Home Country

by Slim Randles

I was one of the half-dozen guys holding Isaac Okleasik’s sled down while his dozen-plus sled dogs were screaming and lunging. It was the first Saturday in March back in 1973, and Isaac was one of the first mushers to leave on the first Iditarod Sled Dog Race. I was wearing bib number 37, and since we let a team go every two minutes, I had plenty of time to help others before it was my turn.

The announcer was counting down the seconds for Isaac, hundreds of cold people were standing around in Anchorage’s semi-pro baseball stadium, cheering and clapping.  And then Isaac, a legendary dog driver as well as a legendary member of the elite Eskimo Scouts during World War II, looked at me and said, “Where we go?”

“Nome, Isaac.”

“Hokay.”

Then while the world was going insane, Isaac walked up the long string of dogs and knelt down and talked to his lead dog. Then he started back toward the sled.

“30 seconds,” said the p.a. system.

 Isaac got back to the sled and stood on the runners. He was ready.  I had to ask.
  
“Why did you go up to the lead dog, Isaac?”

 “He don’t know where we go, so I tell him.”

“Zero!” said the announcer.

Dog and sled holders pulled away from the team just like a gantry releases a rocket, and Isaac Okleasik shot out of sight down the trail. He must have given his leader good directions, because 1,100 miles later, Isaac was in Nome.

And on the first Saturday of every March since then, I say a little prayer for the dogs and the men and women on trail on that long, cold camping trip. It’s lonely and quiet out there … and it’s a very long way to Nome.

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Brought to you by Dogsled, A True Tale of the North. Now a Kindle ebook.

Home Country

by Slim Randles

   Windy Wilson was cruising around the other day, in search of an audience, but the cold drove him indoors … at the elementary school cafeteria.

  “What’s that you say? Coldest you ever been? Well, kids, let me tell you somethin’ about cold!

  “When I was just a tad, we was comin’ off what they used to call an Ice Age, you know. Thassa fact. It was so cold back then we had to use special thermometers to see how cold it was. Mixed anti-freeze in with the mercury or it wouldn’t work. If you had a regular thermometer, had to bring it in the house to make it work.

  “Speakin’ of bringin’ things in the house … most mornin’s it was so cold we had to bring the milk cow in the house to milk her. If you tried it outside, them faucets would just break right off! Why, one time the train coming here from the east got so cold it plumb froze solid at sixty miles an hour. Yessir, just locked up, wheels and steam boiler and the whole caboodle. This happened about four miles east a-here, but them passengers was safe. You see, that train was going fast enough when it froze that it just slid the rest of the way into town and came to a dead stop right by the station house. Thassa fact.”

  Windy warmed to his cold subject.

  “’Course, by the time I come along, it was gettin’ harder to find them woolly mammoths, you know. Got too dang warm for their wooliness. Yessir, they all migrated to Kentucky and holed up in a big ol’ cave. Named it in their honor, a-course. Look it up on the map. Call it Mammoth Cave.

  “So it ain’t really whatcha call cold out here, but you kids should probably still dress warm … you know … ‘case the temperature drops.”


Brought to you by Windy’s Words of Wisdom, a regular feature on the podcast. Listen to him at www.homecountryshow.com.

Home Country

by Slim Randles

   Steve finished the ride up the mountain on Ol’ Snort and just sat there in the saddle, looking at his cabin for several minutes. Each board had been personally nailed in place, and the epicenter of his delight, of course, was the turret. After stabling Snort and feeding him, Steve went in, built a fire in the Home Comfort range’s firebox, and then went up into the turret for a look at … well, everything.

   Down the long, timbered ridges to the valley below, and off to the hills on the other side of Lewis Creek, it was all there. Up here there were no worries about doctoring cattle or helping cows to calve. If a corral board fell down, well … okay. The other guys could handle it. When he and Snort came up here, all that temporarily went away.

  Steve climbed down and put the coffee pot on, swept up some wind-borne dust that had invaded the place, and then went up the ladder again, this time with a cup of coffee.

  The light of the late sun shining on Miller Pond, just out of town there, turned first a glassy brass, then a deeper purple as the world prepared to rest. The lights in the town appeared and he looked down and smiled. Behind each of those lights was a friend of his. In anyone’s book, that’s a smiling situation.

  It wasn’t easy finding this hole-up spot. He’d had a bunch of false starts before finding it. It’s never easy. The real estate sales piranhas don’t like to deal with them because – if it’s a real hole-up spot – there’s no money in it. Basically, if lots of people want it, it can’t be a hole-up spot.

  Steve considered writing a book once, but he didn’t like words, so he revised that plan. He thought of painting a picture once, too, but the result looked worse than what’s on the wall at Parent’s Night in the second grade. His twelve chords on the guitar didn’t lend itself to becoming a composer, either.

  But these were the kinds of things a guy can do in a hole-up spot.

