My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--The World's Most Grueling Race

by Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--The World's Most Grueling Race

  Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  O'Donoghue tells what happened when he entered the 1991 Iditarod, along with 17 sled dogs with names like Rainy, Harley and Screech. O'Donoghue braved snowstorms, sickening wipeouts, and endured the contempt of more experienced racers. Narrated with icy elan and self deprecating wit, this is a true story of heroism, cussedness, and astonishing dumb luck.

  Brian Patrick O’Donoghue

  My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian

  A native of Washington, D.C., Brian Patrick O’Donoghue has worked as a cab driver in New York City, a cargo ship wiper, an elevator mechanic’s helper, a pipefitter’s apprentice, a science museum technician, a press photographer, and a TV and print journalist. These days he reports on the oil industry, politics, and sled-dog racing for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. O’Donoghue, 40, and his wife, Kate Ripley, live in Two Rivers, Alaska, with a howling kennel of retired Iditarod dogs.

  This book is dedicated to Doc,

  who showed us the way,

  and B.L.,

  who had the spirit

  but none of the luck

  CHAPTER 1. Klondike Lesson

  The jitters were gone. I hadn’t lost the trail or my dog team. Nobody was limping from injuries or fights. My dogs looked absolutely great, and little Raven was playing cheerleader as usual.

  I knew better, but I couldn’t resist. With one hundred miles left to go in the Klondike 200 I began imagining how amazed people would be at the finish line. Entering the Klondike, my sights had been set on merely finishing. My farthest trip on a dogsled had been 50 miles. This race stretched 200 and I had to go the distance to qualify for the Iditarod, Alaska’s Great Race to Nome. The dogs and I were already signed up for the main event, just six weeks away, but I still had to earn the right to compete. More than six months of preparation and thousands of dollars were riding on our performance here. I had to succeed.

  But such concerns were behind me now. As I packed to leave Skwentna Roadhouse, the Klondike’s halfway point, a top ten finish looked to be in the bag. This wasn’t the way the Coach, Tim Mowry, and I had planned it. Our strategy, developed over a few beers back home at Deadline Dog Farm, called for me to tag along behind other, more experienced mushers. But the dogs were proving more ambitious.

  The Mowth was stuck in Fairbanks, pulling the weekend shift at the News-Miner’s sports desk. I’d recruited two friends from the Matanuska Valley, Vicki and Cyndi, as my Klondike handlers. None of us knew what we were doing as I steered Mowry’s old Ford, loaded down with howling dogs and gear, onto the ice at Big Lake. But then ignorance had become a defining characteristic of this reporter-turned-dog-musher’s brief racing career.

  I’d drawn the last position, number 18. My parking spot was located at the far end of the staging area. Driving to it, across the frozen lake, we nervously scanned the other racers readying their teams for departure.

  I directed my unschooled pit crew sorting through the mess of harnesses and lines. Finally we began hooking up, connecting a pair of dogs at a time, in eight-foot intervals along the gang line. I was taking 12 out today, two more than I’d ever harnessed before. By the time we were done, the gang line, a plastic-coated steel cable channeling the team’s power back down the center, stretched over 50 feet ahead of me. Standing rigidly at the far end—“Good dogs!”—Rainy and Casey looked impossibly distant. They looked back at me, impatient to go.

  Another friend, Sandy, turned up at the last moment. The big schoolteacher’s arrival was perfectly timed, and I drafted her for brake duty, sharing the runners with me on the back of the sled. Cyndi and Vic were positioned along the gang line, ready to lead the dogs to the starting line, which was painted out on the lake ice, some 200 yards away.

  Sled dogs begin each run like champions, or demons, depending on their musher’s readiness. The trick is to hang on tight until they settle down. But that’s easier said than done. It’s bad enough setting forth on familiar trails. In the riotous atmosphere of a race, stirred by comradery and fresh smells, a sled dog’s inborn enthusiasm reaches a frenzy. Excitement had been building in my team since we began loading the dog truck that morning. They all recognized the signs. We were going someplace new.

