People from Outside often think all Alaskans are crazy.  Real Alaskans know that the crazy people live in Anchorage.  If I needed any evidence to point to for support of that contention, I’d need to look no further than Fur Rendezvous, affectionately known as “Rondy”, which starts today in downtown Anchorage.

In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, as settlers moved west from the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and started building towns, some of those towns grew up around the trappers’ forts that were already there.  Social life among the settlers was relatively tame and the participants were generally only the local residents, except for a few weeks once a year:  the fur rendezvous.

Trappers would spend the winters, when pelts were thick and lush, running their trap lines in the mountains.  It was a solitary life with many dangers and a lot of doing without.  As snows started melting and animals started shedding their winter coats, they would take up the traps, load the furs and traps onto pack mules, and lead the mules down to a fort to meet the fur dealers who had come out from Saint Louis, Chicago, or points east.

They would work hard at making up for lost time, drinking and whooping it up.  They’d challenge each other to shooting matches, wrestling matches, and, now and then, even chess matches.  They would bow their fiddles, stomp their feet, and dance.  As a kid, I thought it must have been a lot of fun, but that was before I read about the carousing, violence and general lack of sanitation and hygiene.

The tradition of the Rocky Mountain fur rendezvous was dying out by the time there were enough American fur trappers in Alaska to revive the annual party up here.  At first, fur traders made the rounds of bush villages to buy pelts.  At some point, trappers started meeting up in Anchorage to sell their furs.  In 1936, Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous became officially organized.  Long before I got to Anchorage in 1973, Fur Rondy was THE must-do social event of the season.

Which season?  Winter, of course.  The only time to hold a fur rendezvous is after the peak of the pelts’ quality, and before breakup when the rivers thaw and travel in the bush starts to vary between difficult and impossible.  This being cabin fever season, Anchoraguans are more than ready to get out and whoop it up.  They are deliriously eager for Rondy.

In addition to the commercial fur auctions, and an auction by state game authorities of hides confiscated from poachers (at which the buyers are often the same miscreants from whom the skins had been seized in the first place), Rondy brings a week and a half of festivities.  There is a carnival at which frostbite is a real possibility if you’re stopped at the top of the ferris wheel with inadequate gear, and there is the annual outhouse race.

 

In one recently added event, the Running of the Reindeer, men and women pay for the thrills of running along a city street with a few reindeer, probably more hazardous for the domesticated caribou than it is for the humans.  One event that has proven in the past to be hazardous to onlookers is the Rondy Grand Prix car race.  The World Championship Sled Dog Race, a sprint race of a few urban and suburban miles, isn’t much of a danger to anyone.

Other more or less harmless events include a parade, Multi-Tribal Gathering, the Frostbite Footrace, a snow sculpture contest, and a beauty contest.  Around the year-end holidays last year, there was some buzz of plans to construct a snowman to dwarf Snowzilla.  I have heard nothing about that scheme recently.  You can be sure that the Keystone Kops will be out, ready to lock up anyone who is caught in public without the official Rondy lapel pin.

 

The Miners and Trappers Ball has changed a lot over the 36 years that I have lived in Alaska.  It used to be a rather exclusive affair with scarce and expensive tickets.  Tickets are still costly, but it is now held in a bigger venue so more of the rabble can attend.  It has always featured a mix of formal dress and outrageous costumes on an annual theme, competing for prizes. 

A perennial highlight of the ball is the Mr. Fur Face contest for the best beard in Alaska (or at least the best at the Miners & Trappers Ball), and another beard contest for more civilized men.  “The Businessman’s Brush Booster Button is your ticket to show up at work Grizzly Adams style until the night of the Ball where your dun-drearies will be measured and a winner is announced!”

I have no plans to go to Rondy.  When I lived in Anchorage, I did go to the carnival some years, and I dodged the silly Kops to attend the lapidary club’s Gem and Mineral Show.  Now, it is too far to go for too little payoff, and Anchorage’s air quality has deteriorated along with my respiratory health.  I’m just not crazy enough for Fur Rondy.

College counts as “school”, doesn’t it?  I have many traumatic or merely unpleasant memories from elementary school, and very few even mildly pleasant memories of high school before I dropped out.  One of the best things that ever happened to me in a school building was when I went into one to take the test for my GED.

