Which gets them a small but rabid audience, and for six straight
days in San Francisco, sold-out or near-sold-out crowds were happily taking in all the ambition and precocity Sonic Youth and Shellac had to offer. Shellac played three straight nights in town,
immediately followed by three more by Sonic Youth. Watching them onstage,
you’d never once think “nostalgia trip” — partly because neither
band has songs that are anything like what you’d call “greatest hits,” but
mainly because what both bands were offering was stronger than cheap
nostalgia; their music is too honest, too new, for that tag. The final
shows of each of their three-night stands were simply artful without
getting artsy: sober, aggressive and at times downright angry. But there
were moments that were open, playful and often beautiful. The wrinkles are
starting to show, but both bands are having the time of their lives.

The start of Sonic Youth’s show was a dry hum of feedback, hanging for a
few long moments, when out of nowhere came guitarist Thurston Moore,
leaping into the air, pouncing on his distortion pedal and launching the
band into “Anagrama,” the first song from a 1997 self-released EP that set
the stage for
“A Thousand Leaves.” It’s an elliptical song, but quite different from the angular songs the quartet was making during its
rise to glory in the 1980s. Those earlier songs, like “Expressway to Yr
Skull,” “Schizophrenia” or “Eric’s Trip,” were punk rock as splatter-art,
waves of feedback crashing back and forth against the riffs to give them
added force. “Anagrama,” in contrast, is noisy but much more tightly
controlled: the feedback purposeful, the riffs ringing clearly, the total
effect hypnotic.

The band’s vision — if not its sound — has become much clearer. The band
approached the songs from “A Thousand Leaves” — which made up the majority
of the two-hour set — as if they were free-jazz tunes; guitarists Moore and
Lee Renaldo, along with bassist Kim Gordon, play off, against and with each
other as if possessed of an unbreakably psychic bond, breaking out in
random directions after using the opening verses and hooks of songs like
“Sunday,” “Wildflower Soul” or “Karen Coltrane” as starting points (the
latter title is telling; their sensibility is not unlike John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”-era sheets-of-sound approach). The whole time, drummer Steve Shelley acted as both guide and explorer, calling the noise and feedback inward, or pushing it back out again. This is what
happens when you meld wild musical ambition with maturity: a collection of
moody, foreboding but somehow uplifting songs that a group with nearly 20
years of experience can bend to its whim. Even as the songs pushed the 10-minute mark, very little of it seemed self-indulgent; closing the show with a hail of atonal feedback squeals, it sounded less like noisemongering and more like a sigh of relief.

If Sonic Youth’s newest songs are tightly wound — sounding so even as they
expand outward — the music Albini makes with Shellac sounds ready to
snap. Like Sonic Youth, Albini fought the good punk-rock fight in the ’80s
in Big Black, supporting independent labels, helping to lay down fan
networks and never taking orders. And like Sonic Youth, he’s made some
concessions to the mainstream, producing major-label albums for Nirvana, P.J.
Harvey, Bush and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. He does it, he says, just
to pay the bills and to keep Shellac going. A trio with bassist
Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer, Shellac’s music is harsh, muscular
and, recently, more musical. The opening track on “Terraform” (which
opened their live set as well), “Didn’t We Deserve a Look at You the Way You
Really Are,” rides Weston’s slow, dublike bass line and Trainer’s
bone-snapping snare hits for over 10 minutes, building up to
a barrage of slashing guitars. It’s a far cry from the days when all
Albini’s music did was slash, on caustic Big Black songs about wife beaters
and race baiters.

Big Black was noise; the Shellac that showed up onstage has mastered the
power of silences — pregnant moments of quietude that make you fearful of what’s coming next. The staccato riffs of songs like “Disgrace” and “Canada” revealed the band to be aggressive but controlled; Albini is no longer waging a sonic war of attrition. Like Sonic Youth’s performance, Shellac’s set was at once noisy and delicate, but the final effect of its music is quite different. Sonic Youth stuns you with how beautifully it stretches out its musical rage;
Shellac scares you with how powerfully it compresses it into diamond-sharp
points. Regardless of the method, it’s music that could only spring from too many years of few people caring but yourself, and growing older until you start
making the music of your life. And what about success? Depends on what
you mean by that. As Albini cavorted onstage, a hilariously overstuffed
billfold threatened to pop out of his back jeans pocket. Between songs,
one person in the audience demanded to know: “What’s in the wallet,
Steve?”

“Everything but money,” Albini replied, sounding like a million bucks. And
then he tuned his guitar for the next song.

The Head Pull is pretty much what it sounds like: big strong men pulling on each other’s heads. Two Inuit lie face-to-face on their bellies, heads linked by a loop of canvas cargo webbing. At the signal, they attempt to pull one another, by the head, over the line between them.

