Pure Living!

I think it was 1988 or so when I was looking around in a shop in Fairbanks. I was just passing thru on my way to Anchorage, the final leg in a long journey from Houston Texas, where I had lost my job as a machinist and had decided to return home to the place I loved. Inside this shop I noticed a woman whom I'd only seen before in news reports, never in the flesh, and that woman was Susan Butcher. Like I've said before, I don't have this idol-worship gene, and I didn't bother her, but I had always admired her. Who is Susan Butcher, you ask? Why, thanks to her, they came up with a saying in Alaska and it goes like this......."Alaska, where men are men, and women win the Iditarod!" She did it four times. Against men. And don't tell me it didn't humble them.

Susan lived out in the sticks in true Alaskan style, raising sled dogs, and she treated her canine companions like the true champions they were. These dogs were her life, and as a team, they and this plucky woman put many a man and his team of huskies to shame. The iditarod sled dog race is a grueling eleven hundred mile race over frozen and inhospitable terrain, staring in Anchorage and ending in Nome. Those who compete these days really can't lay claim to her amazing feats thanks to global warming, sometimes even having to cross increasingly larger areas with very little snow cover.

Susan took time off from competing to have a family, and produced two daughters, who I imagine one day might carry on their mother's ability to overcome sexual stereotyping. However, Susan finally met her match against leukemia, despite a determined and heroic battle against the disease.

A fellow blogger once asked, "Can one truly die happy?" Here's your answer my friend. Yes.