SNOTCICLES
If you’ve been reading my stuff for more than a year, you may know what season this is: dog racing season. Sled dogs, to be precise. Remember? They’re sled dog races, not dog sled races.
This photo was on the front of the sports section in the Anchorage Daily News today. I had two reasons for posting it. One is that it goes along with the recent series of blogs on Alaskan winter that Greyfox and I have been doing, and of course the other is that it leads into the annual Iditarod obsession.
The Kuskokwim 300 (that’s 300 miles) is a long-distance dog race like the John Beargrease and the Yukon Quest. Some people have begun thinking of those shorter races as qualifying races for the thousand-mile Iditarod. True, the Iditarod committee won’t enter a musher unles he or she has experience in another long-distance race, but those races are stand-alone challenges sufficient for any team and musher.
Okay, for starters, technically those are not entirely snotcicles hanging in Ed Iten’s mustache. Moisture from breath condenses in facial hair and that’s what most of it is. But that big one… cold air does make the eyes water and nose run, too. We just call them all snotcicles generically in the same jocular sense that we refer to the fecal stalagmites in the outhouse as shitcicles: Alaskan humor… so sue me.
This winter is the first that my son Doug’s beard and mustache have been long enough to collect visible frost. My boy is growing up. 
That was the thought I had the other day when he came in from his trek to take warm water to the feral cats across the highway and there was frost on his parka hood and his beard. Maybe this is kinky, but I find something oddly attractive about frost in a man’s beard. I just like facial hair in general (on men, not on women, girls or little boys) and the frost enhances it.
Expert speculation is that the cold snap gave underdog Iten the edge in this year’s race. For those not up on Alaskan geography, his home town of Kotzebue is ‘way up north, above and to the right of Nome on a map. His dogs know cold.
BETHEL — Arctic training paid dividends for Kotzebue musher Ed Iten, who outran a strong field in temperatures dipping below minus-40 to claim victory in the Kuskokwim 300 sled dog race.
Iten (rhymes with “sweeten”) won $20,000 for his 40-hour effort but gave the credit to his dogs.
“These guys are not real pretty, but they’ve worked together for two years now, so they just clicked,” he said.
Greyfox’s favorite musher Charlie Boulding, below, (my favorite changes from year to year, but he’s a more loyal fan) came in third, after Su Valley resident Martin Buser, right, one of my perennial favorites for the way he obviously loves his dogs (Marty has won the veterinarians’ Humanitarian Award in the Iditarod more than once, and that’s Josie with him there, not one of his dogs.) and his generally sweet and humble disposition. I ran into him once in the Salvation Army store in Wasilla. The clerk asked him to sign a Martin Buser trading card someone had donated, so they could put a higher price on it. He blushed as he complied, with that shy smile of his.
Boulding is not shy, nor is he sweet. He is a cantankerous old coot, the epitome of his breed. He doesn’t mush dogs for fun.
The race for third was one of the most exciting of the weekend. Just minutes from the finish line, Kusko veteran and recent chemotherapy patient Charlie Boulding, 61, pulled around rookie Dallas Seavey, the 16-year-old son of Iditarod veteran Mitch Seavey.
As the two raced for the $10,000 prize for third, both mushers started running. In this case, age defeated beauty as Boulding held on to win by two minutes.
Boulding wasn’t racing for vanity. “It was seeing a stack of twenties about that high,” he said, holding his fingers an inch apart.
Dee Dee Jonrowe, who has won the Kusko before, was still running in tenth place out of Akiachak when the paper went to press.
There’s lots more in the story. You can read it for yourself. There’s also a link to a sound clip of Denali National Park Ranger and multiple Iditarod champion Jeff King talking about the role the cold played in this race.
No matter, we’re all deserving.
As I went, we conversed in shouts as I tried to follow the direction of his voice to find him. Sound was broken up and distorted by the rocks and I must have spent half an hour or more, as the sun went down and the wind came up, fruitlessly trying to find the slot he’d gone up to reach the slide down onto that ledge. I was beginning to think of calling the rangers, of floodlights and foofaraw in the middle of the night…. Meanwhile, some other campers had heard our conversation, and joined the effort. Two young men, college students from back east somewhere, J.J. and his friend whose name I’ve forgotten, found Doug. One of them held onto the other as he dangled down that slide Doug had taken, and Doug climbed the man’s body back out of the trap he’d gotten himself into.
