Hugh at work/Craig Medred photo

The strange things we love

With every passing year, the tidal marshes at the head of Turnagain Arm remind me more of how physically brutal that which I love to do so much.

Hunting companions and a series of beloved dogs were long ago walked into history, and the two-year-old canine partner of these days leaves me jealous of his energy. Following his nose everywhere in the flooded grass, he does tens of miles where I do miles, and still he is out front at the end of the day.

Admittedly, this is due in part to the fact that the days in the marsh have grown shorter over the years. The 10-hour marches deep into the Twentymile River valley that left dogs tired and trailing in my wake are no more. So, too, the need for multiple retrievers to ensure a fresh dog ready to go on the morrow, and the belief the day should end until we have killed our legal limit.

I can still ride 100 miles on the bike over the course of six hours or so on the road, but four or five hours hiking the flooded grass, the bogs, the mucky bottomed ponds, and the squishy patches of buckbean, not to mention the occasional struggle through one of those  “nearly impenetrable thickets” of sweet gale, pretty much does me in.

Off-trail in Alaska, there is always a bounty of bad ground for hiking, but this is the worst of it. Still, passion is a powerful emotion that can lead a man or woman to put themselves through all kinds of hell.

Aging

Looking back across the decades at this age, it is interesting to see how passions like this have come and gone. As a kid, I couldn’t fish enough.

Growing up in central Minnesota, I spent endless hours wading the Crow Wing River not far from town in pursuit of northern pike, walleyes and rock bass, and pedaled a single-speed bike on what always seemed a long ride out to Dower Lake, more a pond than a lake, to fish for crappies or largemouth bass.

When the family visited friends and relatives with cabins on lakes in the area, my parents invariably had to drag me off the water to get me into the car for the drive home. By the time I could drive, I would regularly be out late with a girlfriend before swinging by the house to pick up my younger brother and a canoe in the wee hours to spend the start of the new day with flyrods in hand flipping bass poppers to largemouth bass hanging along the grass banks of a creek connecting Lake Alexander to Fish Trap Lake.

The fishing passion stayed with me long after I made the move to Alaska more than five decades ago. That first, pre-pipeline summer in the north, I largely lived on grayling and snowshoe hares, which was a good lesson in the importance of jobs.

Later would come a move to Juneau, life on a boat, and endless hours of fishing for halibut and salmon. Then, a move to Anchorage for a job as the outdoor editor at the Anchorage Daily News and endless fishing opportunities all over the state.

The sheer volume of fish hooked over the decades that followed might well have burned out that passion. One can get too much of a good thing.

Over time, the urge to catch fish with hook and line somehow faded away, as have other passions: sailing, fly tying, rod building, beer brewing (I got good enough at that to win a blue ribbon at the state fair before giving it up), woodworking, running and more.

There was a time when I was running more than 100 miles per week and expecting to be running sub-3 hour marathons well into my 50s. The engine was certainly there to power such performances.

But the passion up and died for reasons I still don’t fully understand. The days of embracing the agony of speed work on the track or running 10-minute splits at 6-minute per mile pace on the Chester Creek Trail died, and what had been a much-loved form of agony became an impossible mental strain.

The same would eventually prove true for Nordic skate skiing, a very technique-driven sport, that I also got pretty good at before the need for “hard days,” a necessary part of maintaining a high level of performance in any aerobic sport, fell victim to my weakness of mind.

Running and skiing did, however, offer a lot of insight into the psychology of sport. You can only do what you truly believe you can do, although if you believe enough that might on rare occasions, lead you to do better than you thought you could do. It took me years to understand the power of belief and yet more time to tailor a training plan to really make me believe before I ran my first sub-3 hour marathon, and then the next one was stupidly easy, if any marathon can be called easy.

Now, I seldom run at all because, well, it seems so slow, and if all one is doing is jogging along at a pace less than that of a good race walker, why bother?

And yet I still, strangely, have clung to this passion to go out and exhaust myself in the marsh. I’d blame all the dogs that have come and gone and the one here now if not for the fact that this passion predates them.

Mr. Fidget

Maybe, it all comes back to a little genetic hyperactivity. I was never worth a damn at sitting still. It drove my father nuts when he’d put me on a “deer stand” to wait for white-tails in Minnesota and come back an hour later to find out I’d climbed down to wander around in the woods looking for deer.

It drove me nuts in grade school when I had to sit and listen to non-readers stumbling along forever when required to read out loud in class while I’d long before finished whatever it was we were supposed to read and started looking for something else with which to occupy myself.

Teenage hunting friends could sit in a duck blind for hours chatting it up while waiting for birds to show. I was good for no more than half an hour of stillness before it was time to go check nearby ponds or sloughs for ducks to jump shoot or wander the woods hoping to put up some ruffed grouse.

