Mark Twain captured the magic of youth, particularly the antics of boys discovering the world at large, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Much of the world considers the two books to be for young adults, but Mark Twain actually said he wrote them for adults. There is joy, and magic, in adventures, creating memories out of afternoon chores, and spending time with friends; he wanted adults to revisit those feelings.
In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom, Huck, and their friend Jim end up in a hot air balloon. What starts out as a short trip to a nearby city turns into an international adventure. We decided to imagine what the story might be, if it featured The Flat Friends Abroad!
The Flat Friends Abroad
Ever since Flat Stanley got his travels printed up in actual bound books, there was no living with the situation. We didn’t mean to be jealous of him—he was a decent enough fellow from school, even if he was a bit stiff—but it is a powerful hard thing to look at a glossy paperback with your friend’s name on the cover and not feel a little itch.
Halena couldn’t stand it. She said writing down our everyday notes wasn’t going to cut it anymore. We had to do something bigger, something that would make Stanley’s mailed-in trips look like a walk to the corner store.
“We ain’t just going on an adventure, Hal,” she says to me one afternoon, smoothing out a map on the floor. “We are going on an Odyssey.”
“Well,” I says, looking at the map, “what’s the difference? Do we have to pack heavier for an Odyssey? Because being two-dimensional, my carrying capacity is severely limited.”
She just sighed, shaking her head the way people do when they pity your ignorance. “An adventure is just knocking about, Hal. Any piece of cardboard can have an adventure if the wind blows right. But an Odyssey is epic. You have to seek something out. There’s trials, and tribulations, and maybe a cyclops or a siren.”
“I don’t know much about sirens,” I told her, “unless you mean the fire engine kind, and I am certainly not looking to get mixed up with a cyclops. Can’t we just call it a grand tour?”
“A grand tour is for tourists,” she says, tapping the paper. “An Odyssey is for heroes. Now, are you with me, or are you going to stay here and read Stanley’s book again?”
Well, what was I supposed to say to that?
The cheapest way for two paper-thin folks to travel, Halena reckoned, was by the United States Postal Service.
“Stanley,” she pointed out, “always goes in a padded manila envelope with priority postage. It’s too comfortable. It lacks grit. An Odyssey, Hal, requires genuine hardship.”
Well, we got hardship, alright. What she didn’t mention, on account of her being so caught up in the high-minded romance of the expedition, was that she plumb forgot to write “Airmail” on our parcel.
Instead of soaring with the eagles in the belly of a jet plane, we ended up sandwiched between a bulk shipment of heavy-duty rubber boots and a crate of industrial snow shovels in the damp, groaning hold of a cargo freighter. It was pitch black, it smelled powerfully of rust and salt, and the pitching and rolling was enough to make a two-dimensional man wish he was one-dimensional.
“Halena,” I groaned from my side of the envelope, “if this is an Odyssey, I’m ready to trade it in for a quiet Sunday afternoon. How long until we reach the North Pole?”
You see, that was the grand prize. The ultimate Ithaca. Stanley had been to Paris and the Grand Canyon, but he had never rubbed elbows with Santa Claus. Halena figured if we got an audience with the old man himself, the Flat Hal Journal would be legendary.
“Patience, Hal,” she says, her voice muffled by the thick paper. “The journey is the destination. Besides, I might have made a tiny, insignificant error on the address.”
“What kind of error?” I asked, feeling a cold dread that had nothing to do with the ocean chill seeping through the cardboard.
“Well, my pen was running dry, and I was in a hurry. I meant to write ‘North Pole,’ but my ‘N’ got a little sloppy, and the ‘orth’ got smudged into ‘outh’. And then I figured, just to be entirely thorough, I’d add the continent. But I was looking at the atlas upside down.” Hal resisted the urge to tell Halena he’d asked her to practice her penmanship, as for the map — he struggled with geography too.
“Halena… where exactly is this boat taking us?”
“Ushuaia,” she announced, trying to make it sound grand and historical. “They call it the End of the World! And from there, it’s just a hop over the Drake Passage straight on to Antarctica.”
“Antarctica!” I hollered, or tried to, though being flat severely limits your lung capacity. “There ain’t no Santa in Antarctica! That’s the complete opposite side of the globe! That’s penguins and icebergs! We’re going to the wrong pole!”
“Don’t be so terribly literal, Hal,” she reasoned, cool as a cucumber. “Santa runs a massive global enterprise. He’s bound to have a southern distribution center. Besides, an Odyssey is supposed to have major navigational detours. Odysseus got blown off course for years. If we went straight there, it would just be a delivery. The mistake actually makes it more epic.”
