08. Spring with Women and Dogs

March 27, 1994

Greetings to everybody, with more notes from North Pole:

It's March! Daylight has returned (10 hours today ─ about 4 hours in Jan.), temperatures are relatively mild (broke 40 degrees for the first time since October), people are putting on their spring clothing (it's sometimes possible to tell male These are the true "dog days" of the year and as you watch the rear end of the dog in front of you it gives meaning to, "in Alaska, unless your the lead dog the scenery never changes". It is said that they were the first species domesticated by humans. Well, up here that becomes questionable. Not whether they were first but whether or not they are domesticated. They tend to look more like, sound more like and act more like wolves than dogs. The real difference was recently demonstrated in the outskirts of Fairbanks when wolves killed and ate a couple of huskies (which were chained in a yard). Dogs don't eat wolves.

Anyway, our historical companions are everywhere. The Iditarod is running, the Yukon Quest just finished. And there are hundreds of shorter races (100 to 300 miles-anything shorter is a sprint). Diana and I went to Eagle for the Percy de Wolf race from Dawson (Yukon Territory, Canada) to Eagle (Alaska) and back (couple of hundred miles). Percy de Wolf is a catchy name but also happens to be the name of the last person to carry mail, by dog sled, along the Yukon River. Skijoring (dogs pulling people on skis), weight pulls (dogs pulling sleds loaded with concrete) and sprint races are popular each weekend. Here at North Pole we even have the "I Did A Block" which is billed as a businessman's sled dog race. Diana and I watched the North American Open (sprints and weight pulls) last weekend. The sprint dogs average 20 miles an hour over a 30 mile, hilly, course and with temperatures at about 25 degrees below zero. In the weight pulls, a dog in the under 60 pounds class pulled over 2,000 pounds to win, while the 3 dog class pulled almost 3,900 for a championship.

In an earlier letter, I related the incident about the sled dog who was a fellow passenger on a plane returning from Eagle. Here is the "rest of the story". Diana asked one of my employees (a musher) about the wisdom of having half-wild sled dogs on airplanes. He had been wondering the same thing and had asked one of the bush pilots. "Simple," was the reply, "you just do a barrel roll if they start fighting. Quieting everybody and everything down real quick." My assumption is that this refers to human passengers also (both parts probably-fighting and quieting).

Aerobic exercise is a fact of life in Alaska. A fellow bus rider was very excited (for a cold, dark, 7am morning) when he got on board the other day. Like me, he has to walk about a half mile to the bus stop. It seems that he got a late start and was afraid he would miss the bus even if he jogged all the way. As he walked past his neighbor's place, he saw the guy was out starting his car. In the winter, at least, everyone helps everyone else and it seemed like a good idea to ask for a ride to the main road. When he walked up close he heard a very loud, very violent, snort of irritation and watched the car turn into a cow moose, his neighbor into a moose calf.My friend turned into a world class sprinter. He was not late for the bus.

The no middle ground, everything in extremes, of Alaska continues. A local, and very fundamentalist, church has a lighted sign out front. For reasons which never did become clear, they put up the message that Santa Claus would send you to hell. Now some of Santa's elves took offense and rather than simply explaining that not only were they not threatening Christianity and that they only have a short life span (existing totally in the minds of very young children); they took more direct action and shot hell out of the sign (gun control is not a debatable issue in Alaska). The church saw the light (not from the sign) and decided that up here Santa Claus has the home field advantage and that they might be better off tackling Satan instead.

Speaking of sinning. It is easy to see why some forms of transgression are not too big a problem up here. As noted above, gun control is not very well understood making armed robbery a rather hazardous occupation. Breaking into houses has its own perils as nearly everyone has a big dog. Someone broke into a house here in North Pole, the family's dog (a fairly large Rottweiler) did not bark, growl or issue any other warning ─ it simply watched the burglar, who thought from this lack of interest that the dog was harmless ─ a serious misjudgment. When the burglar started his acquisitions ─ well, when he gets out of the hospital he faces trial. Rape and attacks on women carry some degree of risk as noted in the statement, "Come to Alaska where men are men BUT women win the Iditarod". The risk was demonstrated when one of my employees (Pat is about 90 pounds and 5 feet tall) was accosted on the street in Anchorage. I guess things are different in Alaska's only city and people there tend to forget that there are those who come in from “the bush” and who live a different lifestyle. The last time I had seen Pat she had shot a moose on the north side of the Yukon and was moving it, in big pieces, across the river and up the hill to her cabin (took her two days).

