January 21, 2006
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Snowmobiles
Scott A. Schneider for The New York Times
A rider on a practice run for the 43rd annual World Championship Snowmobile Derby in Eagle River, Wis.
January 15, 2006
Snowmobiles Keep Coming Though the Ice Is Melting
By JOE DRAPE
EAGLE RIVER, Wis., Jan. 14 – It has been a tough winter here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin for reasons less-hardy souls may have trouble fathoming. White gold, the local name for snowfall, has been meager, and the sunny skies and the 39-degree weather make it downright balmy for a place accustomed to temperatures of zero and below.
So far it has claimed this town of 1,443′s proudest winter attraction: the Ice Castle, which for more than 70 years has been sculptured from more than 2,000 blocks of lake ice and stood sentinel on Railroad Street. Then the Eagle River Area Fire Department lost a borrowed pickup truck when it plunged into Silver Lake as the ice harvest began 17 days ago.
But the wintertime blues disappeared Friday night, Day 2 of the 43rd annual World Championship Snowmobile Derby, which residents herald as the Indianapolis 500 of snowmobile racing.
Jimmy Blaze followed a fireworks display, which opened Friday Night Thunder, by defying physics and doing a back flip on a snowmobile to the whoops and mitten-muffled applause of the 10,000 people who crammed on a snow-covered hill at Eagle River Derby Track. The temperature had dropped to 25; the wind chill made it feel like 11 and a steady snow fell.
Hundreds of the young men and women in parkas bearing the logos of their favorite sled manufacturers, like Polaris and Arctic Cat, arrived by snowmobile. Families, too, planted camping chairs in the white bowl, but while mothers and fathers watched the racers hit 100 miles an hour on the track’s icy oval, their snowsuit-bundled children found a steeper hill for body-sledding.
“The Derby made this town,” said Chuck Decker, who owns the track and the event that celebrates all things snowmobile. “This community was one of the first to get hold of snowmobiles to race them, to make them a family activity and to really love them.”
The high-pitch whir of motorized sleds screamed from the 600 miles of trails that crisscross the woods and towns of Vilas County and drew more than 30,000 people here for the weekend. At the Ico Station, snowmobiles idled behind cars at the gas pumps. Dim headlights darted across Highway 70 to the sound of scraping asphalt as sledders sniffed out another trail. At Smuggler’s Lounge, a dark, shotgun tavern, they emitted steam in the parking lot.
“The helmet rack is halfway down to the right,” the bartender at Smuggler’s Lounge said, greeting one snowmobiler after another who walked through the door.
The more than 200 competitors who came here for four days of racing in junior, amateur, semipro and professional divisions were a serious bunch. They stalked the Best Western near the track in racing boots and leathers tattooed with patches from myriad sponsors.
But the motels along Wall Street, Eagle River’s stoplight-free main artery, and the resorts along its jumble of lakes offered easy access to the trails for the thousands who had come to drive their neon-colored machines up to 100 miles a day.
There is a reason this town proclaims itself the Snowmobile Capital of the World. The vehicle is rooted in the county’s history. Carl Eliason of nearby Sayner, Wis., put a motor on a toboggan to fashion the first snowmobile in the 1920′s. Snowmobiles have become part of the region’s culture, used for transportation as well as recreation. Students ride them to Northland Pines High School and anglers park them alongside ice-fishing shacks on many of the 1,300 frozen freshwater lakes here.
“They are practical,” said Bill Demlow, a hunting and fishing guide. “Everyone is up here for the outdoors, and if you can’t get to work or go out to the woods or on the lakes, you’ll go goofy.”
Vilas County issues tourist-handy trail maps that list 63 businesses as official “pit stops” to break up a sledder’s day. They range from diners to beer joints, from resorts to beer joints and from fine restaurants to, yes, more beer joints.
Wisconsin has averaged 25 snowmobile fatalities over the past 10 years, with alcohol contributing to more than half of them, according to a 2003-4 report by the state Department of Natural Resources.
Still, the state government embraces the pastime, promoting more than 20,000 miles of snowmobile trails. Last November the Wisconsin State Lottery teamed with the World Championship Snowmobile Derby for a $2 scratch-off game called Cool Winnings.
