My maternal grandmother Eva Brooks Scott at age 44
in 1917 with baby “Jack” aged 3 weeks.
Jack
was the name he preferred to be called.  I don’t know if he chose
it for himself or if a sibling or parent tagged him with it when he was
young.  Grandma is said to have taken his name, Forrest Vivian,
from the hero of a novel she was reading before he was born.

He was the baby of a big family that didn’t remain big for very
long.  Grandma had 13 children, and died in childbirth with the
fourteenth, who also didn’t survive.  Only seven of her children
survived into adulthood.  Jack was the only one of them who was
younger than my mother.

I think I see some of his deviousness and ill-temper in this
squinty-eyed baby, but that perception could be colored by my later
acquaintance with him.

Jack
and my mother had two surviving sisters and three brothers by the time I
was born, and a step-brother and step-sister who both were older than
the Scott siblings. 

All three of the “girls” got along with each other and with their
brothers Roy and Earl Scott, their step-brother Frank Howard and step-sister Nora Howard Gavin, but my other two
uncles, “Jack” and “Scotty” (Harrel C. Scott) didn’t seem to get along
with anyone very well.  I remember Scotty as irascible and Jack as
irresponsible.

I
didn’t even know that I had an Uncle Jack until the day he showed up at
our little house on Fox Avenue in San Jose.  It was about 1948,
judging by my apparent age in this photo with the twins Jack
brought with him.

He had their mother with him, too, but she
wasn’t Audrey, and wasn’t Jack’s wife.  That might have been part of the problem for Mama.  At least I
recall her mentioning their “shacking up,” not being married, so it was an issue,
anyway.

The chummy attitude between the twins and me indicates that this
picture must have been taken very early in their visit.  Maybe
Mama and Daddy took the visiting “kinfolk” for a day at the beach when
they first came to call.  I recognize this as the “concrete boat”
a beached vessel that had once been a gambling ship that cruised
beyond the twelve-mile limit, but was just a beached derelict used as a fishing
pier at Santa Cruz in my youth.

The main problem between my parents and Jack, his paramour, and her
blonde twin daughters, was that they moved in with us.  They just
came and stayed.  We lived on a tight budget in a small three-room
shotgun house.  Each room was eight feet by ten feet, and the
bathroom was barely big enough for the toilet and shower stall and one
person at a time.  Mama and Daddy had a double bed in the middle
room and I slept on a roll-away bed in the front room.  When Jack
and his girlfriend moved in, they took the roll-away and the twins and
I had a nest of blankets on the floor.

I don’t know how long they stayed.  It was certainly long enough
to wear out their welcome, and then some.  The twins’ mother made
herself at home, used Mama’s toiletries and such, and didn’t offer to
help with chores.  Jack wasn’t working and wasn’t apparently
looking for work.  He hung out in pool halls, Mama said.  He
didn’t offer to buy groceries or help in any other way.  A few
times he and his girlfriend went out in the evening and left the twins
with us, until my parents told them that was unacceptable.

I don’t remember anything about that day at the beach pictured above.  I have
only two detailed memories from the time that they stayed with us, and
many more memories from subsequent conversations overheard between my
parents and between them and other members of the family.

The twins were noisy, active and undisciplined, “full of mischief,” my
mother said.  One of them climbed up and took down from a high
shelf a little box in which I kept some small treasures.  It was a
decorative pressed-paper box with another box, slightly smaller, which
slid into it like a drawer, and a brass button as a drawer pull. 
Instead of pulling the drawer open, the rowdy twin just ripped the top
off the outer box to open it.  Mama taped it back together, but it wasn’t the
same to me.  There were very few possessions I could call my own, and I had really treasured that one.

My other memory from their visit was the day they left.  Mama and
Daddy had discussed the situation and decided to confront Jack and his
lady friend and tell them that our family simply couldn’t support their
family, and that our little house didn’t have room for the four of
them.  Jack’s lady friend took offense at that.  Jack became
red-faced and started yelling at my mother.  She started crying
and my father put his arm around her and quietly told Jack he’d better
leave.  When my six-foot-five-inch father went quiet like that, people generally listened.

 Jack told his little blonde entourage to grab their things. 
Then he said to my mother, “You’re no sister of mine.  I disown
you!”  That seemed to break the tension.  Mama wiped her
tears on her sleeve and started laughing.  That really pissed off
my ex-uncle Jack, and he stomped out, trying to slam the screen door behind
him, but as always it just flapped shut and bounced on its slack spring.  Daddy picked me up and with his arm around Mama’s waist and our heads together, we
all laughed as Jack and company roared away.

I didn’t see him after that for about twelve years.  I had left my
first husband and was staying with my mother and her latest husband,
Grady O’Neal, on a ranch near Redlands, California, within a few miles
of Mama’s sister, step-sister, and their extended families.  On
Thanksgiving, we all got together at Mama and Grady’s place, and Jack
showed up.  He was fat and loud and drunk. 

He started arguments with one sibling after another, and I heard one of
my aunts ask the other one if she’d invited him.  She denied
it.  No one seemed to know how he happened to show up at that
little “family reunion.”  It later turned out that Scotty, who
lived in Sacramento and was invited but didn’t attend, had told Jack
about the party.

The last straw for Grady was when Jack followed me into the kitchen and
groped my butt as I was getting something out of the fridge.  I
yelped and turned on Jack, screaming at him to keep his filthy hands
off me.  Grady came running.  He told my ex-uncle to get the
hell out of there, and I never saw or heard from him again.

Photo credit:  Marc Lester, Anchorage Daily News

Reaching Nome at 1:11 this morning, Jeff King, the ranger from Denali
National Park, won the Iditarod for the fourth time.  His time was
9 days, 11 hours, and 11 minutes.  At 50, he is the oldest musher
ever to win this race.

