Pat vs. the Iditarod--4/1/2007

Hi all! I had some big news that I wanted to share with everyone and I'm just now getting the chance to sit down at my email to send it out to everyone.

Long story short (because I know many of you don't or won't read most of my emails because they are too long), after months of strange happenings (and a few bumps in the right direction from Providence, I think), Libby and I have decided to become Mormons so that I can take another wife. Libby especially is looking forward to this since she will get to be "first wife" and have many of her household responsibilities relieved. I am looking forward to it because it finally allows me to legally (in the eyes of God at least) seriously look into the prospects of making my Asian concubine an official part of our family.

It all started two months ago. One day, as I was sitting on the can not reading a book because I had forgotten to replace the one I had recently finished, I had a figurative Come to Jesus. My life was beginning to stagnate. I was in a sort of rut. Everything I did mattered little or not at all, but I was still doing those things EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE. I mean, come on. How can not-really-teaching a bunch of adults to write formal essays do much of anything to change the world. Hell, most of the time, once they've gone through my class, I'm not even sure if I can say I've changed the way they write, much less anything else about them. Pretty depressing stuff, really.

So I decided to run the Iditarod.

As you all know, I'm sure, the Iditarod begins on the first Saturday of March. My porcelain epiphany came on January 29th (Kansas Day, for those of you who don't have it marked on your calendars and engraved in your minds as I do), which left me precious little time to prepare, especially considering that I: 1) had no experience, 2) dislike dogs (still do, in fact, but considerably more so now), 3) wasn't sure where the Iditarod took place except up North, and 4) had none of the necessary apparatus skill-sets to accomplish my goal. So, I went where everyone goes in times of self-exploration and troubled thoughts, the YMCA.

Strangely, the YMCA in Wichita had little to no information available on dogsled racing in general, much less specific information and guidance for gathering a sled team and the skills necessary to guide it across the Great White North, eh. I did, however, meet Guan "Klondike Stan" Ping, a one-time champion and underground legend in the dog sledding field. Actually, he found me. Apparently, though there is little interest in this fascinating sport on the surface in the Wichita area, there is a considerable sledding sub-culture that lives and works on the fringes of society.

The intricate inner workings of their culture and the social microcosm that they have created would take volumes for me to explain (fortunately, for the sake of my adventure, I'm a fast learner), but the long and short of it included, among other things, the removal my left testicle before I could be inducted into their complicated hierarchy. At my height of involvement, even after much personal sacrifice (besides the testicle they also claimed 1/3 of my pancreas, which was transplanted into a Red Panda--a hopelessly cute creature, which I was happy to share a portion of a vital organ with), I was still only ranked as Dog Herder, which may sound impressive, but is actually only slightly higher than the lowest man on their totem pole (which they actually have), the Sled Waxer.

Klondike Stan had heard through his formidable channels that there was a new, not-so-young interloper asking the wrong kind of questions and poking his nose where it didn't belong. So he took a personal interest. And, not surprisingly, he found me one afternoon while I was walking in Athletic Park, where everything surreal and strange happens to me.

"You want to run Iditarod?" he asked. He was obviously of Asian origin. I could tell not only by his strikingly eastern features but by the way he glaringly omitted the article "the" from the question he asked me. He would go on to omit most of his articles and some of his helping verbs in a most stereotypical kind of way.

Before I could answer, he pushed me to the ground using a cunning and under-appreciated form of martial arts known now as the Puffy Dog Style--it's a sort of unholy combination of kickboxing and the motions made to milk a yak (not surprisingly, these go hand-in-hand much of the time, which those of you in the yak-milking industry are well aware of).

“You not GOOD enough for Iditarod!” he shouted into my face while he held me prone with one sandal-clad foot to the throat.

This was no news to me. I knew well enough that I lacked pretty much everything that I needed to successfully participate in, much less win, the race.

Then he did something surprising. He reached out a deceptively delicate but heavily calloused hand to me and said, “But with my help, you WILL be.”

And there my journey began. Far too much happened in the next few weeks for me to go into great detail, but we were fortunate enough to have nearly a full month of snow cover here for me to practice and hone my skills. At the end of it, I became more dog-sledding machine than man. I ate and drank dog sledding. I lived and breathed dog sledding, literally at times. It was a little disgusting.

Then came the first Saturday of March. Unbeknownst to me, Klondike Stan had taken care of all of the entry fees and figured out all of the logistics of the thing for me while I was busy training.

“Why are you doing this for me, Stan?” I asked while we shared the ride up north in his ancient Dodge Dart. As far as I could tell, I still wasn’t anything special. Surely there were more qualified racers in the Society that he could have thrown his considerable energies and resources behind.

“I see in you kindred spirit, Pat-san,” he said. That was his nickname for me, even though I had told him several times that that sort of stereotypical wordplay, like a Native American friend calling a companion “Kemosabe,” was just a little too over the top for me. Still, he persisted, claiming that it was not, in fact, stereotypical if he, an Asian man, used the term. It would only be stereotypical if a white person, like me, represented an Asian man saying it. This made me feel a little better, but I still asked that he refrain from using the pet name in mixed circles.

