’t reflect its deep interest in initiating us into the “The Brotherhood of the Newly Neutered” if his master ended up skunked.
I’m not sorry about meeting or helping that family, but I am about giving them my name, address and phone number.
Re: The Sneeds from what they claimed was Swamp Gas, Mississippi.
John Billlie Joe Bob supposedly told them to “Drop on by my bubba Nick’s place, ifin ya hits Homer. Just tell I sent ya’all.”
Well, damn, if they didn’t call and I blurted, “Yeah, drop in when you get here and we’ll have a cool one. It’ll be great to hear what John Bubba’s been up to.”
I should have said that we were expecting an earthquake along with major volcano eruptions and it would be more prudent for them to visit Peru. I didn’t and they landed in our front yard. Big mistake.
The meeting went something like this…
Two homemade plywood campers pulled into the driveway and backfired to a shuddering halt. A man the size of a belly-dump stepped out of one of the rigs and said, “You be Varney?”
“Yep. You be Sneed?” I countered, staring at the humongous dude while trying to estimate the mud slide that the hygienically challenged Cro-Magnon would create if he ever opted for a shower.
“Yep. Hey, where’s the beer ya’ll promised? I cud sure use a chug, can’t stay long though, cuz we gotzta get back down the road to Anchor Point where Emma’s third cousin’s cousin lives. They gonna be surprised, too. They think I’m still in the slammer.”
“Well, I sure don’t want to hold you up Beauford, how about a six pack to go?”
“Sure. Hey, ya gots inee extree fish? We ain’t caught nutin’ worth keepin’ so far. Can’t believe ya don’t have no catfish, bass, or yellow-whiskered mud suckers.”
As I turned to find him some brew and complimentary cologne, I asked “Does some halibut sound OK?”
“I dunno,” he whined. “That’s a really ugly fish. Me and Emma don’t like ta eat ugly fish.”
“We have some frozen salmon steaks that are sporting a whitish gray appeal. Howz that?”
“Well, I guess anything will do ifen it’s free.”
“Great,” I mumbled as I went inside to retrieve a block of ancient fillets that I had been using as shelving in the freezer.
As the mental flat-line drove off, Jane informed me that some guy had just called and claimed he read my columns online and remembered we had once been thrown out of the same children’s Bible school for disruptive behavior and was hoping to getting together in August.
I immediately dialed Turk and asked a question.
“Yo, Bro, do you still have that old bulldozer?”
“Yep.”
“How much do you want to build a moat?”
Nick can be reached at ncvarney@gmail.com if he isn’t hiding out in a remote yurt somewhere above the Brooks Range until the first frost hits the Kenai Peninsula.
