You Slept Where?: Calamities of a Clumsy Businesswoman

By Brenda Prater Sellers

As a little girl, author Brenda Prater Sellers traipsed around Prater Flats in Louisville, Tennessee, thinking she was Ansel Adams with her first, clunky, black-and-white Polaroid that didn’t work half the time. The love of that camera and the unknown turned her into not only an overzealous wannabe photographer but into a Southern, Mountain Dew-driven, M&M eating, adrenaline-seeking adventurer, skydiver, and climber of Mount Everest.

In You Slept Where? she shares her story about a businesswoman who is also a wife, mother, and a farmer’s daughter pursuing a childhood dream of being published in National Geographic, while coping with life’s struggles of her parents’ eldercare. Sellers also tells about her experiences and mishaps in bizarre locations and staying at the world’s most unique places: an underwater hotel, an ice hotel, sleeping with polar bears, or sleeping in wigwams along Route 66. Imagine the movies Miss Congeniality meets National Lampoon’s Vacation in her version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

With cost-saving travel tips and other advice included, You Slept Where? provides insight into one woman’s crazy adventures while encouraging others to create their own bucket list.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665722780

Brenda Prater Sellers

Brenda Prater Sellers went from receptionist to president of a global manufacturing company, a leader in licensed graphic accessories in the automotive aftermarket industry. Her photography journey and extensive “To Do” list has resulted in her being a two-million miler on several airlines, to sixty-nine countries. Sellers is also a community leader and philanthropist. She and her husband, Big Ed, have one son but also claim fifteen others as their own. Visit her online at http://www.brendapratersellers.com/.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Brenda Prater Sellers.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by

any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system

without the written permission of the author except in the case of

brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author

and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of

the information contained in this book. The names of some but not all

characters have been changed to keep them from being embarrassed. Or

maybe I forgot their names. The only time individuals are modified into

composites, is when combining personalities in a scene makes more sense

to preserve anonymity. This also explains why over the thirtysomething

year period of this book some timelines are to the best of my recollection

but may have been switched for clarity and a better flow of the story.

Archway Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2279-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2277-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2278-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022907890

Archway Publishing rev. date: 9/7/2022

CONTENTS

Introduction and Dedication

1: Under the Water

2: With Polar Bears

3: In a Silo

4: In the Belly of a Dog

5: At the Bottom of the Grand Canyon

6: In an Ice Hotel

7: At the Airport

8: In a Red 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille

9: In the Land of Chocolate

10: At the University of Tennessee Medical Center

11: Wigwams along Route 66

12: In Lighthouses

13: In a Shack

14: In a Death Room

15: At Momma’s House, the Praterosa

16: In a Cave

17: Over the Water

18: Anywhere and Everywhere

Epilogue

APPENDIX A: Meeting the National Geographic Photographer

APPENDIX B: How to Save Travel Pennies and Road Warrior Lessons

APPENDIX C Where Have You Slept?

Acknowledgments

Praise for

You Slept Where?

Sellers’ memoir is clever, touching, funny, and a pure delight!

-Homer Hickam, author, Rocket Boys and Carrying Albert Home

"A witty, unique, touching, and inspiring story that

will keep you entertained while vicariously visiting

the most bizarre places." - Carol Sommerville

"This is a heartwarming account of coping with parents. A

bumbling female company president will surprise you and keep

you laughing while trying to check off her ever growing To Do

list of the most unusual places in the world." – Carolyn Forster

"A humorous modern-day Erma Bombeck visits

some unbelievable places to stay in order to achieve

a prize-winning photo." – Angela Massey

INTRODUCTION AND DEDICATION

Write what you know, instructed my writing coach at our first session of "How to Start Writing Your Book Today. It was ten years ago when I enthusiastically wrote on a piece of paper my book idea: I slept in a big potato."

Sherri, the puzzled instructor, looked at me like I needed counseling.

"Well, I’m known for staying at bizarre places, so I’m going to write about my childhood dream of getting an award-winning photograph published in National Geographic," I explained. It’ll be a story about my calamities while trying to obtain ‘the shot’ at some of the most unusual places in the world while juggling life. The kookier places I checked off my To Do list, the more peculiar places I discovered, I said, laughing.

