But Enough About You: Essays (15 page)

The next day, we climbed Huayna Picchu. (“Little Mountain,”
Machu Picchu being “Big Mountain”). Huayna Picchu is the peak you see in the photographs that looms above the ruins like a mossy, breaching whale. For any serious mountaineer, it’s probably a Sunday walk in the park. For a middle-aged asthmatic gringo, it was work: 800 feet up at 65 degrees. It took us an hour, no reflection on Edgard or Dr. Melocotón. Edgard once did it in seventeen minutes, after hearing over the walkie-talkie that one of his clients had managed to fall off the top.

What a view it is from up there. Edgard pointed out a declivity carved into the summit stone. An altar. They sacrificed animals to their condor gods on it. We posed for pictures.

It began to rain. Edgard’s cell phone rang. The Inca didn’t have the wheel; their descendants have cell coverage at 9,000 feet. It was his five-year-old daughter, in tears with the desperate news that the bunny rabbit he had given her had died. He promised her a new one, and we started down.

—
Forbes FYI
, October 2006

It’s a bit cramped in the back of the Cessna 206. The windows are frosting over, and as I scrape away the rime with the edge of a credit card what I can make out is not entirely reassuring. Fog and terrain—the latter is disturbing because it is at eye level. Nor is it reassuring that the automatic warning keeps announcing in computer deadpan voice: “Caution, terrain. Caution, terrain.” At such moments one asks oneself,
What am I doing here?

Aeronautically speaking, we are trying to find our way through the Alaska Range. That task falls to our pilot, an excellent fellow named Burke with whom we will bond tightly in the days ahead. Burke has a sweet, laid-back, Deputy Dawg manner, and a martini-dry sense of humor. He says, with a casualness that seems discordant, “Now we have the first serious obscuration ahead of us.”

Burke executes a 270-degree turn in the narrowing canyon, looking for a way through the pass. The terrain is now not only eye level but quite close.

“I believe,” Burke says, “we’re going to have to backtrack and find a different route.” He puts the plane’s nose down and soon we are flying low enough to make out moose tracks. It crosses my mind that he is using these to navigate. This does not make me less nervous.

An interesting hour later, we are sitting at a bar called McGuire’s Tavern in a town called McGrath, thankful that the Alaska Range is behind us. Burke drinks coffee while his three passengers self-administer restorative liquids. The bar is decorated with old boxes of blasting caps and a mastodon bone. Outside it is 10 below. Among the four of us, we are wearing a serious amount of fur: seal, moose, bear, wolf, pine marten, sea otter, and Lord only knows what else—gerbil, possibly.

The bartender hangs up the phone and announces, “Mackey’s out of Anvik.”

That would be Lance Mackey, a champion musher of dogs; Anvik is a hamlet roughly halfway between Anchorage and Nome, which is by way of explaining what I’m doing here. I am following the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

The Iditarod is a 1,049-mile sled dog race that honors the tradition of dog mushing generally and specifically the heroic “serum run” of 1925, when men and dogs braved the worst that nature could throw at them in order to bring diphtheria serum to icebound Nome. I grew up around New York City and many times have walked past the statue in Central Park of Balto, one of the dogs who accomplished this great feat. I now have a far better appreciation of what Balto and the other dogs and their mushers endured to save the children of Nome. After returning from this trip, I found myself quite
by accident walking past Balto’s statue. This time, I stopped and took off my hat.

I won’t recapitulate the whole story here, other than to note, with awe and humility, that it involved among other hardships temperatures of minus 60 degrees, gales of 65 to 70 miles per hour, and a dozen other ways of dying, none of them pleasant. The frostbitten and exhausted man who mushed the last relay team (including Balto) into the streets of Nome was named Gunnar Kaasen. In their gripping account,
The Cruelest Miles
, Gay and Laney Salisbury write, “Witnesses to this drama said they saw Kaasen stagger off the sled and stumble up to Balto, where he collapsed, muttering, ‘Damn fine dog.’ ” Diphtheria kills young children by a process of slow, agonizing suffocation. Next time you pass the Balto statue, pause in respect.

The Iditarod race is run every March. Sixty-seven teams were competing this year. Mackey, a wire-thin man with a goatee and wolf-pale eyes, had previously won two Iditarods. The record time was posted in 2002 by Martin Buser, who managed to reach Nome in 8 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, and 2 seconds, averaging more than a hundred miles a day. The distance covered—1,049 miles—is about the same as Washington, D.C., to Miami, only this route goes over mountains, lakes, rivers, and what must seem to them an endless stretch of Alaskan winter.

