FORGOTTEN BOOK: MISS PICKERELL GOES TO THE ARCTIC

 Miss Pickerell Goes to the Arctic by Ellen MacGregor  (1954)

It's time to look in on Miss Pickerell, this time with the fourth and final book written by Ellen MacGregor, Miss Pickerell Goes to the Artic.  It would be another eleven years before the series was picked up and continued by Dora Pantell, using MacGregor's notes and story ideas.

This time Miss Pickerell's house guests for the summer are her niece and nephew, Rosemary and Dwight.  Not that the retired spinster sees much of them -- both are amateur radio enthusiasts, spending much of their time on their short wave set talking to people they have never even seen; often when Miss Pickerell attempts to speak to them, they turn around and tell her to "Sh." 

Because she is not spending much time with Rosemary and Dwight, Miss Pickerell spends a lot of time thinking, and when she thinks she wants to look up things in her encyclopedia.  But she does not have her encyclopedia handy.  She has lent it to Mr. Esticott, the conductor of the train that ran from Square Toe City to the state capital and a part-time worker at the local drug store soda fountain.  (Gratuitous aside:  This clears up one aspect from Miss Pickerell and the Geiger Counter, in which it was implied that Square Toe City was actually the state capital.  It isn't.  And we should all be thankful.)  Mr. Esticott had a lot of time on his hands between taking tickets on the train and he was a fast reader, so Miss Pickerell lent him her encyclopedia to help him pass the time.  He would have read it all by now, but there just so many fascinating things in the volumes that kept drawing his attention -- he was now working on the final volume, W-X-Y-Z.  So it was that, on a rainy day, Miss Pickerell and her cow rode to the drug store to ask for the encyclopedia back, thinking that Mr. Esticott had finished the books.  (Miss Pickerell seldom went anywhere without her cow, who was her friend; she had just installed a new canvas tarp on the cow's trailer so she would not get wet in the rain while she was in the drug store.)  Mr. Esticott had just received a new shipment of peppermint syrup (Miss Pickerell's favorite), so he made her a peppermint sundae.

Mr. Esticott waxed eloquent on the many fascinating things he had read.  The B volume was one of his favorites (for some reason, the H volume was a bit boring; no matter).  Take birds, for example.  There was one type of bird -- the arctic tern -- that travels all the way from the South Pole to the North Pole every Spring.  there are 8600 species of birds and each has its own special pattern of migration, but the arctic tern migrates the most.  there was also, Mr. Esticott continued, an interesting article on bush pilots; his cousin was a retired bush pilot, flying to remote regions in the Arctic.  Then the train whistle blew in the distance, signaling that Mr. Esticott was anted as a conductor, and Miss Pickerell made ready to drive to the weather station to find out if there would be any major blizzards that coming winter (if there were to be any as bad as the one last year, Miss Pickerell wanted plenty of time to move her cow to a warmer climate; last year's blizzard was very traumatic for her cow).  Miss Pickerell agreed to let Mr. Esticott take the encyclopedia with him to finish it; she would get it from him in two days when she traveled to the state capital to buy her cow a birthday present.

More than you needed to know, perhaps, but this first chapter sets up everything to follow in the book.

Miss Pickerell had a birthday tradition for her cow:  She would fill a bucket with coil and plant grass, along with some colorful flowers. in place of a birthday cake.  With all the rain, the grass was coming in lushly, but the lack of sun meant that the flowers would be late this years.  She thought of the Arctic, which had 24-hour daylight this time of year and what that sunshine would do for her flowers.  Alas, the weather station was unable to predict weather for the coming winter, but it could predict severe storms that week for the arctic.  Mr. Esticott's bush-flying cousin stopped by to use Rosemary and Dwight's short-wave radio for contact a weather base in the arctic, which was willing to hire him to take them to the Arctic to study glaciers, provided he could have his plane ready in time.  Miss Pickerell decided to place the birthday bucket under artificial light, hoping that would make the flowers grow..  On the way to the state capital to buy her cow's present, Miss Pickerell met  Bellingham Busby, a mobile home sales engineer, who was upset because he was about to sell the new Model X24 mobile trailer (a combination snowmobile/mobile trailer) to the scientists headed to the Arctic, but they had to leave before Busby could reach them due to weather conditions.   Busby instead sold the X24 to Miss Pickerell for her cow, making arrangements to airlift and parachute the trailer to her pasture during her cow's birthday party. 

Sadly for Mr. Esticott's bush plane flying cousin, Foster Esticott, he was not able to ready his plane in time for the Arctic expedition, so they left on another plane.  He was, however, hired by Mr. Busby to drop the X24 onto Miss Pickerell's pasture for her cow's birthday.  Two days before the birthday party, word came that the weather expedition plane was lost in the bad Arctic weather!  Foster decided to fly to the Artic, a region he knew well, to help in the search for the missing expedition.  He needed an observer and Miss Pickerell volunteered.  Since the X24 had already been attached to his plane, Miss Pickerell felt they should take it with them to provide a shelter in case they found the missing scientists.  Miss Pickerell hastily said goodbye to her cow, apologizing for missing its birthday, and Dwight and Rosemary promised to look after it.

And off they went to another exciting adventure for the redoubtable Miss Pickerell, who found herself alone and adrift on an ice sheet in the Arctic Ocean (among other things)...

I can't say how much I have enjoyed Miss Pickerell's adventures since I was in the fourth grade.  It is so much fun to experience them again.  Full of humor, quirkiness, science light and science easy, and a heroine we all can root for -- one with an old-fashioned sense of right and wrong.  These books are a much better read than many others I have read recently.