We finally got out of there, back into the sunlight. Frank’s skin was the color of Aqua-Velva. His wife was saying, “Are you OK, Frank?” and Frank, who could not talk, was clutching the side of the boat with his good hand and giving her what he probably hoped was a reassuring smile, but which came out looking the way a person looks when he pulls a hostile Indian arrow out of his own shoulder. You could just tell that, no matter what his doctor gave him permission to do, he was never, ever again, for the rest of his life, going to travel more than 15 feet from his BarcaLounger. The rower wouldn’t let us out of the boat—he literally blocked our path with his squat and surly body—until we gave him a tip.

Someday, this rower is going to come to the United States, and I will be waiting for him. I am going to take him to Disney World, which any travel writer will tell you is a Fantasy Come True, and I am going to put him on the ride where you get into a little boat and nine jillion dolls shriek at you repeatedly that It’s a Small World after All, and when he is right in the middle of it I am going to hurl Fodor’s Guide to Florida into the machinery so he will be stuck there forever. Wouldn’t that be enchanting?

Ground Control To Major Tomb

I have good news and bad news on the death front. The good news is that within a very short time, sooner than you dared hope, you can have your ashes leave the immediate solar system. The bad news is that it may soon be impossible to purchase your casket needs wholesale in Wendell, Idaho.

We’ll start with the good news. I don’t know about you, but I was starting to wonder if the space program was ever going to produce any practical benefits. Oh, I realize it produced Tang, the instant breakfast drink, but my feeling about Tang is that I would consider consuming it only if I were stuck in space and had already eaten everything else in the capsule, including my fellow astronauts.

So I was very pleased when the Reagan administration gave the OK to an outfit called the Celestis Group, which plans to send up a special reflective capsule filled with the ashes of deceased persons, each packed into a little container about the size of a tube of lipstick. Your container would have your name on it, and of course your Social Security number. God forbid you should be in a burial orbit without your Social Security number, in case there should be some kind of tax problems down the road and the IRS needs to send an unintelligible and threatening letter to your container.

What I like about this plan is, it’s a chance for the common person, a person who does not happen to be a United States senator or a military personnel with a nickname such as “Crip,” “Buzz,” or “Deke,” to get into the space environment. And the negative aspect, which is to say the aspect of being in a lipstick tube, is I believe more than outweighed by the fact that, according to the Celestis Group people, if you take the Earth orbit package, you’ll be up there for 63 million years. Plus, your capsule, as I pointed out earlier, will have a highly reflective surface, which means your Loved Ones will be able to watch you pass overhead. “Look,” they’ll say. “See that little pinpoint of light? That’s the capsule containing Uncle Ted! Either that or it’s an early Russian satellite, containing a frozen experimental dog!”

And that’s just for the Earth Orbit Package. If you can wait a couple more years, and pony up $4,600, you can get the Escape Velocity Package, which will take you right out of the Solar System, such that your remains, as Celestis Group Vice President james Kuhl explained it to me, “will be sailing forever through deep space, etc.”

My only concern here is this: Let’s just say this particular capsule, a couple of billion light years from Earth, gets picked up by those alien beings Carl Sagan is always trying to get in touch with. And let’s say they open it up, and they see all these tubes resembling lipstick, which is a concept they would be familiar with from intercepting transmissions of “Dynasty,” and they naturally assume we are sending them, as a friendly gesture, a large supply of cosmetics. I don’t know about you, but where I come from, we like to think of our dear departed ones as being with their maker at last and resting in eternal peace. We are not comfortable with the concept of their being smeared upon the humongous lips of jabba the Hutt.

But other than that, I think the whole idea is terrific, and I urge all of you who feel that you or a loved one may at some future date be dead, to look into it. Please note that you should not contact the Celestis Group directly, because, as Mr. Kuhl explained it to me, “We enter the picture after the cremation has taken effect.”

This means you have to deal with your local funeral director, which you will find a very interesting experience, because funeral directors, at least the ones I’ve dealt with, generally manage to make you feel like a Nazi war criminal if you don’t purchase one of the better caskets. Never mind that they’re just going to set fire to it; somehow, you’ll get the message that, OK, sure, they can use a plain old el cheapo $900 pine box, if you’re comfortable with the idea of having your loved one’s ashes spend 63 million years mixed in with the ashes from a common, sap-filled softwood of the same type used to make Popsicle sticks, whereas all the other loved ones in the entire reflective capsule will be mixed with, at the very least, walnut. If that’s what you want, fine.

So I think those of us who are not bog scum will want to purchase a higher-quality casket. This is why it’s such a shame about the situation out in Wendell, Idaho. That’s where Roger King, who’s a woodworker, has got himself into this big hassle with the funeral directors because he’s trying to sell caskets directly to the consumer. He has a showroom, right in Wendell, where he has some caskets on display, in addition to furniture, and he claims he charges a third to half as much per casket as a funeral director. “We’ve got a pine for $489,” he said, “and a solid walnut for $1,500.”

So naturally the Idaho funeral directors association fired off a letter to the state, claiming that King was selling caskets without a license. This of course would be a violation of the law designed to protect the public from buying caskets from unlicensed people, which as you can imagine would lead to who knows what kind of consumer tragedies. I don’t even want to think about it. And I’m not making this up.

So then King sued the funeral directors, claiming they were discouraging people from buying his caskets. When I talked to him, he had sold only two in about six months, and he sounded kind of desperate. He had even started running radio casket advertisements, which is something you might look forward to if your travel plans call for you to be in the Wendell area. But to be brutally frank, I doubt that Roger’s going to make it in the direct-to-the-consumer casket business. This means you’re going to have to continue purchasing your caskets retail, from your local funeral director. Be sure to ask him about the space burial plan. My guess is he’ll somehow manage to suggest that, if you really cared for the deceased person, you’ll want the Escape Velocity Package.