He praised his team and talked about some of the “fun runs” such as the
stretch out of Takotna when his team was rested and strong and the sky
was filled with aurora.  Asked when he would start thinking about
getting ready for next year’s race, he laughed and said, “I was
thinking about that on the way into town tonight.”

Jeff with lead dogs, Salem on the left,

Bronte on the right.

Photo credit:  Al Grillo, AP

Jeff
said that he’s not an athlete; the dogs are the athletes and he’s just
supposed to train, coach, plan strategy and such.  After the
bright lights and hoopla in Nome, he went to sleep, but got up again to
join a much smaller crowd and welcome Doug Swingley at 4:18.

The latest update I have, at 9:49, shows the following teams in Nome:
3) Paul Gebhardt
4) DeeDee Jonrowe
5) John Baker
6) Bjornar Andersen

Out of Safety, on the way to Nome and due to finish within the next three hours:
7 Ed Iten
8) Jason Barron
9) Mitch Seavey
10) Lance Mackey

Through White Mountain and on their way to Safety are Aliy Zirkle,
Jessie Royer, Aaron Burmeister, Sonny Lindner, Cim Smyth, Ken Anderson,
Ramey Smyth, Melanie Gould, Louis Nelson, Sr., Hugh Neff, and William
Hanes.

It looks like the rookie of the year will be one (or  maybe both)
of the Norwegian husband and wife pair, Tore Albrigtsen and Tove
Sorensen.  They’re out of Elim in 23rd and 24th place, about two
and a half hours ahead of another rookie, Mike Jayne. 

Behind those three leading rookies, in 26th place, is hard-luck
nine-fingered 4-time Champion Martin Buser.   Leaving Elim
within six minutes after Marty were Jessica Hendricks and 5-time
Champion Rick Swenson.

The pack is strung out along the coast through Koyuk, Shaktoolik and
Unalakleet, and the last eleven trailing mushers are still on the Yukon
from Kaltag back through Nulato to Galena, where the Red Lantern, Ben
Valks, has just checked out.  

[EDIT, around noon:   jassmine asked:

 Did the girl who was legally blind finish? Judi

Not even close, but she has moved up a few positions in the last couple
of days.  She is on the coast between Unalakleet and Shaktoolik,
in 57th position. 

…and for a while things did get a little better.

The winter of 1956-’57 in north Texas was cold and the little one-room
shack my mother and I lived in didn’t keep the wind out.  There
wasn’t a place to hang up our clothes, so we lived out of cardboard
boxes.  I didn’t have my own bed, much less a room of my
own.  I remember eating breakfasts there when I could see my
breath and my oatmeal was cold before I could get half of it down. 

The only heat was a small gas thing with ceramic inserts like lacy
bricks that glowed when they got hot.  It sat out in the floor
between the bed and the table, attached to the gas pipe by an old
cracked red rubber hose.  My mother was always cautioning me not
to trip over the hose or tip the heater over.  I escaped
gratefully to school each morning, and spent most of my time under the
covers on the bed when I was home, with only nose and eyes poking out
from under, watching the same old 17-inch Philco black and white TV
we’d brought with us from San Jose.  I didn’t know anyone who had
color TV, but I’d heard of it.

We
got through the worst of that winter, and spring was coming when I brought home
a Weekly Reader magazine from school.  It had a picture of the
Atomium, and the entire issue was about the upcoming World’s Fair in Brussels. 
There was a lot of hoopla over that Expo, because it was the first
world’s fair in 18 years, since they’d been cancelled during World War
II. 

I wanted to go.  The hype had gotten to me.  I loved the
county fairs I’d been to, and the thought of a WORLD fair was
overwhelming.  Mama listened to me gush and then reminisced about
a World’s Fair in Chicago when she was young.  It must have been
the one in 1933. when she would have been 22, three years before she
met my father.  The Brussels fair was scheduled to open in about a
year.  When I told my mother that I wanted to go, she said, “Save
your pennies.”

Since she advised me thusly, I thought I could do it.  I actually,
at twelve years of age, believed that I could stash away enough money
in a year to go to Europe for a World’s Fair.  We had broken my
piggy bank some time before then and used my savings for some
necessities.  When I asked my mother for something to keep my
savings in, she looked around, picked up the box of “strike anywhere”
kitchen matches, emptied the matches into an old teacup with a broken
handle, and gave me the box.  I wrote “Brussels” on the top of it,
put a few nickels and pennies in it, and set it on the windowsill over
the table.

We couldn’t have lived in that little shack for more than three months,
but it seemed longer.  The next place we found to live had a big
L-shaped room that wrapped around a bathroom that was about half as big
as the main room.  There was a bed for Mama and a couch for me to
sleep on, a dresser we shared, and a clothes-hanging rod enclosed by a
curtain.  Off the narrow side of the L was a lean-to kitchen with
windows on all 3 sides, sunny, bright and WARM.  The landlady,
Marie, was sweet, friendly and funny.  She showed us where her
storm cellar was and told us to join her there when the tornado sirens
blew.  Suddenly, home was a better place to be than school.

Safeway
was giving away dishes with wide yellow rims, gold trim, and a sheaf of
wheat in the center.  We would get a plate with each purchase one
month, a cup, cereal bowl or saucer with each purchase in following
months.  We ended up with a basic service for four, but since they
wanted money for the platters and serving dishes, I never had any of
them.  I wanted to use the new dishes, but Mama told me to put
them away for my “hope chest” to use after I was married.  We went
on using the old dishes she had gotten years before as premiums from
Jewel Tea Company.

