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| February 28, 2007 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth, insurgent49 The Illusion of Progress
The
purpose of snowmobile recreation is not to get anywhere, see anybody or
understand anything but to generate noise, poison the air, crush
vegetation, destroy wildlife, waste energy, promote entropy and
accelerate the unfolding of the second law of thermodynamics.
For this purpose, then, an endless circling round and round from morn to night could be perfectly satisfactory to all participants, requiring only that road signs be shifted here and there, now and then, so as to provide the illusion of linear progress on a European-style space-time axis. Everyone knows that.
— Ed Abbey, Hayduke Lives!
It was the first bluebird day after a week of snowfall and there must have been twenty pickups, some with ramps, along the road when we arrived in the morning. Another snowboarder, a cross-country skier and I set out up a wide, packed trail. After a half mile, the trail narrowed. We jumped quickly off to the side when we heard the buzzing of a snowmachine below us. They came by us on the trail, accelerating on the hill, skis lifting. “Wahnn, wahnn, waaahhhaannn.” The sixth snowmachine was having trouble. It pitched toward the softer bank. The driver leapt to the side, too far, over-correcting. He crossed the trail then launched into deep powder and came to a standstill beside a tree trunk; he throttled the engine, but it only sank deeper. “Need some help?” I offered, taking off my pack with its heavy snowboard attached. “Naw, he’s coming down,” he shouted behind his helmet. Another sled motored down from above us and the two men began digging. We hiked on. By mid-morning, we reached a cabin. One of the seventh-graders I teach waved at me from the porch. He’d been staying there for four days, driving his snowmachine, snowboarding, and watching movies. He invited me inside. The cabin was spacious, energized by a generator, batteries and diesel. It had an enormous outhouse with toilets that were, apparently, filled beyond capacity. On the wall was a wanted photo featuring Osama Bin Ladin’s taciturn expression, a beer poster of a buxom woman in a skimpy bikini, and a copy of an x-ray of someone’s ankle. “That just happened last week,” a man wearing a red outfit said, pointing to the fractured bone. Heavy metal music blared on a radio outside. We left the cabin and clumped across the lake on our snowshoes, following a thin line of tracks up a steep hill. We had to move off the track every now and then to let snowmachiners pass. Across the lake, the machines raced up a face to “high mark,” leaving loops as a challenge to other riders to climb even higher. I instantly remembered that six snowmachiners were killed near Turnagain Pass in 1999 when high marking triggered a massive slab avalanche. Someone made his mark, and died for it. In January, a 7-year-old was killed when his snowmachine rammed into a berm. He was driving a powerful machine with more horsepower than my car. Even though kids 15 and younger were averaging 22 injuries a year from snowmobiles, the Alaska Legislature, in 2002, passed a bill that allows anyone to drive a snowmobile at any age. I used to watch my downstairs neighbor in Girdwood run his sled up into his truck as I got my cross-country gear on. He would eventually injure himself and, by the end of the winter, hoped to sell his machines. At the top of a pass, we stopped after a long climb, breathing hard and deep. A pair of snowmachines whined by us, leaving an oily, blue cloud that settled for several seconds before it moved on into the sky. By early afternoon, we had laid several pair of tracks on safe, but tree-lined slopes the snowmachiners could never reach. Then, we boarded back down the winding, washboard trail towards the road. A half-mile from the end, we came across an abandoned snowmobile. The windshield was creased inward and a ski bent toward the well of a small hemlock tree. Clots of yellowy blood stained the snow. I worried about my student. At the truck, I wearily took off my boots and changed into dry gear. Behind me, there was a dull, metallic clatter. A man on a snowmachine throttled up onto an embankment, killed the engine and lifted off his helmet. “I’m beat,” he said. He stared at us dully, unresponsive. And said nothing more. Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. 'Red Alert' appears on insurgent49.com every Wednesday. |
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