About 20 minutes into the 15-kilometer Frank Soos memorial ski race Saturday, I found myself abandoned.

That’s what happens when you go a lot slower than everyone else.

Being alone for the next hour or so gave me the chance to think about Frank, who told me he sometimes used his time alone on skis to find the elusive words or images he needed to improve whatever writing project was waiting at home.

I kept thinking about how to write about Frank on skis. He shuffled like a penguin, some would say. Others would compare him, a little unfairly, to a giraffe struggling to stay upright on ice skates. He had a high center of gravity and couldn’t convince himself to try to balance on one leg and then another, as he glided along.

“I am a most mooselike man, tall, gangly, clumsy, and slow, above all an animal given to loneliness,” the retired English professor wrote of himself. At 6-foot 6 inches, he was built for basketball and played it as a younger man, but his mind told him he should ski.

Lest this be misunderstood, Frank was a much faster skier than I am. He had better technique on skis and improved as the years passed, with thousands of kilometers gone by. I looked up to him in more ways than one.

He finished the 50K Sonot Kkaazoot in the spring 14 times, dreaming each March he could crack the four-hour barrier. “I keep slipping down the ladder; I keep trying,” he wrote.

While he was an artist with the language, the former Alaska State Writer would never become one on skis—not for lack of effort—though he managed to find poetry and wonder on the snow.

About the halfway point Saturday on the lonesome trail, it occurred to me that watching Frank striding on skis was a bit like watching a sandhill crane take off from Creamer’s Field. He had a tremendous wingspan, befitting a man who kept his elbows out and needed the longest ski poles in Fairbanks. You didn’t want to pass him or be passed by him going downhill.

For someone that skinny and that tall, the sweet Virginian could take up a lot of room.

After the race I mentioned my Soos sandhill simile to Susan Sugai, skiing mentor to both of us, and she said instantly that I should read again what Frank wrote about himself in his essay “Why Is It That We Do This?”

It turns out that it wasn’t an original idea to compare Frank to a crane.

“Years ago, I saw a picture of a crane in full mating ritual in National Geographic,” Frank wrote in an essay published in 2016. “The light from behind its outstretched wings showed its biceps, puny as marbles. Not so different from my own.”

“Thinking of my own skinny arms, I felt a kinship to that bird, far flyer, symbol of long life—how much could be accomplished with so little,” he wrote.

He never could answer the title question about why he did what he did, but he went on biking and skiing, certain that “I can do nothing other than hope to continue, getting slower and slower until finally I blink out.”

“I don’t know how else to live, and I’m not sure I or anybody else needs to live any other way than his own. We’re here to do what we can, what we love, for as long as we’re able,” he wrote in another essay.

Frank continued to do what he loved until a bike accident in August 2021 in Maine, the state he visited each summer with his wife Margo Klass. He was 70.

The distance series races are named for Frank to recognize what he did for one of the sports he loved and what he meant to some of those who loved him.

Over the last quarter-century he found a loyal group of friends—the SCUM—who shared his addiction to skiing and were not likely to mention the themes in the novels of Joseph Conrad or ask him for editing advice.

There was, however, lot of blather about ski waxes, dealing with 10 below or 25 below, staying warm, trail conditions, falling down, injuries that come with age, and some sophomoric humor. About the latter, Frank mostly kept quiet. He was among the more cerebral SCUM—quiet, bemused, shy, contemplative and kind. What he shared was the core principle that it was never too cold to ski in Fairbanks.

Frank witnessed what he called “incremental” improvements in himself and the rest of us made possible by the instruction of Susan Sugai, our volunteer coach. The group that began in the last century as “Susan’s Class of Uncoachable Men” comes up from time to time in Frank’s essays. Now the uncoachable are not just men.

“These are good people, good friends. We kid around; we sometimes work out pretty hard; nobody blames me for skiing poorly or envies me in the unlikely event I ski well. But SCUM probably stretches me to the limit of my sociability. In the jostling give-and-take, I find myself yearning to hit the trail, to ski away to quietude,” he said.

Frank was a private person, and a welcome presence even when he was stretched beyond the limits of his sociability.

He loved skiing long distances by himself and riding his bike for miles and miles. “Moving meditations,” he called them.

His love for bicycles is something he shared with my brother Terrence, who died two years ago Monday, and thoughts of my twin’s absence are always at hand.

After my brother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, Frank played a leading role in bringing two books to publication, kindnesses for which my family will always be grateful.

Frank and fellow UAF professor emeritus Mary Ehrlander edited “The Big Wild Soul of Terrence Cole: An Eclectic Collection to Honor Alaska’s Public Historian,” published in 2019 by the University of Alaska Press.

And Frank and writer Jessica Cherry edited “Wheels on Ice: Stories of Cycling in Alaska,” just published by the University of Nebraska Press. The bicycle book includes an introduction by my brother and three classic tales about biking in Alaska from 1898-1908. They are reprinted from a book my brother edited in 1985 that people have been talking about reprinting ever since.

In addition to the stories about bicycle history, the new volume includes a couple of dozen accounts of more recent adventures on two wheels by writers from across the state. Frank and Jessica recruited bicyclists who could write eloquently about why they love the sport.

On Friday at 7 p.m. in the Bear Gallery at Pioneer Park, there is to be a reading and panel discussion with local contributors to the book. After introductory remarks by Jessica Cherry and Margo Klass, readers will include Corrine Leistikow, Eric Troyer and Rachael Kvapil, followed by a panel discussion.