Cindy Abbot Iditarod

Cindy Abbot after breaking her pelvis in her first Iditarod last year has entered the race again, bib number ten and is in 73rd place. When I learned of her courage last year, I wrote this poem. Hope you enjoy it and join me in wishing her a safe race and finish.                                                            

A Woman’s Place

Time to toss the myth of members of the Golden State

As laid back surfers with waves and sun only to motivate

Go to Silicon Valley or here in the Tech Coast

To find hard work and creativity as a common host

Put to bed the myth of women as frail, not strong but only weak

Marathons, channel swims, transPac sails, mountain climbs, and even combat women seek

                           Add to that growing, grueling list, the Iditarod Race

Where dogs and humans are fused in a freezing 1000 mile embrace

Irvine’s Cindy Abbott should be a hero to all although maybe out of her mind

At 54, a mother and prof she enters the Last Great Race although half blind

With special gear to see at night, a lot of weight to top the sled scales

Maybe her children canines were already looking tired at start of trail

No vials of vaccine to spur her on to sick children near death’s bed

Only awareness of a rare disease that must not life’s spirit cause her to shed

Briefly near the top ten, only to slowly fade

Facing a never ending mushing up and down icy grades

Onward, onward, “can’t” is a word only for fools

A thousand miles of solitude where to find the finishing tools?

Global warming or a fluke but on slush her balance on the first day failed

Broken pelvis, hand swollen, no one but her dogs to hear her painful tale

Forced to on hands and knees her dogs to tend

A wrist so swollen it would barely bend

Bone pounding on bone with each step, yet she refused to quit

New meaning for the phrase chiseled into the Alaskan ice—True Grit

After 600 miles and close to 400 left to Nome

Dogs fading and her being chilled to her inner bones

Shivering and throbbing more each hour, losing the hypothermia race

With frostbite eagerly awaiting the chance to shape her face

“I have scaled Everest, mush on, mush on, as long as my “children” last

Must link awareness for my disease to the serum run’s lifesaving past”

Dreams die slowly, but reality 25 miles from Kaltag finally sank in.

After 24 hours resting on the Yukon, denial of pain no longer to spin

A race checker found her and her dogs almost totally spent

Scratched her from the course and to a clinic she was sent

Iditarod once again has lived up to its name—the Last Great Race

But in the halls of heroes this woman has earned her place

Broken pelvis, blind in one eye, mush on one checkpoint at a time

Shed from the vocabulary the word “can’t”, almost all goals you can climb

Pity those jihadists who women’s achievements block and belittle their brains

About as smart as racing the Iditarod in T-shirts and shorts with parkas to deign

© March 15, 2013 Michael P. Ridley aka the Alaskanpoet