March 28 Friday roundup

This week’s “Next Comes What” podcast episode covers my return to Roanoke, Virginia. I accompany residents to their weekly protest as they work out what to do about their unresponsive Congressman, and then speak to them about organizing to protect their vulnerable neighbors (and themselves). You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Today, I’ll take a brief detour to talk about finding your own path in weird times. We are mostly off the grid of what anyone would have imagined for themselves in, say, early 2015. Again and again, people have had to revise plans or put off dreams to manage the crises delivered to us by our political leaders.

The older I get, the more I realize that (at least for me) failure is just part of how life unfolds. Those include times institutions or organizations fail me, as well as times that I fail to accomplish what I’d hoped to. I don’t mean this in some inspirational way, but more in a diagnostic one. In my experience, failure is rarely final. The ghost of one plan sometimes gives birth to the next, and like a shadow child, retains some of the shape or movement I’d imagined for the lost part. Sometimes the new creation seems like a lesser one, though at other times, it transcends my original idea. Often, it’s neither worse nor better than what I planned, just different. But no part of what we make and do is ever really gone.

I keep this in mind when I get frustrated or tired of pitching something or trying to convince someone to get on board with an idea that, to me, seems obviously brilliant. I try to think of the New Yorker cartoonist who submitted literally thousands of cartoons before getting a single one accepted, or of another artist who took 25 years to get his work into the magazine. People keep focused on the things that matter to them in ways that astound me.

I’ve definitely never had to pitch 2,000 ideas to a single outlet—I might not have formally pitched 2,000 ideas in my lifetime. So I try to cultivate patience instead of nursing my disappointments, and imagine forging my own strange way forward, digging out the path that I want to take if I can’t quite follow the one I’d planned on.

There are goals I’ve adopted that have been made harder because I’m a woman, but a lot of systemic barriers don’t target me. Though I would have an easier time than many in institutional environments, I still tend not to do things the “normal” way. I’ve never worked full-time in a newsroom. I haven’t had an office job in thirty years. My writing life is odd, and I reinvent my approach every few years. Sometimes it feels like high-wire walking without a net.

But there are upsides. Wonderful surprises come out of the blue once in a while, from people who are doing the same kind of thing with their lives.

In late 2016, I got an invitation from someone I knew only a tiny bit online, through Twitter. Blair Braverman reached out to invite me to dogsledding boot camp in snowy Wisconsin, where she lived with her partner, Quince Mountain. Quince would be out of town, she said, but she was inviting a handful of women writers to her home in February, and she wondered if I wanted to come and learn to mush.

In terms of disposable income, I was pretty broke in that moment. But I was not about to miss out on the trip. Blair had no idea when she invited me, but I was planning for my next book to be an Arctic one, about a shipwreck from four centuries ago.

When I got to Wisconsin and told Blair, she gave me great advice about first experiences in the Arctic and entry paths that would let me avoid simple tourism. (She also had me sleep outside without a tent that night while it snowed, to help prepare me a little.) The whole weekend was such a kind gesture—a real gift from someone I barely knew at the time.

In early 2018, I headed to the high Arctic for the first time. A year later, Blair ran and finished the Iditarod race in Alaska as a rookie. It’s as grueling a sports event as currently exists, with participants winding their way through about a thousand miles of snow and ice with a sled and a team of dogs in weather that often turns extreme.

Blair’s captivating spirit and way with social media (not to mention her charismatic crew of dogs) inspired a huge online following. Those followers wound up starting a tradition of funding community projects along the route of the race—a tradition that’s continued under the name Igivearod.

In 2020, Blair’s partner, Quince, set out to do the Iditarod himself and was the first openly trans man to compete in the race. But he was withdrawn from competition late in the race after being too far behind the pack. This month, he set out to try again in the wake of the loss of his mother and the death of a good friend, whose ashes he hoped to sprinkle at one point on the trail.

Quince ended up in a similar, heartbreaking situation this year. He and another musher were pulled from competition by race officials when both fell behind the remaining competitors. (Several other mushers had voluntarily left the race at previous stops.)

The withdrawal was posted on the leaderboard the same day, so those of us who’d been following Quince’s progress realized he was out of the race. But then everything about him went to radio silence. I wondered if I should write Blair to check in with her, but didn’t want to interfere if the situation was complicated.

After days in which those of us watching had no news, Blair posted a short note that read only “Y’all” and included this video.

It turned out that after being required to withdraw, Quince and the dogs had been taken to another checkpoint to regroup for the ride home. But then he had decided to finish the course on his own instead. He no longer had the network of support undergirding the official race (vet checkups, an SOS tracker beacon, and more). But he was also free of the rules that limit help and interaction between mushers and the general public while the race is underway.

He piled food for the dogs on his sled, sprinkled his friend Daniel’s ashes, just as he had hoped to, and set out. Nome, the endpoint of the race, was still over two hundred miles away. Along the route, he used a public cabin to let the dogs catch up on their rest overnight. He stopped to help someone fix a snowmobile, which seems like the most in-character thing ever. In the end, Quince got to Nome.

Scientist Sarah Hörst posted the video on Bluesky, noting that that “you don’t have to give up because people tell you to.” All this was terribly moving to me, because I was rooting for Quince, and it’s so hard when you work toward something important to you and the plan you had disintegrates. You can’t always control what happens in the world. But life is largely what you make of those disruptions. Quince had found a way to do the parts of that trek that mattered most to him.

Some townspeople came out to see him when he finally got to Nome, five days after the last competitor. During this year’s race, social media fans of Blair and Quince’s BraverMountain Mushing team had collected nearly $139,000 of donations for community projects along the way.

If you’d like to know more, here’s a story from the Anchorage Daily News. But what I want to say is that some of us grew up outside the institutions and security of conventional society. Others chose to leave them for many different reasons, or were forced to. But however each one of us got to where we’re at, millions more people are now or will soon be outside the usual channels of their previous lives, having to invent a daily existence in the face of a government that appears hostile to most of the citizens in its care.

We are never helpless. However it goes—and there will be plenty of challenges—we can fix each other’s snowmobiles. We can take and give shelter, metaphorical or literal. We can stop to grieve when we need to, and then we can carry on. We can leave behind an old vision of the future to make a new one. You don’t have to give up because people tell you to.