Author: rakemag

You got one thing wrong in “Iron Will” [December]. You said Steger’s was the first dogsled team in Antarctica. It was actually the last, due to the Antarctic Treaty banning dogs for potential diseases affecting native species. Ever heard of a rabid leopard seal? Dogs were used there when Roald Amundsen first cruised to the Pole in 1911, with a pack of strong dogs. Dogs have not been used in Antarctica since 1993. The ban was enacted because of evidence that the canine disease distemper was spreading to Antarctica’s seals. (This evidence is up for debate.) The British, who had used their dogs intensively through the early 1970s, were the last to remove their dogs. Maybe they were making up for not using them earlier: Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition’s failure to make good use of sled dogs, while the Norwegian explorers were experts at dog handling, is considered one of the main reasons that Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole. Also, the Norwegians used skis. (Hello?! Does this make any sense on snow?) They also dressed like the Inuit, with mukluks and native fur clothing. Scott and his gang did not want to sink that low and take part in the ways of the “primitives.” They chose a more “noble approach,” with canvas clothing and leather boots, no dogs and no skis.

Per Breiehagen
Minneapolis

Breiehagen’s photos from Antarctica appeared in last month’s cover story.

Recent articles [“Dealing From the Bottom,” September] and letters in The Rake compel corrections of the record. Disagreements about custody will occur; places for their resolution are required. Many are resolved privately by written agreements without attorneys involved. Mediation works for more. Collaborative law works for others. Only a few custody cases actually go to trial. The late Honorable Joseph Summers, Ramsey County judge and first Almanac host, once said to me, “When divorce cases go to trial, it’s because there is a jerk somewhere in the group of parties and lawyers. If I can figure out who the jerk is, we can settle the case.” There is truth to that, but I would not go as far as Judge Summers. Every month, I see civilized presentation of divorce cases in my court. The original article did a great disservice to the many attorneys who, in the last twenty-five years, have drastically changed custody and divorce cases for the better. If you want to know more about that quiet revolution, contact the Minnesota chapter of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, the Collaborative Law Institute, and the Honorable James Swenson, presiding judge in Hennepin County Family Court. Finally, Glenn Bruder’s letter [November] is filled with inaccuracy. While gender-based arguments are made to the legislature every year, the legislature has given us laws that are child-focused and helpful. There is nothing about our current system that devalues fathers. For example, about forty-four percent of custody studies done by Hennepin County Court Services result in recommendations of either joint or father’s custody. The system of twenty-five years ago was a “win”-based system for most people. That has changed dramatically, in the last few years especially, to a problem-solving model. Fathers who were significantly involved with their children before the divorce are seeing their children much more often than alternate weekends. If they don’t have joint physical custody, they have evening and overnight access during the week; they coach their children’s teams; and they take children to the doctors, attend school conferences and performances, and provide alternate care when mothers are unavailable. The child support guidelines do assume that the custodial parent has financial responsibility for children. It is rare that a child support order covers all the costs of raising the affected children. One can righteously quibble about the details of the guidelines and how they are implemented. But the evidence is strong that, overall, the Child Support Guidelines have corrected financial inequities, not created them. On the issue of divorce and custody, the Rakish angle needs to be tipped toward telling the whole story.

Stephen C. Aldrich
Judge of Hennepin District Court
Family Court Division

The author was a family law practitioner for twenty-two years before taking the bench in 1997. He has served in the Family Court Division since 1998.

