Frozen Wasteland ...

January 28, 2019
9:45 a.m.
decal in upper right shows young Charles Dickens

I look out my study window and see the White Death. Piles of snow. Bitter cold (supposed to be much worse on Wednesday: a high of, oh, -2). I snarl at the OED, which today offered as its word-of-the-day musher (see full entry at bottom of this post)--"a person who travels through snow" (with dogs and sled--or afoot).

So, I have indeed been a musher the past week or so--wearing a parka, face wrapped in a long scarf I acquired while teaching at Western Reserve Academy. School colors--green and white. The opposites: spring and winter. Life and Death.

I wince at an irony: I spent about ten years of my life pursuing the story of writer Jack London (who specialized in Northland tales)--traveling twice to the Yukon, even hiking over the Chilkoot Pass (a mountain pass from Alaska to Canada, a pass which figures in The Call of the Wild--a pass that London himself had traversed in 1897--see pics below).

Of course, wimpy lowlander that I am, I visited both times in August. Warm. Sunny. Midnight sun and all. And I hiked over the Pass but once; the gold-rushers had to do it about thirty times, once a day, to haul all their stuff to the top of the pass where the Northwest Police of Canada would not allow you to proceed without a year's supplies. Oh, and tens of thousands of them did it in the winter, when temps routinely plummeted far below zero.

Chilkoot Pass, Aug. 1993, when I
scaled it

And so I feel a little ... wussy ... when I complain about my quarter-mile walk--on salted sidewalks--over to the coffee shop and back each morning.

But, being a Man among Men, when I returned today, I put my backpack inside the back door and shoveled our sidewalk ... well, that wee portion of it that needed a shovel's attention (a friendly neighbor had used his snowblower to do the main sidewalks, up and down both sides of our street).  Still, I felt virtuous. Hardy.

Hardly.

Hardly hardy these winter days. A better word? Grateful. Grateful that I can still get to the coffee shop using my corporal locomotion only. When you arrive at a "certain age," you begin to wonder and think about how much longer you can keep doing what you're so fond of doing.

And now, as I stare out my window, I remember "The Cremation of Sam McGee," the Klondike Gold Rush poem by Robert Service.  Sam McGee is from Tennessee, and he cannot abide the cold, so he makes the narrator, his travel companion, swear that "foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains." Sam worries about "the icy grave"--and thus his plea for cremation. (Link to entire poem.)

Sounds like a plan--especially when I look outside and see a sight that would please a penguin, a polar bear. But never me. Instead, I think of comforting flames ... though they're putatively not so comforting in ... you know ...

musher, n.3 A person who travels through snow, on foot or with a dog sled; (also) the driver of a dog sled.

Origin: Formed within English, by derivation. Etymons: mush v.3, -er suffix1.

Etymology: <  mush v.3 + -er suffix1.

 Chiefly Canad. and U.S. regional (Alaska).

1900  J. White Jrnl. Yukon River Exped.(MS) 118 in  R. Tabbert Dict. Alaskan Eng.(1991) 201/1 Musher, one who travels on the trail, with or without dogs.

1902  L. McKee Land of Nome  178 I felt that I had received a very high compliment..when an old-timer in the party..told me that I was a ‘musher from hell’.

1925 Chambers's Jrnl.  July 456/2 Those far northern regions are inaccessible..except to the most hardy and expert ‘mushers’.

1948 Time  19 July 34/3 Klondike Mike, the greatest of the mushers, the sourdough who struck it rich and kept his poke, is a living legend.

1973 Islander (Victoria, Brit. Columbia)  20 May 3/1 Art Fraser, owner and musher of the dog team, was my guide.

1991 Daily Tel.  21 Jan. 42/6 It takes every ounce of human energy to keep the dogs from running away with the sled, with or without their musher on board.