We fly on from McGrath and reach Unalakleet at twilight. We tie down the Cessna. Alice, our hostess and owner of the Cessna, has made arrangements for the all-important plug-in for the engine warmer. It is essential, indeed imperative, in Alaska that you keep your plane’s engine heated so that it will start. This aspect of Alaskan bush aviation will become a major theme of our trip. Plug-ins are scarce at airstrips, with the result that people go around unplugging one another’s airplanes. This will happen to us, with the result that Burke and I spend the better part of one day trying to heat the Cessna’s engine by means of a gas stove.

“Burke,” I say, pausing before setting the match to the gas in the stove’s priming cup, “is it
wise
to be doing this?”

I ask this because the idea of inserting a flaming device into an aircraft engine full of high-octane fuel feels . . . illogical, somehow.

“Yes,” Burke says contemplatively.

The more immediate problem is the 30-mile-an-hour wind, which, in conjunction with the 15-below temperature, makes one’s fingers less than nimble. Burke tries repeatedly to start the engine. The propeller turns—
rrruh-rrruh rrrrrrrrruh
—and then stops after a few feeble rotations. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” meets “The Flight of the Phoenix.” In the end, a kindly flying cardiologist takes pity on us and lends us his super-duper engine warmer, which is like a giant hair dryer.

At Unalakleet (in the Inupiaq language, “the place where the east wind blows”), we watch Lance Mackey and his team come in. He is comfortably ahead of the field, but wastes no time. He beds down his dogs in mounds of hay and cooks them a hot meal of beaver meat, frozen salmon steaks, and high-protein pellets. The dogs get four hot meals a day, consuming 10,000 to 12,000 calories daily. The dogs are thin and not at all large: 40 to 50 pounds. I’d been expecting enormous bruisers. Alaskan sled dogs are bred for one purpose, to pull. If it is grueling work, they nonetheless seem to love it. A volunteer force of up to forty-five veterinarians from all over the world tends to them meticulously, examining them at every checkpoint for signs of illness, dehydration, and muscle sprain. Dropped dogs are picked up by the “Iditarod Air Force,” a volunteer squadron of airborne pickup trucks. A musher starts out with as many as sixteen dogs and must finish with at least five. There are casualties. At the Unalakleet hangar one day I saw two notices:

The gross necropsy of Victor, a six-year-old male from the team of Jeff Holt, has been completed. No cause of death could be determined by the board-certified veterinary pathologist. Further testing will be conducted to complete the necropsy process.

Nigel Is Found!

On March 10, 2009, Iditarod XXXVII musher Nancy Yoshida (Bib #3) encountered a series of events in the “Steps” on her way to Rainy Pass that forced her to scratch from the
race. The impact of those events included losing one of her sled dogs, Nigel. Nancy and the rest of her team stayed put for hours hoping Nigel would return and they could move forward. When Nigel didn’t return, she and the rest of her team made their way to Rainy Pass, where Yoshida officially scratched. Nancy and the Iditarod continued to search for Nigel on the ground and in the air. Today, Nigel was reunited with Nancy and his teammates after he appeared at Talvista Lodge in Skwentna.

Lance Mackey did not linger long in Unalakleet. You don’t win the Iditarod by sitting around the fire reciting “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” That night, we watched in foot-numbing cold (20 below) as he applied pink ointment to his dogs’ paws (fifteen dogs times four paws, with bare fingers; it took over an hour), then harnessed them. The dogs did not look particularly eager to be setting off. But off they went in the crunching cold in the direction of Shaktoolik.

A promontory that juts into the frozen Norton Sound, Shaktoolik means in the Inuit language: “the feeling that you have when you have been going toward a place for so long that it seems that you will never get there.” Every child in the backseat of a car instinctively grasps the concept of Shaktoolik.

The next day, after Burke and I spend hours trying to warm the Cessna engine, we set off for Nome, into pink twilight, toward the United States’ westernmost parts. I swigged from a bottle of port. My face showed signs of frostbite and my hands were claws, so the port was very welcome and warming.

I looked through the windshield at Norton Sound, a forbidding stretch of ice water. Back in 1925 one of the serum runners, a famous musher named Leonhard Seppala, risked crossing Norton Sound rather than take the longer, coastal route. In Alaska, even today, people speak of Seppala in reverential tones.

At this stage of the 1925 serum rum, the entire world was watching. A headline read: NOME SITUATION CRITICAL; ALL HOPE RESTS IN DOGS
.

