Alaska politics and José Jiménez
(This is an incoherent headline.)
Lately: Here’s where I tell you I’m attempting to get my life organized when it comes to this newsletter. I feel like every year, I devise some new grand plan about how to do Grazing better — or, in this case, how to organize it to reflect the topics I find myself writing about. In recent months, there’s been a bit less food and a bit more writing about books and life in general, and I think the words I type will keep veering in that general direction in the near term. So, with that in mind, I decided to try to codify a bit more of a consistent schedule for Grazing, since the People Who Know Things About Newsletters say that consistency is key. Here’s what that looks like:
If you’re a free subscriber, you can count on four emails every month: one recipe, one review of all the books I read, one essay (about food or books or life or anything else my brain is drawn to) and one round-up of the stories I’ve written on other sites1.
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Alaska politics and José Jiménez
Have there ever been two more unrelated concepts that coexisted in a headline? Maybe not. But here’s the one thing they have in common: I wrote about both in stories published in the month of October. One, I had no prior knowledge of. The other, I had far more thought about than any rational person should. If you know anything about me, you can guess which is which.
Let’s start with the out-of-the-blue subject matter: Alaska. A few months ago, I started talking about story ideas with an editor at Washingtonian, the city magazine here in D.C. That editor asked if I’d ever heard of Mary Peltola. I hadn’t.
Peltola is the sole representative from Alaska in the House of Representatives; because Alaska’s population is so tiny, it actually has more senators than it does reps, which is relatively interesting. More interesting: Peltola’s story. She’s the first Alaska Native to represent her state in the House, and she won her seat in 2022 after entering the election to do little more than try to spread a message about the catastrophic situation subsistence fishermen in Alaska have faced in recent years. “There was a very deep understanding that my path to victory was zero,” Peltola told me.
I also wrote this month about José Jiménez, the former MLB pitcher who was a disastrous starter for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1999 — except for the two times he pitched against Randy Johnson, who’d go on to win that year’s Cy Young (and the next three after that). In his first matchup with Johnson, Jiménez tossed a no-hitter, and I wrote about the joy and incredulity of listening to that game on the radio.
Below, I’ve included previews of each story, along with links to read them in full in their respective online homes
Mary Peltola Has Carved Out Her Own Space in Washington
In late July, Mary Peltola scrambled to change her travel plans. The first-term Democratic representative from Alaska had just returned to DC after a trip home to help her family put up salmon for the winter: smoking, salting, drying, canning, and freezing fish for the long, cold months ahead.
She’d missed several votes, drawing criticism from conservative groups, and now—after just five days back in the capital—she was packing again.
Leaders in the House of Representatives had canceled the following week’s agenda, starting summer recess early. For Peltola, that meant another exhausting journey, about 4,000 miles from start to finish. There would be a flight to Seattle, another to Anchorage, then one more, on a cramped, narrow-body jet to Bethel, a town of 6,276 on the banks of the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska.
Peltola’s trip is more than 1,500 miles longer than the distance the representative from the next-farthest-flung district travels. She jets through five time zones, often facing delays, which means that by the time she reaches her bed, it can be the middle of the night on the Yukon Delta. Back in Washington, the sun has already risen.
continue reading on Washingtonian.com
The World as a Dream
The story I’m about to tell you is almost entirely upside-down. There’s an alarm clock that never once woke me up. And there’s a winner who found the most incredible way to lose. There’s a little girl whose favorite lullaby was baseball and a hapless rookie pitcher with a baby face and skinny arms and an ERA trending toward 7. There’s this one solitary no-hitter that will forever confuse his legacy.
A child’s life is dotted with firsts: first word, first steps, first friend, first crush. When I was a child, for a period of about three years, the only firsts I cared about had something to do with baseball. There was the first game I watched in person through the final out, the first time I saw Mark McGwire bat, the first time I saw him hit a home run, the first time I witnessed a record thoroughly, scandalously pulverized. And then, a year later, a different kind of something new: my first no-hitter (Jose Jimenez’s first, too), beamed well past my bedtime along radio waves from the Arizona desert to my confused ears in St. Louis.
You had to see it to believe it, and all I could do was listen.
Unless, of course, I’m in a slow period and no one else publishes my writing that month, in which case I will probably feel sad and maligned. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to make me feel better.