Years passed, and the children grew older. Like so many people, Sensing was content to keep his vision of a better life locked away in his imagination. He waited for "just the right time," but that perfect time never arrived. In 1998, at the age of 65, Sensing, a long-time smoker, died of lung cancer in his daughter?s home in Murfreesboro, Tenn., 5,000 miles from the Alaska of his dreams.

Wiley?s son, Scott, 35, plans to honor his father?s dream this summer by making the 10,000-mile journey from Murfreesboro to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and back in a 1952 Chevy pickup truck. He will raise money along the way for the American Cancer Society (ACS). Sensing?s goal is to collect $100,000 to help fund cancer research and education.

The trip will begin on June 11, 2000, but the journey actually started in 1982, when Scott Sensing was 18 years old. That year, he was given an old Chevy pickup. The truck was in bad shape -- all four tires were flat, the side windows were broken, more than half of the wooded bed had rotted away, and a family of mice had nested beneath the bench seat. The engine, however, still worked.

Together, father and son ? mostly father, as Sensing recalls ? worked to restore the truck. "I pretty much just watched and learned," he said. "Dad was in the Navy and had worked on a lot of engines, not just cars."

That truck was the younger Sensing?s transportation through college and during the period when he first met his wife of 12 years, Barbara. Later, when he had graduated and gotten a job, he still couldn?t bear to part with that old truck.

Apparently, he kept it for a good reason. Although it will average only 45 mph and Sensing will have to take secondary roads all the way to Alaska, driving the old Chevy will be a fitting tribute.

"I don?t really know what I?m going to do when I get there," he said. But, one thing is for sure ? on the way he will reflect on lessons he learned from his father. "I learned from my father that life is a finite thing," he said. "There are plenty of reasons not to move to Alaska. For my father, he had a family to raise. There are plenty of reasons not to drive an antique truck to Alaska, but at some point you have to set aside reasons for not doing something and have the courage to do it."

To learn more about Scott Sensing?s trek to Alaska, visit his "10,000 Miles for a Cancer Cure" website at www.truck.bigstep.com. Funds raised will be donated to the Murfreesboro ACS Unit unless a donor chooses to make a donation to their own local unit in Sensing?s honor.