Don't Slow Down

It's the Iditarod, and the sled dogs are jangly with joy. They yip and twist and yearn for the starting line. They've got a thousand proud and beautiful miles to pull.

There's no wonder Alaska is beautiful. It's tectonically rumpled and sparsely peopleated. Extremes of elevation and weather protect much of it from our schemes. The consequences of human trampling are not as evident when you have this much space. There are few enough humans here that they can boast of living on the edge of the wilderness, and not so many that the wilderness ceases to exist.

We've trampled it some. We're pulling oil out of it as fast as we can. We've threaded a big old pipeline over some geologically rambunctious landscape and right through the caribou, and that got some people upset, but proponents insisted that the thing was virtually spill-proof. Which may be as true as it is irrelevant. Some dude might dump a bucket of strychnine in our water reservoir and boast that he didn't get any on him, but we really don't care about his laundry.

The state of Alaska established a Permanent Fund made up of oil money and designed to provide for future generations once the oil runs out. They cut every citizen a check from it every year. You could dang near make a living off it if you had enough kids, and weren't particular about how well you fed them.

It's an interesting concept. It acknowledges that the resource being extracted is finite while doing nothing to slow down the extraction. The fund is an example of a certain narrow kind of prudence, but it also has the side benefit of neatly co-opting the citizenry and ensuring plenty of political will to continue the pillage. There will be no examining the prudence of that.

Alaskans do have some justification for thinking of themselves as exceptional, independent, rugged frontiersmen. This is not a group that's going to whine about an arugula shortage; this is a group standing proud, with a bear gun in one hand and a warm dividend check in the other.

Meanwhile, this year, as Alaska's winter got shipped off to Atlanta on the polar vortex, we can't help but think of the old saw about the fellow who was able to sell ice to Eskimos. It doesn't take that good a salesman anymore. The Iditarod got off to its ceremonial start in Anchorage only after quantities of snow were trucked in and parceled out in a tight lane on the city street. Spectators watched from dry pavement and people manned the intersections to shovel the snow back in place after traffic was let through.

The dogs know it's all their effort and elation that will get the sled to Nome, but as for us, we don't even use our muscles anymore and we don't remember how we're designed to work. Instead we've built ourselves a big engine and driven our sled over the mountaintop and now we're riding it straight into the sea with no brakes. We're flying behind it with every other living thing, like the tar-baby of doom. I'll be dead before we hit the ocean but I feel sorry for the kids, and the caribou.

Two Dudes And An Icehole

So I don't get to have a fur hat, but I can still enjoy my Alaska vacation as long as I wear everything in my suitcase at once. It's not even that cold here, according to our friends Scott and Kevin, whose credibility on the matter is beginning to wane. This year, Alaskans have to travel to Atlanta to visit their winter. Whether you think ten degrees is warm or cold depends on which direction you're approaching it from. But it's cold enough for me. Scott and Kevin are the people we used to visit down the valley in Oregon who had emus and pigs and alpacas and trout and sturgeon and sheep and peacocks and ducks and goats and a slope of wine grapes AND the ability to put it all together in splendidly edible form, plus day jobs. All that. You never knew what they'd be up to at any given moment: rendering lard, or stripping milt from live trout, or making cheese, or knitting a tractor out of steel wool. They're right handy folk.

So we couldn't wait to see what they were doing in the new digs in Alaska. There is no garden. The house is relatively small. They've confined themselves to (1) dog and (1) cat. How were they planning to make our Alaska visit perfect?

Well, the first door past the bathroom opens to the hangar, and just past the ice cream freezer and the beer fridge there are a couple planes in it, and we got in one of them and taxied out to the runway and into the air to pop up a valley and peer at two turquoise glaciers and watch the snowy mountains pink up in the sunset, and got back in time for dinner and some of the wine they made when they still had grapes, taking care not to disturb the moose on the taxiway. There's some Alaska for you. What else?

I'd brought a bird book and binoculars. Things seemed strangely quiet in the bird department, so I consulted the internet. There are five birds wintering in the Anchorage area. They're all named Hank. Ha ha! Just kidding. They are named raven, raven, raven, bald eagle, and raven. I put my book back in the suitcase. What else?

We went up a beautiful snowy path through the mountains and watched Kevin attempt Ski-Joring, which is having your dog pull you on cross-country skis. It probably works better if your dog is not a German Shepherd bred to round up the group by dashing back and forth from one person to another, and who has not already been trained not to pull at a leash. I'm just guessing. Also, Kevin and I have an equally tepid grip on verticality. What else?

"We could go ice fishing."