Sherri went into journalist mode with rapid-fire questions: "What? When? Where? Why National Geographic?"

I replied, "Because of that magazine, as a little girl, I traipsed around Prater Flats in Louisville, Tennessee, thinking I was Ansel Adams with my first clunky black-and-white Polaroid that didn’t work half the time. My love of the camera and the unknown turned me into not only an overzealous wannabe photographer but into a Southern, Mountain Dew–driven, M&M eating, adrenaline-seeking adventurer, skydiver, and climber of Mount Everest (although I didn’t do so well) on a lifetime tangent."

What’s your motivation? Sherri asked.

I paused to reflect. Well, all girls have dreams, even gearheads like me. I grew up as a tomboy on a farm, the middle child between two brothers, to become a businesswoman in corporate America. I was a farmer’s daughter, a wife, and a mother, but my childhood competitiveness took me from a receptionist to president of Chroma Graphics, also known as CHROMA—a global manufacturing company and a leader in licensed graphic accessories in the automotive-aftermarket industry—while multitasking in other businesses along the way.

What do you want readers to gain?

As a businesswoman, I turned into a detailed list maker with an over-the-top To Do list that grew faster than Daddy’s soybeans. In the end, I hope to inspire readers to make their own lists and experience places they never knew existed. I added, With all the traveling I did for business, I want to include an appendix with tips and lessons learned, including cost-saving ideas.

Who would be your characters? Sherri continued.

Well, we have one son, Dustin, but we also helped raise fifteen other ‘kids’ whom we call our own, but that’s another story, I began. The foil of this story is Big Ed, the husband, but like Ernest T. Bass in Mayberry, Big Ed appears only occasionally in the chapters at some of these weird places. He’s an army military intelligence veteran and undercover investigator. I never knew what he did exactly, nor did I ask. He had no idea how my wacky escapades on my To Do list would change our lives forever.

Sherri stared and I continued.

Oh, and there’s Bertha, another main character and lifelong travel companion. She’s not alive, although I do talk to her. She’s my suit bag.

Sherri raised one eyebrow but didn’t inquire further. Writing a book will be one of the most overwhelming projects you’ll attempt, she warned, "but remember, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Start writing today. Then she closed our session, asking, Who is going to buy your book?"

All the folks who want to live adventures from the couch and need a good laugh. But I dunno. I thought more. I bet my momma will buy a copy. She loves to read. I caught the photography bug from her. She had a Ciro camera. So I’ve dedicated this book to both my parents, Harold and Katherine Prater, since it also includes some of their stories and resilient journeys.

Ten years, thirteen writing seminars, six consultants, more writing coaches, and reading other authors’ work to learn later, I launched a website to show readers chapter-by-chapter photos of these odd places. Big Ed’s and my photo scrapbooks fill two rooms with close to a thousand albums. We have a pending application with Guinness World Records for the most albums/scrapbooks in a single household. (If you have more photo albums, we need to talk.)

My quest for the shot has taken me to sixty-nine countries and earned me a two-million-miler status on Delta Airlines alone, all while living life, but mostly laughing.

Thank you for allowing me to share my stories. I’m humbled, honored, and usually hungry.

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Visit the website www.brendapratersellers to see chapter-by-chapter photos:

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CHAPTER ONE

Under the Water

JULES’S UNDERSEA LODGE—

KEY LARGO, FLORIDA

N aked and shivering, I quickly wrapped a towel around myself.

Moments before, as small fish darted in the green water of the lagoon, I had struggled out of my fluorescent-pink scuba wetsuit and peeled off my tight two-piece bathing suit underneath.

We were thirty feet underwater at Jules’s Undersea Lodge in a crypt-like vault, only fifty by seventy-five feet. A large grayish blob loomed in the porthole.

Big Ed, there’s something out there! I exclaimed.

The blob slowly edged closer.

It looked vaguely like a manatee. I grabbed my camera and waited eagerly for the manatee, or whatever it was, to come closer.

