Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers
Page 24
We helped them figure out the best route (or at least one they had a chance of finishing before winter) and then flew them up to the old mining strip at Iron Creek. Then they vanished into the back country and we didn’t hear anything from them until yesterday, when they ambled into our hangar looking like they’d just walked from pole to pole.
They said they’d had a few adventures, such as falling into raging mountain rivers, nearly starving, and dodging bears, but otherwise they’d had a grand time. After 25 days they’d finally made it down the Chickaloon River to the Glenn Highway and hitched a ride back to Talkeetna.
As we pumped cup after cup of coffee into them, the talk turned inevitably to dogs. They allowed as how they’d always been interested in dogs in Sweden, but they’d never had much of a chance to get more involved. When I mentioned the Iditarod, they immediately asked if they could see my dogs. Since they needed a place to spend the night, I said why not—I could hook up the trailer to the three-wheeler and they could ride along when I ran the dogs, and then they could help me feed and give some shots to the puppies.
Back at my place, hooking up nine dogs, I was struck by the trailer’s uncanny resemblance to a tumbrel cart carrying victims to the guillotine. (I wonder if Citizen Robespierre and his henchmen ever envisioned using dog power to haul the ancien régime to the butcher block.) I didn’t mention this to my visitors, but I figured they’d get the picture soon enough.
The dogs didn’t even notice the triple load and surged out of the driveway. Within a mile, they’d managed to flip the trailer on the back trail, spilling my Scandinavian sojourners into the willow bushes. For the rest of the run I used the engine on the three-wheeler to both help and hinder the team as we rocketed down the narrow, bush-lined track.
When we made it back (it was only a three-mile run) the first thing my somewhat-the-worse-for-wear passengers said was “We want to run the Iditarod.” Considering they’d just climbed Mount McKinley and hiked across the Talkeetnas, and one of them had previously biked from Stockholm across Europe and Africa, I had the feeling they might actually mean it.
They asked how much it would cost to run the 1997 or 1998 race; I told them $10,000 to $30,000 if they wanted to rent a ready-to-go team from someone like Joe Redington and show up in December to get their qualifying races out of the way. On the other hand, I mentioned they might come over at the beginning of the season to work as handlers for room and board at one of the big kennels that sends one or two training teams down the trail every year. More than a few young mushers have earned their first trip to Nome that way, breaking in a team of yearlings.
They thought the latter concept might work for them because it would allow them to really learn the ropes and get to know the dogs. They were also concerned about looking like “fire-and-forget” mushers who rent a team for one race and never get on the back of a dog sled again. Given a chance, they want to take up mushing seriously in Sweden and maybe return in the future to run the Iditarod with their own teams.
Anyway, they proposed to come over at the end of August next year or perhaps the year after to start work, and I said I’d try to find a musher who might be able to work with them when the time was right. They also said they could probably get sponsors in Sweden and come up with maybe $5,000 each, which would nicely cover the extra expenses necessary for entry fees, dog food, and gear for the qualifying races and the Iditarod itself. I said that would be a big help, since walking in the door with 5,000-buck checks pinned to their shirts would certainly make a few more mushers amenable to working with them for the season.
They need a ride to Anchorage today, and since the weather is going to be lousy anyway I call in to Hudson’s and take a day off. We pile into the van and head down the highway. On the way I decide this will be a good time to stop at Iditarod Headquarters and sign up for the 1996 race. My income tax refund should eventually cover most of it and I’ll shuffle some bills until it gets here. Besides, if I don’t get my money on the table now, I’ll just find some equally frivolous way to spend it. And once I’m signed up I’ll be a bit more motivated to keep up my training schedule.
Joanne Potts, the race director and a longtime acquaintance, is glad to see me; she wasn’t sure I really meant to try it again this year. As I fill out the paperwork she says I’m number 52, which is a lot of people for this early in the year. She thinks it might be one of the biggest races yet if sign-ups continue at the current rate; this is fine with me—the more the merrier, since it means I’ll have some company at the back of the pack. If I’m running with somebody I won’t be as prone to scratch if my thinking processes get muddled, which I’m sure they will somewhere out on the trail.
