After replacing “As Far as the Yukon” with a 1954 Yuma, Arizona phone book,Margaret settled herself on the divan and began reading the book she’d found under the leg of the dining room table. Florence Page Jaques was Margaret’s favorite travel author from the 1950s. Long a friend of the family, Florence’s one-time neighbor, Isabella Cruiseforth, was due to arrive that afternoon and a quick brush-up of knowledge of the Alaskan wilderness seemed to be in order.
“I like getting into a train, waiting for it to start toward unknown expanses — it is like waiting for the curtain to
come up in the theater. I like the very rattles and rumbles and jiggles when we start, though on these modern Western trains they have been so eliminated that the journey is like being wafted along on a cloud…” Florence writes. “I like taking the precarious walk through the swaying coaches to the observation or dining car. I like watching from the end of the train the track streaking away behind us, and how I like eating in the diner! From the constant clink of the ice in the goblet to the little coffeepot with the too hot handle! And why is it that though you just look through the window in other cars, in the dining car window you look down on humanity with the serene grandeur of gods and godesses in Valhalla?”
Margaret rose from the divan. She threw open the sash and hollered to Spencer who was in the garden with the clinch bugs. “Spencer, dear! It’s time for a real journey. Not a melancholy one like our last when we had to tend to Anastasia Terdman’s funeral. Shall I dispatch a missive to Farmlife Travel and book a destination, say New York City? We can leave on Thursday after we fumigate the attic. I long to see the theater. And you said you wished to photograph the boring beetles of Central Park.”
Spencer smiled. “Ahhhhh. Boring beetles barking up the wrong tree. My favorite time of year in the City. Who cares for heat? We shall attach the personal cooling device Cook has developed and then we can walk, carelessly, through any urban sprawl or rural destination. Do you have the pith helmets I told you to secure from Catatonic Hardware Store? Good, good. Yes, book the necessary tickets, Amtrak… and we will stay in the apartment, dear, just call Allistair and have him tell Mrs. Format to prepare the fridge and alert the staff. Why, just yesterday I read on the Internets that dung beetles had found their way to Saks.”
"Don’t forget, Isabella will be here for tea. She is only staying a few hours and will not impede our pending departure. And, doubtless, she’ll have a current Zogby’s for us to borrow. I will begin packing immediately. Find my valise, would you? I believe it’s in the rose garden, seems I may have planted some petunias in it."
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