  I slipped off the knot anchoring my sled to the truck’s front bumper. The team bolted toward the starting line. My overmatched crew began slipping. Big Sandy and I jammed our heels on the brake claw, with little effect — besides etching a pair of fresh streaks on the ice. Cyndi wisely let go. Vicki fell but maintained her grip on the gang line, as she scooted down the lake on her ass.

  “Just get out of the way, Vic. We’ve got it.”

  She shrugged and let go. Two of my younger males stumbled over her. My eyes remained focused on the trail ahead. A hairpin turn waited at the end of the staging area. What would I do if they headed for the parking lot? I needn’t have worried. Out on the lake, over a dozen rippling chains of dogs were visible. Mine rounded the corner in full loping stride, whipping the sled sideways. They were determined to catch the other teams.

  Race marshal Kevin Saiki waved me straight through. Sandy was no longer sharing the runners. I assumed she had bailed out, stepping off the runners as soon as she saw that the team was on track. But I didn’t see her in the crowd, which was receding fast. Actually, Sandy had been flung clear at the turn. Cyndi watched her skidding away and was reminded of a bowling pin.

  The Klondike’s opening miles passed through a network of frozen lakes. Through most of it, the dogs had me at their mercy. I just rode the brake, watching others taste disaster. One dog team went careening down a driveway and over a snowmachine, ripping off its windshield. I saw local kids chasing through the woods after another team that was missing its driver.

  I had passed the man, a veteran Iditarod musher, seated in the snow. He smiled and waved at me like a casual spectator. His manner struck me as odd, but I had no time to wonder why. My lead dogs leaped over a fallen log, and the others swiftly followed. My sled smacked the thick trunk, went airborne, and I steered it through the air.

  Later I learned the cause for the musher’s strange expression. As his dogs jumped that same fallen tree, the unlucky racer had caught a leg under it. Something had to give against the pressure exerted by his 12-dog team. He let go as his leg splintered in a compound fracture. Another racer paused long enough to prop the injured musher in the snowbank, where I saw him, while local kids fetched help. Shock was apparently setting in by the time I passed by.

  Leaving the lakes behind, we climbed a few hills then entered a broad lane through thick trees. The trail here was well-packed, a sign of heavy traffic. Not far ahead, I knew, a sharp turn was coming, one I’d been warned not to miss. From that point onward, Klondike racers followed some 70 miles of the Iditarod Trail, a historic gold-rush route to the Interior mines.

  I was still looking for that turn when Casey showed signs of lagging. No surprise there. We’d been on the trail more than an hour, and that was Casey’s usual limit for leading. I swapped her with Raven, but my little black-haired princess wasn’t in the mood to run out front. She kept darting left and right, tripping Rainy, her coleader, and the swing dogs running directly behind. After several pauses to untwist lines wrapped around careless paws, I played a hunch and moved Harley up front.

  Harley and Rainy made an odd, but effective pair. Rainy was one of our kennel’s smaller dogs, weigh
ing 35 to 40 pounds at most, with brown hair and squirrellike movements. Harley cut a hulking figure, twice her size and splotched black, white, and brown. When he ran, Harley’s ears flopped up and down, keeping time with his lumbering stride.

  I’d only used Harley in lead once before — on a dark night marked by mutiny and desperation. On that occasion, Harley and Denali, the only dogs still showing any confidence in my miserable sense of direction, led the final miles back to our cabin. Denali was a hindrance. The big young male had no idea what to do. But Harley barreled straight through, dragging his baffled partner along. Listening to me recount the performance, Mowry refused to give Harley any credit. He figured the big dog was probably just hungry and making a beeline for his food dish.

  Today Harley’s inexperience showed as we entered an icy marsh, where the trail was less obvious. He repeatedly slowed to look back, seeing encouragement. “Go ahead, Harley!” A few firm words aimed at him had a powerful effect on the entire team. As the big leader’s attention returned to his work, I felt an immediate burst of speed, as if I’d tugged on a snowmachine’s gas throttle.

