"Stacy, that's wonderful — congratulations," Anita Thompson said Sunday. "Hunter would have loved it."

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro," Hunter S. Thompson famously declared. Since I'll soon be leaving The Washington Times and traveling to Sudan (explained in my resignation letter that some weisenheimer leaked to MediaBistro) it struck me as a good time to flip open the cell phone and call my friend Anita, widow of the legendary "gonzo journalist."

She answered the phone cheerfully and informed me she was in Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, where she'd be attending the premiere of Alex Gibney's documentary, "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson."

She was staying on the top floor of a first-class hotel, she told me, and the view was lovely. She had been sick last week, she said, and her brother was tending her Owl Farm Blog. But she felt fine Sunday and said she would soon be traveling to Geneva, where she'll be studying French.

Mrs. Thompson was ecstatic to learn that I'm scheduled to spend two weeks in Africa next month with Sam Childers, the Christian missionary who runs the largest orphanage in Sudan.

"That's fantastic," she said. "I'm so happy for you."

When you work for The Washington Times, you get to meet the nicest people in the world, and Mrs. Thompson is one of them. I covered a book-signing in September, when Anita offered this advice to young writers who dream of emulating their hero:

"After Hunter died, I received hundreds of e-mails from young people around the world. … People felt lost," Mrs. Thompson said.

Many of those fans, she said, seemed to misinterpret her husband's career — and especially his reputation for substance abuse.

"A lot of young people are under the assumption that if you do a lot of cocaine and drink a lot of Wild Turkey, you, too, can write like Hunter S. Thompson," she told the audience that included Richard Cusick of High Times magazine and R. Keith Stroop, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Like her late husband, Anita is left of Lenin (she's supporting Hillary Clinton for president). Her radical moonbat politics, however, never stood in the way of her befriending me, despite irresponsible accusations by some bloggers that I may have voted for one or more Republicans at some point in the past 15 years.

Once she learned I'd been a fan of her husband's work since reading his book about the Hell's Angels during my sophomore year at Jacksonville (Ala.) State University, Mrs. Thompson treated me like a real human being.

She called me crying in November, infuriated by a Los Angeles Times review of an oral history of her husband. The book was co-authored by Jann Wenner, who'd published some of Thompson's most famous writing in Rolling Stone. Mrs. Thompson felt that both the book and the L.A. Times review were disrespectful of her husband.

Had I predicted in 1979 that one day I'd be caught in the middle of a literary feud between Jann Wenner and Hunter S. Thompson's widow, my friends would have told me I was crazy. And they would have been right.

Now my friends think I'm crazy to go to Sudan. They are also right. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, "What Would Hunter Do?"

Being "gonzo," as Mrs. Thompson explains, is not about drugs and booze. Nor is it about politics. "Gonzo" is about being crazy enough to seek once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and taking them — over and over again.

A month from now, if all goes according to plan, I'll be in Sudan, surrounded by Dinka bodyguards carrying AK-47s.

My beautiful wife has been praying a lot lately, but I'm not worried about Sudan; it's the May 1 deadline that scares me to death. If God gets me past that deadline, I'll be OK. But if the deadline kills me, just make sure I end up among my kinfolk in the red clay at Ava Church Cemetery in Randolph County, Ala.

Of course, Hunter S. Thompson had his own ideas:

Like the man said, "Buy the ticket, take the ride."

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times