This is it. With joy in my heart, I thought, This’ll be the photograph I’ve waited for my whole life: my National Geographic-worthy shot. Having a passion for manatees and envisioning a close-up encounter with the teddy bears of the sea, I clutched the towel tighter with one arm as I tried to focus through the glare of the porthole.

In my daydreams, the photo I was about to take would appear on newsstands everywhere. Even busy passersby would stop and stare at my image of the manatee’s sweet egg-shaped face, cute little wrinkles, bushy whiskers, and sad cow eyes. People would pause, smile, and say Aw.

But my magazine cover-page fantasy burst like a cartoon bubble when the manatee image became two nonmanatee shapes looming closer.

We were supposed to be alone. What, or who, was approaching?

Big Ed, get up. Get up. My husband was stretched on the couch in his sweatpants, not happy about the underwater pilgrimage in the first place. He moaned, mumbled that he was swimmy-headed, rolled over, and closed his eyes. I stood frozen, mouth wide, not believing my eyes at what happened next.

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I had booked this underwater one-night stay not only because I was a wannabe National Geographic photographer but also for a much-needed getaway and surprise anniversary present for Big Ed. When I had first enrolled him for scuba lessons, also a surprise, I had no idea he wasn’t a good swimmer. To make matters worse, he found out quickly that he was claustrophobic. Now in a tight enclosure, he was trapped like a goldfish in a pickle jar.

My life on land was not perfectly peachy but challenging. I was a thirty-something female president of CHROMA, a manufacturing company of licensed, decorative automotive accessories. It had taken years for CHROMA to become the industry leader and even longer for me to climb the ladder from receptionist to president, after spending part of my career in sales, in the mostly male-driven automotive-aftermarket environment. Running a business became more difficult with increasing competition and the ever-changing economy, as we dealt with not only the nation’s largest retailers but also with worldwide licensed brands and their various demands.

The trip was also an escape from reality; we had recently received the heartbreaking news of my daddy’s brain tumor. Being the biggest daddy’s girl ever, it was as if swimming into the unknown could keep me in that state of denial or possibly help me overcome the unknown. At the same time, my momma, a sweet, timid, and faithful Christian woman, was experiencing some symptoms of what I thought could be vascular dementia. Bless her heart. It was like a sledgehammer had broken my heart into tiny little pieces, and we couldn’t foresee how our lives would change with time.

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Our underwater situation went from bad to worse.

I stood watching the wet entrance, which is like a water floor, when two heads popped up from the green water inside the private entrance of our lodge. This uninvited couple had swum from the lagoon, disturbing our privacy. They climbed the ladder into our tiny hotel as if they were boarding a friend’s boat for a weekend party.

Not only was there no manatee photo op, but to my shock, this couple was making themselves at home on the ledge no wider than a sidewalk around the entrance, casually removing their scuba gear like invited guests.

I watched them unzip their wetsuits, and for once in my life, I was speechless.

There had to be a mistake. This couple was in the wrong underwater villa.

My inner voice screamed, Get out! But, trying to be nice, I firmly said, Excuse me, while tiptoeing around their masks and fins in the entryway. Our scuba gear and underwater video gear lay scattered on the tile floor.

To make myself clear, I said, We’ve rented this place tonight. It’s our anniversary, as I pulled the towel tighter. I was changing clothes, as if making excuses for my towel outfit.

The female intruder, a blonde sporting an inhuman Barbie-doll figure, wore a stark-white string bikini, not much wider than dental floss. Cringing, I looked at my discarded and dingy bathing suit bottom taking up a lot of space on the floor. By comparison, it looked like a jumbo-sized pair of granny panties in desperate need of Clorox.

Barbie girl was toned, tanned, and tattooed with intertwined roses and barbed wire stretching from her neck to her feet and snaking around her waist onto her back.

She was stunning, and her burly dive partner was the hairiest man I’d ever seen. He also was tanned and toned and had chiseled six-pack abs and a bright-yellow Speedo, seemingly painted on. He shed his wetsuit and slid back into the water. In a trance, I watched as the long black hair on his back swayed back and forth in the water like seaweed, taking on a life of its own.