This was a time when “gas wars” were going on.  Some filling stations
were selling gasoline for nineteen cents a gallon, until the place
across the street lowered their price to fifteen cents so the first one
would go down to fourteen, and so on.  For a while, when the stations
in town were selling their gas at twelve cents a gallon, we would go to
a station out on the highway to get it for a dime.

We saved “trading stamps:” S & H Green Stamps when we lived in
Kansas, and then Blue Chip Stamps after we moved to Texas.  We
bought groceries only at stores that gave stamps (one stamp for every
ten cents worth of merchandise we bought) and always shopped on
Wednesday, double-stamp day.  Sometimes the stores offered triple
stamps on certain promotions and if it was something we needed, we went
for it.  I licked the stamps and stuck them in a book and tucked
the books away until we had enough to trade in on some luxury item from
the catalog or the stamp store.

While we lived in that little house with the sunny kitchen, I traded seven and a half books of stamps for a copy of the Joy of Cooking,
and
started learning to really cook.  I had been getting a lot of
basic instruction from home ec classes in school, mostly knowledge I’d
already picked up from hanging out in the school cafeterias where my
mother worked.  After taking us through how to measure, mix, boil
and stir, and emphasizing safety tips such as not leaving pan handles
sticking out or cupboard doors hanging open, the first recipe they let
us actually cook was “Eggs
Goldenrod.”  It consisted of simple white sauce (milk, butter,
flour and salt), with the diced white of hard boiled eggs, poured over
toast and
garnished with the boiled egg yolk that had been forced through a tea
strainer. 

Mama never had the energy or inclination for cooking at home.  We
were both tired of eating quick-to-fix boxed spaghetti dinners and
macaroni and cheese.  After eating Eggs Goldenrod a few times,
Mama put up no argument when I asked her to let me trade the Blue Chip
Stamps for a cookbook.  The first meal I cooked from “Joy” was
baked beans.  The next one was pot roast.  Beyond that, I
don’t remember what came next.  I went for variety.  I do
remember making popcorn balls, and some experimenting with different fudge recipes.  The fudge taste
tests were lots of fun.  Mama and I finally agreed that Mamie
Eisenhower’s recipe using Marshmallow Creme, that I’d cut from a newspaper, was the best.

The bathroom in this house had a bathtub of modest proportions, not an
old claw-foot giant that I could stretch out in, but a big improvement
over the dank and rusty old shower stall in the hovel we’d just moved
from.  I took to it passionately.  My autoerotic experiences
ratcheted up a notch in that house, when I started combining my
orgasmic bubble baths with the soap operas on TV.  Then, up
another notch when I started my own soap-opera-like fantasies.  I
anticipated reality TV by a few decades, sitting there in my tub of
bubbles, imagining myself the focus of a video camera.

I have been trying to remember how I managed so much free time home
alone in the daytime without Mama around.  Maybe I pretended sick
and played hooky, or maybe they were times when I had a cold or
something and legitimately couldn’t go to school.  After we moved
from Halstead to Wichita at the end of sixth grade and my menstrual
periods started, I’d experienced a remission of most of my rheumatic or
autoimmune symptoms.  I had a series of ear and bladder infections
during that time period, and pictures of me from that time show dark
bags under my eyes, but my general health was better than it had been
for several years.

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race isn’t anywhere near over, because the
Red Lantern, still held by Ben Valks, has only just gotten to the Yukon
River.  He appears to be taking his mandatory 8-hour river rest at
Ruby, where he had been for about five hours when I brought up the
latest standings at around 11:40.

Jeff
King got into White Mountain at 6:34 with thirteen dogs.  He’s
required to rest his dogs there for eight hours before the run to
Safety and on to Nome, as is Doug Swingley who checked in at 9:41 with
eleven dogs, and all the other mushers who make it that far. 

Observers in Elim last night said that Jeff’s team is looking a lot
stronger than Doug’s.  From what I heard of both men’s voices on
the radio this morning, those dogs better be in better shape than their
mushers, or they’ll never make it.  Both men were having a hard
time making their mouths work well enough to form words, but that might
have been because some reporter stuck a microphone in their faces while
their lips were still chilled from the trail.

DeeDee Jonrowe regained third place from Paul Gebhardt between Koyuk
and Elim when his moving ahead without resting his dogs backfired on
him and they slowed down.  DeeDee checked into Elim at 3:46 this
morning, rested for about two and a half hours, and checked out exactly
three hours behind Doug Swingley, at 5:19.  Within the next four
hours Paul Gebhardt, John Baker, Bjornar Andersen and Ed Iten had gone
through the Elim checkpoint and were out on the trail to White Mountain
behind DeeDee.

[update at 12:34:  Gebhardt recovered third place from Dee Dee
between Elim and White Mountain.  Paul checked in at 11:59, and
she followed at 12:24.]

[update at 3:55 PM:  Jeff King left White Mountain at 2:34,
returned fifteen minutes later to drop one dog, then took off again
toward Safety.  He should be getting into Nome about midnight.]

Currently resting in Elim are Lance Mackey in eighth place, followed by
Jason Barron, Mitch Seavey, Sonny Lindner, Aliy Zirkle and Aaron
Burmeister.

Martin Buser leaving McGrath a week ago on day 4
 - Photo credit: Official Iditarod photographer Jeff Schultz
The
pack is strung out along the coast through Unalakleet, Shaktoolik, and
Koyuk.  Resting in Koyuk right now, Martin Buser is in 26th
place.  He was in thirtieth place and uncharacteristically bummed
out when he was talking to the APRN reporter last night.  The
reporter mentioned that Marty flashed his “trademark smile” only once
during the interview. 

