A Nod to Marlin Perkins

My Barbies did not marry Ken and move to the Malibu Dream house. Instead my ill proportioned plastic beauties threw ad ladles, roasted pigs on spits and ran around topless, wearing only well placed loin cloths. To this day the photos of "Primitive Barbie" camp are the favorites of my childhood, reflecting my adult life better than the snapshots of me uncomfortably dressed in ruffles and lace. They were "Survivors" long before the reality show hit the airwaves. My Barbies would never get voted off the island.

It is the now well-worn tale of a tomboy being raised in a Southern culture where female playmates were planning their weddings at the ripe age of eight. Their Mattel dolls practiced their vows over and over. The women of my clan, unaccepting of my rough and tumble ways, tried in vain to "girl me up", forcing me into shifts, jumpers and velvet whenever they could. Sunday mornings were especially difficult. Lest I should ruin my dress my father dutifully loaded the car with my siblings as Mom escorted me out to the running family sedan. Given any free time likely I’d be found up in a tree or start work on an archaeological dig in the back yard. Before this strategy was employed I was the one responsible for more than one late entry into Grace Presbyterian Church.

Later in day, after the dinner dishes were cleared and family scattered, I’d park my six year old self in front of our Zenith console TV, cross legged on brown and olive carpet shag. It was two o’clock and time for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. For half an hour I could vicariously travel with Marlin and his trusty aid Jim Fowler. Each week they’d go to the Serengeti, the jungles of Uganda, the coast of Madagascar, capturing and studying the fauna of Africa. I watched with intention, my first grade self knowing two things: when I got big I was going to be a wildlife biologist and I was going to Africa.

One Monday morning, my mind filled with images of the tall giraffes of Kenya, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Standefer, announced the school districts art competition. Students in all the grades had till the end of the week to sketch our entries. Unlike my classmates, whose subject matter lay restricted in scribbles of their suburban homes, stick figures of Mom, Dad, kids hand in hand, the occasional dog by their side. Instead I drew a simple circle rectangle circle version of the world’s tallest mammal. I took particular care with the markings, trying to remember the exact spacing I’d seen just twenty-four hours before. I even made certain to provide the quintessential African tree, a flat-topped umbrella thorn, for her to eat.

One month later a week before Thanksgiving, I went proudly with Mrs. Standefer and my parents to see my "Giraffe in Crayon" with a big blue ribbon on its left lower corner. I’d won the contest for my age group, the winner’s drawings on prominent display on the top of Asheville, North Carolina’s only high rise building. I felt my fate sealed. Not only would I be a world renowned biologist roaming the plains of Africa, I would be a famous artist, capturing my adventures in charcoal, watercolors and oils. Jim, Marlin’s intrepid sidekick, would fall head over heels with my energetic, artistic spirit. We’d marry and would live our lives far from civilization. A wilderness fairy tale on the open savannah.

Alas my artistic career proved short lived. It was the subject matter and not my skill allowed me first prize. I never received another. Many family moves long since relegated my two dimensional giraffe to the trash bin. I stare at the wood block print of a similarly proportioned giraffe in my bedroom, a full moon behind its head and wish my family had a bit more pack rat in them. Still the picture I purchased at an art gallery in South Africa takes me back to a time when I helped wrangle rhinos in Swaziland.

I did become a wildlife biologist of sorts. More accurately my Forest Service title: range conservationist, essentially a camouflaged term for federal government cowgirl. In my career I monitored the comings and goings of domestic livestock on the public lands, helped re-introduce elk in the Great Basin on the Idaho-Nevada border, restored damaged trout creeks in the Sierra Nevada and in general enjoyed many hours in a saddle or on foot seeing the beauty and grandeur of the American West.

At the close of the 20^th century the public land battles got nasty. My Mormon superiors grew impatient with a woman unwilling to marry and bear children. The threats came too close, the politics too complicated and I chose to remove myself from federal service. My father had similar struggles in his thirty year career as a forest ecologist, but he had complied with the social norms of the times, family, home ownership. After retiring in plenty of time to travel the world with my mother for almost twenty years, artificial knees and the wear and tear of aging finally ending their wanderings, he gave his youngest daughter a piece of advice. Travel while your body still works! I signed my resignation papers searching for something else to do with my life. Exactly what I didn’t know, but traveling would play an integral part.