I tried not to gawk but couldn’t help it, as I caught myself searching for tattoos camouflaged underneath all his hair. Where had I left my camera?

Happy anniversary, Barbie girl said. We’re staying here too. Her voice echoed against the steel enclosure. Her electric-blue eyes darted around before landing on my thin towel attempting to cover my pearly thighs. I hoped she didn’t notice what looked like hail damage. I wished I had a spray tan and less cellulite. She said, We’ll celebrate with you.

With my toes, I moved my wet bathing suit to the side. With nowhere to hide it, I stood on it. There was no way we would share this room, which was smaller than a single-car garage and had a bathroom the size of a closet with these complete strangers underwater—and on our anniversary night.

I was becoming an unhappy underwater camper. Who were these people anyway?

Traveling alone for business, I had recently completed a self-defense class and was taught to think of every stranger as a possible threat. Barbie girl and Hairy Ken seemed nice enough, but what if they were escaped convicts on the loose, wanted by the FBI, or guilty of murder? Oh. My. Goodness. Where was my dive knife?

Big Ed stumbled from the couch, his hair in disarray and a puzzled look on his face. Unprepared for the surprise strangers, he made haste to the bathroom, leaving me to deal with the situation.

Apparently I’d failed to read the fine print. When I made the reservation, instead of booking the entire underwater lodge, I had booked only one of the two bedrooms. It was an oopsie-daisy moment in which I discovered the bathroom and living area had to be shared.

The scuba divers explained to us that they were checking the place out as a wedding destination. Did you know they can actually bring a wedding cake underwater for the ceremony? she asked, astonished. Bringing a cake might have been easier than hauling all of my food and belongings.

She continued. The only catch is our wedding guests and parents will have to get certified. My mother can’t swim, and my father is afraid of water. Well, that’s one way to keep the wedding party list short, I thought.

Do your parents scuba dive? the wet bride-to-be asked me.

Uh, no. My momma is a housewife, and my daddy is a farmer.

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Don’t you go swallowin’ that water. The lake had a faint odor of rotten eggs, and Daddy called it Fort LaTurd because his cattle waded in the same place where we swam as kids. Others called it Fort Nasty. We lived two pasture fields (or five minutes away on a tractor) from the section of lake known as Prater Flats, where the Prater Ferry had transported passengers from Blount to Knox County back in the 1800s.

Ew, Daddy, the water smells like doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, my sandy-blond-haired, blue-eyed baby brother Mark said, standing in knee-high muddy water and playing with his beach ball.

Daddy, who usually worked in soybean fields all week, would normally be enjoying a Sunday afternoon nap in a quiet house while we were swimming. On this day, standing on the shoreline, he waved his arms and shooed his Black Angus cows away from us. Git on outta here.

My brother Stevie, who was one year older than me, pointed at the cows headed across the small channel where I was swimming. Daddy, Brenda’s gonna get run over! he shouted. They’re headed to the island.

I was maybe six years old and swimming farther from the shore than I was supposed to, way over my head. I was lost in my daydreaming as the cows came closer. You’re not the boss of me, I sassed back at my brother as the cows turned and headed to the shore.

Momma, soaked in the rays on the hot July day, watched from the edge of the shore. She was wearing her black one-piece bathing suit and black Jackie O sunglasses. She smiled sweetly. Now, Brenda, be nice. You’re out too far. She motioned toward me. Come on back this way.

Momma, who always had a golden tan, lay on a yellow, faded, and tattered beach towel. Positioning her Ciro 35 slide camera, she instructed my brothers and me, Look over here, as she waved and snapped a quick photo.

For hours we splashed around with so much floating debris we couldn’t see our feet in the murky waters. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined that a childhood passion for swimming would morph into adventures in another unknown underwater world, one with crystal-clear visibility and without mud and cow manure from Daddy’s cattle.

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Several years prior to our underwater stay at Jules’s, a serendipitous meeting of a scuba instructor at a party started the scuba diving phase and had me adding another category to my To Do list of places to dive. The instructor informed me that he had space available in his beginner’s class the next day, so the day after the party, I had signed up for NAUI Open Water I lessons starting that evening.