He talked about his several incidents of bad luck during this race,
about hitting the tree stump and having his sled come apart.  He
said that he’s just concentrating on finishing the race, not even
considering himself to be in competition any more.  He said it
would be pointless to try to make a move from thirtieth place. 
“If this is a mid-life crisis,” he laughed, “it must mean I’ll live to
be 96.”

The media seem to have gotten their fill last year of the visually
impaired young woman (that blind girl who sees better than my husband
and the musher now in second place, Doug Swingley).  Besides the
paid ad I saw on the Anchorage Daily News’s website at the start of the
race, the only time her name has come up in my searches during this
race was one two-line blurb on the website of a TV station in her home
state.  I have seen a few photos of her seeing-eye musher Tim
Osmar, but none of her.  Tim was out of Kaltag in 57th place in
the latest standings.

The husband and wife team of rookies, Norwegians Tore Albrigtsen and
Tove Sorensen, who have been staying together throughout this year’s
race, are in 27th and 28th places, ahead of all the rest of the rookies
and almost thirty race veterans.

If you want to watch the (winner’s) finish of the race, keep an eye on the nomecam tonight.  Mushers will be straggling into Nome for the next week or so.

The Augustine Volcano has been active again for a week or more,
emitting steam, ash plumes, and “hot avalanches.”  There is a new
lava dome building, which could cause some spectacular fireworks when
it collapses. 

There’s this comment:

Judi hasn’t been reading me very long, and hasn’t read all the memoirs,
so to satisfy her curiosity and bring some other new readers up to
speed, I will recap why I started this memoir process.  Then I’ll
delve into my unconscious mind (what better time for it than this
incredible Full Moon with Mercury retrograde?) and examine what I might
be getting out of it.

I have always been telling stories.  Storytelling is a family
tradition with the Douglasses.  I have retold stories that were
passed down to me from my great grandfather Cyrus Dow Douglass, who
lost a leg in the Civil War and had some interesting times sailing to
old California before that.  I seem to lack the sort of
imagination that it takes to be a good fiction writer, so I tend to
stick to stories I’ve heard or read and the things I remember from my
own experiences.

By the time I was thirty, I’d had an interesting enough life to give me
a pretty good supply of stories.  The first time I seriously
considered writing my memoirs was around that time.  I was working
in an office with half a dozen other women.  I’d told a few of my
stories during our lunchtime gab fests, and someone said, “You ought to
write a book.”

At the time, I’d been keeping notes for a few years on a flying saucer
serial killer thriller I wanted to write.  I thought I’d finish
that book and then maybe do an autobiography.  I still haven’t
finished that novel.  It is character-driven, and those characters
keep multiplying and doing things I find hard to explain, and I have
always had so many other ways to spend my time….

Then Angie,
the daughter I gave up for adoption when I was eighteen, found
me.  She asked me one day if I had loved her father.  She
sorta wanted to know if she’d resulted from a one-night stand. 
Angie’s father had been the love of my life.  The story of our
meeting was a long story, and a good one.  I wrote down some of it
for her.

Later on, that old lady in my dream who urged me to keep a journal, and Sarah,
who was already blogging on Xanga, brought me here.  This was to
have been my healing journal, to help me sort out and transcend my food
addictions.  I worked on that for a while as I was also working my
way into the Xanga social scene.  One day, the little backbiting
head games some Xangans were playing, and the various sets of unwritten
rules that seemed so self-evident to some people and absolutely absurd
to others, reminded me of the rules and games in prison.

I wrote Rules of the Game,
and the response to it motivated me to back up and tell the story of
how I’d gotten into prison.  I already had part of the beginning
of that story on disk because I’d done it for Angie. 
Some of my readers were plainly blown away by my story.  I had
discovered my own deep enjoyment at blowing people’s minds while I was
riding with Hells Angels, and I knew that the biker part of my story
would blow a lot of minds, so I went on here and told it.  By the
time I’d gotten through that, I’d formed the intention of writing my
full memoirs and trying to get them published.

So, that’s why I’m doing this, but what you really asked was what I’m
getting out of it.  First, I’ll tell you what I’m not getting out
of this.  It is not a journey of self-discovery.  I did that
thirty-some years ago during and following the months that I
participated in the Reality Attack Therapy group run by a bunch of
abstaining junkies.

That wasn’t a twelve-step group, but I had already
found the 12 steps and worked them solo in prison.  For me, those
steps have always worked better when not distorted by the dogmas and
bullshit that have grown up around them in AA and NA.  The tenth
step: “…continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong
promptly admitted it,” melded with what I learned in group about
self-honesty and self-esteem, and became the guiding principle in all
aspects of my life.  I am much more likely to find a valuable
personal insight through simple social interactions or solitary
reflection on present realities, than when I’m telling stories from my
past.

Hang on, I’m getting to what you wanted to know.  What I get out
of writing my memoirs has an upside and a downside.  Often, there
are months of frustration between segments as I try to recall the
chronology of a group of memories or some detail that seems especially
pertinent to the story but elusive to recall.  There is the
nagging knowledge that I’m including too much irrelevant detail and
that I am practically incapable of sifting out what is relevant. 
I just can’t judge that, so I write down everything I remember. 
There is the task looming ahead, when I’ve gotten it written up to the
present, of editing it for submission to a publisher.  Sometimes I
console myself with the thought that Doug or Greyfox can do that chore
after I’m dead, and then I feel guilty for burdening them with it.

That’s the downside.  On the upside, there is satisfaction in the
continuation of a project, working toward finishing something once it’s
started.  There is also the pleasant prospect of some actual
income from it if it is published.

