The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  1953

  SNO

  CALVIN TRILLIN

  Walking from the Oval Track to the Endurance Track at the Fifth Annual Paul Bunyan Snowmobile Derby, I happened on a man in a parka who was trying to peddle a Chevroletful of canvas snowmobile covers. Since I judged the temperature to be four or five degrees short of the temperature necessary to sustain human life, it was possible that his constant patter was only an attempt to keep his mouth from freezing shut, but, all in all, he struck me as an aggressive salesman—a man quick with persuasive explanations of why it would be pound foolish not to invest twenty-five dollars to protect a thousand-dollar machine. He was experiencing unrelieved failure. It suddenly occurred to me that I had stumbled across what may have been the only example of unsuccessful merchandising in the short, awesomely profitable history of snowmobiling. I immediately took the salesman in hand. “You should be wearing a snowmobile suit!” I shouted to him. It was necessary to shout, because the way a lot of snowmobilers enjoy a derby most is to bring their own machines on trailers and spend most of the day buzzing around the grounds, stopping at the track occasionally to watch the contestants in the two-and-a-half-hour Grand Prix race zip by. “Nobody at a snowmobile derby is going to pay any attention to anybody who isn’t wearing a snowmobile suit,” I explained. I spoke from some experience, being dressed at the time in a sheepskin coat that I had considered quite fashionable until I realized that everyone at the derby assumed I was there to replace the hot-dog supply at the refreshment tent or repair the loudspeaker system. A snowmobile suit is ordinarily a one-piece coverall of quilted material—the kind of thing an airplane mechanic might wear if he happened to work at a very cold airport. Like mechanics, a lot of snowmobile owners wear patches identifying the make of machine they tinker with, but the color of a snowmobile suit alone is usually enough to indicate whether the wearer drives an Arctic Cat or a Polaris or a Scorpion. The snowmobile industry is color-keyed. The owner of a Ski-Doo—a black-and-yellow machine that has the largest share of the market—ordinarily wears a suit that is black with yellow piping, plus black snowmobile boots with Ski-Doo patches on them. A snowmobiler who is particularly fashion-conscious—most often a female snowmobiler—may wear under the Ski-Doo suit yellow wool tights and a yellow sweater with black piping. The inner clothing can be used as what is known as an après-snowmobile outfit, making the wearer a merchandiser’s dream—brand identification almost down to the skin.

  The cover salesman happened to have a red deer-hunting outfit in his car that we decided might pass for a snowmobile suit, although the patch sewn on it said “National Rifle Association” instead of “Sno-Pony” or “Ski-Daddler” or “Sno*Jet.” When I couldn’t find him later in the afternoon, I assumed that my marketing advice had enabled him to sell all his covers and go home to watch some game on television—the way he had wanted to spend his Saturday afternoon in the first place. I wanted to tell him about meeting a couple wearing black-and-white snowmobile suits with patches that said “Snow Goer.” When I asked if they knew why whoever had named their make was the only person in the field who felt it necessary to spell out snow to the very end, they told me that Snow Goer was not a machine but a magazine—a publication that happened to consider it good business to have its own snowmobile suits. I did find the salesman again at the end of the day, and he reported, with restrained gratitude, that he had sold three covers. Brainerd, Minnesota, like all the other places that call themselves the Snowmobile Capital of the World, is a small town, and the salesman thought his problem might be that not many people in a small town walk around on a Saturday with twenty-five dollars extra in their pockets. That was not the problem. “Get a proper patch!” I shouted. It was obvious that all he needed was a patch on his hunting suit saying something like “Sno-Cougar Covers.” I didn’t see him Sunday, but if he followed my instructions he is now a very rich snowmobile-cover salesman.

  None of the people representing snowmobile manufacturers at the derby seemed in need of my marketing advice. They all had snowmobile suits on, all bepatched with their brand names, and the fact that a state like Minnesota, which ten years ago had no snowmobiles, now has a hundred thousand seemed to be an indication that the snowmobile industry had been getting good advice from somewhere. Also, I couldn’t think of any promotional possibilities in a snowmobile derby that they hadn’t exhausted. Although the Brainerd derby is considered only a middle-sized event on the snowmobile-racing circuit, several of the manufacturers had brought their factory racing teams, the results of certain races having too great an impact on sales to be left to amateurs. “People are kind of silly about racing,” the representative of one manufacturer told me. “They know that the machines that race are not the same ones they get in the showroom, and very few people actually buy snowmobiles to race them anyway. But they don’t like the thought of being left behind on the trail. They want a machine just a little faster than their neighbor’s. Not much; just a little.” Johnson Motors, which makes a snowmobile called a Skee-Horse, sponsored a Skeeburger Fest on Friday night at the Brainerd Armory, where the Exchange Club served the skeeburgers and Miss Brainerd welcomed everyone to town (“Have a good time, eat a whole bunch, and have a ball”). On Saturday, a few hundred snowmobilers went on a Snowmobile Moonlight Cruise—driving their machines twelve miles to a cookout and back, with guides, mechanics, trailmarkings, hot dogs, and souvenir patches furnished by Evinrude, the producer of the Evinrude Skeeter. A couple of the companies that make snowmobile oil offered extra prize money for drivers who won races while displaying the company decals, and another oil company towed its banner above the derby grounds by plane Saturday afternoon and furnished placemats and matches for the Awards Banquet at the Elks Lodge that night. The local race officials, sanctioned by the United States Snowmobile Association, wore bright-orange snowmobile suits with a patch that said “Miller High Life Snowmobiler.”

  At a Friday-evening parade through the streets of Brainerd, and during the day at the derby, the public-relations man from the largest distributor of Ski-Doos hauled behind his snowmobile a yellow sleigh that held Miss Minnesota, accompanied, for good measure, by Miss North Dakota—both of whom would alight occasionally to hand out Ski-Doo “Think Snow” buttons or Ski-Doo safety booklets. Miss Minnesota is retained for such duties through the Miss Minnesota Pageant at a straight hundred dollars a day (with special rates for appearances under two hours), and both she and Miss North Dakota appear at snowmobile functions exclusively for Ski-Doo—leaving Arctic Cat, a Minnesota company, to make do with Miss Wisconsin and Miss Michigan. At the Skeeburger Fest, the Johnson representative, in a friendly mood, asked Miss Minnesota if it would be in violation of her contract for him to pin one of his limited-supply “LOVE is a Johnson Skee-Horse” buttons on her. She thought about it a moment, smiled pleasantly, and said it would be. The Awards Banquet guests included not only the Misses Minnesota and North Dakota but also Miss Brainerd, Miss Little Falls, Miss Park Rapids, and the Princess of Silver Bay—almost all of them with tiny crowns perched on their heads. But the star was Miss Minnesota. She is known in the state for having won the talent competition at the Miss America Pageant, playing the flute, and before the banquet ended the master of ceremonies announced, “She’s going to perform her talent for us tonight.” Having dressed for the banquet in a gown that was totally without brand identification, Miss Minnesota first reminded those present that she and Miss North Dakota were sponsored by Ski-Doo, although they both hoped everybody had a good time, no matter what kind of machine he drove. Then she played the flute. At a hundred a day, Miss Minnesota is considered a bargain.

  Brainerd is about 120 miles north of Minneapolis and St. Paul, in what the snowmobile industry usually refers to as the Snowbelt—an area where the billboards are as likely to advertise Arctic Cats as Fords (on the Arctic Cats, imitation leopard-skin seat covers are standard rather than optional), where sporting-goods stores sell snowmobile racing stripes made of contact paper, and where some sma
ll towns average more than one snowmobile per family. In Brainerd, which has nearby lakes that make it a summer recreation center, the word snowmobile enthusiasts often use to describe what life was like in winter before snowmobiles came along is hibernation. Anyone who listens to a few snowmobilers talk about how dismal existence was in the old days begins to find it amazing that they managed to survive until someone discovered that a revolving belt and skis and a one-cylinder motor will propel a small vehicle over the snow at thirty or forty miles an hour. “I grew up around here,” the employee of a snowmobile distributor told me as we sat in a roadhouse one dark, cold night. “And in the winter the only sound was the Grain Belt beer sign creaking in the wind.” I shivered.

  To businessmen, an area of hibernating people amounts to a block of dormant consumers just waiting for the right product to bring them to life. In the Snowbelt, no testimony of a snowmobiler on how glorious it is to have something to do all winter is quite as rhapsodic as the testimony of a banker on how glorious it is to have something to give loans on all winter. Snowmobiling has been marketed not as a sport but as a culture—a way to turn the former hibernation period into a time of what snowmobile marketers often refer to as Family Fun. Once winter is considered fun, the rest follows automatically. People in the Snowbelt enjoy being outdoors in groups, and now they can enjoy being outdoors in groups all winter merely by purchasing snowmobiles, snowmobile clothing, snowmobile trailers, snowmobile oil, and a drink called Snowshoe Grog. They like competitive sports, so there are snowmobile derbies every weekend. People who like to hunt can get to the hunting grounds in a snowmobile. People who like to drink can go from roadhouse to roadhouse in a snowmobile. The only adjustment necessary is to the cold, and snowmobilers are militantly oblivious of the cold. They like to talk about how explorers have proved snowmobile suits to be warm in temperatures as low as thirty or forty below zero, and they often stand outside when they could just as easily stand inside—the way little boys with new boots go out of their way to splash through puddles.

  Snowmobile manufacturers are quite aware that their customers are, for the most part, small-town people—people who might like to go on outings pulling their kids behind them in a sled attachment, people who are more likely to be the townies of summer resorts than the owners of summer houses, people who, in the words of one snowmobile promotion man, “might feel uncomfortable in a ski resort.”

  “You might call them the Silent Majority,” a spokesman for the industry told me at the derby, as we stood chatting just outside a heated tent.

  “About the noise…” I replied, raising my voice enough to be heard over the sound of two passing Ski-Doos.

  “It’s terrible,” he said. “Awful. Our worst problem.”

  Like the manufacturers of anything else, manufacturers of snowmobiles are organized to protect their interests—the International Snowmobile Industry Association has an executive secretary in Washington, the same man who serves as executive secretary of the American Golf Car Manufacturers Association, the Power Saw Manufacturers Association, and the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute—but even a trade association could never hope to persuade anybody that snowmobiles are anything but noisy. People in the industry admit that six or eight snowmobiles cutting through a backyard in the middle of the night can bring a homeowner leaping from his bed in the belief that, somehow, an anti-aircraft battery has just opened fire from his bedroom. They also admit—as they increase the power of some models to the point of being able to travel sixty miles an hour—that snowmobiles can be dangerous. On the theory that excesses could eventually result in a nasty backlash against Family Fun, the ISIA representative who makes the rounds of the Snowbelt legislatures acknowledges the need for legislation to prevent people from riding snowmobiles on highways or hunting from snowmobiles or using snowmobiles in populated areas late at night. He says his goal is “regulatory encouragement.”

  What nobody connected with snowmobiles will acknowledge is that the peaceful woods are being violated by snowmobiling—an idea they associate with people from big cities who know nothing about snowmobiles or woods. It is true that there is an automatic disdain for snowmobiles among the people I have always thought of as Abercrombie & Fitch Conservationists—sailing enthusiasts who complain about the noise the riffraff make with their outboards, people who build tasteful hundred-thousand-dollar houses on the unspoiled parts of the California coast and then talk about preserving the natural beauty of the area against the ugliness of tacky beach cottages. There are also serious conservationists who believe that, for a number of reasons, inaccessible woods ought to remain inaccessible, but their arguments have no effect on serious snowmobilers, who like to think that they are outdoorsmen and conservationists themselves. One snowmobiler I was talking with dismissed the idea that the noise of the machines frightens animals by saying that a snowmobile makes less noise in the woods than a chain saw. When I said that the comparison might not be the most felicitous to use with conservationists, he informed me that a chain saw attracts deer faster than a salt lick. Listening to a snowmobiler talk about the joy of riding through the woods at night, with the snow on the jack pines glistening in the moonlight, I found it hard to keep in mind that the scene would have to include the smell of gas fumes and the noise of an indoor go-cart race.