The first step on my list was to get certified.

Scuba 101 teaches people to never dive alone. I needed a diving buddy, so I recruited Big Ed to fill that role. Bless his big heart—I married my opposite, a stay-on-the-couch, private individual with a no-nonsense personality. Big Ed’s demeanor was like my own daddy’s, and he had a lot in common with Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband: another reserved, supportive man who preferred to remain in the background.

Big Ed was a beefy bodybuilder back in his twenties, but now he wasn’t in as good shape and was larger. He wasn’t happy about taking classes and having to squeeze his big-boned body into a Speedo-inspired neoprene wetsuit. "You want me to put that on? I don’t think I can get my big toe in that thing," he complained when he first saw the wetsuit. Somehow, he sucked it in and struggled into the black dive suit trimmed in fluorescent blue.

Both Big Ed and I earned our Open Water I certification in thirty-degree weather, with snow on the ground and water temperatures averaging in the low forty degrees. Big Ed was a lot like my daddy, also a big man who was strong and hardworking and who worked the fields in all kinds of weather conditions, and I never once heard him complain. But unlike Daddy, Big Ed whined like a little girl during the scuba class. It’s cold. I can’t feel my hands or feet.

For such a big guy, Big Ed seemed afraid of water and didn’t really care to take Open Water II, but we would get a discount if we both enrolled, so I registered him too. He made it known after the Open Water II class that his diving education was over. Somehow, and after additional swimming lessons, he passed the advanced class.

Initially, he didn’t like spending money on the essential masks, fins, and snorkel, but now on our anniversary, he wouldn’t like spending our vacation pennies on dive locations on my scuba To Do list. I, however, didn’t hesitate to invest in a once-in-a-lifetime experience of a scuba diver’s dream destination at Key Largo in Florida, known as the Sunshine State.

He knew we were diving at Devil’s Eye in Ginnie Springs, but he became suspicious when we turned onto the gravel driveway with hand-painted signs pointing to Jules’s Undersea Lodge. Why does the sign say ‘underwater lodge’? he asked.

Surprise, I replied. Happy anniversary. This’ll be great.

I usually forget our anniversary each year, scoring zero brownie points, and I couldn’t remember if it was our eighth, ninth, or tenth wedding anniversary, but Big Ed was too much of a Southern gentleman to complain and was amazed I had remembered. But his apprehension grew as we carted our belongings across the gravel parking lot and to the diving dock.

My new black TUMI suit bag, which I named Big Bertha and weighed about the same as a small elephant, had to stay in the rental car as we unloaded.

Even though the confirmation letter had instructed us to pack light since dinner and breakfast would be provided, I’d failed. My overnight belongings now had to be transferred from Bertha into a bright yellow, briefcase-sized, watertight container. I crammed in a tote bag of snacks, a six-pack of Mountain Dew, one jumbo bag of peanut M&M’s, three packages of crackers, four Snickers bars, one bag of Reese’s Pieces, a small jar of Jiffy chunky peanut butter, and a loaf of locally made Kern’s Old Fashioned bread.

A tall, thin staff diver with shoulder-length hair who doubled as bell captain and chef glared at my supply. All this food yours? For one night?

My snacks probably outweighed him. I made a note to myself to tip the aqua-bellman named Jason generously for his efforts.

The second load in the airtight container included three jumbo notebooks for projects I was working on and several books—including Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and the past few months of National Geographic magazines. At the last minute, I tossed in a VHS copy of Jaws to watch underwater.

After four trips taking my belongings to our underwater room, the exhausted Jason confirmed, That’s all of your stuff, minus the kitchen sink, right? He seemed thankful that Big Ed had only one load in the small waterproof case, which also included our camera gear.

Prior to making the dive to the hotel, we were instructed to store our street clothes in lockers and change into our bathing suits before squeezing into our thick wetsuits. We watched Jason demonstrate the hookah, an underwater breathing device.

