"Water, the Old-Fashioned Way"

Dolly Farnsworth hoists a glass of water in her Soldotna home in 2008.

WATER, THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

AUGUST 2008

Dolly Farnsworth was at least 10 feet deep in a 4-by-4-foot hole when company arrived. Her husband, Jack, said, “I’ll go out and talk to them. I don’t want them to see you down there.” He ambled out to greet the visitor, careful not to acknowledge that his wife was standing, short-handled miner’s pick in hand and a small shovel and galvanized bucket at her feet, at the bottom of the well she was digging.

In those days, it was considered unmanly to allow a woman to do such work, but some men recruited their wives because the women tended to be slimmer. A smaller digger could mean a smaller hole, which meant that less material had to be removed. Also, according to Dolly, she had difficulty hoisting the heavy bucket, so it made more sense for her to be in the hole.

But because he was worried about the ribbing he might receive, Dolly says that Jack tried to keep her presence a secret. He hoped to avoid any shame by keeping the company—a B&C Auto representative from Anchorage—from entering the frame house they were building.

But this was 1950, and frame houses were uncommon in Soldotna’s pioneering days—log homes being the standard accommodations—so Jack could keep his visitor outside for only 10 to 15 minutes. Meanwhile, Dolly cooled her heels in the hole, leaning against the cribbed sides of the well, which had been carved bucket-by-bucket through tough gravel. Eventually, Dolly looked up to see two faces peering down, and Jack’s secret was out. “He was very embarrassed,” Dolly says.

That was the end of the digging days for Dolly, now 86 and still living on the original Farnsworth homestead. With help from another man, the Farnsworths hit good water at 32 feet, and with a hand-pump they were able to supply their basic water needs. When power came to the area, an electric pump was installed and kept the family in good water until they hooked up to city services in the 1970s.

Dee Stock tells a similar water-seeking tale: She says that, like the Farnsworths, she and her husband, Bill, were digging their well indoors while they were completing their home. About eight to 10 feet down, she was using a shovel and a crowbar to pound away at the exposed strata below her when Bill announced, “I think someone’s at the door.” He disappeared from the portal of light above her and walked to the other end of the house to see who the company was.

At that time, Bill was the foreman for the local Alaska Road Commission office, and at his door were “two of the Anchorage bigwigs,” Pete Bagoy and Ben Peterson. “They brought some beers,” says Dee, now 90 and living in Utah, “and they sat and visited for two to three hours drinking and talking.”

Meanwhile, she says, “I was cold and damp and getting madder all the time. I yelled and screamed and hollered, and they didn’t even hear me.” At one point, she says, she began to plot revenge. “I was plotting anything I could think of.”

When the company finally departed, Bill returned to the top of the well. “He was sorry,” Dee says, “and he just apologized and apologized. We had a few words.”

In the end, the well was complete at about 20 feet, but Dee did not return to the hole. “I helped,” she says, “but I didn’t get down in that well again.” Bill hired someone else to finish the job.

On the north side of Soldotna Creek, a third woman was also digging for water. Marge Mullen, now 88, was excavating with a sawed-off clam shovel and an old coffee can and sending up buckets of till to her husband, Frank. Unlike Dee Stock and Dolly Farnsworth, however, Marge eventually completed all of the digging herself—down the narrow cribbed shaft to a depth of 25 feet.

“I couldn’t do this all day every day,” she says, “because I had a family to take care of, you know. Meanwhile, I had Soldotna Creek to get water from.” For two or three years, the Mullens hauled buckets of water directly from the creek, while most early Soldotna residents drew their water year-round from a community spring on the south side of the creek, at the end of an ARC road in what is now Soldotna Creek Park.

The few residents who owned vehicles could drive to the spring, while others had to tote it by hand or on their backs. And everyone conserved in some way: outhouses, infrequent bathing, communal laundry days.

The work on the well, Marge says, was “kind of forbidding when I first started out, but then I got braver on the whole thing, knowing the final results would be a great help for me.”

The view up the shaft could be daunting. “I could see the sky and tree tops,” Marge says. “But it was a great day when I got out of there and saw a little bit of liquid in the bottom, and it was on the sand layer. So that was pretty exciting, and then to go back the next time and find that it had filled up a little bit further.”

By the mid-1950s, well drillers, such as Kenny Carver and Jess Shelman, were appearing in the area, and the era of hand-dug wells quickly faded. Frank and Betty Kraxberger arrived in the early ‘60s, and have been finding water for local folks ever since.