  “I wouldn’t have one of the things,” a Brainerd citizen told me during a derby social hour at the Elks Lodge. “They just amount to a way of getting from one bar to the next, and I can get to a bar without a snowmobile.” It is true that some people in Brainerd use the snowmobile as a kind of pub-crawl vehicle—the pubs in this case being the restaurants and bars on the nearby lake shores. But going to a bar with a group of snowmobilers—and snowmobilers seem to go to bars only in groups—is not at all the same as arriving in a car. One of the promotion men at the derby told me that, in his view, the success of snowmobiling is due partly to the secret yen middle-class people in places like upper Minnesota have for the life of motorcycle gangs. But a snowmobile group entering a Minnesota roadhouse also carries the mystique of the Western—the Cartwrights riding into town and coming into the bar together, part of a good, strong outdoor group. In a bar, snowmobilers usually keep their snowmobile suits on—just getting out of the top half and letting it hang over their belts behind them as they talk about the bumpiness of the trail on the way over or about the relative virtues of a Polaris and an Arctic Cat.

  The Saturday night of the Paul Bunyan Derby, I was in a roadhouse near the race track. Its parking lot seemed to have as many snowmobiles as cars. A few couples from Fargo, North Dakota, were there—people who had driven over in their cars for the derby, pulling their snowmobiles behind them on trailers—and there were a lot of local people making the usual Saturday-night rounds in their snowmobiles. The place was jammed. A snowmobile promotion man I was with was talking about his company’s spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year in racing, and about color-keying clothes to snowmobiles, and about putting out instructions to people on how to form snowmobile clubs. “Sometimes I think it’s all a childish game,” he said. “And sometimes I think we’ve rejuvenated these people.” A lot of the snowmobilers were gathered around a piano bar. They were singing along with the piano player, and going over to the dance floor to jitterbug to the faster numbers, and drinking a lot of Grain Belt beer.

  1970

  MUSHER

  SUSAN ORLEAN

  These are the questions that Susan Butcher, Alaskan dog musher and two-time winner (and record holder) of the eleven-hundred-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, is asked most often: How cold does it get in Alaska? How cold is it in Alaska right now? Is your house cold? What does caribou taste like? What’s your dog’s name? Susan’s first four answers are: Very, very cold. Not too bad. Doesn’t feel that way to me. Really good.

  The last question has approximately 150 answers, because Susan has approximately 150 Alaskan Husky sled dogs, who live outside her log cabin in the Alaskan bush. Such a large numb
er of animals strikes many people as unusual, and even unmanageable, so sometimes, instead of “What’s your dog’s name?” she is asked if she actually bothers to name all her dogs.

  The people who ask that are not fellow mushers—dog-sled drivers—but, rather, the kind of people (including us) who came to the Plaza hotel last week to see Susan receive the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Professional Sportswoman of the Year Award, and who find the circumstances of Susan’s life nearly unimaginable: the dozens of dogs, the rigors of sled racing, the near-isolation. (For much of the year, the only human being she sees is her husband, David Monson.) Susan, who told us she much prefers two days on a dog sled to two days in the Plaza, has accrued so much fame as a musher that she is used to being a curiosity, and she is gracious enough to answer even the most elementary dog-mushing, Alaska, or life-in-the-bush question with only a trace of exasperation. “Of course I name all the dogs,” she explained. “I name some after places and some after people. Then, for a while, I’ll have themes, like the names of book characters. One of my studs is Crackers, so another theme is to name his puppies after cracker brands. Another stud is Granite, and a lot of his puppies have rock names. I know every dog by name. I know every dog’s parents. I know every dog’s grandparents. I know which one has a cold, and which one didn’t eat well last night, and I know each one’s personality and where he likes to be scratched. You have to understand, this is all I care about, and this is all I think about. I don’t understand anything else, and I don’t care about anything else. I’m with the dogs twelve or sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. They’re my friends and my family and my livelihood.”