“But I don’t think I’m good enough yet,” I insisted, laying it all on the line perhaps a little too late to do any good.

And then he reached across the front of the car and grabbed me by the shirt while keeping his eyes on the road. Drawing on muscle reserves that I knew he had but which he kept well concealed in his baggy, Buddhist-monk-style civara robes, he smashed my face into the car’s dashboard.

“You good enough,” he said. “You better be.”

And with those ominous words still ringing in my head, I went through my pre-race preparations once we arrived and mentally embiggened myself in a most cromulent way for the race.

So there I was, decked out in full-on winter regalia, astride a rickety and suspect bamboo sled (Stan had built it himself—and, though he was a brilliant theoretical dog-sled teacher, his sled-crafting skills, I was soon to find out, were not quite up to snuff) packed with everything that I would need for the next leg of the race. As the starting gun sounded, I cracked my bullwhip (which I need to thank my dad for picking up for me on one of his trips to Brazil) and my team of would-be champions leapt to life, nearly unseating me (figuratively speaking since I was standing) from the back of my sled.

If you’ve never blasted through sub-arctic temperatures in a raging blizzard behind the jolting and jostling of a team of expertly-bred sled dogs, then all I can say is that you’ve never truly lived. I highly recommend it—though, as you’ll soon see, I would recommend going through more traditional methods of placement behind said team.

No more than a quarter mile from the starting point, with me soundly in last place already, the right skid on my sled began to give out. Within two minutes of the first hints of trouble, my sled, quite literally, disintegrated beneath me. Still, unwilling to give up, I clung to the reigns for another fifty yards, letting the dogs drag me wherever they wanted to go (by that point steering was simply not an option), bound and determined to see this thing to the bitter end. And bitter end it was as my dogs tore me through some rocky terrain where I brained myself quite completely on an outcropping of glacier trash.

I came to almost a week later, lying on my back on a mat on the floor of what looked to be a temple (it was, in fact, not a temple, just a pagoda, which usually look suspiciously like temples even when they aren’t). A young Asian girl named Ming (the Merciless, I often called her, quite cleverly, during my weeks of rehabilitation), was rebinding my wounds.

“Good,” she said. “You’re finally awake. We must leave immediately before Ping can find you!” She sounded quite frantic and I found her command of the English language to be quite appreciatively non-stereotypical.

“What the . . .” I began, needlessly ellipsising my sentence because I had recently sustained a nearly fatal head wound. I still find myself ellipsising with some . . . .

“It’s Ping! Klondike Stan! He’s part of the Yakusa, and he bet nearly a million dollars on you to win the race! Since you were such an underdog (I still managed to smile inwardly at this reference, considering what I had been doing just a week earlier—get it? You’re pretty stupid if you don’t), he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on you, even if you only placed! Since you destroyed his sled, he assumes that you did it on purpose, and he’s been trying to track you down and kill you ever since!”

“I don’t . . .” I began again, then my brain started to clear up a little and I tried my hand at whole sentence construction. “But I thought Stan was from southern China. Aren’t the Yakusa Japanese?”

“Shut up with your details! I heard that he arrived in town this morning and he will kill you no matter where he’s from!” She was, I soon found, quite fond of the exclamation point. But it’s something of an endearing quality, I think.

From there a quite entertaining adventure took place that involved much kung-fu kicking and high flying action as Klondike Stan, my one-time mentor and undeniably abusive friend, chased Ming and I across northern China, Mongolia, and, for some reason, Andorra. How we got to these places would take a fortnight for me to explain, so just believe that it happened. At any rate, it was quite an experience. If you’ve never run for your very existence from a real-life Yakusa assassin and his scores of ninja minions, then all I can say is that you’ve never truly lived—or seen a real ninja, I’d wager. They are quite like they are depicted in docu-dramas like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, except shorter.

Needless to say, during our encounters, Ming and I grew quite close, which made things a little awkward once we finally cornered and killed Stan in an old west style shootout in Tempe, Arizona, and I was able to return home to Libby.

“Let’s just keep her as a concubine,” Libby suggested quite eagerly. “I’ve always wanted you to have an Asian concubine.” She's a real trooper, my wife. And we did, too, though it was a little weird since Ming insisted on sleeping in our closet and helping out with the chores around the house—useful, of course, to have an extra set of hands, but still a little weird. She says the closet reminds her of her childhood. So far, I’m afraid to ask what that means.

But we respect her endlessly, and really want to show how much we appreciate her as a person, not just a sexy-hot concubine, and make her a more permanent part of our family.

And that, my friends and family, is why we’ve decided to become Mormon. I haven’t really done much research so far on the religion or what it stands for, but it can’t be ALL bad if it lets men take multiple wives, right? I’ve put out a few feelers in the Mormon community in the Wichita area (which, strangely, is something of a sub-culture also and seems to have a multi-tiered membership system that I’m afraid I’ll have to donate body parts to gain access to—I just hope they let me keep my spleen, it’s seen me through some really tough times). Hopefully something will come of all this soon, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted either way!

Have a happy spring, everyone.