The Mullens eventually replaced their hand-dug well with a drilled one. Now, from her home along the Kenai River, Marge draws her water from a well 157 feet deep. And she doesn’t need a coffee can or clam shovel to do it.

 

"Home to Rest at Last"

Sue Stein, with mementoes of her father.

HOME TO REST AT LAST

FEBRUARY 2010

When the telephone rang in the early morning of Nov. 16, Sue Stein was in her Soldotna home alone, grieving for her mother, June Goodman, who had died only a few days earlier. When Stein answered the phone, the voice and the words she heard were an echo from the previous November, and the start of a spiral of history going back more than 40 years.

The voice said, “This is Alan from Mortuary Affairs….”

In her home, Stein began to cry.

“I started bawling, is what I did,” Stein said. “I knew what it was. I knew it was either going to be very good news or very bad news. And as I’m sobbing, I could hear him saying, ‘Do you want me to call you back?’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. My mom just passed away six days ago.’

“He’s like, ‘Oh my God. If I had known, I would not have called you. I am so sorry.’ He’s just apologizing and apologizing. And through my tears I finally get out, ‘No, I need to know. I need to hear what you have to say.’

“And that’s when he said, ‘It’s 99.9 percent sure it was your dad.’”

In less than one week, Stein said, she had officially become an “orphan.”

It was less than one week, but the actual journey through time stretched back to Feb. 20, 1967, when her father, Major Russell Clemensen Goodman, along with his weapons/systems officer, Navy Lt. Gary L. Thornton, were shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying a bombing mission against a railroad yard in Thanh Hóa Province, North Vietnam.

Goodman was an Air Force fighter pilot flying for the Navy on an exchange program. A narrator/pilot for the elite Thunderbirds flight demonstration team in 1964-65, he was still attached to the Thunderbirds when he was sent to fly naval bombing missions in Southeast Asia.

Just days after he had earned the Silver Star for saving a downed aircrew, Goodman, along with Thornton, took off in a F-4B Phantom jet from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, and they were about eight miles south of Thanh Hóa city when the left front section of the plane was struck by a missile. Thornton tried but failed to establish contact with Goodman, and he was uncertain, based upon what he could see from his position, whether Goodman was unconscious, wounded or dead.

At approximately 250 feet altitude, Thornton ejected. He could not cause Goodman to eject because Phantoms in those days were not equipped with dual-ejector controls. Although he believed that Goodman had not ejected on his own, Thornton was never able to confirm his suspicions because, within minutes after parachuting to the ground, he was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers.

As he was marched away, he saw a plume of black smoke from the wreckage of the downed jet.

Thornton became a prisoner of war, including time in the brutal prison known as the Hanoi Hilton. For the next three years, he would be believed dead, and his parents would be told that he had been killed in action. He would not be released by the Vietnamese for another three years.

Back in San Diego, where Goodman’s family was living, they were informed that Goodman had been shot down. Like Thornton, Goodman was declared “K.I.A., no body recovered.” Search-and-rescue attempts were curtailed because the area was rife with anti-aircraft and automatic weapons fire.

 Within a couple of weeks, a memorial service was held for Goodman, attended by his wife, who had been his high school sweetheart while growing up in Utah, and their three young children: Christine, age 10; Sue, 9, and Russ, 6.

And thus began an odyssey for this family—the quest to discover the true fate of Maj. Russell Goodman.

After three years, when they learned that Thornton was alive, they had a glimmer of hope. If Thornton had survived, they reasoned, perhaps Goodman also had. When Thornton was released and repatriated in March 1973, they hoped that he would give them some reason to keep believing, but Thornton was doubtful and could offer no definite proof.

In 1975, America ended its involvement in Vietnam, but politics and continuing enmity kept military personnel from searching for remains. As Vietnamese P.O.W. camps were emptied and demolished, no word of Goodman materialized, and the family had to accept that the pilot had probably died in his plane that day in 1967.

Still, they wanted evidence, and they were beginning to tire of false hopes.

In October 1993, a joint U.S.-Vietnamese team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), investigated the crash site and conducted an excavation, recovering bone fragments, none of which was adequate for the DNA testing they hoped to perform.

Complicating the discovery of adequate forensic evidence was the North Vietnamese practice, during the war, of burying the remains of dead pilots as soon as possible after impact, Stein said. To further forestall detection of the crash sites, the villagers had also been trained to haul away all aircraft pieces.

