This morning as I listened to This American Life‘s “Guns” episode, I was impelled to reflect that some people are gun people and others aren’t.  I flashed on a series of vignettes from my life.  The flashes didn’t come to me in the same chronological order in which they are arranged here.  This arrangement is the only way I can hope to recall many of them.

My parents didn’t own guns.  My father was a fisherman, not a hunter.  I don’t recall any strong feelings expressed either pro- or anti-gun.  In the ’40s and ’50s, “thugs and zoot-suiters,” the gangstas of the day, wielded chains and knives more often than guns.  Eliot Ness had already taken down the Tommy-gun mobsters.  Home invasions were unknown.  It was a different society.

I had toy guns when I was a kid.  My aim was so good that it’s hard, in this image, to see that I had a gun in my hand – it’s pointed right at the lens.  That was a cap pistol, a revolver that could be loaded with a roll of fifty explosive caps.    It smoked and went “pop” like a firecracker when I pulled the trigger.  Even now, the smell of fireworks triggers recall of my cap gun.  I never gained any skill with the lariat, and turned my rope into a whip, like the one wielded by my hero, Lash Larue.

The first time I ever handled a real gun, I was nineteen and the gun was older than I was.  It was an old British Bulldog revolver that the love of my life had gotten cheap somewhere.  He was a gun person, with gunslinger propensities.  He had worked in Old West re-enactments at Cowtown in Wichita, KS, and had won at least one regional quick draw competition.

He thought I should learn to shoot, so he took the Bulldog and me out to a rock quarry scattered with rusty old junk cars and had me shoot at one of them.  After the first few shots, he declared me a “natural,” and decided there was no use wasting more ammo teaching me to do something I could already do.

Years passed, he dumped me and I took up with other men, eventually ending up with an outlaw biker and another borrowed gun.  That came about during a minor gang war in Vallejo, CA.  I was present during a skirmish in that war, and my car, a recognizable red MGB convertible, had been parked nearby.  After my car took a bullet through the windshield while I was driving it, the guys thought I should start carrying some protection, so somebody loaned me a little .25 automatic with sweet feminine pearl handles.  Nobody thought to give me a rig for carrying it, few of my clothes had pockets, so I kept it in my purse.  Fortunately, I never had need to go digging through the debris in there to get it out, and after a while the “war” was settled and I gave it back.

Until I came to Alaska, I was mostly surrounded by non-gun people with only a few encounters with gun people.  That situation is reversed here.  Especially right here, far out of town, gun people have the rest outnumbered.  Just up the street from me is a guy with survivalist leanings and an arsenal that includes some impressive automatic weapons.  I suspect, based on the size of the arsenal, that he’s planning, should the shit ever hit the fan, to arm the whole neighborhood.  That suits me fine, because my own arsenal is conspicuously lacking in full auto.

My arsenal is described, and the hows and whys of its acquisition are explained, elsewhere, if you’re curious.  It’s a pretty good story, really.

We are only one week from the start of this year’s Yukon Quest.  It’s an even-numbered year, so the race will start in Fairbanks, AK, US, and end in Whitehorse, YT, CA.  Last year, it ran the other direction, and next year it will go that way again.

Twenty-five teams are signed up, and more than half of those mushers are rookies, having never before finished a Quest.  That doesn’t mean they’re new to the trail, only that they never made it all the way to the finish.

Six of the entrants in this year’s Quest are women, only one of whom, Kelley Griffin of Wasilla, has finished the Quest before. 

Last year’s Quest Champion, Sebastian Schnuelle, is not on the list for this year, but 4-time Yukon Quest Champion / 3-time Iditarod Champion and only musher ever to win both thousand-mile races in the same year, (drumroll please) Lance Mackey, is. 

Last year, Lance did not run the Quest, but spent the time training the Jamaican rookie, Newton Marshall.  Marshall finished a respectable middle-of-the-pack 13th place.  He is not registered for this year’s Quest, but does plan to run the Iditarod.

Yukon Quest is the big race of my title.  The new one is Jeff King’s, The Denali Doubles Invitational, two weeks from now.  It’s a mid-distance race, with all racers expected to finish in 3 days, with a total of 16 hours of mandatory rest along the way.  It runs from Cantwell, AK to Paxon Roadhouse, and back.

