THOUGHTS ON
What is it to assert, to propose, to declare? What is it to say a thing on a whim or go by one’s gut? What is it to claim something, something extraordinary in opposition to all known facts. Regardless, of what it is or means, it must be exhilarating. Maybe not healthy or wise but certainly worthwhile. In the moment, various persons have left it all to chance. With no more than earnest conviction, they set about to prove what cannot be proven. It hardly comes as no surprise many failed.
Although, occasionally, one hears tell of that .0001 % that beat the odds. It is in the infinitesimal margin, I would give anything to know how it feels. One such underdog, E. J. “Stroller” White, a writer, was hired by a modest paper out of Dawson, Alaska. It was on one faithful morning, as White recounts in Tales Of A Klondike Newsman—
“It was a cold winter morning in Dawson and the newspaper business was at a very low ebb. There had been no mail for nearly a month and the telegraph line had been out of commission for more than a week. In consequence, no news was forthcoming from the great world outside, while local news was scarce as to quantity and insipid to quality. The editor was pacing the office and alternately moaning and tearing his hair. The paper, he announced, had reached bedrock; the only way it could sink lower would be to fold up and go out of business entirely.
‘Go out and rustle up some news,’ he demanded. ‘Get me something that will make headlines and sell papers.’”
White and his colleague, Casey Moran, hotfooted it out the door. Strolling about the frigid streets of the lonely Alaskan town, a subtle sound caught White’s ears. A “squeak, squeak, squeak” of a sled across the ivory snowbanks hit “the stroller” with a definite bit of inspiration.
Returning to his desk, White began to put his imagination into words. The product of White's brainstorm was a curious tale of how a heavy fall of blue snow, coupled with inhospitable cold, had coaxed particular creatures out of their hibernation. The strange animals proceeded to “squeak, squeak, squeak,” so disruptively, in fact, that hardly was there any in Dawson who could get a wink of sleep. It is in this original story, the first of many, what would feature the wonderful yet wholly fanciful, “ice worms.”
Early that very next morning, signs at a local tavern read “Ice Worm Cocktails, $1,” and remained there for a great while following. For a good business was had inserting pieces of a spaghetti into ice cubes floating atop a bubbly beverage. As with White’s writings, they would see national circulation. Letters came pouring in requesting information on the behavior and attributes of the remarkable creatures, which White happily obliged in fabricating *cough,* I mean, furnishing.
Still, unbeknownst to White, and to the great surprise of many, White's ruse was not as he predicted. For relatively unknown at the time, ice worms, of the genus Mesenchytraeus, really do make their homes in glacial ice. Sure, they make no audible noise, at least to human ears, but ice worms they are nonetheless. And so, White’s legacy lives on in an annual “Ice Worm Festival” held in Cordova, Alaska and to numerous nature websites having to disclaim, “Ice worms do exist.”
Out of the purest of coincidences, the outcome of White’s practical joke is the equivalent to excusing your lateness at work due to a dragon attack only to return home and find a fire-breathing lizard sleeping in your living room. Oh and, as an aside, remember Moran, White’s colleague? Well, he wrote a story too. It purported that Noah’s ark was found atop an Alaskan glacier. At least, that has not come true... yet.