As of January 7...

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Crow Pass Crossing

There was a point there, sliding on my ass down a hundred-yard snowfield rippled with minute waves of ice & buried rock, when I wondered if perhaps I ought to reorient myself in order to avoid slamming into the jagged boulder looming below. & there was a point while loping across another pitch of snow sidelong wherein I noticed I might well slide a mile off course if I didn’t hit the footholds. There was incessant rain, beating down from the report of the starting pistol until the finish line, & a fierce firn wind weaving through the willows, the Devil’s Club, the sedge-green grass. & the feeling on the far shore of Eagle River of wholly numb legs wobbling underneath me. I completely ate shit a half dozen times, tripped & recovered a dozen more, stubbed my twice-broken toe, stepped knee-deep in beaver ponds, slid & slopped through mud, leapt over twenty piles of fresh bear scat & clutched looming thistles to right myself, committing the ensuing mile each tim
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January 20

This morning I sat through the inauguration upstairs, the bosses smug in their pajamas, barking at the television, slurring ejaculates firing out of their fat lips. What a thing to witness. I live among Palin supporters, old guard Republicans who extol Christian virtue out one side of their mouth while spitting vitriol always out the other. Obama a terrorist, Obama not even a citizen, the “negro situation,” the elegance of Laura Bush, the accolades due her husband. I left the room after a comment about how blacks might finally get their acts together, went to pull weeds from the superfluous garden of these superfluous people, to tend to shoots & weeds & improve their lives even as they go about the deleterious business of condemning everyone else’s. At 11:30, I rose from weeding, nauseous with the morning, with what I was doing. I came in & packed for an hour, ate & went back to work. The neighbor stopped over in the afternoon to join the chorus & pitch polemics at
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Suggestions

I want to thank everyone for the supportive, constructive comments on the previous post & more importantly for the collective will to effect positive changes to the way things look moving forward. I have every respect for the ITC, for the volunteers, the veterinarians, mushers & dogs involved in the race, & it is out of that respect & love for the sport & the Iditarod that I hope we can all agree upon changes. I hope it’s also clear that I encourage & support every opinion to be voiced through this & any adversity, regardless of whether or not I’m in agreement. We all assume the burden of these things individually, even when the brunt of them is not our own, & we process them in ways that are often incompatible or contrary. Even still, I believe that every person inclined toward utterance in the wake of Dorado’s death wants the same thing: the prevention of repeating that tragedy in the future. & I think everyone can agree that nothing is more effect
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