I was curled in a cold ball inside my sleeping bag Saturday morning in Galena when Emily Schwing started shouting at me.
“Oh my GOD! ZACH!!!”
It was about 7:15am, and Schwing had just seen a press release about a snowmachiner hitting Aily Zirkle and Jeff King en route to Nulato overnight, killing a dog and injuring others.
“Zach – get up! GET UP!”
I started making calls and poking at the computer while Schwing roused her pilot and basically sprinted toward the plane, and Nulato.
Over the next few hours, while I was Twittering, and emailing, and phoning, and etc’ing, Schwing spoke with Jeff King and Aliy Zirkle. They were telling and moving interviews, and put the digital information into a better, more relatable context. I.e., solid news reporting. There’s no print sentence that can capture the constrictive, warbling grief in King’s voice like the sound of that interview did. Schwing had files and stories out to those of us with better Internet connectivity almost immediately. In between, I believe she was sending news out to NPR, as well.
It is a hustle I literally didn’t know was possible. My first reaction to getting shouted at that something bad had happened was to gape and yawn and think, “Gosh, how are we gonna sort out what happened.” But Schwing had half her torso in her jacket before I could even sputter that thought aloud. She leapt like few leap, and must have the circadian rhythms of vampiric apex predator, because I do not believe she’s slept much more than the mushers she’s stalking to remote shelter-cabins between checkpoints.
For my part, I followed along a day behind, getting from Galena to Kaltag to Unalakleet by Sunday afternoon. A week in and I stink, too much grime trapped beneath layers of marino wool, Carrharts, and a cavernous Cabella’s snow-suit. But if I have one bias in Iditarod coverage it’s for Unalakleet, a place I’ve been lucky to visit regularly the last few years. With the exception of a short nap on a cot at the KIYU studios in Galena (who showed us ever-impressive Public Radio camaraderie/generosity by letting us crash and pilfer their Internet–thank you Brian, Paul, and Tim), I got my first real break from work in Unalakleet.
Up the hill, a little ways out of town, I got to take a sauna with friends and family-members of my boss-mentor Laureli Ivanoff, who two years ago set a very high bar at KNOM for what constituted good Iditarod coverage. Now, she’s nudging that bar even higher still writing for ADN. We stared at the race-tracker on her phone speculating about who would push past Elim or rest where, and Laureli let me sneak spoonfuls of chocolate-chip dough from a batch of cookies she was making.
It was quite late by the time the sauna was hot–but it was really hot. Stove-pipe glowing orange hot. As I sat there in the excruciating constriction of hot air I counted backwards all the chores left to file my story that night: Finish writing, find a quiet place to voice, produce it, etc. But then something broke, sweat started pouring out, flushing away some portion of all that grime.
When I took a break, stepped out into the cold-but-in-a-good-way air, great white plumes of steam rolled off my shoulders, neck, and chest. They were the same plumes I’d seen roiling forth from cookers when mushers readied hot water for feeding their teams. Big plumes of relief and rest and respite. Big plumes of awe for the race, for the land glimpsed from frozen shores and chilly planes, for the people I’ve been beside at checkpoints, on cots, and in the sauna.
Zachariah Hughes reports on city & state politics, arts & culture, drugs, and military affairs in Anchorage and South Central Alaska.
@ZachHughesAK About Zachariah