[EDIT:  I forgot!  The
mental exercise, I am told, is good for my brain.  Remembering is
supposed to be good for the memory.  Thinking, working puzzles and
playing word games, are all supposed to help delay the onset of senile
dementia.  Does the fact that I forgot that mean that it's not
working?]

But I get an even greater
reward when someone leaves me a comment and says that the story of my
life has given her insight into some troubling issue in her life. 
I have little to give in this life besides my story, so I take pleasure
in giving that.  The greatest reward of all for me, from the
writing of my memoirs, is when by my frank and blatant example I
motivate one of my readers to drop her own masks and shields to tell
her own story openly and shamelessly.

I hadn’t been happy for years.  I had lived in a self-created hell
since my father died suddenly, right after I had made an angry wish
that he would die, five years previously.  So it either means a
lot, or means nothing at all, to say that I was miserable when I was
twelve years old and my mother and I left Wichita, Kansas and moved to
Vernon, Texas.

She had met a man through a lonely hearts club and after meeting him
decided to move to Texas to be near him.  In Wichita, I left
behind my steady boyfriend Bill, with whom I’d kept up a routine of
nightly phone calls and Friday night movie dates ever since Mama and I
had moved away from our old neighborhood and I’d entered a new school
in southwest Wichita.  I also left behind an exciting secret “love
affair” with a boy known as Frenchy.  We met each Saturday morning
at a kids’ club movie in north Wichita, where we sat in the balcony and
kissed and groped each other into a breathless frenzy.

It has sometimes been suggested to me that as I went from boy to boy
and then from man to man, I was seeking my absent father.  I heard
that so often that I almost came to accept it.  The problem was
that it wasn’t true.  Maybe through my father’s early death I was
spared an agonizing Electra complex or even more problematic incestuous
relationship — incest ran in his family — but as it was I had no
sexual thoughts or feelings associated with my father.  What I was
left with when he died was insecurity both emotional and economic, and
guilt over my belief that I had caused his death.

I found some psychological relief from my insecurity in those
relationships with the boys I became attached to.  I had been
enculturated with the fairy tale and soap opera version of romantic
“love,” and thought that their adolescent hormonal interest in me was
love.  It felt good to be “loved” and even better to be “in love,”
to have the racing pulse, paralytic thrills and damp panties that came
with kisses and caresses.

The downside of  my preteen love life was more guilt because the
adolescent fondling and feelings had to be kept from my mother. 
She had taught me it was bad.  Likewise, I understood that my
masturbation was bad and had to be kept hidden.  These matters
were awfully confusing, because my mother was going through a series of
romantic relationships in her attempt to replace my father, and movies
and popular music were filled with both veiled and overt references to
sexual “love”.

Some of my classmates in school were as breathless and lovestruck as I
was.  I had skipped a year in school, so my classmates were a year
or two older than I, but I had budding breasts and wisps of pubic hair
in fifth grade at age nine, and started menstruating when I was ten,
before many of those older classmates.  I was far ahead of
that curve where the opposite sex ceases to be alien and pestiferous
and
becomes fascinatingly attractive.

The move to Texas changed everything.  Mama and I moved into a squalid little dwelling
behind the modest home of an old lady I think was called Minnie. 
I cried myself to sleep every night for I-don’t-know-how-many
nights.  I whined and howled to my mother about how much I missed
Bill, how I wanted to go back to Kansas and stay with Granny until we
were old enough to get married.  She laughed at the idea the first
few times, and then grew angry when I wouldn’t shut up about it as
instructed.  I missed Frenchy, too, but since I had never told
Mama anything about him I didn’t think it would be prudent to bring
that up.

We didn’t have a phone in that “garage apartment” and even if we had
Mama wouldn’t have allowed me to call Bill long distance, so I wrote
him long, intense letters.  He wrote back two or three times,
briefly saying that he missed me, too, until finally I got a letter
from him saying that his parents didn’t want us to correspond any
longer.  My first Dear Jane letter.  I was devastated.

 Leaving behind the
established relationships I had, I found myself unable to attract a new
boyfriend.  In Vernon, there seemed to be two kinds of boys: 
those who weren’t interested in girls and those who were going
steady.  In that era and that culture, about all a “decent” girl
could do was flirt a little.  She couldn’t even ask a boy to dance
except when it was “ladies’ choice” or on Sadie Hawkins Day.  She
couldn’t call boys on the phone, ask for a date, or “chase” at all, or
she’d be branded a bad girl.  Mama was firm in her insistence that
I be a good girl.

Vernon was a small enough town to be exclusionary, and almost all the
kids in jr. high were in one clique or another.  Girl friends were
about as hard to get as boyfriends.  With no social life and only
a very secretive solitary (though active verging on hyperactive) sex life, I had lots of time and attention to
spare for schoolwork.  That was fortunate, because everything I’d
learned about Kansas history was completely irrelevant here. 
Suddenly, I was in the Confederacy and was thrown into a history class
near mid-term, where they were studying the War Between the States.

I knew a little bit about the Civil War, so I didn’t feel completely
lost until I held up my hand in class to answer a question.  I was
swiftly informed that in Texas it wasn’t the Civil War.  Realizing
that I had a lot of catching up to do, I approached the teacher after
class and asked for some make-up assignments. 

I also asked if there was something I could do for extra credit. 
In junior high in Wichita, “extra credit” projects were offered to any
student who needed to bring up a bad grade or wanted to expand and
enrich her experience in a favorite subject.  I’d had fun writing
a play for a science unit on the solar system, and doing library
research papers on archaeology for a history class and on Cubism for an
art class I would otherwise have failed because of my inability to draw
a recognizable figure.