I am a female reader who really likes Stuart Greene’s column, and not as kindling for a fire. I hope I am part of a legion of such readers who have written to say “rock on.” I presented your debut column to my (male) team teacher as a potential piece to use in our college-level gender unit. He was thrilled to find this opinion in print, as our unit lacked any unpretentious, intelligent counterpoints to the status quo. As an added bonus, I think it saved his sanity—or at least encouraged his suffering conscience, which is down for the count after twenty years of marriage to a woman who seems, as you point out in the December 2003 column, to go “Def-Con Five” when he wants to talk about sex. Not for these reasons alone do I like your column. I know there are at least a few married women who can discuss sex as a sensuous plumbing issue without the emotional high jinks. They are my friends, and they certainly give me an earful. But many don’t, I surmise, because women’s insecurities about monogamy are so perfectly socialized that merely a discussion of sex without “all the other things that go into a relationship” is too threatening. “If my husband works up a froth about shaving me in the shower, what next? Pretty soon he’ll be taking appointments—and not with me!” It seems the Buddhists have it precisely right when they point out that it is our grasping and rejecting that makes us so unhappy. A lot of women grasp at the idea of monogamy as if it were the only available relational life raft. Though my choice to be unmarried and childless perhaps makes me atypical among women my age (mid-thirties), I have been like the women you described. Happily, circumstances have conspired to show me what a hypocrite I have been, when, in the past, I emotionally hijacked conversations with lovers and boyfriends. I was behaving as if emotional withdrawal was the only card I could play to keep the horny man from straying. But as you point out in your debut article, it ain’t quite like that. Not all men in relationships want to act on their imaginative nonmonogamous impulses. But many women are guilty, I think, of subverting our own desires. Maybe we think this will save us from abandonment. On the contrary, I have been liberated by expressing my own desires. Emotional withdrawal is not the only action open to me, but figuring that out wasn’t easy. Women, I think, are afraid to talk about sex because it threatens their security. Furthermore, even if they weren’t so threatened, if other women are like the way I was, I could barely choke up the words to say what I wanted. Ladies: practice! Get a journal. Rustle up some words that work for you. Start writing about what you want. See what happens.

Name withheld by request

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In response to Jenna Sophia Hanson’s letter [December] ripping Stuart Greene’s column “Should Married Men Go to Strip Clubs?” [Sex & the Married Man, September], here is another take: The human body is a thing of beauty. That we grow up in a culture that shames that nakedness is the real problem. The fact is, the human body is an object of beauty that has been celebrated by the likes of Michelangelo with his statue of David to the Romans’ Venus Esquilina. The key word is “object.” Our Puritan culture dictates that erotica and nudity are sinful because humankind will fall prey to lust. Sexuality beyond the bedroom of marriage is a sin, yet the most vocal tend to fall prey to the very vice they against. The men who frequent strip clubs only go there because nudity has been so reviled that the very act of taking off your clothes has been routinely relegated to “the seedy side of town.” You don’t see men decrying the “exploitation” of male dancers who strut their goods to the crowds of dollar-fisted women on Ladies Night. Some marriages, both healthy and otherwise, can handle a spouse’s visit to a strip club. Others can’t. Some people have addictive personalities. Others don’t. Visiting a strip club doesn’t disrespect one’s partner any more than satisfying an urge for chocolate disrespects broccoli. Disrespect in a marriage starts and ends at home. Erotic desire is natural. What is sexually arousing to one may be a turnoff to another. The next time you look at a man (or woman) and have an erotic desire, Ms. Hanson, keep in mind that you don’t need to be in a strip club to “callously objectify” that person.
Peter Christensen
Minneapolis

After threading his car through a few harrowing switchbacks on a Norwegian mountainside, Erling Strand stopped the car and pointed. “It started down in the valley and someone saw it moving up the hill there. The lights are yellow, many white, some are blue, very few green, also different types of colors. It’s been so bright that part of the valley is illuminated at night.”

Erling was describing an unexplained light spectacle in this land of the northern lights. “It’s not the aurora borealis,” he cautioned preemptively. “The lights are down in the valley and there are no houses there. Even the Norwegian air force has seen something and can’t explain it. When a plane comes, the lights go away, but often come back afterwards.