As I drop Nicolas and Johan off at a hostel in Anchorage to wait for their plane, we agree to stay in touch. Now that I’m on the Internet, we decide to use it as our main communications link. I almost wish they could stay and try to run next year, but they’ve got a lot of work to do in Sweden (including assembling a video of their adventures for Swedish television) before they can head back this way.
After a stop at Sam’s Club for another 500 pounds of dog food, I hit the highway in high spirits. Getting my entry fee in was my major financial (and psychological) hurdle, and I think meeting the young Swedes and sharing a bit of their enthusiasm was good therapy. I’m finally back on track, and this time I’m going at it in a considerably more systematic and methodical manner than last year. I’ll have to scrape to get everything else together, but now I’m sure I’ll manage. At least I feel like I almost know what I’m doing this time around.
September 20, 1995
Montana Creek, Alaska
Ie been running the dogs the past couple of weeks with my old beat-up three-wheeler, the same one I vowed last year never to use again for anything except perhaps a suicide attempt. The four-wheeler I borrowed from Bert last year isn’t available yet, so out of sheer necessity I’ve been hooking nine dogs up to the tricycle from hell and going up to 10 miles on trails that would challenge Arnold Schwartzenegger and his personal HumVee.
True to form, I’ve been up close and personal with the shrubbery at least once or twice on every run, thanks to the fact the three-wheeler has about the same stability as a case of 50-year-old dynamite. The dogs have been fully aware of this, of course, and have positively delighted in whipping me around corners and through ruts whenever they’ve had the chance.
Yesterday I finally picked up the four-wheeler, making the 100-mile odyssey into town in Old Blue, the $700 dog truck Ron and I acquired a couple of weeks ago. Considering Old Blue needs some front-end work (actually, a lot of front-end work), and taking into account I also picked up a ton of lumber and dog food, the drive home was more like a drunken sailor wobbling back to the ship on Saturday night.
Tonight, as I hook up 12 dogs for the first run on the four-wheeler, it’s raining. This has been the normal state of affairs this fall. We’ve broken all of the rainfall records for Southcentral Alaska, and I think it’s rained here on 20 of the last 21 days, sometimes quite heavily. Most people are taking it philosophically, reckoning this is payback for the extraordinary summers and falls we’ve had for the past two years. I firmly believe there’s no such thing as normal weather in Alaska—only extremes some anonymous statistician massages to derive a meaningless average.
This fall, most dogs in this part of Alaska have probably been wondering whether they’re training for the Iditarod or an English Channel swim. I’m debating whether I should start breeding for dogs with webbed feet. Running down the narrow tracks with their overhanging branches laden with moisture is like breaking trail in a rain forest. It’s great for the dogs because it keeps them cool, but I’ve been thinking about investing in a diver’s dry suit.
In addition, some sections of the trail are so muddy there’s no way to stop anything with wheels—with or without brakes—if the dogs don’t want to cooperate. On a previous run with the three-wheeler, they dragged it fully 50 yards through the goo after the
y flipped it and tossed me into a mud puddle the size of Lake Erie. The snow is going to be positively welcome this year, and the sooner the better.
Mud or no, the dogs are getting back into shape quickly. I can already tell the difference, especially on the cooler nights when they aren’t as oppressed by the unseasonable warmth. It’s clear they are happy to be out on the trail again after being canine couch potatoes all summer. With the exception of a couple of the old veterans like Rocky and Socks, who probably wouldn’t get excited if they were turned loose in a dog food factory, they are all frantically eager to run.