  He smiled as he sipped his coffee in his turret, in his cabin on his hole-up spot, with his horse, Ol’ Snort, happily munching his supper out in his stable. If he ever decided to become artistic in any way, he now had the perfect place to do it. But sometimes it’s enough just being a good cowboy and sipping coffee and smiling at the world.

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Brought to you by the national award-winning book A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right. Read a free sample at www.slimrandles.com.

Home Country - The Grandpa Boogie

by Slim Randles

There is a payoff, Doc told us, for getting the aches and pains of old age. Doc should know. We have it on good authority that he is actually older than a flat, brown rock.

  "A payoff?" Steve said. Steve's an old cowpuncher who has collected hurt places for a long time now. He kinda wriggled around, reliving in two seconds' time two buck offs in the rocks, one horn wound from a nasty mama cow and a groin kick from a bronc mule.

  "Sure," said Doc, in his usual cheerful way. "You get gray hair, or maybe kinda bald like ol' Steve here, and you develop wisdom, which we all know just means you know not to argue with your wife, right? So then what happens? Your grandchildren think you have all the answers."

  "So you have to help them with homework?" Dud said.

  "Naw, not a bit. What I mean is, you have your grandchildren all primed for some real Olympic-style embarrassment."

  Doc leaned over conspiratorially. "I live to embarrass my grandchildren."

  We had a good laugh, but Bert wanted specifics.

  "With me," Doc said, "it's dancing. You see, they are all teenagers now, and therefore they are cool and know everything, and the world couldn't turn without them. So when their friends come over and they crank that stereo up to where it's killing the neighbor's geraniums, I ask them just once to turn it down."

  "Takes me a lot more than once," Bert said. "I swear those kids are hard of hearing."

  "But do you dance for them?" Doc asked. "You see, if they don't turn it down, I kinda totter to my feet and start what the kids call the Grandpa Boogie. I mean I shake it like an Egyptian pharaoh. I wiggle and jiggle and stick out my chin like this ... and sort of thrust myself around the floor until one of them dashes over and shuts off the music. Then I go sit down and read the paper again. The first couple of times I did that, the kids got me to one side and begged me never to do that again. I guess they were just jealous of my moves. Well, I hated to show them up in front of their friends, seeing as I could dance better than they could, but the music was too loud. I tell them when the music gets more than just kinda regular, I can't help myself and dance fever hits me like a sledgehammer."

  "So," Steve said, "how did you do it? I mean, show us, OK?"

  So Doc stood up and went into spasms, twitches and slides that had the whole coffee shop cracking up, and people didn't know whether to applaud or call the paramedics.

  "The really great thing," said Doc, sitting back down, out of breath, with his coffee, "is that these kids think they invented being cool. And I blind-sided them with great mo-o-o-o-ves! I showed them a slink or two.

  "And you'd be surprised how much quieter it is when they come over these days."

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Brought to you by the personally inscribed new book “Home Country,” at www.slimrandles.com.

Home Country: Jenkins Cabin

Jenkins Cabin

by Slim Randles

We all know that someone will find Jenkins's cabin. Someday. Oh, it's up there in those hills somewhere. We all know that.

It's become a friendly object of conjecture and speculation. No one living has seen it, as far as we know. Jenkins himself died quietly when he was on one of his infrequent trips to town for supplies. Funny guy, that Jenkins.

He worked in the city for years, mostly as a night watchman in a factory that made diapers. Didn't really enjoy people much, and told us many times how nice it was to just be in the huge factory when it was quiet. Then one day he decided to move to the mountains and make pretty things out of leather. Once in a while he'd have his coffee at the counter at the Mule Barn, but often as not, he'd camp out on the edge of town for the two or three days it took him to sell his crafts and buy supplies. He'd smile and wave from his campsite, then he'd be gone one morning. We wouldn't see him again for months.

Now and then someone would ask him where his cabin was, and he'd just point toward the mountains and say, "Up there." How far up there? "A ways." What was his cabin like? "Not too big."

And so we came to regard the little cabin as an intriguing mystery, an object of local legend. After he died, several of the fellows tried to backtrack him to find the place, but Jenkins evidently didn't take the same trail each time, as though he wanted his quiet times protected from even a friendly visit from one of us. During his lifetime, we respected his wishes.

In this country, a man has a perfect right to be a little strange. And, truth be known, we hold a certain admiration for those of us who hear different instructions. But there is something in the human spirit, also, that begs to have its mysteries solved. So now, several times each year, one or two of us will use the mystery of the lost cabin as an excuse to poke our noses into the nuances and seclusions of these hills. We play off our curiosity against our wishes to respect a man's privacy, even when he's gone.

We have yet to discover Jenkins's lost cabin. Maybe we never will. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, either.
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Brought to you by Home Country, a book of the best columns from the first five years, at www.slimrandles.com.