Doug was the first of mine who was a planned pregnancy. One essential part of that plan was that NOTHING… absolutely nothing short of death itself was going to get this one away from me. Another part of my plan was that I was going to do this one right. I had studied developmental psych in prison and discovered the works of Alice Miller. With my first daughter, I had slapped her hand and shouted “NO” when she reached for forbidden objects. As Doug began to explore, there were no slaps, and the only shouts were wordless oops or acks to get his attention, to forestall some injury as I swooped in to bodily remove him from the hazard. Our house was fully baby-proofed. We solved the problem of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves by covering their fronts with pegboard from which we hung bright, shiny, jingly objects on stretchy cord. They kept him occupied and taught him coordination.
He was such a busy little guy that I started calling him Doodle, Doodle Bug and then Dougal Bug, and it became shortened to just Do, long ooo. He was a daring Do, too. He loved to climb. Before he could walk he learned to bounce his Jolly Jumper to the extent of it’s horizontal stretch, catch hold of some solid piece of furniture, then call out to me to watch as he let go and went zooming back, and up, and up and down…. When he was eight months old, a time when kids are ordinarily afraid of strangers, that Jolly Jumper often hung by it’s thick bungee from a doorway in the Astrological Center of Alaska, a bookstore in Anchorage where I minded the store a few times a week to give the owner a break, and where I taught Tarot classes at night. One man who was there frequently gave him another nickname: Grinner. At a developmental stage when the typical picture shows a child clinging to mother, hiding his face, Doug would chatter and giggle with a continuous flow of strangers.
He has always loved books. He literally cut his teeth on books. From the time he could first sit up, Charley and I would frequently sit side by side on the couch reading, with him between us gumming one of his plastic-coated alphabet or animal books. To occupy him as we worked in our Beanery bus during the State Fair when he was thirteen months old, we gave him a cheap cassette player and five Disney Read-Along books. He’d plug in the earbuds and sit in his hammock behind the driver’s seat at the “back” of the Beanery, turning a page every time the tape chimed its signal. By the time he was three, his personal library (this is in the ”underbed” space next to the woodstove, beneath the “nest” in our old wannigan) contained more books than are owned by an average American family. I read to him a lot at his request, but I also required him to read to me. He wasn’t yet three when he read a whole book aloud to me for the first time. It was The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree. 
His Dad, Charley, didn’t like the way I was rearing him because it didn’t conform to the way his parents raised him and was noticeably short on the yessir and no ma’am stuff. That was only one source of conflict between us. Charley also wanted to isolate me and keep me all to himself, which wasn’t really comfortable for me. He had promised me when we wed that I could get out whenever I wanted out, and when Doug was four and Charley resumed active alcoholism (he’d been sober for years when we met and all through our time together), I asked him to move out and he went. One result of that was sudden relative prosperity for Doug and me when we got on AFDC. This is a shot from our first prosperous Xmas. He’s adjusting the “popcorn” (the styrofoam variety), that we strung for the spruce tree that the two of us tracked down in the woods, cut and dragged home. Partially obscured by his body is one of our best acquisitions of that year: a floor-standing propane light.
Off to school he went. He missed the bus that first day, because he needed to stop and pee before we got out of the yard. We immediately hitched a ride with a passing motorist (had been hitchhiking together ever since his dad moved out and took the car) and caught up with the bus within ten miles. I had packed a snack because he has always had unstable blood sugar and mood swings if he goes too long between meals. They took his food away, because eating outside the lunchroom is forbidden. I will never forget the miserable look on his face as the bus pulled to a stop that afternoon. He was starving. We got sneaky, with “pocket snacks” he could hide in the restroom to eat, and he eventually adjusted to longer intervals between meals.
In third grade he had a brief period of honor and local fame. It was the first year he was qualified (by age and grade) to compete in the National Spelling Bee. He easily won the Talkeetna Elementary School competition. Jody Fitzgerald, the Special Ed Resource teacher who had become his main teacher and advocate, told me that the students carried him from the spelling bee assembly on their shoulders, chanting his name. (This shot shows him, in his favorite retro mauve corduroy jacket with the leather elbow patches, at the head of the line waiting to spell at the Regional in Anchorage. The next one is one of his own first photos, a shot he took of me with his first camera, on that trip to Anchorage in 1990.)
When the time came for the Regional Bee, we hitchhiked to the edge of Anchorage and caught a city bus into the downtown bowl area, where we spent a couple of nights in a cheap hotel while he competed with kids from across the state. He endured three rounds sitting in that chattering crowd while hundreds of competitors filed across the stage and one by one spelled their words. After the second round, bored, he wanted to leave. He asked me how much longer we had to be there and I explained that he was in the thing until either he made a mistake and was eliminated, or all the other kids had made mistakes and he was the only one left. He ”missed” his next word, spelled “nauseous” with a “C” and still claims it was an honest error. I don’t know.
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