My history teacher answered my query with a blank look and I tried to
explain what extra credit was.  She eventually understood, and
suggested that I do ten pages on the Battle of San Jacinto.  My
research led me to the Alamo, of course, and for a while then I was so
involved in Texas history that I didn’t have time to notice the lack of
friends or familiar faces.

When I had enrolled, I’d had my doctor’s excuse from physical
education
in hand.  Being freed from that required course, I was offered an
extra elective.  For the remainder of eighth grade, in addition to
the required algebra, English, history and music, I had a business
course taught by my English teacher Mrs. Pace, home economics
(cooking), and a study hall that I didn’t need.  I soon got out of
the study hall so I could spend that hour shelving, dusting and
cataloguing books in the library.  When the chorus director
discovered that I couldn’t carry a tune in a tub, she got me out of
that class and I took a semester of elective ninth grade science.

Mama got a job as cook’s helper in the school cafeteria.  Money
was very tight, so she got me a job washing dishes after lunch in
exchange for my lunches.  That helped cover for my lack of social
connections.  While the other kids were gulping their food in the
cafeteria and running to meet friends outside who had brown-bagged it,
or the ones down the street at Cooper’s store who lunched on burgers, I
was gulping down my lunch so I could get to the dish room, scrape
plates, load rack after rack through the dishwasher and get done before
the bell rang for afternoon classes.

I even got the occasional bit of paid “overtime” there when the
cafeteria was used for evening events.  One very
memorable occasion was when the sports booster club held a fund-raising
chili feed.  It was my first taste of Texas chili.  I’d
always thought that chili was made with beans and smelled and tasted
like tomato sauce.  The steam table was loaded with
spicy-smelling, tangy real chili, all beef and no beans.  It
didn’t look like chili to me, but they offered me a free bowl and I
tried it.  When the chili supper was over, Mama and I filled a
clean #10 can with about a gallon of leftover chili and took it home,
where it didn’t last more than a day or two.  This was my
introduction to a lifelong love affair with Tex-Mex food, which even
now remains my favorite cuisine, my specialty.  I can smell that
chili now, and it’s making me salivate.

What with wind-driven wildfires in Texas and New Mexico, and people
picking up the pieces after Kansas and Missouri tornadoes, not to
mention really big longstanding hunger problems in Ethiopia, Somalia,
and Niger, the Sunnis versus the Shiites in Iraq, and serious trouble
elsewhere, the Iditarod is seeming ever and ever more frivolous and
trivial to me.  With that said, I also feel that this would not be
the best time to drop the subject, now that I’ve come this far with it.

With straw for bedding and baled straw as protection from the wind,

Jeff King’s and Doug Swingley’s teams rest in Unalakleet Sunday.
Photo credit: official Iditarod photographer Jeff Schultz.
The
race is becoming more intense, as the leaders (Jeff King, Doug
Swingley, Paul Gebhardt, and DeeDee Jonrowe) are out of Shaktoolik,
heading across the sea ice of Norton Sound toward Koyuk. [UPDATE: 
Jeff King checked into Koyuk at 11:24 AM and out at 3:51 PM.  Doug
Swingley checked in at 2:09 PM, Paul Gebhardt in at 3:23, and DeeDee
Jonrowe in at 4:34.]   King,
Swingley and Jonrowe, coming in about three hours apart, each rested
their dogs about five hours in Shaktoolik this morning.  Between
Doug’s departure and DeeDee’s, Paul Gebhardt blew through the
checkpoint pausing only long enough to exchange signatures with the
checker and vet.

Steve Heimel, reporter for APRN,
talked to several mushers in Unalakleet about the race so far and the
effects of fatigue.  DeeDee had lost the trail and lost time
getting back to  it.  She said then that she was hoping and working to
maintain third place, which she lost to Paul Gebhardt in
Shaktoolik.  Aliy Zirkle says that she’s finding herself walking
in circles, forgetting what she’s doing as she packs up her sled to
leave the checkpoint.  She’s worried about the winds on Norton
Sound, saying that wind tends to panic the dogs.
 

Hallucinations
are one thing they all have in common.  Aliy says that out on the
trail she keeps seeing characters from Roger Rabbit coming at her out
of the darkness.  DeeDee keeps dodging tree branches that aren’t
there, which is sorta weird.  She has a strong reputation for
running into the ones that are there.  Maybe the hallucinations
are easier to duck.

Martin Buser told about one year when he was far in the lead and had a
vivid hallucination of being passed by Rick Swenson, who was many miles
behind him.  Then he waxed philosophical, saying that
hallucinations bring out the best and worst of what’s inside, that they
reach down into one’s soul.  “People who don’t
like what they’re seeing, they don’t run the Iditarod year after year.”

A third dog has died:  Cupid, a four year old female from Jim
Lanier’s team.  This is the largest number of dog deaths since the
1997 race when five dogs died.  There doesn’t seem to be any
pattern or any connection between the deaths.  The first two were
from inexperienced puppy-training teams taking it easy back in the
pack, and Lanier was maintaining a competitive pace.

Details of the first death, of Yellowknife from Noah Burmeister’s team, were in the Anchorage Daily News today:

That ADN link goes to a longer story about the dog deaths.

There
are persistent mutterings of discontent from mushers over the way that
the snowmachiners set the trail this year.  The following is from
Roxy’s trail reports on ramybrooks.com.

A village dog in Kaltag watches the action as Ramy Brooks mushes out of town behind him.

Photo from Associated Press
…also from Roxy:

Bryan Mills was carrying one of his dogs in his sled when it jumped out. 

He’s shown retrieving the escapee in this photo from the AP.

The pack is spread out from
Kaltag to Unalakleet, with a lot of slower mushers moving down the
Yukon in that direction.  The Red Lantern is still held by Ben
Valks, out of Cripple on his way to Ruby.

