Chapter 5

Nicole opened the back door, to find an old woman wearing a long coat standing there – well into her eighties, at a glance, with a deeply lined and wrinkled face. She held a large covered paper plate in her hand. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"Is this the right place for Randy Clark?" the woman asked.

"Sure," Nicole smiled, wondering what this was all about. "If you'd like to step inside, I'll go get him."

"Thank you," the woman said, stepping through the door. "This won't take long."

Nicole turned and faced the "living room" area of the great room. "Randy," she called. "You have a visitor."

"Coming," Randy called, getting up from his chair near the fire.

As Randy approached, the woman looked through the kitchen at the great room beyond. "My, what a fantastic house," she exclaimed.

"We like it," Nicole grinned. "We had reason to make it a little spectacular. I sometimes think it came out a little more spectacular than we intended."

"There's nothing wrong with spectacular," the woman grinned; Nicole could detect a twinkle in her eye as she said it.

"Hi," Randy said as he walked up. "Can I help you?"

"Mr. Clark, I just wanted to thank you for what you did for me today," the old woman said. "I usually have a neighbor take a snow blower to the driveway, but he's in the hospital. I had come to realize that I was going to have to do it the hard way and just started on it when you showed up this morning with that loader of yours. I appreciate that you don't want to take money for doing a random good deed, so I thought I could at least bake you a plate of cookies to thank you."

"Like I said, it was no big deal," Randy smiled. "I was there, I had the time, and I could see you had a big job in front of you. I like playing with that machine, and I don't get to do it enough, so it was really sort of a treat for me."

"It was a huge treat for me, and I can't thank you enough," the woman told him.

"Randy," Nicole snickered. "Were you playing Boy Scout with the Bobcat again?"

"Well, yeah," Randy smiled. "I was headed back from Brent's and I didn't want to have to go back to the office and work. That put it off for another five minutes or so." He turned to the woman, "Ma'am, Spearfish Lake is a small town but it's not that small. I know I've seen you around, but I'm afraid I don't know your name..."

"Nellie," the woman said. "Nellie Fedewa."

"Nellie, like I said, it was no big deal. I appreciate your thinking of the cookies, even though it was something you really didn't have to do."

"I felt I had to do it," Nellie smiled. "It would be impolite to not make the gesture. Kindness and courtesy seem to be dying things these days, but I try to do my part to keep them alive."

"Your kindness is appreciated," Nicole said, then on a whim added, "we're just serving up dinner. Would you care to join us? There's plenty of food and always room for one more at the table."

"I really shouldn't," Nellie protested. "I didn't realize you had guests."

"All the more reason," Nicole smiled. "We all know each other pretty well, so it'll be fun to have someone else present and hear some new stories. Besides, that way we can repay you for your kindness with the cookies. Let me take your coat."

It took Nicole and Randy a little bit of talking to get Nellie to stay, but there was something in the way she agreed that made Nicole think that she was grateful for the opportunity to spend some time with others. Randy got the impression that she might be an interesting person to find out a little more about.

Myleigh actually was the one to put the cap on the decision; without asking she set another place at the big dining table. She called the rest of the group to dinner while Randy and Nicole were still talking to their unexpected guest, and after taking her coat guided her to a place at the table.

As Myleigh and Nicole were serving things, Randy made a quick introduction of their new guest, explaining that Crystal and Preach were from out of town, and that they normally were Grand Canyon raft guides.

"Oh, how I envy you!" Nellie grinned when she heard that. "Harold and I made a trip down the Grand Canyon, oh, it had to have been over thirty years ago. What an extraordinary experience that was. Of all the things we did over the years, that was one of the most intense and most memorable. It was with a company called Canyon Tours, if I recall correctly."

"We're familiar with Canyon Tours," Crystal grinned. "Preach and I are trip leaders, and my father owns the company. I've made over sixty trips down the Canyon, and there's something new every trip I make."

"You know," Debbie sighed. "I've got to do that run sometime. I'm still the only person at this table who hasn't been down the Grand Canyon at least once on a Canyon Tours raft. It really makes me feel like the odd person out sometimes. Probably not this year, though."

"Considering your friends, you probably ought to think about it," Nellie said. "Life is too short to be allowed to be dull. There used to be a beer commercial that said, 'You only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can.' I'm afraid I was through the best of my gusto-grabbing days by the time that commercial came out, but I thought it outlined my philosophy of life perfectly."

"Never saw that commercial," Crystal smiled. "But it probably gets pretty close to my philosophy, too. I've tried to do what I can. I mean, there's a lot to do, I want to do what of it I can."

"I couldn't agree more," Nellie said. "In fact, the Grand Canyon holds a special memory for me, since it was there that Harold and I decided that we were getting older and we'd better be getting on with some of the things we wanted to do. It was mostly there that we made the decision to sail around the world the second time."