There are perhaps two kinds of snowmobile enthusiasts: speed demons and nature lovers.
“It’s my rush, my release,” said Stacey Schwartz, 24, a paralegal from Burlington, Wis., who won the women’s division race last year, an achievement that returned $85, or $4 more than her entry fee.
Unlike Nascar, snowmobile racing is mostly a break-even proposition. The top professional teams spend $200,000 a year on equipment, testing and travel, but the season is short. Most racers hold other jobs.
“It doesn’t matter what level you’re racing at, it’s like one big family,” said Schwartz, whose father and brother are professionals.
Dick Burbey, on the other hand, is clearly in the outdoors camp.
Before attending opening day of the snowmobile derby, he put on his leathers, pulled his sled out of the garage at his home in Goodman, Wis., and glided over wooded trails for 100 miles. Burbey, a 57-year-old truck driver, said that his arms were sore but that it was a small price to pay.
“I saw a dozen deer and at one point had to stop because there was a wolf on the trail,” he said. “I sat there and waited for him. Where else can you see that?”
In 1964, an innkeeper named John Alward, along with his wife, Betty, and a friend, Walter Goldsworthy, were the founders of the snowmobile derby. The Alwards, whose Chanticleer Inn is situated within one million acres of national and state forests with chains of pristine lakes filled with fish, and other business people had long attracted Midwesterners seeking good fishing and cool temperatures in the summer. But John Alward was concerned by what happened when this summer haven froze over.
“We had a couple of snowmobiles in the garage, and Dad figured more than a few other people did, too,” said Jake Alward, who still owns the Chanticleer Inn, which his father bought in 1951. “He decided to have a rally and caught all kinds of stuff for it. People around here thought he was crazy.”
When more than 100 racers entered and 2,000 people showed up for what was billed as the World’s First Snowmobile Derby, resort and restaurant owners hurried to winterize their facilities. The inaugural race was run on and around Dollar Lake, next to the Chanticleer Inn, and many of the snowmobiles could not make it up a small hill. Eventually, an eighth grader named Stan Hayes took first place in the marquee race for 9-horsepower sleds.
The Alwards held the championships on their property one more year before passing it on to the local Lions Club.
“The Lions Club trademarked the name World Championship Snowmobile Derby, so anyone who wanted to call themselves a world champion had to race in Eagle River,” said Decker, whose family bought the event in 1985.
Decker, who was the 1986 world champion in the marquee 25-lap Pro 440 class, has built the derby into an extravaganza. He enticed sponsors whose brightly colored signs overwhelm the snowy backdrop; by contrast, minor league baseball stadiums look aesthetically restrained.
Decker added “hot seats,” or heated suites, for those willing to pay $80 to $225. Last year, that looked like a bargain as temperatures lingered around 20 below zero. Decker also groomed bumps and jumps inside the oval for sno-cross racing and put lights above the track.
About $130,000 in cash, prizes and trophies were on the line over the weekend, Decker said, nearly a third of it earmarked for the 12 professionals from Minnesota, Michigan, Canada and, of course, Wisconsin, who qualified for the Pro 440 class finals on Sunday. But for competitors and spectators alike, Derby Week, as it is called, is more about the experience than about the money.
“We came mainly to ride,” said Jim Anderson of Junction, Ill., who was unwinding with a beer outside Sweetwater Spirits and Resort(Pit Stop No. 56) after coming off the trails.
Schwartz, the paralegal, made the five-hour drive to Eagle River with her daughters, 8-year-old Alexis and 5-year-old Hannah, to try to defend her title. Hannah just joined the junior circuit.
“This is the most prestigious race of them all,” Schwartz said. “You win this and you got bragging rights. I’m the only one in my family that can say I’m a world champion.”
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Columbia Unbecoming
[posted online on April 25, 2005]
In recent months, a growing chorus of conservative critics has decried the existence of a liberal orthodoxy on college campuses and called for new measures to safeguard students’ free speech. Curiously, however, these critics are silent regarding the free speech rights of graduate student employees, including teaching assistants (TAs) and research assistants (RAs) who have been trying to hold union elections and have been censored by their university employers. In recent years, in fact, Columbia, Tufts, Penn, Brown and other prestigious private colleges have responded to student organizing drives with tactics that can only be described as profoundly illiberal and undemocratic.
