April 9, 2007

• BREAKUP – the musical

  How do you know that breakup is here, winter is finally over and it’s really springtime in Alaska?

  The Kobuk 440 is finished, of course.  The last big endurance sled dog race of the winter is run.  Martin Buser won.  Here’s how it shook down, copied from dogsled.com, last updated yesterday:
  

  Kobuk 440  Final Standings

  Date	Pos	Musher	Dogs	Time In	Elapsed Time
  4/8	1	Martin Buser	9	8:04:00 AM	64:04:10
  4/8	2	Louie Nelson Sr	9	8:39:00 AM	64:39:30
  4/8	3	Ed Iten	11	8:49:12 AM	64:49:12
  4/8	4	Paul Gebhardt	8	10:19:29 AM	66:19:29
  4/8	5	Gerry Riley	7	11:25:37 AM	67:25:37
  4/8	6	Rayme Smyth	5	11:45:41 AM	67:45:41
  4/8	7	Lance Mackey	6	12:58:27 PM	68:58:27
  4/8	8	Melanie Gould	8	1:07:37 PM	69:07:37
  4/8	9	Hugh Neff	9	1:14:50 PM	69:14:50
  4/8	10	Ken Anderson	6	1:32:25 PM	69:32:25
  4/8	11	Noah Burmiester	9	2:38:29 PM	70:38:29
  4/8	12	Robert Nelson	10	5:53:57 PM	73:53:57

  We will be waiting for our final musher, Toleff Monson.  He is expected to
  finish 3 or 4 AM. monday morning. 

  Scratched:  Rick Swenson, Kelly Williams, Raymond Wood, Karlin Itchoak and Henry Horner

  Bryan Bearss  did not make it to the start.

  This morning Doug came in laughing after a trip to the outhouse.  I asked him to share the humor, and he said he had the thought, “It must have dropped below freezing last night,” because he wasn’t post-holing [breaking through the crust, leaving post holes in the slush] as he traversed the deep pile of packed snow off the roofs, between the trailer and cabin.

  That wasn’t the funny part.  What made him laugh was that his thought sang in his mind like a Broadway show tune.  He laughed again and sang out,”Breakup – the musical.”  He had been listening during the night to the songs from Avenue Q.  He played them for me, then, and we laughed some more.  If the upcoming tour gets to Anchorage, we will try to go see it.

  The debris you can see on that pile of slushy packed snow between the buildings includes some leaves, twigs and other wind-borne bits of trees, but most of the dirty-looking stuff is ash from the woodstove.  The ash that doesn’t get scattered for traction on the path at the spring is spread on top of the snow here to absorb solar energy and hasten melting.

  By the time I’d gotten dressed and out there with my camera, I was post-holing so I kept to the shoveled path and plowed roads.  I tuned my eyes to pick up GREEN, and went looking for signs of new growth.

  
  The first green I spotted was a dyed feather from my crafts materials.  It probably broke off one of the jingle-bird toys I made for the cats.  The “dirty” bits there are just wind-blown debris.  The entire snow pack looks this way, up close.

  

  The next green that caught my eye was the Talkeetna sticker on the back bumper of Lassie, the old AMC Eagle that served as Greyfox’s roadside stand for several years.

  
  There was the evergreen tip of a spruce bough, blown down in the recent windstorm…

  
  …the yellow green of some moss just exposed by receding snow, and the fading green of clover leaves that have lain frozen under snow all winter and will turn brown as soon as they dry out.

  
  Other than the green plaid flannel shirt I was wearing and the old green tarp partially covering what’s left of the firewood Mitch helped us buy when we ran out mid-winter, the scenery was mostly monochromatic.

  
  Earthtones were supplied by Granny Mousebreath [foreground] and Muffin in the rear here, but Max in the middle is as monochromatic as his surroundings.

  
  All the sky I could see was various shades of gray, but there was a flash of blue through the trees from the old truck parked by the abandoned house where the feral cats take shelter.

  
  I found some spring flowers.  No, this isn’t the wrong caption for that picture, and those are flowers, really.  Pussywillows — if you look closely — are the catkin-flowers of the red willows, the nasty, fuzzy little pollen spreaders.  Hay fever always comes before spring, here.

  
  This fault line extending across the road is a visible sign of the earthquake activity I’ve been feeling lately.  When the road grader goes by, it gets obscured, but it always shows up again in the same place.  Alaska has nothing even remotely resembling bedrock.  We are riding on crumbled chunks of crust at a plate boundary, with faults everywhere.  Behind me in this view, this one runs along the north side of our house.  Another bigger crack parallels the highway on its other side, and about a mile away is the HUGE Susitna Fault with high bluffs all along one edge showing where a chunk of crust is slipping under the adjacent one.

  
  This big mass of snow marks the end of the plowed road where the track across the muskeg takes off toward the cul de sac turnaround.  Snowmobiles have packed a trail out that way, but I was post-holing too much to go very far out there today.

  

  I saved the beauty shots for last.

  

  

  • 7:29 pm
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