The Inuit Games guidelines list 12 pulls. Not all of them will be part of the week’s events. The Ear Pull, for example, has been omitted owing to health and safety concerns. Ditto the Mouth Pull (“Competitor grabs mouth of opponent …”) and the Ear Lift (“The weight is looped around any ear and the competitor … walks forward, carrying it with his ear for as far a distance as his ear will allow”).

Aside from an occasional tendency toward the gruesome, the main identifying feature of Inuit sport is its compactness. Games are divided as follows: Pulls, pushes, reaches, kicks, twists and rotations. The entire Olympiad could be staged in a large walk-in closet.

It’s not for want of space. North of the tree line, space is the prevailing — one might almost say the only — geographical feature. Baffin is tundra, a scrabbly blanket of moss and shale laid out without a wrinkle. Up here, minute changes of elevation are optimistically dubbed hills. Caribou antlers are nailed up on posts, as though to compensate for the missing trees. (Lest you think it an unalluring locale, imagine a four-hour, 360-degree sunset at midnight.)

Inuit Games are compact for the simple reason that they are indoor sports. The Inuit practiced plenty of outdoor athletics — hunting, sledding, marathon walking — but this wasn’t sport, it was life. The Games were what you did to pass the time when the blizzards hit and you couldn’t see to hunt. And igloos were small — not much larger than the jump circle on a basketball court.

That is, in fact, where this week’s games are being staged: center court in the Ataguttaaluk School gymnasium. Igloolik has no sports arena or landscaped playing fields. This is less a matter of funding than of geology. North of 60 degrees latitude, the ground is permafrost: rock-hard most of the year, muck the rest of it. Grass won’t grow. Buildings have to be set on posts to keep from sinking in the thaw. Architectural diversity is more trouble than it’s worth; the town is basically boxes on a flat surface. I saw a picture of it in winter. It looked like inside my freezer.

The official motions for quiet. As the crowd numbers fewer than 100, this is not hard to achieve. However, as many are children, it is somewhat hard to maintain. A pair of toddlers are carrying out a competition of their own, the winner being the one who can shriek the loudest while running wind sprints across the gym floor. The athletes barely pay it mind. I remark on this to one of the coaches. “Why would they get mad?” he says. “If something messes you up, oh well. There’s other events.”

Competition runs somewhat counter to the Inuit character. To survive an Arctic winter, communities worked together and everything was shared. A great hunter had no more food than the next guy; he just threw more dinner parties. Why, then, have the games been turned into a competition? Because otherwise there would be no Inuit Games. Left to their own devices, modern Inuit teens prefer to spend their time playing basketball and watching Much TV (Canada’s answer to MTV). An impromptu survey of T-shirts and baseball caps in the gym today reveals 17 sports logos and 11 heavy metal bands.

This is not to say that the athletes don’t care whether they win. The winning team has a chance to compete in the international Arctic Winter Games. Depending on which country is hosting them, this could mean a trip to Russia, Finland, Greenland or Alaska.

Down in the ring, the winning head is nodding and grinning. It belongs to a local heart-breaker named Bobby. Someone has written “I love you, Bobby” in ball-point on his arm. Bobby wears a cigarette lighter in a fringed leather pouch around his neck, as though it were an ornament. Given that a pack of Rothmann’s costs more than $10, it may well be.

The irony of 24-hour daylight is that it happens where you need it least. Polar
towns provide the longest days in the world and very little to fill them with. Igloolik has
no restaurants, bars, movie theaters or museums. (Graffiti on the town water tank:
“What to do?”)

Games week is an exception. Every night there’s a community event: harpoon
throwing, drum dancing, a whipping contest (empty pop cans standing in for sled dogs).
Tonight it’s bannock-making. Bannock is a Scottish quickbread, introduced, along with
jigs, tea and tuberculosis, by whalers in the 19th century.

Bannock-making is part of the Good Woman contest. Before Inuit women won the
right to pull heads and twist fingers, their participation in the Northern Games was largely
limited to Good Woman competitions. “The Good Woman,” to quote official Games
literature, “is chosen for her skills and talent (seal-skinning, bannock-making, caribou-cutting, etc.) rather than her looks.”

The schedule says 7 p.m., but it doesn’t say where. Someone suggests the baseball
diamond. People up here are laboring under the delusion that it’s warm outside (it’s 40
degrees) and have scheduled most of the evening activities outdoors.

People are on the baseball diamond, but they’re not making bannock. I’m not altogether
sure what they’re doing. A batter has hit a fly ball, and a catcher has caught it. Rather than
return the ball to the pitcher, the catcher chases the batter and throws the ball at him. The
batter returns to the sidelines. He is apparently out, or perhaps just sore.

The man standing beside me says it’s a combination of “Northern” and regular baseball.

“How many strikes?” I ask him.