Yesterday, just after I’d posted my entry for the weekly_photo_challenge, and was uploading new photos for the Photo Blog-Along,
Doug got up and informed me that he needed the computer.  He was
de-emming yet another Saturday online session.  I had him looming
behind me, with occasional breaks while he paced the floor, and one
longer respite as he walked the dog, but I had no time after posting to
read and comment.  Today, I am compelled to choose between looking
up the Iditarod news and digesting it to report here, or reading and
commenting on your sites.  Guess which one I chose.

Roxy Wright
is the mother of Iditarod musher Ramy Brooks, and is a champion sprint
racer, having won both the North American Sled Dog Championship and the
Fur Rendezvous World Championship Sled Dog Race multiple times
each.  For several years, I have enjoyed sharing with readers her reports from the trail. 
From her, I get not only the stats and standings, but an insider’s view
of the dogs’ condition and occasional bits of gossip.  She gets credit for some of the information in this entry, and for three of the photos here.

I
am a few days behind in these reports.  When I left off, Paul
Gebhardt was in the lead.(He is shown on the left in the photo at
right, talking to Ruby resident Emmitt
Peters, the Yukon Fox, who won the Iditarod his rookie year in
1975.)

Paul was first into Ruby.  Each year the first musher to reach the
Yukon River is rewarded with a special meal.  A chef flies out
from Anchorage to prepare the seven-course gourmet feast.  This
year, Paul’s prize included $3,500 cash.  The First to the Yukon
prize and the gold nuggets won by the first musher to reach the halfway
point provide more than just an opportunity for additional race
sponsors to get their names in the news.  I think it also adds
some speed and interest to the early days of the race when mushers
might otherwise be holding back, conserving their teams’ energy. 

Paul Gebhardt seemed this year to be going for that gourmet meal. 
He held onto a slim lead, postponing his 24-hour layover while those
now in contention for the championship were resting their dogs. 
He fell behind as he took his 24 and his other mandatory 8-hour Yukon
River layover.  At the latest update, he was out of Kaltag and had
moved up into tenth place.

Sunset on the Yukon at Ruby, by Roxy Wright.
This
race is never easy for anyone, but it has been harder than most for
many this year.  Noah Burmeister is training a puppy team for his
brother Aaron.  One of his dogs, Yellowknife, was slowing and
showing labored breathing on the trail.  Noah loaded him into the
sled and carried him into Rohn, where Yellowknife was flown out to
Anchorage.  He died in hospital.  A necropsy showed that he
had regurgitated, aspirated and developed pneumonia.

David Sawatzky’s dog, Bear, a three-year-old male, died yesterday
between Cripple and Ruby.  No details yet on his cause of
death.  Please don’t let my bald statements in reporting these
deaths give you the false impression that either of these deaths was
taken lightly.  There have been tears on the trail, and the sounds
of strong men’s voices breaking in grief.  It is going to give
fresh ammunition to the animal rights activists who would love to see
this race shut down. 

I should probably devote an entire entry to some of the arguments in
favor of dog racing.  The simple truth is that huskies love to
run, and some of the happiest, mentally healthiest dogs alive are those
who know the pleasure and pride of working in an inter-species
partnership with humans.  There is little difference between these
dogs and those who work with shepherds to protect sheep from predators,
except for the racing dogs’ being under constant veterinary attention
and care.  Everyone involved in the Iditarod dreads and regrets
every injured dog, grieves the deaths, and keeps working toward
preventing them.  Few dogs on the planet have more frequent
contact and more intimate relationships with veterinarians.  These
teams, besides racing, serve science as they are observed and the
observations provide data to improve veterinary medicine, animal feeds,
etc.

One particular trail hazard created by the stupid, ignorant snowmachiner volunteers who pioneered the trail this year, a tree stump
on the side of a curve where the dogs naturally run,
has gotten at least a dozen teams.  (Of course, one of those snowmachiners
died earlier this year in a self-created avalanche, a fact which is now
providing some consolatory satisfaction to some of the more
cold-blooded fans and maybe a few battered mushers as well.)

Martin
Buser’s encounter
with the stump sent him flying out over the sled, broke the sled to
pieces and
injured a dog.  He managed to limp into the Cripple checkpoint,
where,

“It was cold, and I had limited resources. I didn’t build a new sled. I just made it go to Ruby.”

He cut one of his ski poles, making it into
two parts, which became one upright and one cross-section. Two trail
markers became the other cross-sections. He used rope, bailing (sic–I love finding typos in the newspaper) wire and
clamps to create a makeshift handlebar that lasted until Ruby.

“It made it real difficult on those side
hills,” he said, “but I eventually made it. Seems like I’m losing time
everywhere I go.”

Buser lost his best lead dog, Hot Foot,
because of this stump. The impact was so powerful, it “bummed out” her
shoulder, he said.”

adn.com

Jeff King’s frosty mustache in Ruby Friday, by Roxy Wright
Jeff King was in the lead, 36 minutes
ahead of Doug Swingley, out of Kaltag between midnight and 1 AM
today.  [last-minute UPDATE:  King was first into Unalakleet at 12:26 this afternoon] [update to UPDATE:  Doug Swingley got into Unalakleet 22 minutes after Jeff King.  It's close.] They, and all the rest of the top twenty teams, have
completed both the mandatory 24-hour layover and the 8-hour Yukon River
rest.

The leaders, King, Doug Swingley, DeeDee Jonrowe, Aliy Zirkle, John
Baker, Bjornar Andersen, Jason Barron, Ed Iten, Mitch Seavey, and
Gebhardt were through Kaltag by 9:30 this morning.