My best school memory was at Lane Community College, Eugene, OR, in 1968.  A visiting professor was giving a lecture.  I had never heard of him, but he was an anthropologist (and an ecologist and psychologist, but I didn’t know that then) and I had a double major in anthropology and math.  I had a free hour, so I went to the lecture.

The lecturer was Gregory Bateson.  The subject of his lecture was the dawning of the cybernetic age.  He was enthusiastic and I was enthralled and impressed.  Nothing, at that time in my life, could equal the importance for me of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but a couple of years later when I ended up in prison, I took a course in computer programming.

The language then was Fortran, and the medium was punch cards.  I aced the course, but never used that knowledge in a job.  A decade or so after I took the course I went “back to the land” and off the grid, so I didn’t get back into the cybernetic age until the turn of the millennium.

I don’t recall any specific quotes from that lecture, but I subsequently read just about everything Gregory Bateson had in print.  His viewpoints and observations have influenced my thinking profoundly.  

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Years ago, when Greyfox, AKA ArmsMerchant, was new to our family — just visiting, actually, even before he became part of the family — and was also new to Alaska, Doug and I, in the course of our ordinary mother-son interaction, provided him with a memorable moment and a quote from me that is now part of our family lore.

For Doug and me, the moment came and went without notice.  I was not aware of the impact it had on Greyfox until much later, when I was present as he told the story to someone else.  It is not much of a story, really.  When he visited us, the “guesthouse” in which we put him up was a pickup camper parked in the yard.  Just aft of the over-the-cab bunk was a pair of bench seats flanking a table that could be lowered onto the benches to bridge the gap between them, and padded to make an extra bed.

I routinely kept the table up and used the space under it, up against the forward bulkhead, to stow my chainsaw.  The three of us were sitting on the benches, Greyfox and I on one side, Doug (almost nine years old at the time) facing us from the opposite bench.  With his bare toes, Doug was gripping the saw chain and turning it.  It rattled, squeaked, clanked, and made a swishing sound as it slid along the bar.  Thinking of wear on the saw’s internal mechanical parts and of a destructive interaction between cutting edges and bare toes, I uttered an offhand, “Doug, stop playing with the chainsaw,” and went on with whatever we’d been discussing.  Since the rattles and clanks ceased and I could tell he had obeyed, I gave it not another thought.

Greyfox is a horror movie fan.  Where I see a chainsaw as an essential tool, he sees it as a bizarre murder weapon.  He says he had not previously noticed the chainsaw there in his temporary quarters.  He had been wondering about the sounds coming from under the table, but was too polite to say anything.  I would find this hard to believe, if I did not know him so well.  He could miss noticing an elephant in the living room, I think.   Even if he did see it, if nobody else saw fit to mention it, he would pretend it wasn’t there.

This is not my belief.  This is something I know, in contradistinction to what is believed by many people in the common herd, and by the vast majority of sheeple in one or another devout flock.  Hair is personal.  Whether it is on one’s head, face, or elsewhere on the body, is short or long, shaven or dyed, curled, straightened, in dreadlocks or whatever, the choice of how to wear one’s hair is by any rational criteria a personal decision.  If one chooses to adopt a common style to mark him or herself as a member of some group, so be it.  Public health might dictate cleanliness and delousing, and safety might require confinement in certain hazardous environments, but in everyday situations, at home, school, or on the street, we should be free to let it all hang out… or not, as we please.

In a recent legal decision, a federal court ruled against a school district that claimed the length of a boy’s hair was a legitimate educational issue of, “discipline and hygiene.”  The only things about this to strike me as odd or unexpected were that it took a federal judge to set the school district straight, and that the plaintiffs had to appeal to First Amendment religious freedom for relief in the matter.

I see no fundamental difference between a person’s choice of hairstyle and his choices in clothing, jewelry, body art, or other adornment.  Those who attempt to dictate fashion or taste, and try to enforce conformity to their own personal preferences are, at best (and I am being charitable here), misguided.  In a rational culture, clothing would be optional, as would hair, tattoos, body-piercing, prosthetic devices, cybernetic enhancements, etc.

