Not quite the same since long time
bartender and Iditarod musher

Bob Ernisse passed away.

My friend had dreamt
his dad would die.

At the Ceremonial Start,
he snapped a photograph.

Big Bob looked
like he always did, a walrus

with cowboy boots and beer bottles,
burled icicles on his moustache.

Sleep deprived on the trail,
he went to bed hallucinating

in Unalakleet, “Place Where the Wind Blows.”
A fifty-knot Chinook knocked

his sled over as he slept.
He sweat in the snow

that refroze as he froze.
He was found ruined

by hypothermia and frostbite,
Perhaps an hour or two from death.

His friend got him to Safety,
the last checkpoint before Nome

where a Widow's Lamp is lit
and remains hanging

until the last musher is finished.

A decade later in California,
stomach cancer killed him quickly.