New York Times gives positive view of cruel Iditarod

From the Sled Dog Action Coalition, http://www.helpsleddogs.org

In "On the Road and Between the Pages, an Author Is Restless for Adventure," Anne Goodwin Sides gives a positive view of the Iditarod and author Gary Paulsen. Instead of speaking out against the cruelties, at conferences, including ones held by the Iditarod, Paulsen encouraged teachers to promote the race in their schools. Gary Paulsen also promotes the Iditarod for Scholastic Books: http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/iditarod/index.htm . In the New York Times article and on the Scholastic website, you'll see photos of Gary Paulsen's chained dogs.

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August 26, 2006

http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2006/08/26/books/26paul.html&tntemail0=y&adxnnl=1&emc=tnt&adxnnlx=1156609384-xceEp7IkzslK847CZ3oTFQ


On the Road and Between the Pages, an Author Is Restless for Adventure

By ANNE GOODWIN SIDES

WHITE OAKS, N.M. — “I can’t live in towns anymore,” Gary Paulsen says, enjoying the view from his 200-acre ranch on the outskirts of an old ghost town in the Jicarilla Mountains, 40 miles from the nearest grocery store.

Living like a fugitive from society, the 67-year-old author says, is the only way he can think clearly. “I bought a house in a town near here, and a nice guy, a neighbor, came over to say hi,” he says, wincing. “It was too close.”

For generations of young, mostly male readers, Mr. Paulsen is one of the best-loved writers alive. With more than 26 million books in print, his name is practically synonymous with the wilderness adventure genre. He has won three Newbery Honor awards: for “Dogsong” (1985), “The Winter Room” (1989) and perhaps his best-known work, “Hatchet” (1987), about the only survivor of a plane crash in the Yukon.

“Gary Paulsen’s writing is very authentic, and kids sense that,” said Margaret Tice, coordinator of children’s services at the New York Public Library and a member of the Newbery committee. “He’s always lived his life on the edge and survived true adventures, but he’s not just an action man; he also knows how young people feel and think.”

Teri Lesesne, who teaches children’s literature at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Tex., has noted a special power in Mr. Paulsen’s work. “If I have a kid who’s a reluctant reader, all I have to do is hand him one of Gary Paulsen’s books,” she said. “It’ll change his life.”

Mr. Paulsen receives hundreds of letters a day. But his publisher can barely keep track of where to forward them, since Mr. Paulsen restlessly ricochets around the globe: training horses in New Mexico, running dogs in Alaska, riding his Harley across the American West, gunkholing around the South Pacific in his beat-up sailboat.

It’s deliberate: Mr. Paulsen is an unapologetic misanthrope, children excepted. “I don’t have anything against individuals,” he says. “But the species is a mess.” His throat tightens. “The last time I was up in Santa Fe, I wasn’t there 20 minutes before I brewed up, almost slugged a tourist on the steps of my wife’s gallery.” Ruth Wright Paulsen, his third wife, illustrated four of his picture books and a prose poem about an early American farm. “Now I try to be alone,” he says, pointedly.

Compulsively prolific, Mr. Paulsen produces a fresh book for young adults every few months, the vast majority of them novellas. His latest, “The Legend of Bass Reeves,” was published this month by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House. It is identified as “the true and fictional account” of a slave who became the most successful federal marshal in American history.

“He’d ride alone into the center of hell and bring the men out, alive, if possible, or, if necessary, draped dead over a horse,” Mr. Paulsen writes. “He did this 3,000 times. Miraculously, he was never wounded. He rejected countless bribes, and when his own son killed his wife, he tracked his son down, brought him to justice and sent him to prison for life.”

All true. But Mr. Paulsen’s book is a novel, and he openly fictionalizes his protagonist, imbuing Bass Reeves with some of his own traits and experiences. The best writing, he says, is “like carving pieces off your self.” An outcast who survives abuse and a hardscrabble upbringing, Reeves is an expert shot with a sixth sense for tracking and a shamanlike kinship with animals. “Reeves was honest and honorable, and just flat tough,” Mr. Paulsen says, as if he’s fiercely defending a friend’s good name.

Compact, with wolf-blue eyes set in a grizzled face, Mr. Paulsen strongly resembles Ernest Hemingway. There are other parallels. Mr. Paulsen’s prose is spare and well acquainted with death. At various points in his life, he has been tormented by Papa-like demons: too much anger, too much drink, too much emphasis on virility, too many wives, too much loneliness.

