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

by Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  “You’ve got to stop,” Mormile began. “Cooley says—”

  Terhune cut him off. “I told you people, if you stop again — I don’t care what the goddamn reason is — I’m going around. I don’t want nothing to do with this group!” Ordering Daisy past the parked teams, Terhune rounded the cabin, followed the markers into the brush, and vanished.

  Mormile went inside. The group got a chuckle out of this latest declaration from Terhune. No one felt threatened. This was, what, the third time the sourpuss had tried to get away? Those Kenai dogs were slower than dirt. When would he give it up?

  As far as Daily could tell, Terhune couldn’t get ten feet without screaming bloody murder at his poor lead dog. Daily saw nothing noble in it, not when the price was being paid by those poor tired dogs.

  It mattered to Terhune. Every inch between him and those other people mattered. Rounding the shelter cabin, the musher switched off his headlamp. His dogs were slow, but they were tough, like him. Jon Terhune and Daisy meant to show them all.

  I was startled by an approaching light. It came so fast I knew it had to be a snowmachine. The driver, a burly Alaska Native, stopped alongside the trail and beckoned to me. As I drew closer, the man smiled and reached inside his suit. He pulled out a tall bottle of Bacardi 151.

  “Here, take a swig,” he said, handing me the rum.

  “Wind blew down the markers through here,” the snowmachiner said, as I handed back his bottle. “Don’t worry. I put in new ones for you guys. You won’t have no trouble.”

  For the last hour, I’d been climbing featureless, snow-covered hills. The trail was barely discernible on the hard windswept surface. I hated to imagine this place in a whiteout. The trail rose steadily higher and higher over bare rounded steps. Several times I thought I was cresting the summit only to discover another steep hill waiting ahead.

  The moon, near full, shone brightly through the misty night sky. After I switched off my headlamp, the snow seemed radiant with reflected light. The dogs and I were cast into a realm of living negatives. I rubbed my eyes and pressed on. The top — it had to be the top — was getting closer.

  Cresting Topkok, the trail crossed a short flat plateau. I stopped the team and studied the valley below. The view was surprisingly clear. I could trace the trail, winding through bushes and shrubs to a shelter on the valley floor. It looked dark and deserted. Way, way off in the distance, I saw a string of moving lights.

  “Gotcha!” I said. Releasing the brake, I sent my dogs charging downward.

  I’d come straight through from White Mountain. The dogs were due for a break, so I paused to check out the shelter cabin. Leaving the crew gnawing on chunks of whitefish, I headed inside. The cabin interior was hot. Coals were still glowing in the stove. Obviously, the others had spent a fair amount of time at the cabin.

  I found some crackers and munched on them as I read the graffiti on the walls of the cabin. Recently refurbished, the shelter cabin beneath Topkok was in the best shape of any I’d seen on the trail. Most of the graffiti must have been left by mushers in this year’s race. I saw comments from quite a few people I recognized, including Swenson, who was already gloating about win number five.

  I scrawled a ditty about slipping from first to worst. “Let historians ponder that,” I muttered, signing and dating it. Then I headed back outside and roused the dogs. It wasn’t over yet.

  Terhune kept Daisy on the march. He watched over his shoulder for headlamps, but none appeared. He traveled as much as possible with his own headlamp off. No reason to give those bastards a target to shoot at. Finally, Terhune saw a red-neon bar sign. Safety. He’d made it. Goddamn.

  Terhune snacked his dogs and then studied the exit trail. Inside the bar he grabbed a plate of food and took a seat at a window overlooking the incoming trail. He wanted to give his dogs as much rest as possible. Exactly how long that might be, Jon didn’t know. It depended on what he saw through the window.

  Herrman had mushed into Nome early that morning, finishing in fifty-first place. Plettner had pulled across the finish line at 6 A.M. It galled him, but nothing Terhune could do would ever change that. But he could still stick it to those guys behind him. Thirty minutes passed, then 45.

  “Good,” the musher said, studying his watch. His dogs were getting a decent break. His stay was approaching an hour, when Terhune spied a distant bobbing light. He dashed for the bar door.

