During the weeks my computer was down, I had as many ideas for blogs as
I usually do in a comparable period of time. In other words, I
had more ideas than there is time to blog them all out. I took
notes. Most of those notes don’t, now on reflection, deserve to
be expanded and recorded here. One exception is the death, on
December 23, 2005, of one of my heroes.
ColonelNorman Vaughan was in hospital for heart surgery when he celebrated his
100th birthday a few days before his death. The irony of that is
that he had planned to climb the Antarctic mountain named for him on
that birthday. But I don’t think the colonel would have been too
terribly disappointed over missing that expedition. He was a man
who always appeared to take failure in stride. “Dream big and
dare to fail,” was his motto.
Out of thirteen tries at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, beginning
when he was 72, he finished six times, the last finish being in 1990 at
the age of 84, but he kept trying even then. In 1997, he
organized the annual 868-mile Serum Run from Nenana to Nome, to
commemorate the 1925 relay run by village dog teams, carrying
diphtheria serum to save the children of Nome.
Teddy
Roosevelt was president when Col. Vaughan was born. He grew up on
stories about explorers and adventurers such as Robert Peary, Roald
Amundsen, and Sir Robert Falcon Scott. In 1925, he dropped out of
Harvard to join Sir Wilfred Grenfell in Newfoundland, taking medical
supplies to remote villages by dogsled. After that, he went back
to school, but dropped out a few years later when a news headline
caught his eye: “Byrd to the South Pole.”
He was the chief dog driver for Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic expedition of
1928-30. They drove dog teams 1,500 miles, carrying tons of
supplies to the base camp for Byrd’s polar trek, collecting geological
samples and scientific data. The expedition established the first
settlement on Antarctica and made the first airplane flight over the
South Pole. He was the last surviving member of that expedition.
In
1930, Admiral Byrd named a 10,300-foot peak in Antarctica for him in
honor of his work with the expedition’s dogs. After that, one of
his dreams was to climb his mountain. He reached the peak on
December 16, 1994, three days before his 89th birthday. Then he
began preparing for a second climb on his hundredth birthday.
Col. Vaughan served in the Korean war. His military service
introduced him to Alaska and he began visiting here
frequently. In 1967, he rode a snowmobile 5,000 miles from
Alaska to Boston.
He participated in the 1932 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New
York, in sled dog sprint racing demonstrations. One dream
unrealized in his lifetime was to see mushing become an Olympic
event. In 1942, he mushed solo across the Greenland ice sheet to
recover a top-secret Norden bomb-sight from a crashed WWII bomber.
When he was 68 years old, after the failure of a business venture and
the collapse of his marriage, he moved to Alaska “for adventure and
dogs.” The Colonel and I arrived in Alaska about the same time
that time, and both of us arrived here broke. To get his start
here, he shoveled snow from sidewalks for board and room, and then he
worked as a janitor. I’ve also heard that he washed dishes for a
while.
He started building a dog team. He had the chutzpah to claim he
was the dog-driving champion of the Pentagon, and became the first
non-Alaskan to compete in the North American Sled Dog Championship
races at Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous. When Pope John Paul II
visited Alaska, Col. Vaughan taught him how to mush dogs. He
boldly crashed President Carter’s inaugural parade, and earned himself
a place in the next two presidential inaugurals. The stories
about Col. Vaughan are numerous and varied.
I
think it was some time in the 1980s when he fell in love with a young
female dog handler, Carolyn Muegge, who had been helping him train his
dogs and run them in the Iditarod. I recall a great deal of
gossip about them around the lodge. Those who only knew the
public Colonel and assumed him to have a lot of money were sure that
this was what Carolyn was after. They predicted that the match
wouldn’t last.
They married and lived in a one-room cabin five miles off the
snow-plowed road system, accessible only by dogsled or snowmachine, or
by ATV in summer. Carolyn was with him when he summited Mount
Vaughan in Antarctica, and when he celebrated his hundredth birthday in
the hospital in Anchorage.
Until that birthday party, the only taste of alcohol he had ever had
was wine at his confirmation. He promised his mother that he
wouldn’t drink until he was a hundred. His plan was to toast his
hundredth birthday with champagne at the top of Mount Vaughan.
The champagne toast was held, instead, in the hospital in Anchorage.
I met him once. It was the mid-1980s, so he was about eighty
years old. He was still clean-shaven then. Maybe it was
Carolyn who convinced him to let the beard grow. Anyway, I had
been in the sauna out behind the old Sheep Creek Lodge, before it
burned down. I came around the corner of the sprawling low-slung
log cabin, and standing there in the flower bed was this man.
He was bent over so that the cord of his electric shaver would reach
the outlet on the lodge’s front wall that usually served in winter to
power engine-block heaters for trucks. Bemused, I stood there and
watched the guy shave. He finished, straightened up and noticed
me standing there. He gave that engaging grin that is there in
just about every photo ever taken of him, and muttered something about
the necessity of good grooming. Then he wound the cord around the
shaver, shoved it in his pocket, and opened the door for me like the
gentleman he always was.
“If you don’t look for challenges, you become a follower,” Vaughan
said. “Challenges are self-satisfying for a person, testing
himself on whether he can do it or not, analyzing for himself his
character. Many times it answers a great question for the person.”
“I have failed a lot of times — but when I fail, I try to come back and get a better way of doing the same thing.”
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