This hookah is like swimming with a long black water hose in your mouth. You don’t have to carry a forty-five-pound air tank on your back or worry ’bout running out of air. You’re free to dive anywhere in the lagoon, day and night. He explained the safety features, rules, and regulations as we stood waiting in the ninety-nine-degree, relentless Florida sun. I stood wilting like a flower and reminisced about the cold water we had dived in when we received our certifications, so cold I thought my hair would freeze. Big Ed started swaying back and forth while Jason was talking. He was as hot-natured as I was, and I was hoping he wouldn’t collapse on the dock.

Keeping an eye on Big Ed, Jason gave us a history of Jules’s Undersea Lodge. It had originally been designed in the early seventies by diving pioneer Ian Koblick, first as an undersea habitat stationed more than a hundred feet from the coast of Puerto Rico called La Chalupa. The habitat was also featured in a television documentary back in 1971.

Even though I tried to listen, I was so hot that all I heard was, Wah, wah, wah, like Charlie Brown’s teacher, as Jason rambled. Refurbished in the early eighties, it’s the first true ambient-pressure habitat. It’s the world’s first underwater hotel available to the general public. We get divers from all over the world.

When he finished and said, Let’s do a giant stride, I didn’t hesitate. This was scuba lingo for taking a big step off the dock.

With hookah in my mouth, I took that step, my first step on the way to our hotel. Not accustomed to the hookah or paying close enough attention to the instructions, I took a big breath, swallowed a mouth full of water, and snorted a spray into my mask.

Gasping for air, I gagged. Cursed with a phobia of puking, a ninja-like hurl developed at the top of my stomach, but I swallowed hard and prayed. Oh, dear Lord, please don’t let me throw up in the water I’m swimming in. I treaded water, choking uncontrollably, and then I looked at Big Ed waiting on the dock. Something was wrong.

Big Ed stood frozen. His large silhouette made him look like a giant standing on the dock, unwilling to do the giant stride. He glanced upward to the sky as if for divine intervention. For a moment, his eyes darted toward the rental car for a possible getaway. He sighed. From the water, like a mother encouraging a child wearing water wings to jump into the deep end of a pool, I enthusiastically chanted like a Nike commercial, Come on, Big Ed, just do it.

He inched his black flippers closer to the edge. He stepped from the dock but, somehow, in midair turned so that his back was facing me. His tsunami-like splash made me bob like a fishing float in his wake. I noticed he had a wedgie but tried not to laugh as I choked.

We both acclimated and made the okay hand signal to the aqua-bellman, refreshed by sixty-degree water and astonished to suddenly hear Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik surrounding us, the music vibrating throughout our bodies as if we were seated at the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. Even though our eyes burned in the salt water through our foggy masks, we stared at each other in awe, amazed to be hearing music underwater for the first time.

In the fifteen-feet visibility in what Jason had called the Emerald Lagoon, he swam ahead of us, leading the way. I floated through the water theatrically to the beat of the music but wondered why they weren’t playing the theme from Jaws so that we could pick up the pace and swim faster to the lodge.

We weren’t able to see the hotel at five fathoms (thirty feet), but I kept my eyes on the aqua-bellman and followed him into a world of green. It was an easy swim, but I turned around to see Big Ed swimming slowly, like a sick sea turtle with a broken flipper. He seemed to be barely moving and lagged so far behind I thought he might grow gills underwater.

Big Ed and I had visited several dive sites where we swam through white-capped swells of rough seas and worried about losing our lunch from motion sickness or experiencing a Dramamine hangover. Now, I couldn’t get the odd, chalky taste of lagoon water out of my mouth, which reminded me of Daddy’s warning: Don’t you go swallowin’ that water.

Glancing back again at the husband, I saw him stop in a midswim stride and wave his arms. Oh, no, is he having a panic attack? I thought. What if he drowns on our anniversary?

Jason had noticed his dilemma and swam back to Big Ed, who pointed to a lobster hiding in the coral. He gave the universal thumbs-up sign to Jason, who would also be our chef and would prepare our choice of a steak or lobster dinner. Big Ed chose the lobster for his dinner. Relieved that he was just hungry, I motioned for him to hurry up. I was like Dory encouraging him to just keep swimming so that we could eat and change into dry clothes.