"The second time?" Nicole asked in amazement. She decided she'd just proved herself right; this lady was going to have some interesting stories to tell.

"Yes, 1975 through 1979," Nellie said as if she'd been talking about going to the grocery store. "The first time was 1951 through 1955, but we'd always felt we'd missed some places we wanted to see on that trip, so on our second trip we only went a couple places where we'd been on our first, like the Panama Canal. That time we went through the western Pacific, rather than the south, and then around Africa."

"I sailed to Hawaii and back on a Tahiti ketch one time," Crystal said. "It was kind of interesting in a way, but the trip back to California got a bit boring."

"Yes, it would get boring going to weather that far in a Tahiti ketch, wouldn't it?" Nellie nodded with a grin. "We were in a Tahiti ketch our first trip, so we mostly tried to run downhill where we could. We had a fiberglass D&D 36 when we made our second trip; it wasn't as roomy but would go to weather much better. Of course, being fiberglass meant we didn't have a tenth of the maintenance."

"How did you wind up making the decision to go the first time?" Preach asked. "I mean, it's not all that common today, but back in the fifties sailing around the world was even more uncommon."

"Well, Harold was the one who brought it up first," she smiled. "But I thought it was an absolutely marvelous idea. The timing was right and things had been dull for us for a couple years. We'd only been sailing summers, and we didn't have enough to hold us."

"Did you grow up in a sailing family?" Myleigh asked.

"Oh, no," Nellie explained. "I never set foot on a boat larger than a rowboat until after I met Harold. He, well, he was a little burned out by World War II. Several of his friends died, and he was lucky to have survived. He wanted to make up for a little of what they missed, as it were. I, well, I found things a little dull after the war was over and was looking for some way to keep the excitement level up."

"I take that to mean you had a little excitement during the war," Debbie nodded, a little amazed herself.

"A little," Nellie grinned, realizing that she was amazing these people. "Before sailing around the world twice, I did forty-seven Atlantic crossings. Those were all piloting B-17s, P-47s, or P-51s though."

"How ... how did you manage that?" Crystal replied, just a little dazed. She was known for liking her adventures and getting as much as she could, but she'd just been one-upped badly by this old lady and she knew it.

"Oh, that's a long story," Nellie grinned again as they got serious about eating dinner. "My father was a pilot in World War One. He stayed in the Air Corps for nearly twenty years, mostly at Dayton, Ohio where he did flight testing at what's now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I used to love flying as a child, and I was something like thirteen when he started teaching me to fly. I got my commercial and instructor's licenses in the late thirties, after my father left the Air Corps and continued at Wright-Pat as a civilian. Well, along about 1940 the Air Corps had to expand rapidly, and a lot of primary flight instruction was farmed out to civilian outfits. I was teaching young men my age to fly in 1942 when I happened to meet Jackie Cochran, who probably is second only to Amelia Earhart as a famous woman pilot. At that point in time she was trying to set up the predecessor to what became the WASPs, Women's Air Service Pilots. I'd had my fill of Piper Cubs by that time and wanted to fly something a little more exciting, if you know what I mean, so it didn't take much convincing."

"I think I've heard of the WASPs," Randy said. "I really haven't studied that era as much as I should have, I suppose."

"We did test flying and ferry flying, mostly," Nellie explained. "At one time or another I flew most of the major types of American combat aircraft in the war, except for the B-29. I never got to fly one of those; the WASPs were being phased out by the time they came along. As I said, forty-seven Atlantic crossings in B-17s, P-47s and P-51s, by myself in the last two types, of course. We usually flew those in a big formation, with a B-17 or B-24 to do the navigation, but I picked up the basics of celestial navigation along in there. I made a few ferry trips to Hawaii, but they wouldn't let WASPs go on from there, for whatever reason. I also did several to Alaska. Sometimes those trips could be a real adventure. The weather going to Alaska could be horrible. Sometimes you could get closed in for days with the primitive instruments we had at the time."

"I've been there," Crystal said. "I was on a salmon boat coming down the Inside Passage a few years ago, and we got weathered in several times. We almost ran out of food once, except we were able to trade some booze for food with some loggers."

"Much the same thing happened with me," Nellie said. "I got caught by weather once, and the only place I could get into with a P-38 was Kodiak. I was weathered in there for days, and it was there I met Harold in 1943. We didn't have any big fling, or anything, but we got friendly and just hung out together a lot while we waited for the weather to lift. It was no big thing at the time. Well, in early 1945 they phased out the WASPs, and there was nothing much for me to do but go back to Dayton, get a job as a bookkeeper at Wright-Pat and wait out the rest of the war."