# Posted 12:52 AM by Patrick Belton  

DISPATCH FROM THE LAND OF CHRISTMAS, PART TWO: Sing, muse. Sing of snow angels and dog mushing and Christmasses at 40 degrees below.....

I sing of arms, and a man off of whom they froze. Any witnesses here in the Arctic interior of Alaska, where my in-laws' log cabin overlooks Denali, the Great One, 200 miles away to the south, on Tuesday night could have observed the edifying spectacle of this author running around outside in his underwear, searching for firewood in 30 below, shouting "cold state, cold state, cold (expletive deleted) state." The Alaskans have invented an entire technology to combat the cold that surrounds them like a cruel embryo, consisting of parkas, hot tubs, hot springs, saunas, and bunny boots, warm to 30 degrees below. This technology has given the state its dominant symbols - even when temperatures warm up to near freezing, Alaskans rumble about outside in thick, garishly colored parkas, as if displaying the symbols of a common tribe.

Yet in the cold, there is beauty, as in a particularly cruel Aryan ex-girlfriend. While dawn in winter only briefly flashes the state her pink middle finger - Fairbanks receives roughly two hours of sunlight at the winter solstice, while Barrow, in the far north, sees no sunlight from early November until the end of January - the reflective world of snow and ice catch up the ambient light of night, in a universe that shades straight from sunrise to sunset across long reds and pinks, and where you can always be sure of being up before dawn to catch it. And when Aurora-Dawn neglects the state, her sister Aurora Borealis more than makes up for her. The University of Alaska at Fairbanks, which keeps track of this sort of thing, records that Northern Lights appear in the sky 260 days out of the year, and are still not fully understood, even though they disrupt electronic communications...and increase the population of Japan. The belief is apparently quite strong in Japan that conception of a child under the aurora borealis bodes well for the offspring's future, and Alaska has done remarkably little to discourage the belief - the lodge at Chena Hot Springs and the airport in Anchorage (the closest city to Alaska) both sport signs in Japanese as well as English. Each time the northern lights appear here in the Arctic, they appear simultaneously in mirror image in the southern hemisphere, where they are known as aurora australis.

It is a land of sourdoughs and cheechacos - the first, the veridical Alaskans, who sport gruff beards, wear carhartts, and fed the yeast in their dough (hence their names) straight since the gold rush of 1907. The second are newcomers - often soldiers, many black, who served here and returned to a land remarkably free of prejudice against their color. Lawyers, too - the state's bar has the highest percentage of Yale and Harvard graduates in the nation, who come here to indulge their thirst for frontier life, and hang out their shingles as small lawyers with practices based on crashed small airplanes (the only way to get around the great unreachable Bush, apart from snow machines and dog sleds) and torts claims lodged against the odd rifle-ready folk who come up here to treasure their privacy, and who remember wounds. There are poets and theologians, who erect log cabins with gorgeous views to sit and write; and "blow-ins" who come up from the Pacific Northwest to eat granola and work on the large federal parks. (Ninety percent of the state's territory is in federal hands.) There are Christians and communists, who carve communes into the soil, hunt, trap, and sell crafts and furs, like the Puritans before them who settled the lower forty-eight in search of a New Jerusalem. The mountain-men yeomanry of Appalachia have their progeny, too, in the small game hunters and fur trappers, who run trapping lines across the bush, and live a life as remote from human society as any resident of an industrial democracy is likely to lead anywhere. It is a land that features outhouse racing - the only place in the world the sport is played - and midnight baseball on the night of the summer solstice at the home diamond of the Fairbanks Golddiggers. It is a land of extremes, in weather and character.

Fairbanks began as a gold digging town, and in good gold-digging fashion, Cheechaco Lil was the first prostitute to have turned up in Fairbanks, in 1910, on 2nd Avenue - which has retained the reputation. Georgia Lee Eldredge died in the 1950s at the age of 77 as Fairbank's most successful prostitute. She was not attractive, even in her youth. The day she died, one devoted patron called several friends to say he did not intend to go on without her, and then shot his dog and himself with a double .30 rifle. She left $100,000 in her bank account, and no heirs.

I ventured to Two Rivers on a balmy morning of 26 below to take a dog-sled ride in the capable care of Leslie Goodwin, who runs a dog mushing center christened "Paws for Adventure". We were outside for an hour, during which I paid careful attention to the onset of the different stages of frostbite across various appendages of my body. After half an hour, I remember thinking for a brief fleeting moment that even the prospect of Dick Morris sucking on my toes didn't seem that bad, if it would only succeed in warming them up. It was an almost welcome moment when I realized that I was no longer able to feel my toes - at least then, they no longer hurt. With my mind thus cleared of distractions, I could pay attention to my lesson in dog mushing from my expert guide. Mushing terminology is straightforward: "hike" is forward, "haw" left, "gee" right, and "wow" stop. The dogs - anxious, beautiful creatures - are happiest when they are pulling - they are bred to pull things, and left to their own devices run around looking for chains to pull. When first teamed up, they explode off at close to 16 miles per hour, settling into a canter of 8 to 12 mph after a few minutes. There is hierarchy in these things: the front dogs are drivers, who need to be born leaders among dogs, and must be intelligent (not too intelligent, though, or they will forsake the entire enterprise of pulling sleighs wholesale. Sled dogs must not be philosophers). Back dogs must be the strong ones, who can pull the sleigh from a halt. The other dogs are more interchangeable parts.

There's a certain sense of lost innocence one feels about leaving Alaska. It fades away from you slowly - in Fairbanks International Airport, you see the sourdoughs trotting around, greeting each other with grunts in a gruff, manly benevolence. In Anchorage, there are fewer (as they intermix with tourists from Japan and the lower forty-eight, and German and Korean women married to the army); then at Seattle-Tacoma, they fade away entirely as you move past the Alaska Airlines terminal - and then you are left in bland, granola, ski-muffin land. The feeling is one of loss, like an expulsion from Eden. I have never done it without incredible sadness.

So this is my Alaska, the land I have married into. Lastly, a confession - this is actually being posted after my return from the far North to the north of Manhattan island, since with my Alaskan connection it turned out to be roughly as fast to pick up a phone and read 0s and 1s out loud to Blogger. I received this morning an email from a reader in Alaska who turned out to have sat next to my in-laws and me at The Return of the King. People, if you sight an OxBlogger on the street: we're always happy to pundit in person in return for any vices (actually, just caffeine, hard alcohol, or tobacco...and large hats, for Josh...we're fairly clean-cut bloggers....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion