Props

I am a little hesitant to put this one up but today is a day I could use a prop or two so here goes. Please bear with my ego. I've never been very good at receiving compliments so I am not sure how to react to this.

Maybe it's that the race is coming up in a few weeks or that I am helping out with another book about it, but I have heard from a couple people about my 30-year-old Iditarod book recently. Both come from Alaska writers I have the greatest respect for and whose own writing often leaves me in awe.

One wrote on Facebook, just out of the blue. something like "I just re-read your Iditarod book. It holds up after all these years. It's still the best book about the Iditarod. It's a classic." That knocked me over. But, hey, a classic? I thought you had to be dead. Anyway, thanks, and what I have done pales in the face of what he has done in both quality and quantity.

Then yesterday I was talking with another friend who covered the race for the newspaper and is the best of all the people who have done that. We were discussing ways to write our current project. He mentioned years ago telling a teacher he thought he would like to be writer as he grew up. The teacher told him just one thing: "Don't just be an observer." Then in our own conversation we figured we both had accomplished that in that we flew along with the race (he even rode a snowmachine over large sections of the trail), slept on the ground at 20 below, ate, traveled and slept with mushers along the whole trail. We were immersed if not actually running the race. In that context he brought up something he had told a dog musher in conversation once: He said of himself, in writing about the race, "I like to put the reader standing next to the trail seeing what I see. But, Tim puts the reader on the runners." Again a bit overwhelming.

Our conversation came to a close with our usual gentle kidding about one aspect of writing about the race we share but in different ways. It is about the romance that surrounds the race, the heritage. I have always teased him about all the sunsets and sunrises that show up in his stories and in return he gets on me about all the historic cabins that show up in mine. One night years ago we were both working at the paper and the newest Iditarod writer called in with his story. He complained he was having difficulty finding things to write about in slow times. I suggested he do what Frank does and describe a sunset. Not too far away Frank shouted loud enough to be heard through the phone, "do what Tim does, find a historic cabin." The writer hung up on us.