I’m methodically working to train 24 of them, and to identify the ones that won’t make it for one reason or another. Already I’ve decided old Slipper, who is 11 years old, won’t start. She is, as always, more than willing to run and is still a wonderful leader, but it’s time for her to retire. She can help train puppies and go on local runs as long as she can pack her harness, but there’s no point in subjecting her to the rigors of the Iditarod or even a serious mid-distance race at her age, especially with the new rules which will automatically disqualify a musher if a dog dies. Besides, her night-blindness seems to be slowly getting worse, and I’m worried she might hurt herself on the long runs in the dark that comprise so much of any distance race in the winter.
In a way, it’s a little sad to see the inevitable end of such an illustrious career, but she’s more than earned her pension. She’ll join Chewy and Josephine and a couple of other not-quite-varsity dogs. They’ll still get to run often enough (and Josephine will probably have several more litters of exceptional pups), but they’re just not Iditarod material. In any case, I’m not going to get rid of them unless someone wants a pet: after all, they’re family now, and they’ll always have a home here.
October 4, 1995
Montana Creek, Alaska
I haven’t gone two waking hours since March without turning over in my mind what I should and shouldn’t have done on the trail to Rainy Pass. I’ve run every mile countless times and examined everything from more angles than Dostoyevsky. All of the introspectives come down to the same conclusion: I should have kept going. Whatever trials and tribulations I’d have encountered would have been trivial compared to what I’ve put myself through since then.
I think the major lesson I’ve learned is very simple, and goes well beyond anything I did or didn’t do after the start of the Iditarod. It’s something very basic, something I thought I’d certainly absorbed by the time I graduated from high school. In the words of every coach I’ve ever had, I didn’t want to finish the race badly enough. I didn’t take it seriously enough and I didn’t sacrifice enough. And I paid the price in the end.
Finishing the Iditarod, much less eventually doing well, is a matter of desire and determination, and must extend to every facet of training and even life itself. To read my journal from last year, one would think I understood this, but it took a baptism of fire (or ice) to finally bring it home.
This summer has seen what can best be characterized as a stiffening of my resolve. I’ve been able to step back and take a more or less objective look at just what I’ll need to do to improve my chances to finish. It’s clear my preparation last year was riddled with too many inconsistencies and waverings of purpose. Despite the occasional flashes of insight, I was a basically a dilettante.
One of my biggest problems was my consuming involvement in student teaching in Anchorage during the week; I never really built the continuity with the dogs I needed. I missed too many subtle signs from them I should have noticed: stopping on hills, missing commands, becoming unfocused at critical times.
And I definitely didn’t work hard enough to bond with my leaders. I truly didn’t appreciate the value of a good leader until suddenly I didn’t have any when it counted the most. I made a big mistake by using Pullman in lead almost exclusively for the qualifying races and even for training because she was a little faster than Socks. Running back in the team, Socks drifted away and seemed to lose interest—and I missed the signals.
This year I’ve gone out of my way to make sure Socks and I are best buddies and he gets his fair share of time in front. He could have kept me on the straight and narrow on the way to Rainy Pass and beyond if I’d only realized how good he was—and is.
I’ve managed to get pretty close to Buck as well; I consider this an accomplishment of sorts, since he was terribly timid when I first got him, and coaxing him out of his shell took months. This is important, because Buck is my secret weapon this year. Like Socks, he’s a mature, mellow ‘power-steering’ leader and is big enough to drag the whole team if he has to; unlike Socks, he sets a good pace. I wish I’d had him during the Iditarod, and in fact I could have: John Allison offered him to me in January but I figured Pullman would be all the leader I’d need. I’ll not make that mistake again.
Of course, I won’t have any females in heat. I now realize I let the “heat wave” distract me when I should have dropped the offenders and kept moving. It wasn’t an insurmountable problem. Steve Adkins has told me how he somehow made it to Nome with most of his team in heat, putting up with all manner of mayhem in every village. Plenty of other mushers have encountered even worse events of this nature and still made it through in good order. In any case, I’ll be using more big males this time, and the females will all be “on the pill.”
The biggest single change has resulted from the dogs being at my place instead of over at Ron’s. Now I know there is no substitute for staying close to the dogs in a physical and emotional sense. I am forced to pay attention to them whenever I’m home, and I’ve learned worlds about all of them I simply missed when they were out of sight and often out of mind.