It was not until March 2008 that another JPAC-led team conducted more excavations at the crash site—an area of open ground near acres of rice paddies. This time, they recovered some pilot equipment, a small piece of the plane, and more human remains, including a four-inch bone fragment that finally gave JPAC some evidence they could test.

In mid-November 2008, while Stein was visiting her mother, her phone rang and Stein answered it.

“This is Alan from Mortuary Affairs….”

The officer told Stein that usable bone fragments had been recovered and that positive identification appeared imminent—one year minimum, two years maximum.

Stein told the officer that she was skeptical, but he attempted to reassure her: “He said, ‘Well, let me tell you. I’m not usually told to inform next-of-kin unless they have a pretty good idea.’ We’d never heard anything that definite.

“I was trying to be real quiet talking on the phone because my mom, over the years, had gotten more and more upset.” Stein said that her mother, who had moved to Alaska about 15 years earlier, was simply tiring of false hopes, false promises, and false leads. Two years earlier, June Goodman had put Stein in charge of all further investigation news and documentation.

“I got off the phone, and I said, ‘Mom, I need to talk to you.’ And she said, ‘That was Mortuary Affairs, wasn’t it?’ She was really calm at the time, and I had thought she’d be more upset, so I was glad she was calm. But I was frantic. I was like, ‘What am I going to do now? I’ve got to call my sister. I’ve got to call my brother.’”

Stein made the calls, and then, as they had done for more than four decades, the siblings waited.

And then, six days after June Goodman died, the phone rang again and changed everything. “It’s the one call we knew someday we might get, but never really expected to get,” Stein said.

Afterward, in the midst of her efforts to settle her mother’s estate, Stein and her siblings traveled in January to Honolulu, site of the JPAC forensic lab, to collect their father’s remains and escort them to Nevada’s Nellis AFB for an official repatriation and funeral service, with full military honors.

When their plane landed at the airport in Las Vegas, the siblings were introduced to the other passengers by the pilot and were allowed to leave the plane first, as the other passengers applauded. From the tarmac, they watched their father’s flag-draped coffin move out of the belly of the plane, and they were given a special police escort down the freeway to Nellis.

The service was organized by the family and the Thunderbirds, the main point man for which was ironically named Major Goodman. Although unrelated to Stein’s family, Maj. Richard Goodman offered his services after being contacted by Stein.

At the ceremony, one of the speakers was retired Navy commander Gary Thornton, who said, “That day, a father and a friend was lost. I lost a mentor and my professional big brother. I am honored to be here to see him come home.”

With Major Goodman’s return, according to an Air Force press release, there are now 556 airmen, 550 soldiers, 369 sailors, 213 marines, and 32 civilians still unaccounted for who served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era.

In accordance with their mother’s wishes, the ashes of both parents will be scattered by their children this summer on a mountaintop on the Kenai Peninsula.

It is the hope of Stein and her siblings that sharing the story of their father’s return can help other families enduring similar long periods of waiting.

“We want people to understand that, as much as they despise the government sometimes, they are still doing good things,” Stein said. “And for all those Vietnam vets that came home, or that lost friends over there and never had them return, there’s still hope. There’s still a chance that all these guys will come home.”

According to the JPAC’s latest annual report, in Fiscal Year 2009 the agency identified 98 individuals, including 26 from the Korean War, 19 from the Vietnam War, and 53 from World War II.

Meanwhile, Stein and her siblings take great solace in applying their Christian faith to the way things turned out. “We all believed, from the minute we got the phone call, that Mom knew before us,” Stein said. “For us, that told us that Mom was with Dad. He told her, ‘It was me in the crash. Now let’s tell the kids and get this done.’ It made us feel good about the way things had happened.”

 

"Hit by the Bread Truck"

Don and Marjorie Madden, 1940s in California.

HIT BY THE BREAD TRUCK
JULY 2010

As strange as it may seem, Carroll Knutson of Kasilof would not exist today if not for the story behind an old family phrase: “In case I get hit by the bread truck….” The origins of this phrase can be traced back to the histories of two individuals—her parents.

In 1930, Marjorie McCulloch was 12 years old and living in the prairies of South Dakota when she announced to her family her intention to someday become a homesteader. She had listened to the North Dakota homesteading tales of her uncles, and she had been swept up in the romance of owning and developing her own piece of land.