This only got worse – much, much worse – when a long series of dogs entered the picture. Then there was not only the joy of being on the move, but the pleasure of watching them at work, following that sense of smell a thousand times, or thousands of times, better than ours. 

I love now to watch Hugh when he picks up the scent of a mallard in the flooded grass and follows its unseen trail intently until it flushes and, when my wingshooting is successful, sniffs out the carcass in grass so thick a human could spend hours looking for the dead bird and never find it.

I know time will someday kill this passion. Physically, humans wear out. It is what it is, and someday it will force me to give this up.

At this point, thankfully,  that still seem years off,  due in part to the more recent passion for cycling which replaced running to keep my general fitness level high. My Garmin “smart watch” records 719 miles on various bikes last month with 30,000 feet of climbing, and tells me my “fitness age” is a dozen years younger than my chronological age.

I’m not sure I trust the metrics which deliver the latter estimates as to age, but I know it felt good to be fit at 60, and feels even better to be fit today and with a brain still functioning well given the other passion that I somehow cannot let go – that  burning desire to figure out how things work.

This is the upside of recognizing you’re not the smartest guy (or gal) in the room. It leaves you cognizant of all the new things you should be learning, and those are endless.

Not that this passion didn’t and doesn’t have its downside. One of my earliest memories from childhood is of my parents taking away the toy tool set I got for Christmas one year because the pliers and screwdriver were real enough that I was dismantling things around the house in an effort to figure out how they worked.

This would prove a problem throughout my youth, although I would get progressively better and better at putting back together what I had taken apart. This natural curiosity would inevitably pull me toward a career in science, which is about nothing more or less than a search for answers to endless questions, only to end up in the business of journalism at a rare time in history when it was about exploring from all angles that hard-to-define thing called “news” and sharing what you found with the world.

Often what I found was that few things are simple, that questions seldom have definitively  ‘right’ answers, and that I could add to the discussions on which democracy depends by sharing this if nothing else.

Sadly, over time, I got to watch journalism morph from this idea of providing people information that made them think to telling them what to think. The latter is defined as propaganda, and it is rampant today on both the left and the right because journalism is, at the end of the day, a “business” and businesses survive by selling customers what they want.

And we are at a time in American history where what most customers want is confirmation of and reinforcement for what they already believe. Emotions have come to trump facts.

As an old journalist, sitting here now, it is hard for me to imagine a time when the news would reach a point at which a journalist would feel compelled to take a U.S. senator to task or using the word “he” to refer to a madman who shot up a church, injuring 17 children and killing two becuase of his gender confusion.

And yet there was National Public Radio’s Alisa Chang “clarifying”  the reference of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. –  a good, old-school liberal – to a man as a “he” with the statement that it is “unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify.”

Apparently, it now makes a difference how madmen “identify” or define their social construct in a country where 95 percent of mass shootings are committed by men. What in God’s name was Chang thinking?

That trans women would be insulted if Robert Westman was referred to as what he was – a deranged, gender-confused male – rather than the licensed female Robin Westman? Or did Chang fear that Westman, who committed suicide while law enforcement closed in, might have heard Klobuchar from the other side of wherever we go and been offended?

Or did Chang just want to illustrate how messed up the lefty side of the media these days? The right, for its part, isn’t any better. There are some there now suggesting what Westman did is representative of the trans community.

Let’s be real here. Westman is the first of his kind; the only other firearm-wielding trans shooters were trans men, both of whom appeared to have started taking testosterone treatments that tend to make people somewhat more aggressive.

Testosterone might also help explain why the date-tracking website Statista catalogs more than 96 percent of mass shooters since 1982 as male – people with a testosterone-producing organ hanging between their legs – and barely over 1 percent as “male & female,” which is apparently how the website defines those who want to draw a distinction between gender, a social construct, and biological sex, a pyshological reality.

I used to be a big fan of NPR. But it’s now gotten so touchy-feely and at times simply wigged out that I can barely listen to it. An old journalism colleague and I got talking about this other day and we wondered, “What would Marc Salgado say?”

The late Mr. Salgado was an assistant city editor at the old Anchorage Daily News known for his abruptness, his stubbornness and his Sergeant Joe Friday demands for “just the facts.” He died unexpectedly and prematurely in 1991 but is well remembered for “shouting your screw-ups across the room,” as an as an elderly but stil working journalist long gone from Alaska posted on a Facebook tribute just last month.

“We did learn quickly and a lot!” she added. “I thought about posting this in my current newsroom’s discussion channel, but then thought it would probably hurt their feelings which we certainly can’t have in 2025 as you point out. Times have changed and arguably not for the better!”

There’s no doubt about that. The old colleague observed that if Salgado wasn’t already dead, the way in which the news is done today would kill him.’

It regularly tries to kill me now, but I can’t seem to walk away. More than a few old journalism friends seem to have fared better. They’ve washed their hands of the business and walked away, something I can’t bring myself to do.

For better or for worse, this is the way passions work.