Mavis, You're Just Amazing

Mavis apparently is not afraid of much else. All these dirt roads lead deep into the groves of pencil-straight fir trees in the Six Rivers National Forest. This is Bigfoot country, and even if he hasn't been seen very many times by very many people, there are enough bears around to make you want to look over your shoulder every once in a while when you're out alone at dawn.

By now you should have your images of Mavis Lindgren all conjured up, right? What she looks like, how she dresses, what her home with the mud driveway is like. O.K.?

Mavis isn't like that at all. At the end of the mud driveway off the dirt road off the dirt road off the dirt-and-gravel road, Mavis and Carl Lindgren live in a three-bedroom mobile home, complete with piano, simulated wood paneling, thick, fluffy wall-to-wall carpeting and Naugahyde-covered contemporary furniture.

Showing a visitor around the other day. Mavis was wearing a pantsuit in a shade accurately called shocking pink. She had on the kind of glasses ladies favored back in the '50s—the ones with the rhinestone frames that come to a point way out there beyond the temples, like the wings of some great mythical butterfly. There weren't any rhinestones on Mavis' glasses, but the bluish-gray frames almost perfectly matched her hair, not a strand of which was out of place. And she did not have on tennis shoes.