“Well, then,” said her Uncle Louie, “you’re going to have to go all the way to Alaska because that’s the only place there’s still homesteads left.” And she replied, “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

After graduating from Barnard High School, McCulloch traveled 17 miles south down U.S. Highway 281 to Aberdeen, where she earned a nursing degree at St. Luke’s Hospital and then began to work her way west. In Portland, Oregon, in 1939, she joined the nursing staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and in 1942 she was temporarily assigned to a clinic in a lumber camp near White City.

What happened next for McCulloch, however, would not have occurred if it hadn’t been for the bread truck. And that’s where Don Madden came in.

During the Great Depression, Madden lost his job in a lumber camp near the tiny town of Forks on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Like many unemployed young men at the time, he turned his attention northward, deciding to look for work in the sprawling countryside of the Territory of Alaska.

Madden boarded a steamship in Seattle and traveled as far as Ketchikan before he ran out of money, so he left the ship and worked in Ketchikan until he could afford to venture farther north. The second leg of his journey took him as far as Valdez, where he gained employment with a crew building the Richardson Highway.

He stopped next in Fairbanks in 1938, and he worked there on the railroad and in a mine until 1941, when he moved south to Anchorage. And it was there on Dec. 7 that he heard the news that the Empire of Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and, the following day, that the U.S. Congress had declared war.

“Like a lot of single men at the time  that were up here working when they heard about Pearl Harbor, they quit doing whatever they were doing here and they went to Seward and took the steamship back to Seattle with the intention of enlisting in the Army,” said Knutson.

“So my father gets to Seattle, and he borrows a motorcycle from a friend to be the transportation to get him to the enlistment center. And on the way to the enlistment center he was hit by the bread truck, literally the bread truck, from Gai’s Bakery in Seattle.”

The accident resulted in the 31-year-old Madden receiving a compound fracture of the right leg, and after he recovered in the hospital, the U.S. military classified him as 4F (“not acceptable for military service”), so his desire to help in the effort against the Japanese was thwarted.

As a consequence, Madden remained in the Pacific Northwest, instead of returning to Alaska, and eventually he found himself back in the lumber business, working as a sawyer in a lumber camp near White City, Oregon—and that’s where, in 1942, he met a nurse named Marjorie McCulloch.

By the end of that year, they had moved together to Long Beach, California, and gotten married. “She (Marge) always said that she married my dad because he’d been to Alaska and said he was going back after the war,” said Knutson.

The Maddens remained in Long Beach until 1949—Don spent the rest of the war laboring in the shipyards while Marge worked in a hospital—and started their family before heading north to Alaska. They moved first to Anchorage, where Marge joined the nursing staff at Providence Hospital, and they began to eye potential homesteading property down on the Kenai Peninsula.

It would be nearly a decade, including some hardships—in July 1952, their five-year-old son Terry died from severe burns he received in an accident involving a firecracker and gasoline—before the Maddens could make the move.

In 1954, the Maddens filed on a homestead in Kasilof, but had to relinquish it when two of their other children, Carroll and Don Jr., contracted polio.

By 1958, they found a lakeside piece of Kasilof property they liked, and, while Don went to work temporarily in the Interior, Marge and the kids moved into an old 14-foot travel trailer, sans electricity and plumbing, but with an 8x10 lean-to built onto each side.

From the lake, Marge and the kids toted jerry jugs full of water—chopping through the ice during the winter months—and they used kerosene lanterns for their lighting.

Because Don had been hit by the bread truck, he never had a chance to become a veteran and receive easier proving-up terms on their homestead; consequently, according to Knutson, to earn a patent to the land, the Maddens “had to go the old-fashioned route” and spend more years and clear more land than veterans.

And because Don had been hit by the bread truck, the family never adopted the more traditional phrases used when entering a potentially dangerous situation. “In case of an accident” or “In case something happens” never really entered their vernacular.

For them, for better or worse, it was always “In case I get hit by the bread truck….”

 

"Best Present Ever"

BEST PRESENT EVER

 

I have had some fine birthdays.

 

Fading photographs reveal me

At the dining room tables of my youth,

Ringed by grinning cake-eaters,

A stack of gifts heaped by a centerpiece candle.

 

In my teens, my birthdays became family affairs.

I stared solo into the camera,

Or my brother and sister posed at my shoulder

For the obligatory motherly Polaroid.

 

As an adult,

Even when I had begun to form a family of my own ,

I counted on my mother to ply me

With a “special meal” and a cherry cake,

No frosting.