“They’re still trying to decide that.”

The Inuit are not big on rules. Earlier, I asked a Games official how many people there
are on a Northern baseball team. He replied that it didn’t matter, so long as “there’s lots of
people.” One of this evening’s teams appears to be a bit short. “Where are the
outfielders?” I ask the man next to me. He ponders this quietly. “They’re not out there. I
don’t know why.”

The bannock contest, it turns out, is over at the outdoor skating rink. As it’s summer,
there is no ice in the rink, only gravel and dirt. Igloolik’s skating rink looks very much like
its baseball diamond, which both look very much like the lawns, the hotel grounds and the
beach.

Women are hunkered down in front of portable Coleman stoves and great hulking
icebergs of Crisco. The winning sample is passed around. It’s sort of a round, oily biscuit,
or round, biscuity oil. I seek out the judge to ask how the winning entry tastes different
from the others.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t had any.”

“So how do you know hers is the best?”

“She finished first.” In a land with no timber and $1-an-ounce propane, a Good Woman is
one who can make four batches before the fire goes out.

Julie Oolayou is the Flo-Jo of the Inuit Games. She’s broken three records and is about to
break another, the One-Foot High Kick. Clarification: “One foot” refers to the number of
feet with which you kick, not the height of the kick (unless you are a visiting spastic
journalist, in which case it refers to both).

The high kick is one of the few Inuit games that require equipment. As a rule, Arctic
nomads tended to shun athletic endeavors that necessitated hauling racquets and shoulder
pads across the tundra. What little equipment is used tends to be things you’d find lying
around the igloo. Under the equipment heading for Parka Rotation, for example, the text
reads simply, “big parka.” Traditionally, the high kick target was hung from the ceiling
of the igloo. Here, it hangs from a wooden high kick stand, a simple, spindly gallows,
like what you draw to play Hangman.

Oolayou removes one shoe and one sock, revealing an ankle bracelet and an Edmonton
Oilers rub-on tattoo. She takes three easy strides, crouches and springs, clearing seven
feet the way other people hop a curb.

Next up is Oolayou’s rival, Leona Nakashuk. She spits on her sneaker soles. She eyes
the target, a small sealskin seal hanging at eye level. In the stands, an old man begins
chanting songs of the elders. Rattled, Nakashuk breaks her advance. “Anaq!” (This is a
word in Inuktitut, the Inuit native tongue. It means, “Shit.”)

Six minutes and as many false starts go by. There seems to be no time limit. This
doesn’t surprise me. Where day goes on all night and night is six months long, time is a
fuzzy concept. Ask someone how long it takes to cross the bay by motorboat, and he’ll
answer you in gallons, not minutes. I ask games coordinator Angie Luciani if the lack of
time limit has to do with the Inuit concept of time. Actually, it has more to do with the
Inuit concept of planning. “There’s supposed to be a three-minute limit,” Luciani says.
“But nobody brought a stopwatch.”

To understand the Knuckle Hop, it helps to have played Bloody Knuckles. To be sure,
strength and skill are required — you are hopping on toes and fists with your body flat-out
rigid in between. But what is key here is that you are landing on your knuckles. With no
gloves. On a wood floor. The Knuckle Hop, says acting official Gabriel Nirlungayuk, “is
about how much pain you can endure.”

The most coveted seats, therefore, are the ones with a view of the nurses’ station. I
watch as a succession of grimacing men run up and plunge their fists into bowls of ice
water. Their knuckles are dotted with round raw nicks, as though someone went after
them with a potato peeler.

There is no Women’s Knuckle Hop. This is either outrageous sexism on the part of the
men, or outrageous good sense on the part of the women.

I can’t tell you much about the closing ceremonies, as they’re being held in Inuktitut. The
mayor is giving a speech, and the audience has taken the opportunity to chat with their
friends about the polar bear spotted outside town and the rumor that star athlete Kristine
Ootova has a hickey beneath her scarf. It is unclear whether this has to do with the
popularity of the mayor (low) or the popularity of speeches (very low). (Earlier this week, a
visiting politician stopped his speech to reassure his straying audience that he was “almost
finished, OK?”)

The mayor passes the ceremonial blubber lamp (Baffin’s answer to the Olympic torch) to
the mayor of Hall Beach, site of next year’s games. The Inuit Games are officially closed.
A group of athletes pushes aside the folding chairs and the High Kick seal and breaks out
a box of basketballs.

From around the bend, we hear the jingle of dog harnesses and leap to the camera. It’s Jim Hendricks, from Denali Park, Alaska. “Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you, keep going, go straight, good boy!” he calls to Buddy, his leader. Then, to us, “Where the hell am I? How far to Dawson?” “Just eight miles,” we shout. “Oh, Christ, we’ll NEVER make it!” he cries in mock despair.

Watching Hendricks, I am awestruck. His beard is encrusted in ice. His 12 dogs, true athletes, are running gamely after climbing 3,800-foot King Solomon’s Dome with a 150-pound sled.

Welcome to Day Six of the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile international sled dog race from Whitehorse, Yukon, to Fairbanks, Alaska. Twenty-eight mushers from six nations, including Japan, France and Germany, started the race on Feb. 9. They travel 7-12 mph, running six hours, resting six hours, until they cross the finish line about 12 days later. Top prize is $30,000 and a hero’s welcome.

Mushers cross some of the meanest, least populated terrain in North America, following trails first used by fur traders, gold seekers, missionaries and the Canadian Mounties, who considered the successful completion of a winter “patrol” through this country one of their highest honors. Mushers (“mush” comes from the French marche! — meaning “walk”) battle fierce winds, temperatures that drop as low as 80 below without wind chill, icy open water and four summits higher than 3,000 feet. On average, one-third succumb to the hardships of the trail and “scratch.”

I am here working as part of a television crew assigned to produce a piece for German television. Our story’s protagonist is Ralf Zielinski, a 41-year-old German nuclear power plant engineer and mushing enthusiast. With weeks of government-endowed vacation to enjoy, Ralf’s goal in running the Quest is to “relax and recreate.” We had hoped he was joking, but so far, Ralf is true to his word. He immediately claimed last place and settled in.

The Yukon Quest, while equal in length to the better-known Iditarod, is considered more challenging by many mushers. The distance between checkpoints, where mushers can meet their dog handlers and pick up food, is often greater — as long as 235 miles — and the terrain is more varied and arguably more difficult. But the most significant difference is one of power — dog power. Quest mushers are limited to 14 dogs, which is intended to allow smaller kennel owners to compete and is meant to ensure that more time can be spent caring for each dog.

The Quest is deliberately less commercial than the Iditarod. Backed largely by local sponsors, the race’s low profile has enabled organizers to avoid the kind of criticism that has dogged the Iditarod in recent years. According to mushers who have run both races, the Quest is what the Iditarod used to be, before large-money sponsors put pressure on race organizers to become more PC and conform to the standards of the Lower 48. In fact, the Quest encourages values of the North, expecting mushers to look to each other for support on the trail. And indeed, mushers travel together, build campfires and tell stories as their dog teams bed down, nose to tail. But that doesn’t mean mushers aren’t competitive. Former Iditarod champion Rick Mackey, who stopped running that race in favor of the Quest, sums it up: “I’m not here for the money. I’m here to win. The money is second.”

Dawson, the second-largest city in the Yukon by merit of a population of 1,800, is a six-hour drive north from Whitehorse and serves as a mandatory 36-hour rest stop. Nestled on the banks of the mighty Yukon River, Dawson became an overnight sensation in 1897 when George Carmack and his partners, Tagish Charlie and Skookum Jim, struck gold where Rabbit Creek (soon to be renamed Bonanza) empties into the Klondike. Stampeders caused Dawson’s population to swell to 35,000, but its heyday was brief and the decline swift, and since then, the town has been just another small burg on the Yukon. Today, Dawson is finding a revival as a tourist outpost, as the millions generated by Diamond Tooth Gertie’s casino fund the renovation of the downtown, where colorful wooden cabins and historic storefronts line the boardwalks. As one Alaskan said, “I hate to be positive, but they (read: the Canadians) did a nice job with this town.”

The Quest favorites arrived on Valentine’s Day and bedded their teams down in the campground under tarps, snuggled in mounds of hay. Defending champion John Schandelmeier, a trapper from Paxson, Alaska, was first in, followed by Mark May, a veterinarian from North Pole, Alaska. Local favorite Frank Turner from Whitehorse, Yukon, was just two hours behind.

The race’s current drama revolves around Mackey, fifth in, who did the unthinkable and overslept by four hours in a cabin 50 miles from Dawson. He was finally roused by a puzzled mid-pack musher who shook him awake, saying, “What did you do? Give up?” When Mackey arrived in Dawson, he was still visibly upset. Sleep deprivation is a major factor in long-distance races. Mushers tell tales of mirages seen under the Northern Lights — log cabins with lit windows, inviting warm blue lakes. At checkpoint lodges, we see confused and exhausted mushers fall asleep face down on the tables in front of their meals.

We are killing time, waiting for Ralf. We take shifts standing outside by the tripod or sitting in the Downtown Hotel’s bar, filled with mushers, dog handlers and the motley crew of 60 journalists. Most everyone smokes, everyone drinks. Conversations revolve around dogs: watering dogs, feeding dogs, exercising dogs.

Journalists were hoping to conjure up some controversy after the newest and largest corporate sponsor, Fulda Reifen, a German tire manufacturer, literally moved into Whitehorse, taking over an office and hanging Fulda banners under highway signs and on City Hall. But the locals just seem happy to have their $180,000 and a pledge not to interfere too much. Money is scarce in the Yukon, where the economy depends on mining and tourism — and it’s even scarcer in winter.

At 6 p.m., Kathy Swenson pulls in. At 37, Swenson
is the first nursing mother to run the Quest. I am
fascinated by her. Swenson’s menagerie at her log
home in Two Rivers, Alaska, includes 50 sled dogs,
four kids, and a Jack Russell terrier — the polar
opposite of my urban, single, working woman life.
Rick Swenson, her ex-husband, five-time Iditarod
winner and a legendary figure in Alaska sports, lives
next door.

Swenson was injured early in the race when she lost
control of her sled on an icy corner, flew off the trail
and slammed into a tree. Yes, the dogs are true
athletes, but mushers are, too: They often get off the
sled and run alongside their teams to lighten the load,
especially up hills. Swenson’s wrenched knee was a
huge blow so early in the race. Her dog handler, Chris
Knott, tried to remedy the situation by building a
bicycle seat onto the back of the sled.

Knott fits the statistical profile of a typical Alaskan –
in his 20s, male, been in Alaska just a few years.
Maybe it’s the effect of his red hair, but to me, he
always looks so happy that he’s glowing. Knott is the
expert on all things canine: training diet (raw chicken,
horse meat, beef heart and liver, mixed with dog
food, chicken fat and canola oil); breed (part Alaskan
malamute, Eskimo husky and wolf); ideal running
temperature (minus 25 degrees). He teaches me the
dogs’ names and their personalities: Psycho, the little
female leader with two different colored eyes,
painfully shy but tough as nails on the trail; Harley, a
big, tan-colored male and reliable veteran of two
Iditarods; Socks, named for his black fur and white
paws, running his fifth 1,000-mile race.

Day Seven: The lead mushers left Dawson just
before midnight, well-rested and well-fed.
Schandelmeier still has all 14 of his dogs. May,
Turner and Mackey have “dropped” dogs who are
hurt or ill and left them in care of the handlers and
vets. Mushers must finish with at least six. Yukon
Quest veterinarians work with mushers at every
checkpoint to examine each dog, checking for leg
injuries, circulation, pulse rate and overall well-being.
In situations where man and dog depend on each
other for survival, no one can afford to have injured
or ill dogs on the trail.

Ralf has not arrived yet, and except for the occasional
aerial sighting by bush pilot, he is out of contact, in
the great void of the Quest’s longest and hilliest run,
over the Black Hills and King Solomon’s Dome. Not
yet halfway through the race, he is over two days
behind the leaders. With little information to go on,
we decide to move on. The agenda: Drive south to
Whitehorse, then across the Alaska Highway to
Fairbanks, where we will be based for the second half
of the race. It is a long, stressful drive on treacherous
roads. We nervously observe two road signs at the
junction with Dempster Highway: Inuvik, 350 km.
No service, 300 km.

Day Eight: I am reading John McPhee’s “Coming into
the Country.” He calls Alaska “a place so vast and
unpeopled that if anyone could figure out how to steal
Italy, Alaska would be a place to hide it.” The
scenery is spectacular, but after two days of road
food, I wouldn’t mind running into a Tuscan village
right now.

Day Nine: News from the front: Kathy Swenson
arrived in Eagle, the first checkpoint after Dawson,
with a dead dog in her sled bag. Socks simply tipped
over five miles down the trail from Dawson, Swenson
said. She attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,
but to no avail. Socks was a veteran of the 1992, ’93
and ’95 Iditarods and the 1994 Quest, and one of her
favorites. Aside from the personal loss, Swenson
fears there may be a disease spreading among her
team and decides to scratch. (Later, vets found the
cause was a form of non-infectious hepatitis. After a
few days, I will reach her at home. “Some things are
just not meant to be,” she will say in a cracking voice.
“This was just not my year.”)

Day 11: Fairbanks is populated with Camaros and
pickup trucks. The town is situated in a flat and
unattractive spot in Alaska’s interior. But there’s
plenty of “civilization” here, and we revel in our
upscale hotel room and feast on Alaskan King Crab
legs at night.

We spend the day watching preparations for the
arrival of the winners. A huge arch of ice blocks is
assembled over the finish line and barricades are put
up. After days of solitude on the trail, dogs can panic
when confronted with cheering crowds. We keep
checking in with race officials, who have airplanes out
surveying the field: It looks like a close finish this
year, with four mushers within four hours of each
other.

Day 12: Rick Mackey wins the Quest with a time of
12 days, five hours, 55 minutes, five seconds. With
Ralf almost six days behind, this race is far from over
for us.

Day 13: Hoping to film Ralf on the home stretch, we
drive three hours northeast of Fairbanks to Central,
population 120, a gold mining and trapping area. We
are welcomed with this sign: “NOTICE: We reserve
the right to refuse service to anyone — including
special interest groups and governmental agencies
with goals threatening to the lifestyle of the Circle
mining district and our means of making an honest
living. — Owners Jim & Sandy Crabb.” I pity any
card-carrying Sierra Club member who stumbles into
this town.

All of the mushers have passed through here, except
Ralf. We stop at a trapper’s cabin to ask for news.
The place is decorated with Alaskan lawn ornaments:
junked vehicles, including a bright yellow truck used
to build the pipeline, a 1940s-era pickup,
motorcycles, snowmobiles. All are in apparent
non-working order and covered by several feet of
snow.

The trapper wears Army-issue Arctic footgear, called
“bunny boots.” Two lynx are hanging, frozen, from
the porch rafters. Pieces of frozen caribou carcass
litter the ground, gnawed on by dogs. I pick my jaw
up off the ground and shut my mouth. No sign of
Ralf, the trapper reports.

Day 14: Chris Knott invites us to Kathy Swenson’s
house to exercise the dogs. Swenson lives just outside
of Fairbanks in Two Rivers, the dog mushing capital
of Alaska — and therefore, of the world. A vast
network of trails crisscrosses the countryside. While
we’re waiting for Ralf, we will mush on Baseline
Trail, which goes clear across North America to
Newfoundland.

I climb into Knott’s sled. We’ve got two 9-month-old
pups in our team. They don’t know how to pull yet
and trot along, trip over their own feet, get tangled.
Knott says we’ll just keep going; they need to learn.

Finally, it is my turn to mush alone. My lesson is:
Dogs have a sense of humor. As soon as I hop on the
sled runners, the dogs seem to sense,
LIGHTWEIGHT! The lead dog, Harley, has just run
half of the Quest and is a veteran of two Iditarods.
You’d think he’d be resting on his laurels, but instead
he’s hauling butt up a short but steep hill. The sled
reaches the crest and the dogs halt. I’m left teetering
on the peak like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
Harley looks over his shoulder and I swear there’s a
glint in his eye. A pause, and he takes off like a bat
out of hell, the sled careening headlong down the hill.
I chant the musher’s mantra: “Don’t let go of the
sled.” A corner! I squat low on the sled runners and
lean into the curve. Recovering, I stand upright to see
Harley slow to a trot. He turns to glance at me with
what I imagine is a wicked smile. All right, I admit, it
was kind of funny.

In today’s small taste of mushing, I began to
understand the mushers’ love of the trail. I keep
replaying the day, feeling Harley give one leg, then
another, to my hand and the harness. I hear the dogs’
breathing, harnesses jingling, the woosh of sled
runners. That night, I am reading “The Lost Patrol”
by Dick North. In a passage about the Canadian
Mounties, North describes life on the trail as “an
extreme sense of being — all of the sense of sight,
smell, touch, taste and hearing are acutely brought
into play.”

Day 15: Descriptions coined to describe Ralf’s race
strategy have become progressively more elaborate:
“He’s on a camping trip”; “he’s homesteading out
there”; and finally, “he’s a low pressure area moving
slowly westward.” Ralf, a wiry chain-smoker, is
becoming almost legendary along the trail for his
impressive consumption of calories, polishing off two
meals in one sitting and topping it off with eight
chocolate bars and Diet Coke.

At this point, one checkpoint official we meet
reluctantly admits that he’s closing down the place
and leaving a note for Ralf with instructions for
lighting a fire. Another official tells the Fairbanks
newspaper that he’s discovered that Ralf was able to
improve his pace by 1 mph when he learned to light
cigarettes on the fly.

“When he ran out of cigarettes for two days, his
speed popped up another 1 mph. Then he ran into
cigarettes again somewhere and it fell back down,”
the official laughed.

Fairbanks, Alaska, Feb. 26, 1997: Ralf Zielinski
finishes the Yukon Quest last, in 18 days, 10 hours
and 57 minutes. Everyone says he had the happiest
dog team in the race.

Given that most Americans are even more cynical about journalists and the media than they are about our abysmal train system, I was having trouble imagining how the capital’s newest museum was going to elevate its subject to the level of our valiant track-laying ancestors.

I needn’t have worried. You see, the Newseum, located in Arlington, Va., is essentially brought to us by the folks who gave us USA Today. The $50 million Newseum is sponsored by an organization called The Freedom Forum, which is headed by USA Today founder Al Neuharth and supported by an endowment from the Gannett Company, which, in addition to USA Today, publishes 90 other newspapers. Just as USA Today has a way of making all things cheery and uplifting, the Newseum has turned journalism history into a perky success story. And admission is free!

Attending the opening of the Newseum last Friday (and arriving, alas, too late to watch Al Gore give the place his blessing), I did have to pass by a few reminders of the sometimes uncheery realities of the world before I was able to get safely inside. At the nearest Metro stop I discovered a pile of Teamsters flyers lying in the trash. “Does Gannett Buy Silence?” they demanded. The leaflets enumerated Gannett’s crimes, among them the company’s shameful treatment of its striking workers in Detroit. And outside the Newseum itself I found a bunch of real live Teamsters, shouting out slogans that didn’t quite scan: “This is not a museum!” they kept yelling. “It’s Gannett!” Then they found rhyme –”Sanitized! Anesthetized! Homogenized!” they chanted in unison. But still, it wasn’t exactly “I Have a Dream.”

Visitors to the Newseum are welcomed into what at first seems a gloriously gimmicky celebration of Our Multicultural World. You’re greeted in the lobby by the word “news” in 50 languages. Upstairs, at the News Globe, you’ll find nameplates and mottoes from newspapers around the world; my favorite was from Fiji, just west of the International Dateline: “The First Newspaper Published in the World Today.”

But this warm-and-fuzzy internationalism gives way quickly to something else again — a picture of foreign governments as the gravest threat to newsgathering today. In the U.S., home of the First Amendment, good journalism and patriotism are one and the same. And the giant conglomerates that control nearly all the news in this country are, it turns out, the biggest patriots of all. Media monopoly, you see, is a very good thing: Disney and Westinghouse are so powerful that they can stand up to those bad foreign rulers. (And luckily the Newseum won’t ruin our afternoon by bringing up the sticky question of just who can stand up to Disney and Westinghouse.)

The other villain in the Newseum’s story is the ungrateful American public, which doesn’t appreciate the First Amendment or the journalists who heroically defend it every day. The Newseum attempts to right this wrong by letting the public know what a noble profession journalism is. Here are photojournalists dying in battle. Here are Woodward and Bernstein bringing a corrupt president to his knees. Newspeople, it seems, are like saints, their relics — from the satchel that Civil War journalist Mark Kellogg carried when he rode with Custer to Thomas Paine’s trunk — presented with reverence. A block-long wall of press passes celebrates … what? The folks who intrepidly braved all obstacles to attend Norman Schwartzkopf’s sanitized press briefings? Label copy cryptically intones: “The events end, but the press passes remain.”

Of course, not all press passes survive the slings and arrows (not to mention bombs) of the real world. Outside the Newseum there’s a memorial that, in keeping with the rampant necrophilia of the rest of our nation’s capitol, lists the names of journalists around the world who have been slain on the job.

In the News History Gallery, I learned a few facts not commonly found in the textbooks. Did you know that Karl Marx had been fired from the New York Tribune for submitting falsified invoices? Or that in parts of India, a village crier used to shout the news through a conch shell? But this history suffers from some pretty jarring omissions. The protest outside notwithstanding, for instance, labor gets short shrift inside the Newseum; it’s mentioned exactly twice. Taking note of the 1899 “newsies” strike, the label copy reminds us, presumably as proof of this event’s importance, that a Disney movie has been made about it. It also reassures us that after “out-of-town unionists” bombed the Los Angeles Times in 1918, the paper kept right on publishing.

In an even odder twist, although the Newseum celebrates the ideological diversity of the 19th century press, it greets the homogeneity of today’s media with equal enthusiasm. When we get to the 1980s, we encounter what is essentially an ad for USA Today. The hero of the story, clever Al Neuharth, then-CEO of Gannett (now president of the Freedom Forum), launched a crusade to make news easier to read. And though critics derided USA Today as a “McPaper,” its format, all zippy graphics and bite-sized stories, has been widely imitated, because it was such a neat idea. (And certainly not because Gannett gobbled up dozens of local papers and made them indistinguishable from its flagship.)

But don’t think print journalism gets all the attention. The Video News Wall, at 126 feet long and 10.5 feet high, can show nine different breaking newscasts at once. Walking into the gallery, I was immediately assaulted by a 14-by-10.5-foot Nordic Track ad that must have gone on for at least five minutes before it faded into a Fox News promo, celebrating the network’s “fair” and “balanced” news. Then a gargantuan Peter Jennings materialized on-screen to welcome me to the Newseum once again, joined by his clones in Hong Kong, Buenos Aires and Germany.

Most of the Newseum’s multimedia displays aren’t quite as frightening. The interactive exhibits have a certain “What Do People Do All Day” charm to them, and seemed quite popular with the kids. You can read the news — with cue cards, natch — standing in front of a White House backdrop (just like Cokie Roberts!), then you can watch yourself on a TV monitor; if you like what you see, you can buy the tape. I watched a pair of awkwardly feisty 11-year-old girls at once horrified and delighted at the spectacle of their on-screen debut. In another booth, you can put your face on a magazine cover — a treat formerly reserved for such notable celebrities as Tyra Banks, Marshall Herff Applewhite and Alfred E. Neuman. Again, if you like it you can buy it.

