Changing portraits of Susan Butcher

ROSANNE PAGANO

COMMENT

Published: December 26, 2005

Last Modified: December 26, 2005 at 02:42 AM

Quick -- conjure up an image of Susan Butcher.

Chances are she's kneeling in snow, wearing an unflattering watch cap and examining a husky's paw the way some Alaska women might inspect spring's first rhododendron blossoms.

Or maybe your iconic image has Butcher posed beneath Nome's burled arch and grinning widely, hugging her lead dogs close after the team turned in another first-place finish in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. A four-time Iditarod champ, Butcher amassed oodles of those end-of-the-trail snapshots; my favorite is a black-and-white from 1988, the year she notched her third consecutive win -- one of only two mushers in race history to do so.

Then there's Butcher the TV commentator, pausing to talk up strategy along the trail after running her last Iditarod in 1994. Or a young Susan Butcher with an armload of pups, her glossy brown hair in waist-length braids. Or an even younger Butcher, from her earliest Alaska days 30 years ago, grooming musk oxen in a pen at the Palmer farm and looking as if she were having the time of her life.

We Alaskans cherish our stock impressions of Susan Butcher, who turns 51 today. Her wondrous racing defines northern grit: In the 1980s, only the Alaska Airlines' Eskimo rivaled Susan Butcher as the face of the Last Frontier. Never pun shy, Sports Illustrated lauded her "dogged pursuit" of excellence and wished "happy trails to Sue." (Does anyone actually call her that?)

The image we don't have -- blessedly -- is one of the champion in a Seattle cancer ward, where she is undergoing several months of treatment for a form of leukemia that attacks the blood and bone marrow. Butcher disclosed earlier this month that she also has a rare bone marrow disorder, polycythemia vera, and has been undergoing treatment the past three years.

Butcher declined to be photographed, but she did agree to talk by phone with Alaska reporters Dec. 9, just days after she and her husband, Dave Monson, explained the diagnosis to the couple's daughters; they are just 5 and 10.

Butcher is undergoing a first phase of chemotherapy to force the leukemia into remission. She said she will need a bone marrow transplant before being cured as soon as next year.

From my desk at The Associated Press, where I was filling in that morning, I could overhear only one side of the interview. Butcher's accomplishments are storied, but so is her mile-deep, mile-wide resolve. Alaskans recognize her winner's smile all right, but we've also come to know a flinty single-mindedness that lets Butcher step off the sled after hours of running and pumping, ignore cold and sleeplessness, and tend first to her dogs. On the trail, it's easy to misinterpret grit for unfriendliness.

I was pretty sure I knew how the hospital-bed interview would go: Butcher would answer a few questions directly and deflect anything that seemed revealing, anything much about her family or fears. A lot of dead air would be filled with follow-up questions that may or may not be answered. The whole exchange might last 10 minutes, tops.

Very wrong.

The conversation ran twice that long. A single question elicited long minutes of reply, some of it characteristically assured: "I don't know the word 'quit,' " Butcher said at one point, as if we needed reminding.

But other responses resonated with anyone who's ever sat with a sick friend, especially if that friend is a woman whose husband and children suddenly seem to be part of a receding landscape. "It's just very hard," Butcher uncharacteristically acknowledged. "There were a lot of tears for all four of us."

As we Alaskans mentally flip through images in honor of Butcher's 51st birthday, a portrait of a champion in tears is worth recalling. That is a Susan Butcher for the rest of us, for whom arctic adventures and record-book achievements are the stuff of novels, not daily life.

That's a portrait to ponder, especially if it prompts you to set a date at the Blood Bank of Alaska (www.bloodbankofalaska.org) to join a statewide bone-marrow donor drive. It starts Dec. 30.

FOR CARDS: Susan Butcher, Box 60249, Fairbanks, AK 99706

Rosanne Pagano teaches at Alaska Pacific University. She can be reached at rpagano@alaskapacific.edu