  It was dark as we approached Skwentna, a remote settlement of about a hundred homesteaders, trappers, and lodge operators. I was startled by the sudden appearance of what seemed like dozens of fiery red eyes floating toward me, cloudlike, in the beam of my headlamp. Drawing closer, I sheepishly realized it was merely a musher coming the other way. The unearthly orbs belonged to the front dogs in John Barron’s team. The taciturn, grizzly musher from Big Lake had already turned for home. Holding the lead on these familiar trails, he ran with his headlamp switched off to confuse the mushers in pursuit. I’d reported on tactics like that but hadn’t yet seen them used.

  Several other teams followed hot behind Barron. I gripped the handlebar tightly, braced for calamity, but Rainy and Harley handled the head-on passes without a hitch. Third among the approaching teams came Marcie Heckler, the friend who’d talked me into using the Klondike as my own 200-mile qualifier. Marcie wasn’t an experienced racer, but she may as well have been. For years she’d worked as a handler for Old Joe — Iditarod’s founder, Joe Redington, Sr. — and her boyfriend, Kevin, was enforcing the rules in the Klondike.

  “Almost there, Bri,” Marcie grunted as she flashed past.

  Leaving the river behind, I followed a line of markers to a circular driveway fronting an old cabin. The Skwentna checker inspected my gear, then handed me the clipboard to sign in.

  “Looking pretty good, Brian.”

  “Beginner’s luck,” I said, though I didn’t really believe that.

  Bedding my team in a stand of tall birch, I began preparing the dogs a well-deserved bite to eat. Without even trying, my team had leaped ahead of ten others. Not too shabby. I wasn’t going to win this race. But some of those teams ahead of mine were bound to falter.

  I studied the dogs. Raven sprawled luxuriously, her tummy thrust outward inviting a quick scratch. Who’d have guessed that the frail, fine-boned little girl possessed the stamina to run all the way to the Bering Sea coast, as she had done for Mowry his first time out? But the princess was a proven Iditarod dog.

  We didn’t know as much about the racing history of Raven’s companions, however. Few seemed tired tonight. Most were still keyed up, licking their paws. Harley and Pig were watching my every move, drooling in anticipation of the feast on its way.

  Harley’s appetite was the only quality Mowry found impressive.

  “He’s too big,” the Coach had said the day I brought him home. “His build is all wrong. A dog like that will never make it to the finish line.”

  I put more faith in the assessment of LeRoy Shank. He’d seen Harley racing for Andy Jimmy, an Athabaskan villager from Minto. Jimmy had done well that day, very well. Shank, a former trapper and founder of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest, knew that sled dogs weren’t kept through the winter in Minto unless they were well worth feeding. After the race, he had bought the beefy village husky on the spot.

  Shank worked as a pressman at our newspaper. The two-time Iditarod veteran had no plans to race this year, so he took vicarious pleasure in my preparations, stopping me in the hall ways for progress reports, badgering me to give the Minto dog a tryout. “Oh, he’s a big one,” Shank said, after offering to loan me the dog for the season. “Harley could drag you to Nome all by himself.”

  Handling Harley was a chore. He had playfully knocked me on my ass more than once. Wrist injuries were a definite risk for anyone holding this twisting, excitable husky by his collar. He attacked food like a starving convict, slurping his bowl clean as fast as I filled it. He’d whimper pitifully as he watched me feed his kennel mates. I was a sucker for it. I always gave him seconds, often thirds, and sometimes even fourths. But Harley was never satisfied. Given the chance, he’d eat until he burst.

  I poured a bucket of hot water into the sixteen-gallon cooler to soak the mash of dry dog food and frozen beef chunks. We’d come 100 miles in about 14 hours, yet none of my dogs looked tired. All 12 had their eyes fixed on the steam rising from that cooler. If I could hold the team together, we just might do very well indeed.

  Gunnar Johnson hoped to squeeze in a trip to Nome before surrendering his life to medical school. He mushed into Skwentna in a horrified state. A dead dog was stowed in his sled basket. The dog had collapsed with absolutely no warning. No warning at all. Gunnar tenderly laid the dog’s body in the snow alongside the camp. Moving in a daze, he fixed the other dogs a meal. He was chopping meat when a movement caught his attention. Glancing up, Gunnar saw the dead dog panting for a snack.