Will the Newseum succeed in making the media a Washington tour bus subject, complete with oversized heroes and dead patriots? It may well. Though Americans are plenty cynical about the government, and about journalists, we’re not nearly cynical enough about multinational corporations. The Newseum manages to make us grateful for the First Amendment, and for the earnest sweat that brings the paper to our doorstep each morning, by feeding us a big interactive infomercial for Fox, CNN, ABC, Gannett and all the rest. The arrhythmic Teamsters outside the Newseum will eventually pack up their leaflets and go home. And the Newseum will continue to pump its peppy pseudo-history into the heads of jaded journalists and energetic preteens alike.

But to be Canadian is to live a dual identity, to wake up in the morning and read a local newspaper filled with stories of foreign politics and business. It means being denied the pleasure of seeing a movie made in your own country because foreign companies, with their staggering marketing power and cartel-like tactics, control your corner multiplex. It means turning on the TV and being inundated with broadcasts from another country. The U.S. has gone to war over less.

This explains why so many Canadians have gotten themselves worked up over something as seemingly arcane as the sovereign right to levy trade tariffs. A notoriously obsequious nation like Canada doesn’t usually get upset without a good reason. And it’s got good reason this time: America has been trying to force-feed glossy magazines down its throat — and now can do so with the approval of the World Trade Organization.

The problems between the two neighbors began in 1993, when Time Warner started publishing a “split-run” edition of Sports Illustrated in Canada. The practice allowed SI to cover its editorial and production costs with the ads in its American edition, then pull in extra cash from the sale of Canadian ads in a split run north of the border. Not coincidentally, the practice conveniently enabled Time Warner to undercut Canadian publishers in the quest for scarce ad dollars.

Split runs threatened to seriously impair the viability of the Canadian publishing industry, with its notoriously anorexic profit margins, so Canada’s Liberal government responded with an 80 percent tariff on ads placed in those editions. Getting the hint, Time Warner dropped the split runs — and picked up the phone to Washington.

And so, last year, the Clinton administration, in its never-ending zeal to make the world safe for free speech — free American speech, in any case — took the case to the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Last month, the WTO declared the tariff illegal — and now the borders have opened wide: The publishers of over 100 magazines expect to follow Time Warner’s lead with split runs.

Now, it might seem a little strange to see the U.S. turn to the WTO in its hour of need. The WTO, after all, is one of those pesky international bodies, like the World Court, that the U.S. sees fit to disregard whenever it clashes with American policy. Just last month, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshevsky showed she had a keen grasp of that essential fact of life, when her office was asked to appear before the World Trade Organization to defend the Helms-Burton Act against European accusations of international illegality. With the obnoxious swagger that only a superpower can muster, the American trade office told Europe and the WTO to go fuck themselves — it was keeping its anti-Cuba law.

But the U.S. has no trouble with the WTO when it rules the right way: Last year alone, the U.S. government laid a record 15 complaints against its various trading partners. While that’s unprecedented in the history of the WTO and its predecessor the GATT, it might not be completely surprising, given America’s reputation as the only country on earth that practices litigation as a spectator sport.

For many Canadians, the current tiff cements America’s reputation on the world stage as a hypocritical nation bent on cultural imperialism. The WTO decision is like living next to the loudest guy on the block and having the cops tell you to stop whispering in your own house because you’re disturbing his party.

U.S. publishers already have unparalleled access to Canadian audiences: 80 percent of magazine titles sold on Canadian newsstands (including the regular edition of Sports Illustrated) are American. The fight isn’t about access. It’s about the quest by Time Warner and other American media conglomerates for unfettered dominance of the newsstands of the world.

The Canadian film and television industries, dependent on government support and protection for their very survival, are terrified of the possible implications. Americans should be scared, too. If it weren’t for government support of the Canadian cultural industries, this year’s best picture Oscar might have gone to “Jerry Maguire” instead of “The English Patient”: Michael Ondaatje was a grateful recipient of government grants for two decades.

Fact is, if the decision isn’t overturned on appeal, Canadians will be forced to respond with the only means at their disposal, and it won’t be pretty. Thousands of us are currently employed in America’s cultural industries: Jim Carrey, Peter Jennings, Lorne Michaels, Alanis Morissette, k.d. lang, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Pamela Anderson Lee, Scott Thompson, dozens of sitcom writers and producers, the editors of Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan. If it takes just one of us to screw up a $50 million movie like “The Cable Guy,” imagine what we could all do if we set our minds to it.