I fail to understand why some people fear or despise difference.  It seems to me that novelty is as likely as not to be an improvement.  Often, the differences people try to suppress are not even new, but only unorthodox.   I am convinced that accepting any and all individual expressions of such superficial things encourages creativity and can serve to highlight the deeper, essential similarities we share.
 

It is Anthony Burgess’s birthday. (He wrote A Clockwork Orange.)

The following story escaped my attention for about a month:

The Needville Independent School District has a dress code that requires boys to have short hair.  That, in itself, in not applying equally to female students, is a religion-based policy.   Since his parents refused to cut off their five-year-old’s braids the school required the kindergartner, “to wear his long hair in a tight braid stuffed down his shirt at all times.”

I don’t suppose, however, that this decision has given any relief to the other students subject to that absurd “dress” code that dictates the length of males’ hair, but not that of females.

 

About 24 hours ago, when Brent Sass pulled out of Two Rivers checkpoint on the Yukon Quest, he was in fourth position.  Out on the trail, before reaching the finish in Fairbanks, in the urgent push for prize money at the end, Sass was passed by rookie Martin Buser, and Quest veterans Michelle Phillips and William Kleedehn.

At 11:18 last night, Sass finished 38 minutes behind Kleedehn and 29 minutes ahead of Dan Kaduce.  Warren Palfrey finished a little over an hour and a half ago, at 9:50 on Wednesday.

The fourth place finisher and Rookie of the Year, Martin Buser, is no ordinary rookie.  He is a four-time Iditarod Champion and current holder of the speed record for the Iditarod, which, by the way, begins in ten days.

Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is babbling in the background.  I’m not catching everything he says, just noticed that he started out on a positive note then turned negative.  I wonder if he’s going for the old sandwich ploy.

What really caught my attention was when he was complaining about money going for volcano monitoring.  He was opposed to it.  I would bet he wouldn’t be so opposed to hurricane monitoring.  I’d also bet that if he had constituents in Hawaii or Alaska, he’d have picked a different example to criticize.

Early this morning at Two Rivers Checkpoint, Matias Saari of the Fairbanks News-Miner interviewed Sebastian Schnuelle, who had suddenly and surprisingly gone to the front of the pack in the Yukon Quest.

Before the start of the race, Saari had published his picks for the top 15 teams in this year’s Quest, and compared his picks with the top 15 picked by KUAC reporter Dan Bross and Lance Mackey, the only musher to win the Quest four times and to win both Quest and Iditarod in the same season (twice in a row).  Saari had rated Schnuelle eleventh and both other men rated him seventh.

 

Everyone expected Sebastian Schnuelle to take it easy on his dogs and save their best effort for the more lucrative Iditarod next month.  That is what he did, too, at first.  On the way to Carmacks, he got more serious about the race.  (More details in Gerry Willomitzer’s profile article today.)  He left Central Checkpoint in fourth position, 8 1/2 hours after Hugh Neff and William Kleedehn, and 6 1/2 hours after Jon Little.  All three leaders had trouble on their way through the mountains.  Additionally, Hugh Neff was penalized for having left the trail and traveled more than 5 miles on a roadway.

Hugh Neff finished a close second, and expressed resentment for the penalty imposed on him by race marshal Grillot.  He said he has issues with the way the Quest is run and doesn’t see himself returning without better race organization.  That sounds to me a lot like rhetoric heard occasionally from Iditarod old-timer Rick Swenson who bitched and moaned and threatened to quit a few times, but ran in the Iditarod every year from 1976 through 2008, becoming the only 5-time champion.  Swenson is registered for the ’09 Iditarod, starting eleven days from now, as are Schnuelle and Neff.

Jon Little finished third, about an hour behind Schnuelle and Neff.  Brent Sass is expected in Fairbanks after 5 this evening.  Prospective Rookie of the Year Martin Buser will be eligible to leave Two Rivers around 4 this afternoon, expected in Fairbanks before midnight, with Michelle Phillips half an hour or so behind him and William Kleedehn about the same distance behind her.

Newton Marshall is in Central Checkpoint now, in eleventh position.  If he pushes hard or someone ahead of him falters, he still has a chance to finish in the top ten. 

Sebastian Schnuelle arrived in Fairbanks at 10:44, four minutes ahead of Hugh Neff.