"Buck up little camper, we'll beat that slope together. " - Booger, Better Off Dead

Tranquility Base, this is Houston. You are go for EVA.

We had a run of amazingly nice weather up here in Fairbanks. It’s been warmer than usual, and as such, we’ve been making the most of the outdoors. We’ve been cutting wood, shoveling snow, sending The Boy out to do Boy things during the day.

But, aside from The Boy, we were working. While we enjoyed it, it was still work. The itch began for some fun. Fun activities in wintertime in Alaska are numerous. Some of them are even outdoor activities that don’t involve candles and giggling and The Mrs. wearing a French maid’s outfit (oh, yeah, flannel jammies). One of them that we’ve been missing out on is snowmachining. (Alaska note: they’re snowmachines up here, not snowmobiles. No real reason, that’s just the local lingo, like a “junkie” would be known as “mayor” in Washington D.C. Another, much older name for a snowmachine is “Iron Dog,” which relates to the replacement of sled dogs.)

For those of you that don’t know, a snowmachine is, well, a mechanical dogsled. Some of which have 150 horsepower engines and can go from zero to 125 mph fast enough to make your fillings puddle about the back side of your throat. So, it’s not really anything like a dogsled at all, unless your dogs are CGI animation flying dogs from the Lord of the Rings. And those are expensive, and endangered. I would buy some of those, but alas, they’re not at all real.

It was during this warm spell that we heard the snow machines distantly (oh, yeah, we live a quarter of a mile from a paved road) growling, like mosquitoes angry over competition with other shameless bloodsucking beasts, like Anna Nicole Smith.

The Mrs. and I decided to go looking for snowmachines. We decided to go look at some new ones. We went to a local snowmachine shop, and were completely ignored. When I go out to buy something expensive, I attempt to look like I have no money, leaving my tuxedo and Aston-Martin 4x4 at home. Apparently it worked a bit too well in this case, though I did have my Bond girl of the moment, The Mrs., with me. Those particular snowmachine dealers must work for Blofeld. After ten straight minutes of impenetrable inattention, I took my football and went home.

We then drove over to Northern Power Sports, where we could hardly stand unaccompanied for two or three minutes before being surrounded by troops of salesmen with velvet cushions containing prize snowmachine tidbits and pantyhose merely for our amusement. Okay, that’s a bit of an embellishment, but service was good there. I test-drove a snowmachine with The Boy. We both wore borrowed helmets, I’m guessing because brain damaged customers might be bad for business, even though they’d be more likely to accept a lease deal. The snowmachine was wonderful. We drove the least expensive machine they had there, with the exception of the children’s snowmachine. I would have test-driven that one, but a long line of Santa’s elves were ahead of me.

The Boy loved it. When I say loved it, he loved it in the “I don’t think it’s going to go, oh my gosh it does, good heavens it’s fast IS DAD GONNA JUMP THAT PILE OF SNOW oh gosh he did I LOVE THIS . . . muhahahahaha” sort of way, as only the mind of a five year old can. When we finished the ride, he was convinced that we were going to test drive every single snowmachine in the lot, all 436 of them. When he saw we were going to test drive only one, he was greatly disappointed.

Part of being five is the first glimmer of the infinite. The words “forever” and “never” begin to creep into the language. For instance, when I say “We’re not going to drive another snowmachine right now,” it translates to “We’re never ever ever ever going to ride anything as fun as that snowmachine again in your life. This was your last taste of freedom and fun. Forever.” I pulled his tiny grip from the handlebars (and heard the popping sound as the tentacle-like suckers on his hands let go of the hard plastic), and then we went shopping for food, and then went home.

The Mrs. and I talked about getting the snowmachine. She suggested that I look in the newspaper and see what kind of used machines they had, and compare against the new machine we’d looked at. I found one listed that sparked my eye, primarily because it had:

• A small engine - a 340 cc (cc is cubic communistmeters, the unit of measure that the Soviets devised to enslave our soft drink manufacturers) is more than enough engine to propel the snowmachine at 50MPH, which is more than fast enough to hit a tree with
• A small price – even though I am a thousandaire, I don’t need to spend like one

I called the owner. He was fairly apologetic when he told me that he had promised his 1997 Polaris Indy Lite 340cc to someone else. He told me he’d call me back if the person he’d promised it to fell through on the deal.

With winter ending in only 354 days from now, would he call me back?

Oh yeah, he called me back. I’ll tell you about it Saturday in:

SNOWMACHINE 2: JUDGEMENT DAY