Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery. The Extraordinary Story of Alaska Musher Mike Williams Sr. онлайн

8 страница из 77

—Doug Modig

Alaska Sobriety Movement leader

The first time I met Mike Williams he was bundled up in a parka standing in a pile of mushy snow a short distance from Fourth Avenue in Anchorage, Alaska, awaiting the start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

At the time I was the sports editor of the Anchorage Daily News and Mike was an entrant in the thousand-mile race between Alaska’s largest city and the old Gold Rush town of Nome on the Bering Sea Coast.

I had written about the race and Mike had mushed in the race, but he was upping the ante. He had decided that to shed light on one of Alaska’s greatest threats to the health and future of its Native people he would carry in his sled pages—pounds worth—of signatures of people who had pledged sobriety. A Yup'ik Eskimo, Mike saw how alcohol could devastate people as surely as if they had contracted a deadly flu.

It was a cause close to his heart because Mike was the last surviving brother in what had once been a large family. Only each of his brothers had succumbed to alcohol-related accidents, incidents, or illnesses. He recognized alcoholism as a disease with terrible consequences that had wrecked his family. It had also almost claimed him, but he had righted himself.