 

But soon my children’s birthdays took precedence

Over my own,

As my father’s had done before me.

Cards and well-wishes still warmed my heart,

But the occasion itself lost its luster.

 

What’s funny to me now

Is the fact that I remember so few specific birthday gifts—

Except for the time that Larry gave me an entire case of Coca-Cola—

Or special events—

Such as a winter camping trip with Monte and Steve.

 

Mainly, I received clothing and books,

Practical things.

 

More than anything else,

I recall that my birthday signaled the return of the light—

The terminus of another winter

Resolving itself into hints of spring.

My birthday was about rebirth,

About opportunity,

About process,

Not just a single moment in time.

 

And it still is mostly that.

 

Only now it is also something more:

The acceptance of an invitation to birthday lunch;

Grilled cheese and tomato soup;

The aurora viewed from a frozen field;

Hiking up the Skyline Trail;

Midnight in Paris on a flat-screen TV;

Homer baked goods and beach walks;

Skiing in the sunshine on Center Ridge;

Adventure racing, and running at thirty below;

A mid-winter visit to Oklahoma,

And a homecoming.

 

As my birthday came ‘round again this year,

Everything seemed different.

Better.

 

Soon it will be the equinox again,

But I feel as if the light has been with me for a while.

 

I need no gift greater than that.

 

"Still a Drive at 55?"

STILL A DRIVE AT 55?

MARCH 6, 2013

I was born in the Territory of Alaska. When Alaska became a state on Jan. 3, 1959, I was nearing my first birthday. The first birthday for the state came 10 months after mine, meaning that, even though I am inextricably linked to this state, I’ll always be just a little older.

Not that that really means much of anything.

I’m not even sure it’s all that interesting.

It’s just that, since today is my 55^th birthday, I’m mulling the subject of age and wondering how much the numbers really mean.

Personally, I agree with those who say that age is relative, and with those who say “you’re as young as you feel.”

And I feel good. I’m healthy and active. I’m blessed with healthy and intelligent children, a home of my own, work that is satisfying, good friends and family, and a woman I love very much.

So what is 55?

In mathematics, 55 is the 10^th Fibonacci number and the sum of the numbers 1 through 10. It is also a “semiprime,” being the product of multiplying 5 and 11. And it is the sum of the first five square numbers: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25.

Many famous athletes have worn the number 55. The three who come most readily to mind are the NFL linebacker Junior Seau, the pitcher Tim Lincecum, and (one of my favorite former Dodgers) the pitcher Orel Hershiser.

Some of the famous people who also turn 55 this year are Ellen Degeneres, Madonna, Prince, film director Tim Burton, Kevin Bacon, actress Angela Bassett, rocker Joan Jett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Viggo Mortensen, Drew Carey, Jeff Foxworthy, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Sharon Stone. And if Michael Jackson were still alive, he’d turn 55 this year, too.

I read that during the year 55 A.D., Julius Caesar first invaded Britain.

The standard speed limit on the highway is 55 miles per hour.

An old dive in Greenwich Village is called the 55 Bar, famous for its jazz and in operation since 1919.

Interstate 55 (nicknamed the “double nickel”) is a north-south highway that has its official beginning in LaPlace, Louisiana, and its official ending in Chicago, Illinois.

The winner for Best Picture in the 1955 Academy Awards went to Marty, starring Ernest Borgnine.

Most old gas barrels contain 55 gallons of fuel.

On the periodic table, element number 55 is cesium.

And the list goes on and on—including spiritual and mystical and biblical connections, several arcane notions, many mathematical possibilities, etc.

But in the end, 55 is just a number.

And today it is just my age.

Should I act my age? It depends.

The number is irrelevant. Living and loving are what’s important.

 

 

"No Santa, but Eight Reindeer"

 

NO SANTA, BUT EIGHT REINDEER

The woman with the giraffe head, the pale diapered man from Arkansas, and the running banana were among the highlights. The reindeer—the centerpiece of the Running of the Reindeer event at Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage on Saturday—were not.

The reindeer get the most prominent mention on the marquee, but they’re not the main attraction. It’s all about atmosphere, all about hoopla, all about participating in something big and noisy and full of promise.

It’s a lot like a carnival arcade.

