Mrs. Miller, where are you? WHERE ARE YOU!

     A friend started a thread on facebook recently where for each of ten days we were asked to list one of our favorite movies along with a poster. Unfortunately I am in the deep woods with rather poor internet access to poster supplies.
     The exercise did sound like fun though and as I thought through my favorite movies I pulled one from my meager library and watched it. The movie is "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." It stars Julie Christie and Warren Beatty. It takes place in the late 1800s at a small and tacky mining camp in the hills of Oregon. Beatty is a small-time gambler who attempts to build a sporting house to service the miners and take their money at gambling tables. Christie plays an experienced madame who brings some highly qualified talent and some social grace to the operation.
      Along the way a major corporation wants to buy Beatty's business and his refusal leads the corporation to send a hired killer to eliminate him. We also learn that Mrs. Miller occasionally visits an opium den in the Chinese section of town.
     Beatty and Christie spar over their combined business and create enough sexual tension to please any soap fan.
     So now comes the spoiler alert. In the end McCabe and the killer hunt each other through town in a snowstorm. The killer wounds Beatty but he pulls a Derringer and shoots the  guy between the eyes. Then McCabe begins a trudge through the deep snow leaving a blood trail until he can go no further, sits in a snowbank and the movie leaves him right there, right where Mrs. Miller should find him and save him.
    Only she doesn't. What we saw in the original movie was Julie Christie lying on her side in a bottom bunk of a smoke-fill den where she draws on a long-stemmed pipe, her eyes glazed and unaware of McCabe's demise or the world around her except for the Chinese woman who attends to her.
     That was the theater version. In this Turner Classic Movies version they left that scene out. What an outrage. How dare some overzealous pollyanna who thinks he's going to save us from a life of drugs by leaving out the seminal outcome of this movie.
    When Turner started buying and converting movies I remember there was some outrage at the company colorizing black and white films. To my mind this is worse, changing the substance is an absolute outrage. I don't need Ted Turner to protect me from the evils in the world.
    As much as I love the movies of my youth I will never buy a Turner-edited movie again.
    An aside: Leonard Cohen's music in "McCabe" is perfect.

To buid a fire (with an apology to Jack London)

For every mile of the Iditaord trail and from everyone who ever traveled it behind a dog team there is a story, told and retold. Joe May is one of the best at it. This one is no exception. Note that Joe went on to win the Iditarod race that year.

 By JOE MAY

On the 1980 Iditarod it was at least -50° between Kaltag and Old Woman on the way to Unalakleet, I left Kaltag an hour behind Ernie Baumgartner and shortly came upon him shivering in his sleeping bag, in his sled, a few miles out, seriously cold. I was cold, it was cold. We discussed the situation and I went on a bit to the first dead spruce beside the trail and built a fire. The tree had offered itself up exactly when and where we needed it. Ernie arrived shortly and hustled more wood. Soon Herbie Nayukpuk caught up with us, anchored his team, and added another tree to the fire. Herbie said he'd never been that cold (that from an Eskimo). We stayed several hours until good to travel before moving on. By then the fire pit was 8 ft. wide, 6 ft deep, and had inadvertently crept out into the trail.

The next team to arrive, much later and in the dark, unaware, drove his whole outfit headlong into the (by then) cold fire pit...dogs on the bottom, sled on top, and musher up to his ass in squirming dogs and ashes.

Other teams that night faithfully following preceding tracks, as is the custom, drove into the pit with the same result. (Most mushers back then when on uncomplicated trail ran without a headlight to conserve batteries)

The cursing and yelling (well, almost) reverberated through the trees all the way to Nome.

Herbie's gone now...to where good Esqimos go, Ernie never admitted to the fire, and I'm too old to lie.

(I'm really, really sorry, Dewey).

COPYRIGHT © JOE MAY 2019

When this was going on, I was living in a 10x14 cabin on the banks of the  Susitna River writing The Last Great Race. I caught updates about the race on the radio. After Joe left Old Woman he beat everyone to the next  checkpoint at Unalakleet. There a radio reporter cornered him and I heard Joe on the radio telling the unsuspecting reporter his dogs were just about to give it up. He said they were tired, some didn't want to go any more, some were looking sick. He said he was going to try for one more checkpoint and if they didn't improve he was going to drop out. I laughed so loud it got the dogs I was living with to barking. I knew what the reporter didn't. Joe wasn't talking to him, he was talking to any competitors behind him who might hear the broadcast. Joe never saw another musher after that and he cruised into Nome for the win unchallenged. (With those dogs who were ready to quit.) Joe later told me while he was resting and feeding his dogs in Shaktoolik, the next checkpoint to the north, the race marshal flew in and demanded to look at the dogs that were in such tough shape.