Receiving the first overnight guests he’s allowed onto his desert ranch, Mr. Paulsen seems wary but not unfriendly. He wears tall boots and walks gingerly along the overgrown path beyond his door, pointing out rocks and crevices where he’s spotted five rattlesnakes in recent days.

This is bear and mountain lion country, which is why he often carries a snub-nosed .38. “Cats kill you before they eat you,” he says. “Bears like to hold you down and rip your buttocks while you’re still alive.”

All right then.

“Shall we eat?” Mr. Paulsen asks, pulling a few bloody steaks and a plastic vat of potato salad out of the fridge and opening a can of beans.

He is wearing the Iditarod belt that he earned in 1983 on his first try at the brutal 1,049-mile dog-sled race across Alaska, when he finished 42nd in a field of 73. Since then, his love affair with sled dogs has been one of the few constants in his peripatetic life.

“The dogs have affected me in all ways,” he says. “In my understanding of people, in my understanding of love and hate. Once you break down the interlock between species, it’s astonishing.”

Mr. Paulsen also keeps a 40-acre spread north of Willow, Alaska, where he breeds and trains dogs for the Iditarod (which he ran for the third time last March). “From the northwest corner of my land, there’s nothing for 4,000 miles,” he says, his voice quickening with excitement. “There’re no towns, no roads, no people all the way to Siberia.” And few of the provocations of modern society that make him “brew up.”

Mr. Paulsen is a prodigious ranter of the Luddite persuasion; it takes little to set him off. The Internet: “It’s just stupid, faster.” Lawyers: “Miserable human beings.” Organized sports: “Mindless dreck!” Television: “Intellectual carbon monoxide, but hey, TV’s are fun to shoot!”

He grew up poor and lonely in the small town of Thief River Falls, Minn. “My folks were the town drunks,” he says. “We lived in this grubby apartment building. My parents were brutal to each other, so I slept in the basement by an old coal-fired furnace.” He pretended to sell newspapers in pubs, raking the drunks’ money off the bar into his pockets when they were good and juiced. “I became a street kid,” he says. “Occasionally I’d live with aunts or uncles, then I’d run away to live in the woods, trapping and hunting game to survive. The wilderness pulled at me; still does.”

He said he was 13 when he stepped into a library for the first time. It was a frigid winter night. The library stayed open until 9 p.m., and its gold-tinted windows looked invitingly warm.

“The librarian typed my name on a card,” he remembers. “I looked at it and somehow that made me somebody.

Mr. Paulsen became a voracious reader, but not much of a student. “School didn’t work for me. I hated it,” he says. At 17, he forged his father’s signature to join the Army. Once, while he was testing missiles at White Sands, N.M., a Nike Ajax missed its target, locking onto a tagged buzzard instead.

In early 1965, he packed his Volkswagen Bug and drove to Hollywood, where he helped write dialogue for the television series “Mission: Impossible,” and the 1969 Steve McQueen film “The Reivers.” Then Mr. Paulsen left. “I started to like it too much,” he says.

In 1966, he checked himself into a cabin in the Minnesota woods, where he wrote his first book, “Some Birds Don’t Fly,” a collection of humorous essays about the missile industry.

Mr. Paulsen has lost count of how many books he has written since then. His Web site, garypaulsen.com, puts the tally at more than 175. Whether his subject is a slave who risks his life to teach others to read in “Nightjohn” (a book he adapted for a 1996 television movie), or an orphan on the streets of Juárez, Mexico, in “The Crossing” (a film version is now in preproduction), Mr. Paulsen is always writing to conquer his own dark, painful experiences.

“I’m a teller of stories,” he says. “I put bloody skins on my back and dance around the fire, and I say what the hunt was like. It’s not erudite; it’s not intellectual. I sail, run dogs, ride horses, play professional poker and tell stories about the stuff I’ve been through. And I’m still a romantic; I still want Bambi to make it out of the fire.”

Mr. Paulsen stopped writing for adults 10 years ago. “It’s artistically fruitless,” he fumes. “Adults are locked into car payments and divorces and work. They haven’t got time to think fresh. Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty. In the time I’ve got left, I intend to write artistic books — for kids — because they’re still open to new ideas.