Carnival games promise big prizes—giant stuffed bears, huge plastic drinking glasses, cool autographed posters—but the odds are stacked against the players. Try to toss a tiny ring over the top of a glass soda bottle. Try to burst three balloons with three wobbly darts. Try to knock down all the milk bottles with a single tennis ball.

Mostly what participants harvest from such promise is a series of near-misses and then, if they’re lucky, a cheap plastic runner-up prize for coming really close.

That’s sort of what it’s like to participate in the Running of the Reindeer. There’s plenty of build-up, plenty of bluster, plenty of pageantry and pizzazz—but the run itself is all anti-climax.

The announcer from KWHL’s “Bob & Mark Show” stirred up the onlookers by booming out the possibilities—a good goring, a shish kabob human on antler tines—danger, danger, danger! The crowd wanted blood, he said. The crowd wanted to see someone hurt, he claimed. He likened the milling throng, which packed both sides of Fourth Avenue from D Street to H Street, to the crowd at a NASCAR race: Sure, they were fine with all the left turns, for a while, but what they really wanted was a good pile-up.

As I stood among the hundreds of runners, waiting to be released on a sprint for life itself, I was reminded of bad small-town circuses I have attended. I recalled slick ringmasters who knew how to play to the crowd, who knew that the real thrill was not the limber woman performing backbends while riding a somber elephant around a sawdust circle inside a big tent. The real thrill lay in anticipation, in bits of unexpected humor, a delighted child, the antics of an obnoxious clown, a minor explosion and a shower of confetti.

Those circuses had little to offer in the way in true danger or excitement, so it was the possibility of such things that had to carry the day. (Besides, they were there to make money on tame rides, high-priced concessions, and selling lucky-chance tickets.)

“Running of the Reindeer” is designed to make money, too, but for a good cause—for the Toys for Tots organization—which is one of the reasons that the anti-climax of the run itself is really no big deal. It feels good to be a part of something so buzzing with energy and good will, despite the fizzle at the end.

The announcer kept the crowd rollicking, through a series of sarcastic remarks and double-entendres, humorous observances and asides, and plenty of instructions. He punctuated his pronouncements with introductions of guests—Hobo Jim, singing the national anthem and his “Running of the Reindeer” song; Anchorage mayor Dan Sullivan, who attempted cordiality and formality in the face of irreverence; broadcasters from the Anchorage ABC-TV affiliate, who were on hand to film the event live and send images streaming out across the state.

Eventually, though, like the reindeer, we were culled from our herd and put in place for the race.

The first batch to line up were the out-of-state runners, a mix of people from the Lower 48 and other countries, many dressed in costume.

I was not in costume, but costumes were ubiquitous. I saw cheeseheads, a man dressed up an insect with multi-faceted eyes, women in tutus, hockey players in full gear (except for the skates), military personnel, a group of guys in red long johns, shirtless men wearing only running shorts and shoes. (The temperature was perhaps 35 degrees.) There were colorful wigs, plenty of animal motifs, lots of leftover Halloween regalia, a big guy dressed as Sully from Monsters Inc., two women dressed as Thing 1 and Thing 2 from The Cat in the Hat, and fur, fur and more fur.

And it seemed to me that the majority of runners were holding cameras or cell phones capable of taking photographs.

People in the crowd, too, many members of which were wearing the blue-foam reindeer antlers given away before the event, were wielding cameras. Spectators stood packed behind the wooden fencing along the raceway, many holding their cameras and phones aloft, all angled out into the same view of the street, all about to capture the same images from their cramped and seething vantage points.

As a helicopter pulsed across the sky, the announcer had the crowd help him count down to send the runners on their mad dash to the finish line. Then about 10 seconds later he began a second count to release the eight reindeer, who gamboled up the slushy snow (left behind by that morning’s ceremonial start of the Iditarod) and then bolted and ducked through the runners to reach the end point, well ahead of even the fastest sprinter.

The reindeer, all bulls, were motivated by a combination of two things: a supply of reindeer chow, and a cow in heat, both waiting inside an aluminum cage at the other end of the raceway.

After all the runners had reached the end of the course, they were shunted onto H Street, and the reindeer were gathered by handlers who maneuvered the animals back down the blocks to the starting area again so that they could chase after the next group.

The women followed the out-of-state runners. Then men ran next. And the couples and groups finished up the event.

During my run, I tried to stay in the back to get a better view of the reindeer and maybe photograph a big bull darting just past me, but other runners got in my way and obstructed my view, and the reindeer were past me and through the crowd with remarkable agility and alacrity. I satisfied myself with a slow jaunt through snow so soft it was akin to running on beach sand.

