HUSBAND’S RETIREMENT RESPONSIBILITIES

After my June 17 entry in 2to4aday where I discussed creating order in my life, an anonymous person posted a comment, “Isn’t your husband retired?”

I believe that this remark implied that my husband should be pitching in and helping with some of the work I did that day. So I thought I’d defend him, explaining exactly where he was on June 17 and why it would have been impossible for him to lend me a hand. Please understand that because of the sensitivity of his work, he is able to tell me very little. But what he can tell me, I will share with you.

My husband “Tim” (name changed to protect his identity) was on a very important secret government mission for the U.S. Department of the Interior. He was gone for a week to an unnamed lake in an unnamed Canadian province on a secret mission involving species eradication. The site is so secret that there is not even a road leading to the area—he and his fellow agents were flown in on a float plane and left there in the wild to complete their assignment, with nothing but Lindy rigs as weapons. Their mission: find out if walleyes are threatening to infiltrate and take over North America.

He is evidently so good at this secret agent eradication job that this is the third time this spring he has been called into action by the government. The first time was in May when he and his fellow agents managed to infiltrate Lake of the Woods near the Canadian border, gathering intelligence on how thoroughly walleyes could stage a hostile takeover in a lake that was still 50 percent covered in ice. They found the walleyes huddled in the open part of the lake, but luckily the fish were too cold to have staged a massive takeover at that point.

Then a couple of weeks ago, he and other Department of Interior agents spent several days on Lake Winnibigoshish near Bena, Minnesota, fighting three-foot waves and 40 mile-an-hour winds, risking their lives to see if the walleyes had prevailed there. Again, it didn’t appear that the nearby Leech Lake Indian Reservation was in danger of being overrun in a walleye coup d’état.

Midway through these missions, he and other agents were summoned to Demontreville Lake in Oakdale where they were debriefed at a silent “Jesuit Retreat,” which I believe is the code name for the Interior Department’s Camp David-like top-secret government facility. Here they use a complex GPS system to map walleye eradication progress globally.

Does this sound like the kind of person a wife could ask to help clean out a closet or sweep the garage? When “Tim” tells me what little he can about his clandestine life working as a secret agent for the Department of the Interior, I know how fortunate I am to be even a small part of the brave, patriotic work he is doing for our nation. Waxing his boat and mowing the lawn are the least I can do for him while he is away on these missions.