It is entirely useless to argue with Halena when she has the weight of classical literature on her side, even if she is using it to justify a postal blunder of massive proportions. So, I just listened to the engine thrum and waited for the End of the World.
It felt like a hundred years in that dark, freezing mail sack before we finally saw the light of day. There was a terrible tearing sound, like a giant ripping the sky in two, and suddenly our envelope was sliced open.
The light was so blinding white it practically bleached my ink, and the cold was something fierce—the kind of cold that makes a piece of cardboard stiff as a two-by-four.
“Well, Hal,” Halena whispered, her voice trembling, though whether from the frost or the excitement I couldn’t rightfully tell. “Look upon it and weep. I told you my navigational instincts were sound.”
I peeled my eyes open and looked. We were laying in a snowbank, surrounded by nothing but miles and miles of flat, blinding ice. And standing not ten feet away, gathered around a big metal sled with a
motor on it, were about a half-dozen fellows.
Every single one of them was wearing a massive, bright red coat. And every single one of them had a wild, bushy beard, frosted over with icicles.
“See?” Halena said, puffed up with pure triumph. “The North Pole! And there is the big man’s staff! Oh, Stanley is going to be green as a shamrock when we publish this.”
I studied them fellows for a minute. “Halena,” I says, “I ain’t trying to be difficult, but if them are elves, they’ve suffered a terrible growth spurt. They’re six feet tall if they’re an inch.”
“Nutrition, Hal,” she says, waving off my doubts like a pesky fly. “It’s the modern age. You can’t expect elves to stay tiny forever with all the vitamins they put in the milk and cookies nowadays.”
“Alright,” I allow, “I’ll give you the vitamins. But look at what they’re doing. They ain’t building rocking horses or testing out jack-in-the-boxes. That one with the gray beard is drilling a long tube into the ice and yelling about ‘barometric readings’ and ‘core samples.’ Since when does Santa care about a core sample?”
Halena didn’t even blink. “It’s a global enterprise, Hal! You think a man flies a sleigh around the whole world blind? He needs meteorological data to optimize the flight path. Those are his science-elves. You are looking at the highly specialized, advanced logistics division of the North Pole.”
She was so convincing, with her big Odyssey ideas, that I almost bought it. The red coats, the beards, the snow—it all added up, if you didn’t look too close at the math. But then, waddling right up to the edge of the ice hole, came a bird in a tuxedo. It flapped its little flippers, honked like a busted bicycle horn, and slid into the freezing water on its belly.
“Now, Halena,” I says, pointing a stiff paper finger. “I may be just a two-dimensional fellow, but I ain’t never read a poem that mentioned Santa keeping a penguin.”
“A tactical reconnaissance bird,” she declared, not missing a beat, though I could see the wheels spinning hard in her head to keep her theory afloat. “Reindeer are strictly for aerial work. The penguins handle maritime security.”
It was a beautiful thing, the way her mind could build a bridge right over the cold, hard facts.
I hadn’t hardly got the words out of my mouth before one of them tactical reconnaissance birds decided to do some reconnoitering on us. She waddled right over, a little black-and-white bowling pin of a thing, and cocked her head, staring at us with one beady, unblinking eye.
“See how she greets us?” Halena whispered, thrilled to her
very paper core. “She recognizes dignitaries when she sees
them, Hal. I reckon she’s going to escort us straight to the
Chief Elf.”
Well, the escorting commenced right then and there, but it wasn’t exactly dignified. This bird—whom I later heard the red-coated fellows refer to as ‘Adele’—didn’t offer us a flipper to shake. No, she just leaned down, snapped her sharp little beak right onto the corner of my cardboard trousers, and started dragging us backward across the rough ice!
“Halena!” I hollered. “This ain’t an honor guard! This is an abduction! She thinks we’re building materials for a nest, or worse, a particularly dry piece of fish!”
“Hold fast, Hal! It’s a trial! The first great trial of our Odyssey!” Halena was shouting, though it is a powerful hard thing to sound heroic when your face is scraping over frozen tundra at the mercy of an Adélie penguin. “Odysseus had the Cyclops, we have the mighty Adele!”
I was just about to tell her what she could do with her Odyssey when a giant shadow fell over us. One of the massive, red-coated fellows came stomping over in his heavy boots, crunching the snow like thunder.
“Hey! Drop that, Adele! Leave the litter alone!” the fellow boomed, his voice echoing over the ice. He clapped his thick, gloved hands together, and Adele dropped my leg in a hurry. She gave an indignant, rattling squawk, as if to say we weren’t worth the trouble anyway, and slid off on her belly toward the freezing water.