  Tom Daily also arrived at the halfway point carrying a dog. He’d spent $1,500 flying Zowie, his favorite leader, from his remote training camp to a clinic a few months before, after the dog ate a bum salmon. Zowie had pulled through, but still hadn’t regained his stamina. That much was obvious. Daily hated to admit it, but his entire team’s performance left a lot to be desired. Short training runs weren’t adequate to prepare dogs for a trip of this distance. The former hippie knew that from making his living giving sled-dog rides in Colorado. A once-in-a-lifetime sponsorship offer had landed him here, but the disruption of relocating North had interfered with training. With or without Zowie, these dogs were hurting.

  Lynda Plettner wasn’t an official Klondike participant. Why pay an entry fee when she wasn’t here to race? Plettner was just tagging along. Someone had to keep an eye on Urtha Lenthar, the schoolteacher leasing dogs from Plettner’s kennel.

  By Skwentna, Plettner had abandoned any attempt at maintaining a casual distance. Barking orders in a voice improbably loud, the Iditarod veteran was directing Lenthar’s every move. Her dogs were ready, Plettner decided, but the big goof riding the sled needed a lot of work.

  Barry Lee’s borrowed dogs were short on conditioning. With that in mind, Lee took it easy the first 100 miles of the Klondike. Driving two hours, then resting two or three.

  “This race will more than double some of their mileage,” Barry told me, watching his dogs settling down as I prepared to break camp.

  I knew Lee from covering past races. He was one of those guys who was always turning up as a checkpoint volunteer. His confession about his dogs’ training distances was startling. All of my dogs had at least double, if not triple, that many miles of conditioning, and here Barry was playing catch-up. The dogs weren’t the only ones in need of conditioning. The musher’s gut was as wide as his habitual smile. Stepping inside the roadhouse, Barry staggered under the weight of the past 100 miles.

  In the warmth of the kitchen, Lee munched on a wonderful cheeseburger, washing it down with pitcher after pitcher of iced tea. Then he went into the common room and stretched out on the floor for a quick nap. The musher awoke six hours later, racked by pain. His jaw was cramped. His arms were cramped. His abdomen and upper and lower legs were cramped. Struggling to a table, Lee grabbed a full pitcher of water and drained it. All that tea had dehydrated his system, causing his muscles to cramp d
uring his long unplanned snooze. Barry suddenly had to pee so badly he wasn’t sure he could make it to a bathroom. Fortunately, his bladder was also cramped.

  A debate was underway in the Senate chamber of the Alaska state capitol. The governor had hauled lawmakers back to Juneau for a special session to resolve a longstanding conflict over hunting and fishing rights. My newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, had sent me down to cover the bickering between unyielding Bush and urban factions, a boring assignment that threatened to waste my fleeting Alaska summer. At the press table, I turned my attention to an application that could change my life.

  Mushing experience? All I could list was the Montana Creek Cheechako Race, a 2.3-mile run for novice mushers I had chanced into several years before. At the time, I was working for the Frontiersman in Wasilla, a booming highway town of about four thousand located an hour’s drive north of Anchorage. Mowry, our stocky sportswriter, was writing a first-person story. I was on hand to shoot photos of his debut as a sled-dog racer.

  It was a crisp, brilliant December morning. The temperature was holding in the high 20s. One by one, dog trucks claimed spots near the mushers’ clubhouse. The snouts of curious dogs poked through holes in the boxes mounted on the rear of the trucks. Some barked frantically; others harmonized in a howling chorus.

  Iditarod veterans Ray and Diana Dronenburg had brought over a dozen dogs to the track that morning, planning to let one of their kennel sponsors compete. Afterward they would take larger teams out on a serious training run. The sponsor was late. The Dronenburgs went ahead and drew for him, pulling the third position. With time running out, he remained a no-show. Diana asked if I wanted to fill in.

  No one could challenge my credentials as a “cheechako,” a gold-rush term for newcomers to the North. Originally from the East Coast, I was just starting my second winter in Alaska. I’d never touched a dogsled. My professional driving experience consisted of two and a half years of driving a cab in New York City.