There’s no such thing as a part-time dog musher. The commitment must be total, both physically and mentally, and the dogs must become a part of daily life. Continuity must be maintained, or critical trends and important nuances will be missed. Only now am I starting to understand what the really serious mushers have gone through to get where they are—and I appreciate their accomplishment even more.
November 4, 1995
Montana Creek, Alaska
Enough autumn, already! Mother Nature has been dealing from the bottom of the deck to Southcentral Alaska this fall. If winter doesn’t get here soon, we may be running the Iditarod on four-wheelers, or maybe in boats.
First came weeks of rain, then a few tantalizingly brisk mornings in early October, spreading a crust of ice over enough lakes to scare everyone into taking their airplanes off floats a couple of weeks early. Finally the snow started to fall late on the 10th, dumping six inches around Willow and an inch or two here at Montana Creek. The adult dogs were beside themselves with eagerness, remembering snow meant sleds, which in turn meant lots of interesting runs.
Then came the sucker punch: the temperature slithered back up to hover right at freezing, followed by days of cold rain. It’s difficult to imagine a worse situation for training dogs. Enough rain-soaked snow remained on the still-frozen ground to make trails impassable, too slick for four-wheelers and too thin for sleds. And the dogs were thoroughly miserable to boot, shivering in their houses and under their trees in the bone-chilling drizzle.
My running log began to look like it was written in disappearing ink, with week-long gaps. I had no choice but to continue with the four-wheeler whenever I could catch a break in the hideous weather, even though I had virtually no control in many places where a thin layer of mud and lake-sized puddles had formed over the waterproof frozen ground. About all I accomplished was to keep the dogs from completely losing the conditioning I’d so painstakingly put on them in August and September.
By the end of October the rain stopped and we actually had another grudging few inches of snow. The first weekend of November surprised everyone (especially the harried weather prognosticators) by being forecast to be nearly perfect for dog driving, with bright sun, no wind, and temperatures in the teens.
On Thursday night before the weeken
d, Bert called and casually mentioned daughter Kim would be bringing up six Russian exchange students and their sponsors on Saturday morning for sled rides, maybe 15 people or so. And by the way, he said, Channel Two News from Anchorage would probably be coming along to tape the whole thing.
After I recovered from the shock, I frantically ransacked my untouched-since-March storage shed to find the snow hooks, quick releases, and miscellaneous pieces of rigging necessary to fit out the sleds. I finally got everything together about four o’clock this morning and caught a few hours of sleep.
Now it’s show time. Kim arrives about noon with her girlfriends and the exchange students, along with their sponsors and chaperones plus several of their teachers from Anchorage. Mercifully, the television crews can’t make it, which is a major relief: the last thing I need is a close-up of my dog lot and typically cluttered premises splashed all over the six-o’clock news.
The unfortunate thing about such publicity is dog lots can be messy places, especially after the weather we’ve had the past couple of months— and mine is no exception. My dogs all have shelter from the elements and plenty of chain to move around, and they’re as healthy as horses. However, some people think dog lots should look like living rooms, which is a difficult mind-set to combat, especially when the cyclopean eye of the idiot box magnifies the smallest detail and takes everything out of context. Somebody, somewhere, would see something he or she didn’t like and I’d be weeks trying to set things right.
The potential for bad press is compounded because there have been several notorious cases of neglected and abused dogs in Southcentral Alaska over the past couple of years—none of which involved serious mushers—and dog lots have become a hot-button issue. Worse, the borough Animal Control code is apparently copied from some urban Lower 48 set of ordinances and makes no official distinction between a well-cared-for dog team and a sweatshop puppy factory. Every dog is assumed to be a potentially rabid pit bull and every kennel owner is guilty of neglect until proven otherwise. Most mushers loathe any involvement with Animal Control officers because, like any good bureaucrats, the critter cops can always find some “t” not crossed or “i” not dotted.