It is not the length of the race or the magnitude of the purse ($10,000 for 1st place, with four lesser prizes for 2nd through 5th) that sets this race apart.  The distinguishing feature of The Denali Doubles is the “doubles” part:  “The race teams will consist of two mushers and one dog team. Potential configurations include single sled, tandem sleds (drag sled), gee pole sled, or a sled and an attached skier. At no time can a team be changed into two separate units.”  I’m guessing this could provide some great video opportunities.

A quick scan of the musher listings shows eighteen men and eleven women entered, with the second members of five out of seventeen teams remaining undeclared.  One of the teams includes Sebastian Schnuelle, shedding some light on his absence from this year’s Quest, since the Doubles comes right in the middle of Yukon Quest.

I’ll surely be back with updates.  It’s that time of year, and I’ve got the dog race fever.

I’m not “still” up.  I’m up again, already.

A fortunate chain of events woke me in time to tend the woodstove and restart a fire that Doug had put out with wood.  He was talking in his sleep.  I don’t know what he said, but it woke me.

“What?” I asked.

“Ummm… dreaming.”  He answered after a pause.

“Okay,” I replied.  “How’s the fire?”  The last thing I had said to him as I went to sleep around 9 PM was, “When you go down, either set an alarm or wake me so I can tend the fire.”

“It’s okay,” he said, as I was rolling over in bed to look at the fire.  I could see no fire.  Through the big glass in the door of the stove,  I saw wood – fresh blond wood with no charring, no smoke, no flame, not even a glow of coals.

I spoke the line that I think originated with Doug himself, on one of the previous times I had asked him how the fire was, “Fire… what fire?”  He mumbled something, and I told him I couldn’t see any fire.  He swore mildly, and I asked him if he wanted me to get up and deal with it.

“No, I’ll do it,” he said.  I could hear the couch creaking as he got up, then heard the squeal of the hinges on the woodstove door.  He poked at it, shut the door, told me there was still fire in there, and crawled back into bed.

I looked, and could still see no fire, so I got up and got the fire going.  He had done something he does occasionally when he is either sleepy or distracted.  He put the fire out with wood.  All the hot coals had been pushed to the back of the stove, away from the air supply, and the air holes were blocked with ashes.

I pulled out the wood, found some chips for kindling, cleared the air holes, rebuilt the fire, then sat there and watched as it caught.  I was thinking, asking myself if I could get back to sleep.  I decided I’d just as well get up.  I put on my glasses and slippers, turned on the radio (BBC noon news on NPR) and started coffee.

Good morning, world.

For a couple of months or so, Doug and I have been getting all of our water from melted snow and the occasional icicle.  I don’t recall exactly when the big snow came down, but ever since then, buckets of snow have been sitting around the woodstove, each with a few icicles thrust into the slushy snow.

Snow fills a bucket easily, then melts down to about a quarter of its original bulk, more or less, depending on how fresh and/or fluffy it was when collected.  The first big snowfall of the season was light and fluffy and required many trips out with the buckets to gather enough to fill Kermit, the green enamel pot on top of the woodstove, our main “water heater.”

Icicles offer a much higher yield, so we (usually Doug, because he is taller) grab them as soon as they grow long enough to reach.  He plays with the icicles.  They’re fun.  He makes whimsical arrangements of icicles in the snow buckets, and feeds one or two chunks of “crunchy water” to Koji, who seems to like them as much as he does his dog biscuits.

Originally, foraging for our water had been dictated by necessity:  I was down with a respiratory virus, the car was buried, the driveway blocked by an enormous berm thrown up by the snowplow.  By the time Doug shoveled the driveway, I had recovered enough to scoop about half the snow off the car into the melt buckets.  We needed to remove a lot of snow from the woodpile to provide access to our fuel, so… why drive to the spring and haul heavy water buckets up a steep slope, when we had so much of the stuff just lying around the yard in our way?

A week or two ago, Greyfox said in one of our nightly phone conversations that he didn’t know why we went to all that “trouble” of melting snow.  He suggested that Doug could take a couple of jugs and hitchhike to the spring.  He added that he had done so a few times, “early on” when he still lived up here.  He remembers that better than I do (naturally, since I wasn’t the one hitchhiking), but I’m betting that when he did it there hadn’t been three or four feet of snow on the ground.