In Kaltag at the 10:34 update are Lance Mackey, Ramy Brooks, Hugh Neff,
Sonny Lindner, Aaron Burmeister, Ramey Smyth, Jessica Hendricks, Jessie
Royer, and Melanie Gould who has just passed Rick Swenson and moved
into twentieth place.

Dogs can sleep on their feet.  Marc Lester captured the proof,

two of Lance Mackey’s dogs resting in Galena on the Yukon.

Rick,
whose frosty mustache appeared here a few days ago, was out of Nulato
on his way to Kaltag just before six this morning.  Martin Buser
was making up a little of his lost time, going through Nulato in 27th
place, just under four hours behind Swenson.

Each team started this race a week ago with sixteen dogs.  As of
noon today, only two mushers were still running sixteen dogs: 
Sonny Lindner in 17th place, and Danny Seavey in 62nd.  Cim Smyth
and Jessica Hendricks in 14th and 15th places, are down to eight dogs
each. 

About noon yesterday, John Barron became the eleventh musher to scratch
from this year’s race.  A couple of days previously, Terry Adkins,
who came back this year after an eight-year retirement, was the eighth
musher to scratch, about 80 miles short of the halfway point. 
According to adn.com,

The worst of it came dropping out of Rainy
Pass into the Dalzell Gorge on the way to the remote Rohn checkpoint in
the Alaska Range early in the week. Adkins had two dogs falter there.
He loaded them into his sled to carry them to the checkpoint, and the
extra weight in the basket made a nightmare of what is normally a wild,
white-knuckle ride.

“I don’t know how you did that,” fellow musher Lynda Plettner of Big Lake told Adkins.

“I prayed every step of the way I wasn’t going to die,” he said.

If you follow only one of the links in this entry, that last one above would be a good one to read.

Lance
Mackey, both hands occupied applying ointment to his dogs’ paws, holds
the tube in his teeth in this shot from Galena by Marc Lester of the
Anchorage Daily News.

If you’ve read my Iditarod series this year, you may recall that I’m
putting my inconsequential and purely mental/verbal support behind
Lance.  He has won the Yukon Quest two years running, despite
having to haul his dogs around in a truck that barely runs.  He
has said that he could really use the new truck that Anchorage
Chrysler-Dodge supplies to the first-place finisher, not to mention the
$29,000 winner’s purse.  The latest standings just before noon
today show Lance still in Kaltag since about 2 AM, in twelfth place.

One of John Baker’s dogs,
captured by official Iditarod photographer Jeff Schultz.

There had been some questions over whether Paul Gebhardt would be
penalized for the help he received from Doug Swingley and from a hunter
at the buffalo camp when Gebhardt’s team got loose after the sled hit a
tree stump and the gangline parted.  Race marshall Mark Nordman
decided that the three hours Paul lost in recovering his team was
enough of a penalty.  “It’s funny it happened this year,” Nordman
added, “because I told them
at the drivers’ meeting, I don’t care what it takes — a helicopter,
local people, whatever it takes to get your team back. Ride with
another driver. It doesn’t matter. Get your team. That’s the most
important thing.”  (source:  adn.com)

Four-time Iditarod Champion Susan Butcher flew out to Ruby on Friday to
visit with some of the mushers there.  Susan has found a donor and
is scheduled for a bone-marrow transplant on May 16th, to treat
leukemia.

The leaders are off the Yukon River now.  The next big challenge
for them is the long run up the Bering Sea coast.  The pack is
strung out on the river from Ruby through Nulato to Kaltag.  
There’s nobody left in Takotna enjoying Jan Newton’s cheeseburgers and
pies.  The current Red Lantern, rookie Ben Valks from the
Netherlands, is out of Ophir on his way to Cripple, the halfway point.

It is past lunchtime, and I’ve been at this going on four hours with
only a quick breakfast grabbed at the keyboard.  If you want to
know more about the race, you can follow some of the links above and
you can find more links as well as news on the Alaska Public Radio Network’s website. 
I have been watching the crew set up the famous Burled Arch and the
crowd-control fence along Front Street in Nome on the nomecam.

Here’s my contribution to the March Photo Blog-Along:

It is a little early here for sings of spring.  Spring is on its way, anyway.  The days are getting longer.

Yesterday, I noticed a blossom on the begonia in my front window.

I found some signs that we are approaching the end of winter.  Our woodpile is depleted.  I certainly hope winter is almost over.

The Chinook winds are a perennial sign of this season.  They leave wind-sculpted lines and shapes in the snow.

The winds litter the drifted snow with debris

…and they polish the crust until it glistens in places.

While looking for signs of spring, I found signs of moose, too. 
These branches about ten feet above the ground have been broken off by
a browsing moose.  I’ve outlined the few fat silvery willow
catkins I found.

These moose tracks are part of a trail I followed the full length of
our block, but did not follow along any of its side-trips out into the
deep snow beside the road.

Here’s a clearer shot of moose tracks.

…and here’s a mystery:  a few spots of blood in a moose-trampled
area.  Was the moose bleeding a little bit?  There was no
continuing blood trail.  Was the moose stomping on some small
animal?  I found no little corpse, but the area has many tracks of
cats, hares, ermine and other rodents.  Could this account for
Potemkin’s injured front paw?  Would that stray cat attack a
moose?  That seems unlikely.  There are some free-ranging
dogs in the neighborhood, and they do sometimes stand their ground and
bark at encroaching moose.  This might account for the barking,
growling fit that Koji threw yesterday.

The new weekly_photo_challenge is hosted by Gelijke.
The subject is Shadows.

That is Mount McKinley silhouetted against the dusky summer midnight light over Kashwitna Lake.

 
…my yard

…and on the street where I live.