The giant leaned down, his frosty, icicle-covered beard hanging right over us. He scooped up our torn envelope in one massive, red-mittened hand.
“What have we got here?” he muttered, pulling me and Halena out by our heads into the glaring sunlight. He squinted at us, his breath pluming out like a steam engine in the freezing air. “Well, I’ll be. Hey, Davis! Come look at this! Somebody accidentally mailed a couple
of paper dolls down here to the research station!”
“Paper dolls!” Halena hissed to me out of the side of her mouth,
thoroughly insulted. “Oh, the indignity! If I had a third dimension, I’d give him a proper piece of my mind about titles. We are intrepid journalists!”
“Hush up,” I warned her, trying to keep my ink from running
in the melting snow. “If he’s an elf, he’s a terribly confused
one, and I ain’t keen on him putting us in the recycling bin
before we’ve written a single page of our journal.”
They toted us inside a metal building that was humming like a beehive and smelled powerfully of burnt coffee and wet wool. It was a fair sight warmer than the snowbank, I’ll give them that, but their hospitality lacked a certain refinement.
A fellow named Davis—who had a beard so thick you could lose a badger in it—took a pair of shiny silver thumbtacks and stuck us right up on a corkboard next to a calendar with a picture of a tropical beach. Now, getting tacked to a board is a known occupational hazard in our line of work, but it still smarts a bit.
“The high ground, Hal!” Halena whispered, ignoring the tack through her left sleeve. “We have been elevated to a position of oversight. We are the silent watchers of the workshop!”
Well, the watching was mostly just Davis staring at a blinking computer screen for hours, muttering about “barometric pressure drops” and “glaciology reports.” By and by, the other fellows went off to sleep, leaving Davis all lonesome with the howling wind rattling the tin walls.
You could tell the isolation was chewing on him. He started pacing, rubbing his tired eyes, and talking to the empty air.
“Eighty-four days on the ice,” he grumbled to himself, leaning on the desk and looking up at the corkboard. “Just me, the wind, and a bunch of overeducated penguins. I’m losing my edge. I’m going stir-crazy. What do you two think?” he says, suddenly pointing a heavy finger right at us. “Should I just scrap the data and call for a transport plane?”
Now, I am a polite fellow by nature, and when a man asks me a direct question, I feel obliged to answer. “Well, mister,” I says, “if you’re asking my genuine opinion, this ain’t exactly the garden spot of the universe, and a change of scenery might do your constitution some good.”
Davis froze solid as a block of ice. He blinked once. He blinked twice. He slowly picked up his coffee mug, looked inside it like he expected
to find a toad, and set it down real gentle.
“Okay,” he whispered, his eyes wide as dinner plates. “That’s it. That’s the winter-over madness. The ice has finally cracked my brain. The paper dolls are talking.”
“Paper dolls!” Halena piped up, her voice ringing out clear and proud from the corkboard. “We are intrepid journalists of the Flat Hal Journal! And you, sir, are clearly a high-ranking elf suffering a crisis of faith on your Odyssey!”
Davis staggered backward and bumped into a filing cabinet. “They’re talking,” he mumbled, gripping his own hair. “And the girl doll thinks I’m an elf. I need to lie down. I need a psychological evaluation. I need to stop eating the canned beans.”
“Don’t mind her, she’s got a romantic disposition,” I tried to explain, hoping to settle his nerves. “But if you could see your way to pulling these thumbtacks out of our arms, we’d be much obliged to continue our expedition.”
Instead of helping, Davis let out a noise that sounded like a tea kettle boiling over, grabbed a woolen blanket, and threw it right over his own head, trembling in his desk chair.
“Behold, Hal,” Halena said, watching him shiver under the wool. “The Oracle is consulting the spirits. We are witnessing true North Pole magic.”
“Halena,” I sighed, hanging by my tack. “I reckon the only thing we’re witnessing is a man whose cheese has slid clean off his cracker.”
Well, Davis was carrying on under that blanket like a cat in a sack, humming to himself and rocking back and forth, when the door to the sleeping quarters banged open.
In stomped a fellow even bigger than Davis, wrapped in a heavy parka and looking as sour as a green persimmon. This, I reckoned, was the man in charge.
“Davis!” the big man barked, his voice rattling the tin coffee mugs on the shelf. “What in the name of Ernest Shackleton is going on out here? Who are you talking to at two in the morning?”
Davis slowly lowered the blanket, looking pale as milk. “Chief,” he whispered, pointing a shaky finger at our corkboard. “I’ve got the ice madness. The paper dolls are discussing my career choices.”