Yesterday, I asked Doug how he felt about melting ice and snow instead of hauling water from the spring.  He said it was fine with him, and agreed with me when I said it was easier and the water was just as good.  We do boil the stuff we drink, just in case some organic contamination gets in with the snow.  Using this oh-so-available and abundant water is thrifty.  Doug might have been taking the thriftiness a bit far last night, however, when my long-haired cat Val came in with big gobs of snow caked in his belly fur.  Doug cradled him in one arm and picked out the snow, dropping it into an old aluminum coffeepot on the woodstove.  I questioned it, and he reminded me that it would boil — oh hell yes — that little pot boils away every day.  It’s our humidifier.
 

The Congressional debate on “health” “care” “reform” has gotten my attention from time to time.  I was not sure, from the start of this discussion, that we would end up with any significant change of any kind.  I am never sure, on any topic, whether change is for the “better” or “worse.”  Ambivalence is my dharma and one of my greatest assets.  I’m usually able to see more than one side of every issue, and ever since menopause when I outgrew the neurochemical insanity of  falling into (romantic) “love,” I have not been carried away with unalloyed enthusiasm for anything.

Here, in no particular order, are some of my thoughts on the matter of “health care reform:”

• The medical profession has earned my distrust through numerous misdiagnoses of my chronic illness, treatments that resulted not in improvement of my condition but in new iatrogenic disease, and one incident when an injection stopped my heart.  Therefore, I do not associate “health” with medical “care”.  Funneling more money to physicians and bringing more people under their care could well result in higher rates of medical mistakes and iatrogenic disease.  Giving more people access to hospitalization will almost inevitably result in more people being infected with the drug resistant strains of microorganisms that are bred in hospitals.
• I am keenly aware that reforming any system, making any significant change to the way things work, is likely to result in gains for some and losses for others.  The way of the world in current times is such that reforms often result in ever greater wealth going into fewer hands, while more and more people live in deepening poverty.  Reforms currently under discussion will enrich insurance companies at the expense of the general public.
• Insurance is against my religion.  It is, in its essence, betting against oneself.  Some insured people often don’t have a clear intention to, for example, avoid accidents and stay healthy.  If they don’t wreck their cars or their health, they lose all those premiums they’ve paid.  Even those who don’t sabotage their own well-being with such thoughts can tend to be careless if they assume that they are “covered” when anything goes wrong.  In my far from humble opinion, mandatory insurance is as much an infringement of my freedom of religion as the prohibition of polygamy is to a Mormon or Muslim, and the prohibition of ganja, peyote and other sacramental plants is to other believers.
• Existing practices of employer-provided insurance have driven some employers out of business, and the proposed reforms appear likely to increase that trend.  These practices also impel some workers into, and keep them in, jobs for which they are ill-suited, which are detrimental to their mental and physical health, because they feel they cannot afford to give up the insurance.  They are indoctrinated with insurance propaganda, as are those who decry the single-payer system as socialism.  So what?  Who cares what they call it?  The U.S. is the only developed country that does not provide for its population’s basic medical needs.  Is that really cause for patriotic pride?
• Do you know the difference between “addiction” and “chemical dependency”?  The only difference is a matter of medical hypocrisy.  If someone self-medicates or uses a drug for his own purposes and develops a neurochemical dependency on a substance, that is “addiction.”  If a doctor prescribes a drug and the patient develops the same neurochemical dependency on that substance, that is, “chemical dependency.”  By some sort of semantical hocus pocus, our society stigmatizes addiction unless it is medically mediated and euphemized as chemical dependency.  When I mentioned “iatrogenic” illness above, did you understand it to mean that my illness was caused by medical care?  If so, that places you in the minority.  Many normal people skim over such words, assuming that they are abstruse medical jargon beyond their comprehension.  That is what the majority of the medical profession wants us to think.  I won’t deny that there are honest and honorable physicians.  I have known a few, but arrogance is rife in the profession and most physicians adhere to a code of silence regarding their colleagues mistakes that makes the Mafia’s code of omerta seem like transparency.  This may be beside the point of “health care reform,” as it is currently understood, but I would like to see such issues be a focus of health care reform.