Finally, what appeared to be a coffin-shaped structure with a large glass porthole came into view. The three of us swam underneath the lodge and rose through a big hole in the bottom. We had arrived at our underwater destination.

Jason and I surfaced into the entrance easily, but Big Ed struggled. He huffed and puffed, finally managing to heave himself up like a beached walrus.

Once we removed the hookahs, like magic, we could easily breathe underwater because of air being pumped into the lodge.

Wow, isn’t this great? I asked Big Ed.

Although the eleven-foot ceiling made the space seem larger than it was, Big Ed was turning the shade of fried green tomatoes. Oh, sweet Jesus, I prayed, please don’t let him pass out. How in the world would we get the big guy to the surface?

Trying to distract him, I pointed to the television and VCR like I was an excited teenager with a new Gameboy. "Look, they already have a copy of Jaws." I laughed. Big Ed only glared.

Knowing Big Ed was anticipating his lobster dinner, I pointed, Hey, look, there’s a bowl of grapes. You’ll feel better if you eat something. Swimming through the lagoon had made both of us hungry. We devoured the grapes like starving piranhas.

We sat in the kitchen as I ran my hand over the mermaid design that was carved into a tropical theme on the dining table and said, This place reminds me of Margaritaville, don’t you think so?

He seemed to be feeling better after eating the grapes; however, his head wobbled to and fro as he made his way to the plush couches that were built into the soft-carpeted walls surrounding the porthole.

A slight musty scent lingered in the air, like wet laundry that had been left too long in the hamper, but I was amazed to see that we had all the conveniences of any above-water hotel room, including a microwave and a telephone. I wasn’t sure Big Ed could fit into the tiny shower, but for the moment I was in awe that we were under the water—and breathing.

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But the awesomeness disappeared in the reality that we were not alone in our underwater experience. This triggered an outpouring of emotions, transforming me into something like the Incredible Hulk, one of the brands that we manufactured at CHROMA. My agitation seemed to pump through my veins, wishing this younger couple would swim far, far away from us.

In such a small enclosure, we had few options for dealing with unexpected divers. Walking to the front desk or calling to request another room wasn’t an option. I had to learn to accept my circumstances and try to make a negative situation positive even though I was in a mentally dark place.

Instead of having a Murphy’s law attitude of what can go wrong will go wrong, I tried to focus on the bright side. I had just read about being a fountain of positivity rather than a drain of negativity. After all, the Lord is always putting us in unusual predicaments, but I wasn’t expecting to be thirty feet underwater with strangers, especially a hairy stranger who leaves the toilet seat up. I had to deal with the situation as if I had a Coexist decal stuck to my forehead.

I changed my agitated attitude into a plan B. I laughed. Our predicament would have been funnier if it was happening to someone else, but I laughed anyway. Daddy, with his warped sense of humor, always told me, You know what to do. You gotta do what you gotta do.

During dinner with the scuba strangers, I tried to be more like Dale Carnegie to win friends and influence people. But they talked over each other, getting louder and louder. Big Ed listened, but in an attempt to keep them quiet, he started talking about our scuba adventures. The two of them began hanging onto Big Ed’s every word as if he were Jacques Cousteau himself. He told them that he hadn’t wanted to take scuba classes and admitted that he couldn’t even swim that well. But he had tagged along as I marked off places on my To Do list. He shared our detailed scuba logs from diving with the stingrays in the Caymans to the Blue Hole of Belize and even swimming with piranhas in the Amazon. He told of how, in La Paz, Mexico, we had paid for a hammerhead shark excursion and complained because we didn’t see any. Later, when we printed our photos, the sharks were everywhere in the murky water. We couldn’t see them, but our camera lens could. When Big Ed told them about diving at the Great Barrier Reef, where a newlywed groom pushed his bride aside before being eaten by a great white shark himself, their eyes grew wide.

Holy moly, I would’ve been scared to death, Barbie girl breathed heavily. Honey, would you have done that for me?