At Columbia, where the students just concluded a weeklong strike in tandem with their brethren at Yale, a previously undisclosed internal memo (just obtained by The Nation–download here) reveals that the administration has been flirting with union-busting tactics that go well beyond anything an academic institution should contemplate. The memo, dated February 16, 2005, is signed by none other than Alan Brinkley, a well-known liberal historian who is now serving as Columbia’s provost. Brinkley has gone out of his way to assure outside observers, including New York State Senator David Paterson, that “students are free to join or advocate a union, and even to strike, without retribution.” Yet his February 16 memo, addressed to seventeen deans, professors and university leaders, lists retaliatory actions that might be taken against students “to discourage” them from striking. Several of these measures would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act.
Such measures include telling graduate student teachers and researchers who contemplate striking that they could “lose their eligibility for summer stipends” (i.e., future work opportunities) and also “lose their eligibility for special awards, such as the Whitings” (a prestigious scholarship and award program). Yet another proposal cited in the memo would require students who participated in the strike “to teach an extra semester or a year” as a condition for receiving their scholarly degree.
It’s unclear whether Columbia’s deans and department chairs ever deployed any of these punitive measures–or threatened to deploy them–during the most recent strike, where hundreds of students, joined by other union sympathizers, participated in rowdy demonstrations along Broadway. But the fact that Brinkley proposed such illiberal tactics is itself highly revealing. It suggests that, when it comes to the universities’ current administrations, the conservatives have it wrong.
True, college professors in the United States overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But it is hard to make the case that the governance of these institutions–most of whose trustees and regents have backgrounds in business, not education–can be classified as “liberal.” In fact, in recent years, most major universities have adopted a corporate cost-cutting model–predicated on the elimination of full-time professorships and the downsizing of teaching–that is anathema to the academic culture.
Nowhere has this new, corporate style of management been more evident than at Columbia. Just over three years ago, Columbia’s graduate students held a union election, which was sanctioned by the National Labor Relations Board. (In 2000, the NLRB issued a landmark ruling granting graduate student employees at private universities the right to unionize. Students at public universities have enjoyed those rights since 1969.) Columbia, which hired one of the nation’s foremost union-busting law firms to represent it, filed a federal appeal which caused the students’ ballots to be impounded. Then, in 2004, a new Republican-dominated NLRB reversed its earlier pro-union ruling and rescinded graduate students’ right to unionize. This left the students with few options except to strike.
Columbia has consistently argued that graduate students are apprentices, not employees, making collective bargaining inappropriate. This position is shared by nearly every private university, including Brown, Tufts and Penn (student election ballots were impounded prior to being counted on these campuses, as well). Yet the private universities’ argument flies in the face of reality. Graduate students no longer feel like apprentices who are being mentored to join a scholarly guild. A generation ago, when these students could look forward to full-time careers in academia, their years of training, heavy teaching loads and low pay were tolerable. Now they increasingly feel exploited: Most are acutely aware that their chances of finding a secure full-time position in academia are slim. Worse, they know that by allowing universities to exploit their cheap labor, they are helping to eliminate the very full-time positions for which they are purportedly being trained. Today, roughly 50 percent of the faculty in higher education teach on a part-time, contingent basis. A remarkable 60 percent of all new faculty appointments are “off the tenure track,” meaning that professors are ineligible for tenure and have only short-term contracts. So it should not come as a surprise that informal lists of signatures–verified by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz–indicate strong majorities of graduate students at both Columbia and Yale do support a union.
Ironically, although conservatives continue to see liberalism as the bogeyman, the rise of a corporate labor model in higher education may pose a far greater risk to academic freedom and free speech. Historically, let’s not forget, the leaders of the academic freedom movement recognized that the only way to prevent corporate trustees and other outside interest groups from violating the free speech rights of their professors was to establish a system of faculty self-governance, peer review and long-term job security. Otherwise, any professor who voiced unconventional or unpopular views was extremely vulnerable to getting fired.
Viewed through this lens, the unionization campaigns at Columbia, Yale, Brown, Harvard, Penn and other institutions may be the last, best hope for stopping administrators from imposing a corporate labor model on universities that erodes faculty power–and with it academic freedom.