Anyway, she was accosted with, "Give me your money."

And she (politely) said, "Excuse me?"

Whereupon he said, "Give me your money, Bitch!"

Pat said that she is not sure whether it was the fact he wanted her money, drew back to hit her, or called her a bitch, but like the Rottweiler she took action and attacked ─ focusing on the area of well known male weakness. She told me that it was the first time she regretted having short legs and not being able to really high kick. As a bystander relayed to the police, "they went that-a-way and he was badly limping and a woman was beating him on the back and head with her briefcase." The cops finally found her, grumbling, "Cause he got away!" The got a good description from Pat….only having to replace the adjectives and nouns with words more suitable to investigation records.

Alaskans like to bet on everything, especially the breakup of ice on the river. So it is somewhat surprising that Alaska has not approved of gambling at the Las Vegas level. But then, I guess there is gambling enough up here. We hunt game while betting that neither our prey nor the weather will get us first. However, a new form of gambling has been added to hunting up on the pipeline road. There are two herds of caribou. One can be hunted with a rifle and the other only by bow. When the regulations were formulated, no one knew the herds mixed and forgot that, unless they are tagged, it is impossible to tell caribou apart; much less which herd a particular animal is from. So, in Alaska, the question is not do we change the regulations, but how do we enforce it? Simple, just walk up to the rifle hunter and ask which herd he is hunting. If he guesses right wish him good hunting, and if he guesses wrong give him a ticket. Course, if he shoots a tagged animal from the wrong herd your case is a little stronger.

Diana and I spent last week out at Eagle. I was working (trying to get our budget in order) and she was playing (dog sled and snow machine rides). Actually, it was not all play for several reasons. The foremost being that the people of Eagle are "end of the roaders." They drove to the end of the road, looking for a place to settle as far from today's authority as they can get, and would have gone farther if they could. A large number (among the 130 population) resent the Park Service with its uniforms and reminders of government. Diana was able to get into the community and reach people on a level that we employees cannot accomplish. She also found living conditions, in a bush settlement, require some adjustment. The motel shuts off the water during the winter. Showers and restrooms are down a flight of stairs, about 30 yards across an icy parking lot, behind the Eagle Trading Post. It’s quite different to get fully dressed, complete with parka and gloves, to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It is also no picnic to try and reach the motel room while still damp from a shower. Diana had the wonderful experience of feeling her hair actually freeze in the cold. Once in the room, you need to keep your feet off the floor as there is little insulation. We found that cokes, sitting on the floor, were kept at drinking temperature. The roads, unless there has been a recent snow, are sheets of ice. Snow machines and dog teams are about the only means of transportation. Dog teams are the safest as snow machine runners have nothing to grab onto so turns are made by banking off the ice berms at just the right angle (kind of like human billiards) and dumpings are common (as Diana learned). It was fun, but it was also nice to return to the relative warmth (-27 degrees at the beginning of the week) and convenience (restrooms inside the house) of North Pole.

So far, 1994 has been a hectic time for us. We went on vacation in January and returned in mid-February. Two days later I spent a week out on the Yukon Quest, came back to the office for a week, went to a week-long Superintendent's Conference in Anchorage, back in the office for a week, then Diana and I went to Eagle for the week. I was in the office last week, but leave tomorrow for a session, in Albuquerque, on changing the park ranger series, I will be back home for 3 days before heading to Anchorage and a confrontation with the FAA and USAF. Then I return home for a day before flying to Tucson for a fire fighting course. I hope I will have a week in the office before heading back out to Eagle. So the saga of life in Alaska continues, but once again it's time to end this epistle from Paul.