Happy New Year from Frozen Idaho!

There is something quite warming about sitting on a cold night reading Robert Service
poetry.Specially when you have friends and a few beloved roots in Alaska...Suffice to say it is warmer in Idaho tonight than in Fairbanks last week....was -10 here and -30 there.

In Fairbanks they planned better for the snow time than they did in Idaho. In Fairbanks you can go from one business to the one on the back block through adjoining doors! You could leave the old drugstore and go into another building simply by walking out a back door...It was the easiest way to get to my Aunt's beauty school...That wasn't the better part of town. Fact is, it was kind of a seedy district. It was HER town. From the end of the war till she passed in the fifties she loved Alaska..I loved it when she introduced me to it and the many characters she knew there...

I remember standing in a crowd of people in a bar where a woman played "Honky Tonk" piano. I was in love. I think I was also 14 and it was a big bar in a very small town. I'm not sure any more. I think it was Chicken Alaska. At midnight a man sat on the back of the tall piano and recited" The Ballad of Dan McGee" I knew the poem well. I'd always loved his poetry because he had a sense of humor that actually had rhyme and Meter!

How cool was THAT! It was as if I had never heard or read the poem before. The hair on my arms stood on end. I could actually feel the bone chilling cold, and the heat of the fires as he stood in the door way to hell, and watched Dan and listen to him tell his friend it was the first time he had been warm since he got to Alaska!

The cold of Alaska never bothered me a whole lot. I couldn't stand the darkness. I knew that with out even trying. I adored the idea that it was Daylight at midnight. cause I am a night person by nature. I watched on the twenty first of June the Midnight son, go down, and come up again. It happened in a matter of minutes that made it seem as though one was looking at two suns at the same moment!

I can't tell you the beauty of Alaska, I haven't got the words. I can tell you of the mosquito! They are the State bird! There was a story went around a mosquito landed at Edwards air force base,and they dumped in 200 gallon of jet fuel before they noticed it was not an airplane.....In order to take a good picture you had to stand in front of your subject for a while and wave a towel. That kept the mosquitoes from spoiling the picture!

I remember talking with a Native in the Yukon. He paid no mind to the mosquito except to put his hand on his forehead occasionally and dragging it down, then shaking the little beggars off his hand as though his hand was full of some smelly ointment, or cow manure. This is no joke. You would be driving down the AL-CAN "highway"....NOW it is paved...when I went up in the sixties...it was dirt all the way! you could drive for miles and miles, all you would see was a moose on occasion, and more miles and miles of trees and mountains. One would think there was no one for WELL....Miles and Miles! You had no idea where in the world he was coming from, or where he was going.

This was the sixties when a good pair of my favorite white tennis shoes were less than five bucks in the "lower 48" I've always had a frugal soul. You can imagine my distress when I found a pair in Alaska was a resounding 8 bucks! Then I went walking in the tundra. I walked off the road and into the bush only to sink waaay deep till I got through the mud and reached the permafrost down below. The Tennis Shoes were brand new. They were White as a sheet, till I took the walk!

In order for this to be any fun for you. you have to realize I was fanatic about my WHITE tennis shoes being BRIGHT white. I liked to spray them with spray starch, and then put on white liquid polish!They left Alaska a color that can best described with the afore mentioned manure!

The seasoned sled dogs of Alaska were both a mystifying and startling to me. They were beautiful animals. The Working dogs walked like a "muscle man!" You could watch every muscle in their bodies ripple as they walked across the road at leisure. It was no surprise to any when you realized that they thought they owned the world! Probably from where they stood, they DID!

I can NOT imagine a poodle sled dog! BUT, A poodle will pull till he literally bursts his heart. I don't mean the itty- bitty kind that people think are so cute. Mine is a snarling little gray mutt who knows who he owns. I mean the big aggressive kind of Poodle who will take on a bear. Poodles know no fear, a bitty little guy like Mine of twenty pounds..fat old man that he is would fight a wolverine if he thought his human was in trouble. They do not allow poodles in dog races. No it is not cause they look stupid in harness...people actually give them that stupid hair cut! It is because when they lay down on the frozen tundra their curling hair freezes to the ground!

So much for dog lore.....Have a wonderful New Year,

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