Scott hadn't done that yet, himself. He's only been here a year. But he did have a virgin ice augur he wanted to try out, and a chisel, and a few sets of Carhartts that stand up by themselves in the garage and probably walk over to take a pee a couple times a night, and an easy walk to a lake. We pulled a sled of gear onto the ice. "Do you think it's really thick enough to stand on out there?" I queried, and Dave shrugged. "Either way, we'll have a good story," he said, with a gallant arm thrust forward. "Ladies first!"

It was thick enough to land a 747 on. Scott augured away in a stiff polar wind. I was in heaven. For someone with a sturdy Viking chromosome and a need for discomfort that is not of the spiritual variety (I like cold: I hate anxiety), this was the ticket. Snowy mountains reared above and the ice was cracked into partitions a foot deep. Snowball jellyfish lurked below. It was fascinating. I tip over on dry land for no reason at all. What could go wrong?

BAM.

Really, I have got to quit smashing my head. I'm afraid to go to Kaiser to get my glasses adjusted again for fear they'll enter an advisory about domestic violence into my medical record. This time, the glasses were in no danger. I was flat on my back with the birdies tweeting. My Viking chromosome was splayed out with me, all uff da, his little horned helmet rolling around with a micro-clatter. Scott, who has some medical training, was trying to peer into my eyes. That's easy to do. They're small and set close together and you can take in both of them in one glance. "How do you feel?" he asked.

"Flurdo piffling blurgit imminy," I said, but he wouldn't take my word for it, and checked my pupils again. I guess that's where the brain goo leaks out, if it's going to.

I don't know how many cubes a day you're allowed to keep when you're ice fishing, but Scott and Dave had reached their limit after a few hours, and we went home with a goose egg.

I should probably put ice on it, but I don't want to.

A Fur Piece

"Why would you want to go to Alaska for vacation? In the winter?"

Why not? Dave and I have never been inclined toward the tropics. There's something about being comfortable outdoors nearly naked in the wintertime that just seems wrong, somehow. Something morally corrosive about being caressed by gentle breezes, with nothing better to do than fend off parrot poop with the itty bitty umbrella in your drink. You go to Alaska in the winter and you can appreciate the warm shower and the cozy bed quilt and the two-inch view of the mountains through the peep-hole in your balaclava, and your heart is the gladder. You come home from Belize and your nice comfortable home life looks like a pile of crap.

It's probably even more fundamental than that. I have a Viking chromosome inside me somewhere that beckons me north. It's the strapping chromosome with the little horned helmet. The chromosome said harr! Head for the pole, and our more practical friends Scott and Kevin agreed and added a recommendation to pack warm gear. We received our instructions and bought gloves and hats. Snow boots. Insulated trousers. And what most people call "thermal layers" and Dave cannot be dissuaded from calling "panty liners." We were ready.

Scott picked us up at the airport and took us to downtown Anchorage. There weren't enough degrees out there to rub together and make a spark. And the wind was blowing. Dave and I looked like sleeping bags on legs. Giant walking larvae. Charitably speaking, we were penguin-shaped. Everyone else was hatless, busily peeling down their zippers and fanning their necks. I'd seen something like this in Maine one winter. Kids were coming in from playing outside and their mom said "how is it?" and they said "nice! It's above!" by which they meant it was above zero degrees Fahrenheit, which is a totally stupid temperature. Don't they know what zero degrees is? It's no degrees.

Anyway the Fur Rondy was going on. That's short for Fur Rendezvous, and there are sleds and dogs

and parades and snowshoe softball games and, everywhere, people wearing carcasses. One man had an entire wolf wrapped around his face and his companion was trailing lynx paws for ear flaps. A fox curled up on someone's head as if it were trying to get a better view. And those hats with dingleballs? Actual balls. I thought: we're not in Portland anymore. And then I thought: great thundering Thor on a toy pony, I want one.

I tried on a fox hat. It was fabulous. Its provenance via the leghold trap was invisible. I could have bought it then and there, but I could only have worn it then and there. You cannot wear slain headgear in Portland, Oregon. We have standards for earnestness. Shit: there are thresholds you can't cross in Portland unless your shoes pass the hemp detector. Nobody's packing, but if you wear a dead critter in Portland, you will be liberally sprayed with ocular bullets of shame. Nobody thinks a thing about it in Anchorage. If it hadn't been Fur Rondy, they wouldn't have had the stuff on at all: you wouldn't even think of putting on your fur until it's below. So there's that. Fur is really, really warm.

And it's really, really gorgeous, all of it, from snout to dingleballs. You can make a case that it's even more gorgeous wrapped around its original beating heart, and no one could disagree, but it's gorgeous this way, too, and unquestionably the thing to wear if you're a naked human trying to make a go of it in the Arctic. There aren't that many humans in this state (Alaska, not naked). It's even possible there are few enough that most people can get a hat and there will still be critters left too. I don't know.

I know I don't get to go home with a hat.