The Greenville Independent, July 14, 1994, pg 15

If they can freeze John Wayne

It shouldn’t be too hard to ‘suspend’ a couple of goldfish while on vacation

by Lois Carol Wheatley

The answer to my fish-sitting problem was announced recently on National Public Radio. A listener had written in, claiming that a carp she had taken out of the freezer for dinner had “recovered” on the kitchen table while defrosting. The commentator replied that he knew of a woman who always put her goldfish in the freezer when going on vacation.

A light bulb suddenly came on, as with the opening of a common kitchen appliance. Maybe, just maybe, Shiddley and Wumpf-Wumpf could just chill out while we went on vacation this year.

“Shiddley Wumpf-Wumpf,” my daughter had said from the back seat of the car as we drove home from the pet store. Some moron had given her a coupon for two free goldfish, and just a week before we were leaving on vacation she had them swimming around in a plastic baggie she held in her hands. As far as we both were concerned, the gods of the House of Pisces had spoken: Shiddley and Wumpf-Wumpf—token substitutes for real pets—were coming home with us to stay. And then we were leaving town.

To make a long story even longer, we left the fish with a fellow fourth-grader and later picked them up alive and well, but then somehow managed to turn the tank over in the back seat of the car on the drive home. We scooped and shoveled a lot of gravel, some back-seat dirt and a pair of glassy-eyed fish into a bowl of hastily-conditioned water, and miraculously the pair survived. But Shiddley would swim at strange angles and Wumpf-Wumpf ran into the glass a lot, both of them exhibiting more than the average signs of carp confusion.

If they can freeze a couple of people for a couple of centuries, I’ve reasoned, why can’t I freeze a couple of goldfish for a couple of weeks? According to two reliable sources (rumor and innuendo), John Wayne and Walt Disney are both frozen, either waiting for a cure to be developed for whatever it was they died from, or waiting for the doctor to come back from the golf course. They wait, it has been said, in a -320 degree Fahrenheit waiting room, along with some decidedly outdated magazines.

There was a story going around in the ‘70s, presumably fiction, about Howard Johnson touring the country via railroad with various freezer cars, some of which held 17 ice cream flavors, and one of which was kept at the ready for such time when the old man himself had need of becoming a corpsicle.

These are unconfirmed reports worthy of additional circulation and further embellishment. Cryonics societies feel some pathological need for privacy and stubbornly refuse to divulge the identities of those suspended on a trip into the future, leaving me free to name names without fear of contradiction. One reason they’re so paranoid lately is that some of them have been in court a lot, delicately explaining why moving a time traveler from a state of “living” to one of “suspension” should not, in the minds of certain legal sticklers, also be construed as “murder one.”

In a recent court case in California, a mathematician wanted to have his head frozen before an inoperable brain tumor destroyed his magnificent brain. He lost the case and will be forced to actually die before being preserved for posterity, which undoubtedly will erase countless equations from the blackboard of a once-great mind. On the subject of great minds, representatives of Saddam Hussein reportedly have sought American expertise on the prospects of having a certain unnamed world leader frozen, or cloned, or alternatively having his semen preserved. The cryonics guys claim that such a transaction was not consummated, but anybody would say that, right? So there won’t be a lot of scud missiles fired into their holding tanks?

Timothy Leary has publicly announced plans to have his head cut off and stored in the freezer when any normal vital signs have ceased to function—brain death, in his case, being far too vague, and a relative term. Pardon me for saying so, but chopping off and freezing their heads sounds like something that might happen to a bunch of broccoli. While a clear connection may be established with progressive fish and vegetable preservation, albeit not in the usual context of a TV dinner, it is certainly without the same economic advantages.

A full-body suspension costs approximately $125,000. A head-only job runs about $45,000. Life insurance can pay for this, although so far I have been unable to insure the fish. Newly-deceased cryonicists are put on heart-lung machines, and glucose and other medications are injected. As with the catch of the day, the sooner they can be put in the freezer, the better. A popular belief, that the dearly departed are packed into meat lockers such as those we see through the one-way mirrors at Piggly-Wiggly, is simply not true.

According to the literature, your loved ones are neatly stored in liquid nitrogen inside a gigantic thermos bottle, which does not depend on a power source to maintain absolute zero. Just as long as the cap is screwed on real tight and one avoids laying it on its side. Strange and potentially entertaining things can happen in absolute zero. Liquids run uphill, electric currents never stop, air can become either liquid or solid, and previously reliable materials such as steel or rubber may turn into peanut brittle. Silicone implants are apt to do just about anything, like change into the various shapes and colors of Flintstone vitamins.

Currently there are three major organizations that stand ready and willing to meet your cryonic needs: Alcor in Riverside, California; the American Cryonics Society/TransTime in Oakland, California; and the Oak Park, Michigan Cryonics Institute. These groups have newsletters and mailing lists and annual conventions. Members wear charming little ID bracelets so that no one accidentally embalms or cremates them. Their motto: “Freeze a jolly good fellow.”

But back to the fish and the logistics of this new plan. I think I’ll skip the injections, the liquid nitrogen and the iddy-biddy thermos bottles. But does one slap goldfish right down on top of the ice cubes or lock in their freshness with a zip-lock baggie? What about putting the whole tank in the freezer to capture the real, in-the-wild carp-meets-iceberg experience? And what a great new twist on the old fly-in-the-icecube gag.

There must be someone I can call or write to for details. Ben & Jerry? The frozen food section of my local grocery store? Disney World?