October 9, 2007

• It is winter.

  

  I know, the Autumnal Equinox was less than three weeks ago, and the Winter Solstice is still about two and a half months away, but it’s winter.  There is no snow on the ground here yet, but this year there will be none of the early “practice” snow that melts as soon as it falls.  The ground is frozen, so the snow will stick whenever it finally gets here.

  Signs of winter have been piling up, even if the snow hasn’t.  This morning, Doug brought the seat in from the outhouse and put it in its usual winter place behind the woodstove.  I forgot to take it out with me an hour or so later when I went out, and had to come back for it.  It was either that or sit on the cold and splintery plywood bench.  All that handling brought the outhouse seat into our conversation a few minutes ago as I sat here, with Doug washing dishes across the room behind me.

  I said to Doug that we need a new seat.  This one is cracked.  Sometimes when I sit down on it, a little of the tender skin on the back of my thigh gets into the crack and gets pinched if I shift my weight.  He hadn’t been aware of my problems with the seat, but he had problems of his own.  He said he knew about the crack:  “I caught my foreskin in it,” he said.  Ouch!

  Another winter indicator:  we closed the bathroom window.  We have had a fire in the woodstove for weeks, ever since I started having shaking chills from the pneumonia, but we put off closing the window until the nights turned really cold:  low double digits F.  With that window shut, one of us has to get up frequently to let a cat in or out, or to close the door for the ones who are resourceful enough to open it for themselves.  You’d think that if they could open a door, they could close it, but they are cats.  Koji has pushed it shut a few times, but getting up to close it is easier for us monkeys than training the dog to do it consistently, so . . . .

  Fewer than usual of my weekender part-time neighbors have been here since it turned cold.  Until there is enough snow for the snowmachiners, weekends will be relatively quiet.  The lack of snow isn’t keeping the dog teams from their practice runs.  Several times a day lately, a team has run by here, pulling a 4-wheel ATV with two men on it.  It’s an Iditarod team, probably, but I have only seen the men from the back and don’t know whose team it is.  In addition to the mushers who live around here, several teams from the Lower 48 and other countries train in this area.

  The 2007 International Sled Dog Symposium, Working Dog Trade Fair, and ADMA Fundraising Auction will be gathering in Fairbanks this month, October 19–21.

  One of the first (if not the very first) of the mid-distance races of the season, the Sheep Mountain 150, comes in mid-December. 

  Something special in Alaskan dog mushing will occur next March in Nome, after the Iditarod.  The 100th Anniversary running of the 408-mile All Alaska Sweepstakes runs from Nome to Candle and back, with a $100,000 winner-take-all purse.  The last running of the Sweepstakes was twenty-five years ago, on its seventy-fifth anniversary.

  The entry fee is a sum of money plus one ounce of gold. The sum of money is $1,750 through the end of November and then increases to $2,000 on Dec. 1 and $4,000 on Feb. 1. . . .

  Teams are limited to 12 dogs and a musher must finish with all of the dogs he or she started with. If a dog is injured or isn’t fit to run in the team, it must be carried in the musher’s sled all the way to the finish line.

  “The one exception is that if the race veterinarian, with the consent of race officials, believes a dog’s welfare is at stake, then the race official will demand that the dog be dropped,” Crane said. “If a dog is dropped, there will be a time penalty to the musher.”

  Fairbanks News Miner

  While I was online getting race particulars for this post, I made a couple of appalling discoveries.  On Wikipedia and topix.com, I saw references to “dog sled racing.”  I have said it before.  I’ll probably say it again.  The sleds don’t race.  The dogs race.  The winner is not the first sled to cross the finish line.  It is the first nose across the line.

  This morning’s sunrise was too colorful to miss, but I am still too ill to have stayed out there long enough to catch the best light.  I got out of breath and came back in, then watched through the window as the color turned peachy orange before the sun came up.

  
  

  • 1:41 pm
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