“I try to avoid the term ‘UFO,’ because most people immediately think of it as nonsense and then no scientists want a part of this,” said Erling, who during the day is a lecturer in computer science at Østfold College. “We try to use the term ‘Hessdalen Phenomenon,’ after the name of the valley.” Just so, Erling has helped the café in town fabricate a “UFO Senter.” It exhibits numerous photos of the mysterious lights, video footage of UFOs, and paintings of bug-eyed aliens.

As Erling drove on up the mountain to an observation point, his cell phone rang. One hand worried the steering wheel of his Suzuki jeep while the other held a Nokia to his ear. His face turned grave from the news. He closed the phone like a clamshell and said, “That was the police. There’s a missing person in the area. So I have to stop and talk with them, because we have many observers scattered around this area.”

After checking in at a ranger station on the top of the mountain, Erling returned to the car. Oddly, he saw no relationship between the potentially abducted person and the mysterious lights. “The missing man is mentally unstable, so they’ll use a plane first to see if they can see him in the valley.” This reminded him: “Many of the police have seen the lights too.”

Erling summarized the situation. “I’ve been working on Project Hessdalen for more than twenty years, and the phenomenon has slowly diminished. There’s no good theory to explain it; no solution can really cover all of the things that happen here. Some think it’s because this is one of the areas of Norway with lots of sulphur and copper. But Røros has copper too, and there are no lights up there.” After two decades of careful research, Erling obviously has his theories, but he remains inscrutable. He seems to want me to make my own conclusions.

“People weren’t aware of the lights before. But if you know they exist, you start seeing them too and realize that your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. Sometimes we’re not sure if we actually see the flashes, though. That is when we check our machines.” Just then, Erling turned off the road, put the Suzuki into four-wheel drive, and revved up a field to a little automatic monitoring station.

He opened a closet-sized metal building whose roof blossomed with antennas, satellite dishes, and cameras. Inside, gadgets and monitors filled the walls. “We control all this through the Internet,” Erling said proudly. “Whenever anything happens, the cameras will photograph it.” Erling showed me a stack of photos of the phenomenon taken by a spectral camera. (They looked like headlights at dusk.) He boasted in rather an American way that his video has even appeared on the
Discovery Channel.

Next stop was a hytta, a small mountain cabin filled with students ranging from twenty to forty years old. They were in Hessdalen to study the lights. A flying-saucer jungle gym stood outside, and “Alien var her” (Aliens were here) was spray-painted on the wall. Inside, a map of Stjernehimmeln (the starry sky) was tacked above a coffee table loaded with Geiger counters and various electro-magnetic sensors.

Some students were still sacked out in sleeping bags on the floor after spending the night on a “UFO Safari” in the hills. They used their rucksacks for pillows, while others boiled “Yum-Yum” brand ramen noodles. “There was this rising light and many people got very excited,” one of the students said. “We all started taking photos, but it was just the moon rising with the clouds in front of it.”

“Later on, though,” added another student, “we saw small blinks and a light pole slowly rise up the hill. That was real.”

“The biggest observation was when we stood up quickly and got lots of little stars going on—about fifty or sixty of them,” said an impish man with a perfect Southern twang, acquired from a wayward year in Alabama. The others laughed but weren’t fazed by his skepticism. “It’s very exciting to sit there and to take measurements. We took photos of sparkling lights down in the valley…”

“…and then we stopped drinking the moonshine,” the southern Norwegian added.

In the car ride back over the mountain, Erling said, “It’s too early to say what causes this light phenomenon. I could make all sorts of silly theories, but we’ll wait till we get better info. Some people in Hessdalen claim they haven’t seen the lights”—here, he scoffed in rather an American way—“they just don’t want to be connected with it.”

I asked Erling if he’d ever seen any unexplained phenomena during the day. “Yes.” Just lights? He hesitated and chose his words carefully. “No, I’ve seen metallic-like objects and something that was cigar-shaped.” Then, taking the measure of his interviewer, he quickly added, “I choose to focus on the lights, though, because it has been a proven phenomenon.
—Eric Dregni