Hairy didn’t respond. Instead, he changed the subject as he admired our underwater camera gear. Even more surprisingly, Big Ed, who is meticulous with his gear, allowed them to hold our video camera for a few minutes. They were thrilled.

After dinner, the younger couple was going for a night dive, but Barbie girl had a quizzical frown on her face while struggling with her fins. Her toes wiggled like worms as she loudly admitted, I never can remember which fin goes on which foot, showing how naive and inexperienced at diving she was.

When we finally retreated to the tiny bedroom and closed the door, a welcome silence filled the room. Big Ed sighed. They sure are loud.

I said it would be great, didn’t I? It’ll be an anniversary we’ll never forget. Aren’t you glad we’re here?

Big Ed didn’t say anything but closed his eyes and rolled himself in the sheet with his feet sticking from the covers. Neither of us could fall asleep. Big Ed kept gasping for air as if the walls were caving in, thrashing like he was still swimming, rocking the small bed, and mumbling, What time is checkout?

No matter how hard I tried, my wandering mind couldn’t stop thinking about all the worst-case scenarios. What if a hurricane knocked out the electricity and our air supply? What would we do? Can we hold our breath long enough to make it to the surface? My morbid, negative mind couldn’t help but think it wouldn’t be good if we drowned on our anniversary.

Then I began to think about my daddy’s situation again. Even though I was away from home, my thoughts were always with him. I worried about whether his brain tumor was cancerous. And Momma was on my mind too. Would she continue to get worse? I fell into a restless sleep and dreamed I was Jonah, sloshing inside the belly of the whale. When I woke, it was only Jason, splashing around as he surfaced to prepare breakfast and assist in repacking our belongings to get back to the surface.

Later, when I told Daddy about our trip, he couldn’t believe we had slept underwater. This only motivated me to seek even more bizarre places to add to my To Do list. My underwater photography had failed on this journey. Sadly, most of the photos were too dark or too bright, washed out from the fill flash. My winning photo and magazine cover would have to wait until another day, but we did take a few seconds of blurry video footage.

Big Ed would have preferred not to take scuba lessons but had changed his mind. For him, being a scuba diver resulted in a circle of new friends back home, including Corey, a rescue squad diver. Later, they would become dive partners, but never in Big Ed’s wildest dreams would he have imagined how scuba diving would later impact his life.

After this trip and after initially refusing the possibility of brain surgery, Daddy also changed his mind. Unfortunately, the tumor was growing, and so was my apprehension about his future.

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

—DOLLY PARTON

CHAPTER TWO

With Polar Bears

THE TUNDRA BUGGY LODGE—

CHURCHILL, MANITOBA, CANADA

T he tour guide was explaining the many ways my life might be endangered if I didn’t follow instructions, but I was too distracted by a five-foot-tall costumed polar bear waving at me. I waved back and then started taking photos. The faster my shutter clicked, the faster the bear person danced. Perhaps this was a welcoming ritual to Canada. The cuddly polar bear gave us each a bear hug like we were children on a field trip, so I started taking photos of others posing with the bear.

Excuse me, miss, you really need to be paying attention, eh. The tour guide called me out like a teacher trying to regain control of his students, but our entire group, not just me, was more interested in getting pictures with the bear than listening to his lecture.

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A journey into the vast solitude of the frozen North might give me a chance to be quiet and listen to what the Lord had to tell me about dealing with my parents’ situations. Even though I was helpless to affect the outcome of their health no matter where I was, I was trying to process the reality of Daddy’s brain surgery scheduled at the University of Tennessee (UT) Medical Center upon my return.

Escaping my familiar environment for one night, I hoped a change of scenery would offer reflection time and help me get my head straight. At the Winnipeg airport, however, when the tour guide presented us with the detailed liability disclaimer, I wondered if I should have my head examined at the same time Daddy was having his brain tumor removed.

The timing of my choice to gallivant with my camera was also due to finally getting a reservation after years of waiting. But as apprehension about my parents grew, I had a hard time focusing on everyday life. I was trying to run a business in a tough economy, fighting for shelf space at major retailers, dealing with vendor consolidations, and being a wife to a