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Chapter 10
"`Bye, kiddo," Mike said to Kirsten early Thursday morning. "See you at the office."
"Before you go, would you check the bathroom for me again? I have to go."
It was a miracle that Kirsten was using the bathroom at home at all, Mike thought. On their way back from Northwoods Realty the evening before, Kirsten had them stop at the office so she could use the bathroom there, rather than at home. "No problem," Mike said,
and hustled up the stairs.
He was back in a moment. "No snakes," he reported. "I put the stopper in the bathtub drain, too."
"Thanks," Kirsten told him. "See you later, honey."
Their mornings had been a ritual for many years, now. Both he and Kirsten got up about the same time, and shared making breakfast for themselves and for the kids. Mike could get in and out of the bathroom while breakfast was making, but Kirsten faced half an hour
or more of getting her face on and getting dressed. Rather than waiting around, Mike drove his VW Rabbit over to the Spearfish Lake Cafe, out on the highway, for a cup of coffee and a chance to catch up on the latest round of gossip.
Actually, sitting around the big breakfast table at the Spearfish Lake Cafe was partway business for Mike; it gave him a good chance to test the tenor of the community, and hear what people were really thinking about. He found out more about reactions to each issue
of the paper and each major story there than he could ever have found out at the office.
There were actually two different breakfast tables in town where opinion like that could be heard; the other was at Rick's Cafe, just down the street from the paper. However, Webb had been a regular at Rick's for maybe twenty years, and he and Mike had agreed to
split up the territory. They often compared notes afterward.
Actually, Mike didn't mind getting the second choice. Every now and then, he and Webb switched for a few days, and Mike had the opinion that all the guys at Rick's talked about was hunting, golf and football. Mike didn't have any interest in hunting, was a lousy
golfer, and got enough football in the fall to suit him. Talking football in April made him want to barf, anyway.
The crowd at the Spearfish Lake Cafe was a little younger, and the conversation was rather more eclectic. It ran to rock and roll, sex, football, pickup trucks, television, basketball, sex, snowmobiles, kids, fishing, guns, country music, sex, politics, cars, baseball,
women, computers, and sex, but could take off anywhere and wind up almost anywhere else.
"What are we talking about this morning?" Mark asked as he found an empty chair at the middle of the table.
"Would you believe dog sled racing?" Mark Gravengood replied.
Mike looked over at Mark. He'd known Gravengood for years, if not real well. He was a repairman for the phone company, but he was also one of the guys in the Vietnam Veterans that Mike potentially owed a hell of a favor to, if the chance ever came. "Oh,
somebody else saw that PBS special on Susan Butcher last night, huh?" he commented.
"Yeah," Ryan Clark said from down the table. "Ah, Alaska, where men are men and women win the Iditarod."
The last few years, the Iditarod Sled Dog Race in Alaska had become a regular morning topic in the Spearfish Lake Cafe -- but only for the month of March. A dog sled race running a thousand miles through the wildest part of the Alaskan back country, taking ten
days or more to complete, it had captured the imagination of these people who lived in a rather more settled northwoods, the kind of adventure that each of them sort of dreamed of and all figured they'd never take on.
At the Spearfish Lake Cafe, it had seemed like sort of a fluke when Libby Riddles had won the race in '85, but the last two years, Susan Butcher had taken it going away, leaving all the men far behind. That was a little scary.
"Yeah, I got my butt in a sling with my daughter over that one," Mike said. "She's now convinced that she wants to have a dog team. Susan Butcher is her new hero."
"If she has to idolize someone, it could be worse," Clark conceded. "Consider yourself lucky that she doesn't have a thing about Madonna."
"Well, yeah, I guess you're right," Mark admitted. "Actually, fooling around with a dog team does seem sort of like fun. Not that I'd want to do something as crazy as run the Iditarod, but it'd be kind of a fun way to get out in the winter."
"Yeah, I've thought about it once or twice," Gravengood said thoughtfully. "Back when Jackie and I were on our honeymoon, we got to meet a guy that's run the Iditarod several times since. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I don't have any idea of how you'd ever get
started at something like that."
Mike shook his head. "I don't know of anybody around here running a dog team. I've never even heard of anybody around here doing it."
"Used to be some dog teams around here," George Lindquist said. Lindquist was probably the oldest man at the table, a retired school teacher who now ran the county historical museum. "Back before there were snowmobiles, there were maybe three or four guys that
used to run dog teams on trap lines. That's getting to be a while back, now, but there might still be one or two of them around."
"You know," Clark said thoughtfully, "It's too bad that there isn't someone in this neck of the woods that runs dog teams. A dog sled race would make a nice addition to the Tip-Up Festival. We were talking about it at the Chamber the other day. We need something to
spruce it up."
"Yeah," Gravengood agreed. "Maybe out to Warsaw and back on the North Country Trail. The Trail Association would be happy to see something like that, just to draw some attention to it."
"George, do you think you could look up and see who some of those guys are?" Mike asked. "It might make an interesting story, some time." It wasn't a story that Mike would have to write; Lindquist wrote a weekly column about Spearfish Lake history for the
Record-Herald.
"Might drive some dog musher out of the woodwork, too," Clark agreed. "Or, at least someone that thinks they want to be a dog musher."