Still, I had fun, and if I ever again run with the reindeer, I’ll know what I’m getting into. I’ll dress in costume and leave my camera gear behind. I’ll wear boots to keep my feet warm and dry because running fast is unnecessary. I won’t expect big thrills or the dangers of Pamplona. I’ll participate because, in the end, it’s good clean, slightly wacky fun during our long Alaska winter, and because the entry fee goes to help people in need.

Besides, where else will I get to see a big-bellied man dressed in Carhartt bibs and draped in furs gallumphing down a city street ahead of charging animals?

 

"Oklahoma! (Almost by Accident)"

Iconic scenes like this are just one of many good reasons to visit Oklahoma.

OKLAHOMA! (ALMOST BY ACCIDENT)

Until I realized that I had forgotten about Louisiana, I thought that Oklahoma was the only state west of the Mississippi River that I’d never been in.

Now I’ve been in Oklahoma, too, but that’s not what’s important.

I didn’t go to Oklahoma just to see Oklahoma, although it was nice to see. Going there helped me dispel a lot of personal misconceptions about that state—that the whole thing was as level as a tabletop, that it was hot and bone-dry, that it had no real identity because it was so overshadowed by its neighbors, especially Texas and Missouri and Colorado. But it was much more interesting than I had expected. I appreciated its history, even some of its largely flat topography. I thought its residents were mostly friendly folks—a lot of good Midwestern prairie stock, mixed with oilmen and cowboys. There’s a lot of money, still, in Oklahoma.

Custom bootmaker, Ray Dorwart, of Guthrie, is another

good reason to visit Oklahoma.

I liked the streets and stores and statues of Guthrie, Oklahoma’s original capital.



I liked the museums and memorials.

I liked driving on fabled Route 66.

I liked seeing real windmills and stockyards, even real oil pumps and derricks.

I even liked seeing skunks, although I wish they hadn’t all been dead and quite so smelly, and a opossum, even though it, too, was deceased—another victim of highway proximity and heavy traffic—and six whitetail deer, four of which (all in Beavers Bend State Park) were still alive and Bambi-like.

I liked seeing dozens and dozens of soaring, swooping, scanning hawks prowling the grasslands for prey.

I liked revisiting the Big Sky Country I hadn’t really seen since my college days in Montana and one brief pheasant-hunting trip with my father to North Dakota.



I liked seeing white pelicans on Lake Overholser, watching the flashes and hearing the booms of a thunder-and-lightning storm one night and then awakening to an inch and a half of hail-like slush, hiking the dry and rocky ravines of the Skyline Trail in Beavers Bend State Park, visiting with old Kenai Central High School classmate Holly Deitrick in the Tulsa area, spending an hour with custom cowboy boot maker Ray Dorwart, chatting with rickety old Mr. Gerard at the Frontier Drugstore Museum, listening to the backwoods-vernacular musicality of the mother-daughter pair at the convenience store in Antlers, and lunching on an excellent torta with the largely Hispanic crowd at Taqueria Los Comales.

It was a real treat to see a huge flock of white pelicans on Lake Overholser.



And there was plenty more—all packed into 10 full days.

But, as I said, Oklahoma itself was not the goal.

I would not have purchased a United Airlines ticket to Oklahoma City if it hadn’t been for a certain girl who was down there in the midst of nine weeks of training at the Federal Aviation Administration academy. She was the real attraction, more alluring to me than any geography or history lesson the Sooner State had to offer.



Here's the real reason I finally saw Oklahoma.

Together we drove to Broken Bow and Broken Arrow. We dined on crawfish pie and a po’ boy filled with deep-fried catfish. We toured a magnificent botanical garden, watched the whitecaps form on a churning reservoir, and strolled through the stores of Western outfitters. We ate at Crabtown, the Cattleman’s Steakhouse, and the Blue Rooster. We ran along streets and hiked along trails. We felt the stiff Oklahoma winds and crunched over its snow and ice.

More importantly, we communed. We spent time together. And it was wonderful—worth every minute in cramped airplane seating, every airport layover, every bit of jet-lag.

I’d do it again, in a heartbeat, but I don’t need to … because the girl is coming home soon.

The world is full of interesting places—Oklahoma among them, I must say—and I hope to see more of the world. Much more.

But I hope to see even more of the girl.

And then, of course, there’s Louisiana….