Off to our right, the dying sun cast shadows over snow-covered mountains that looked like enormous dunes of white desert sand. We landed at Nome and to our enormous delight found that it was an oasis of plug-ins. We hitchhiked a ride into town, whose main street was being decorated to greet the front-runner.

The next day we stood on Front Street along with two thousand other people, nostrils steaming vapor in the sun-bright cold. We heard a helicopter—a news chopper—buzzing above Mackey. A booming voice over a loudspeaker announced the news in ritual wording: “We have a dog team on the street of Nome, Alaska!”

And suddenly there was Lance Mackey and his dogs, led by a phalanx of Iditarod trailbreakers on snow machines. The cheer went up, and stayed up. I am not a sports person, but this was thrilling.

He finished in 9 days, 21 hours, 38 minutes, and 46 seconds. A day longer than Martin Buser’s record, but Mackey finished with all fifteen of his dogs, a record in itself. The last person to finish this year would be Timothy Hunt, who would pull into Nome six days later. Of the original sixty-seven starters, fourteen teams scratched and one withdrew.

Governor Sarah Palin telephoned Mackey. We listened in on their conversation over the loudspeakers.

“We love ya!” said the governor. Mackey said, “Say hi to Todd for me.”

Mackey was presented with a check for $69,000 and a cherry-red pickup truck. I looked at the dogs. They were pawing the ground, barking and howling, oblivious to all the fuss. They wanted to keep going.

The next day, as we were boarding a plane a bit larger than our Cessna, passengers were talking about how Mackey had spent his victory night. Not soaking in a hot tub or being massaged but arm wrestling at the Breakers Bar.

“He won the middleweight,” someone said. “Then he won the women’s. What a guy.”

—
Forbes Life
, December 2009

Volume II: Rome to the Present Day

78 B.C.—Hiltonus, an innkeeper weary of being rudely woken in the middle of the night by Roman legionnaires demanding wine and salted nuts, creates the concept of the minibar by installing in each room a chest containing miniature bottles of wine and salted nuts. Guests are asked to write down what they consume on a slate, but instead write taunting sentiments—“We came, we saw, we ate your cashews”—causing Hiltonus to abandon his experiment and ushering in a thousand-year hiatus in further attempts at in-room hospitality.

A.D. 1096—Crusaders passing through Malta en route to demonstrating their Christianity by slaughtering Muslims overwhelm island hotel keepers with middle-of-the-night requests for armor repair kits (forerunner of the modern sewing kit) and yew tree bark (forerunner of modern aspirin tablets). When checkout clerks attempt to charge the crusaders for the items, they are beheaded. Pope Suburban II issues a bull excommunicating “any who pilfer salted almonds and beverages without just recompense,” but Antipope Inclement III counterasserts a divine right to free snacking (
Jus Pretzelonis
) by anyone engaged in the holy work of killing Muslims. The issue becomes mired in canonical courts and is not resolved until 1922.

1400—The proprietor of London’s Tabard Inn, a gathering place for Chaucer’s pilgrims, installs “minny barres” in the rooms. Inside are miniature bottles of holy water “Personally blest by St. Thomas” (actually unblessed Thames water), pints of ale, and capon drumsticks. Ingeniously, the drumsticks are tied to strings that ring a bell at the
front desk, signaling clerks with clubs to burst into the room and beat the guest until payment is tendered.

1570—The Hamburg clockmaker Johannes Gluck devises his famous “Honor Bar” for the local hotelmeister Adolphus Kempinski. Something of a misnomer, the Honor Bar contains a hidden steel trap similar to those used to snare beavers and water rats that clamps down violently on the hand of anyone reaching for cocktail wieners or beer, unless they have first inserted coins into a slot.

1772—The manager of Paris’s famed Hotel de Luxe stocks his
bars-de-minuit
with prophylactic sheepskin “envelopes” for the convenience of his male customers wishing to avoid
le syph
or
le clappe
.

1861—On the eve of his inauguration, a thirsty Abraham Lincoln attempts to open the minibar in his room at the Willard Hotel, only to find that the key will not fit. His bodyguard, Pinkerton, offers to shoot off the lock, but Lincoln demurs on the grounds that this might further divide the nation. Lincoln’s gaunt and drawn appearance during his inauguration is attributed to his lack of refreshment the night before, but the incident, widely commented upon, enhances his aura of selflessness and nobility. An early sketch for the Lincoln Memorial by the sculptor Daniel Chester French depicts the president philosophically contemplating a locked minibar.