The Chief let out a snort that could have knocked over a mule. He marched right up to the corkboard, squinting at me and Halena under the glaring fluorescent light.
“The Chief Elf approaches, Hal,” Halena whispered, trying to stand as tall as a tacked-up piece of cardboard can stand. “Look at the authority in his brow. He’s going to evaluate our heroic merits.”
“I ain’t evaluating nothing but Davis’s sanity,” the Chief grumbled, though he jumped back about a foot when he realized the voice came from a two-dimensional woman. He stared at us for a long minute, his jaw working like he was trying to chew a tough piece of jerky. Then, he reached up and plucked the thumbtacks out of our arms.
“Much obliged, mister,” I says, rubbing my paper shoulder.
The Chief didn’t say a word. He just turned us over in his massive hands and looked at the writing stamped on our backs.
“Well, I’ll be,” the Chief muttered, rubbing his beard. “You two aren’t ghosts or ice-madness. It says right here on your backs: flathal.xyz. You’re those journal characters for the elementary school kids. You aren’t supposed to be freezing your ink off at a South Pole research station.”
“South Pole?” Halena gasped, thoroughly scandalized. “Sir, I will have you know we are on a grand Odyssey to the North Pole to see Santa’s workshop!”
“Lady,” the Chief said, breaking into a grin, “the only workshop down here is the engine room, and the only elves are the mechanics trying to keep the generator running. You took a wrong turn at the equator.” He looked over at Davis, who was slowly emerging from his blanket, looking immensely relieved that he hadn’t lost his mind after all.
“Davis, get a proper heavy-duty Priority Mail envelope,”the Chief ordered. “We’ve got a supply plane coming in from Christchurch at dawn. We’re putting these two on it.” The Chief looked at the rest of the information scribbled on our torn, original envelope. “We’re sending them home. Or rather, we’re sending them to catch up with their real expedition. They’re supposed to be on the MS Volendam
for a grand voyage—the ‘Pole to Pole: Pacific’ cruise. I reckon the ship’ll be halfway across the ocean by the time airmail catches up with them.”
“Pole to Pole: Pacific!” Halena cried out, her disappointment evaporating in an instant. “Did you hear that, Hal? Months of voyaging! Oh, the oceans we shall cross! The tempests we shall weather! Stanley’s little paperback book from his trip last year is going to look like a grocery list compared to our epic journey on the Volendam!”
I just sighed, letting the Chief slide us gently into a thick, dry, waterproof envelope. It was mighty comfortable compared to the cargo hold.
“Well, Halena,” I says, as the flap came down and the darkness closed in, “if this Pacific voyage is anything like your idea of an Odyssey, I just hope there aren’t any more penguins for a while!”
And with a heavy thump of a postmark stamp, we were finally headed
in the right direction, ready for our next chapter.
The Stony Giants of the Sea
Well, we had been a-sliding along that ocean for four days and four nights, and I reckon I never seen so much water in all my born days. It was blue here and blue there and blue underneath, until a body felt like he was drowning in the sky. Flat Halena, she was getting powerful restless, and a touch seasick. She said if she saw one more wave she was going to curl her edges up and refuse to be flat anymore, which is a dangerous thing for a person of our constitution to say.
But just when the lonesomeness was about to set in for good, a speck showed up. “Land ho!” shouts Flat Hal, pointing a paper finger. “That there is the navel of the world, Halena. That is Easter Island.”
Halena squinted her eyes against the salt spray. “It looks like a rock floating in a soup bowl.”
“You got no vision,” says Hal, swelling up like he does when he’s fixing to explain something he read in a guidebook but didn’t quite understand. “It ain’t about the dirt. It’s about the Giants. The Moai. They say there’s heads on that island as big as a house, staring out at the sea, waiting for a ship just like this one.”
We drifted closer, and sure enough, the gray shapes commenced to separate themselves from the rock. They were heads, alright. Big, stony, solemn heads, standing in a row like they was at a spelling bee and forgot the word.
“My land,” whispered Halena, and she forgot to be seasick. “Look at the chins on ’em, Hal. They look powerful serious.”
“They are guarding the secrets of the ancients,” Hal says, very mysterious.
“I reckon they’re just lonely,” says Halena. “Standing there for a thousand years, looking at nothing but water. I bet they’re glad to see us. It must be nice to see a friendly face, even if it is two-dimensional.”
We stood there at the rail —the Flat Friends—watching those stone giants watch us back. They didn’t say nothing, and we didn’t say nothing. But I allow there was an understanding. They was stiff and we was flat, but we was all travelers in a big, wet world, just trying to keep our heads above water.