  “Daisy!” the musher called the lead dog’s name as he rushed toward the team. He grabbed several dogs and jerked them to their feet. Jumping on the runners, he reached for his snow hook. The finish line was 20 miles away. The others might be faster, but he had the jump.

  Mushing away with his own headlamp switched off, Terhune watched over his shoulder. The single light had swelled to a moving cluster. Near the bar, the lights stopped. He had expected that. They had to stop to sign in. OK. OK. What would they do now? The lights remained stationary, and he slowly pulled away. Jon Terhune smiled. The fools were letting him get away.

  “I can’t believe Terhune is going to beat us,” Mark Williams repeated. “He had the slowest dogs in the race.”

  Sitting at the bar, Daily shrugged. He wasn’t impressed with Terhune. Daily’s dogs would arrive in Nome in better shape. He was sure of that. And he wasn’t impressed with Gunnar Johnson’s deceitful little maneuver. The way he had snuck off, deserting everybody here at Safety, minutes after pretending he agreed with Cooley’s plan to wait for O’Donoghue and mush into Nome together. It rubbed Daily the wrong way.

  What was the rush? Next year he would come back and really race.

  Daily ceremoniously bought himself a beer, the first he’d had in 21 days. He bought Cooley one, too.

  The veterinarian was embarrassed. “Can I borrow money for a burger, Tom?” he whispered, confessing that he was flat broke.

  If it wasn’t the worst night of my life, it was close. Taking that short break at the cabin had been a major mistake. It had destroyed the team’s rhythm. Leaving the cabin, Rainy and Harley slowed to a crawl. It was a repeat of the Golovin turnaround.

  I was in trouble myself. Couldn’t keep my eyes open. Looking for a caffeine jolt, I started dipping my fingers in the baggy of instant coffee and licking the powder off my fingertips. The secret weapon was a dud. All I got from chewing that lousy powder was cramps.

  The mist returned, and world closed in around me. The whiteness just went on and on. At one point, I saw a light coming up from behind. It looked like a musher’s headlamp, but it couldn’t be; the light was coming too fast. Yet it was a dog team, closing so fast that my dogs seemed to be standing still.

  “It’s got to be Plettner,” I decided by process of elimination. No one else had that kind of speed. The musher waved as the team caught and passed us. It was a man. That didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t figure it out, and then I realized the team and the sled looked all wrong. It wasn’t an Iditarod musher. The sled was empty. It must have been some local speed demon.

  The trail joined an unplowed road. Misery incarnate. Clocking the accompanying mile markers, I calculated that the team had slowed to under three miles an hour. No wonder it felt like we were crawling tonight. Rainy kept stopping to stare at … nothing.

  Tonight my space cadet was in total orbit. Her pauses hobbled us. Watching the lesbian blast off for the third time in a mile, I stopped the team and switched Chad into lead with Harley. The team’s pace improved. But it felt like we were just plowing faster into the void. A light snow caused spots to dance in the beam of my headlamp. I had a terrible time holding on. The road was so smooth. So endless.

  With absolutely no warning, I drew alongside another parked Iditarod team. I didn’t recognize the sled, but it was fully packed. The musher was nowhere to be seen. Dusted with snow and curled in tight balls, the musher’s dogs were sleeping in front of the sled in a straight line.

  Dazed, wondering who I’d caught, I stomped my snow hook into the ground. When I looked up, the oth
er team was gone. A line of driftwood rested in its place.

  I didn’t need my headlamp anymore. The slow-falling snowflakes taunted me, jittering unpredictably, straining my eyes in the blue predawn light. It was approaching eight A.M. We’d been mushing down the lousy road for what seemed like days. The coffee baggie was half gone, and I was feeling queasy.

  At last, a light gleamed in the distance. A red and white bar light. A checkpoint called Safety. “Let’s go home!” I whispered. Chad raised his head. Ears shot up along the line. The dogs shifted gears, recharged with purpose.

  I clung to the hope that others might be having similar problems. Surely I’d catch a few other teams lingering in Safety. I knew Terhune wouldn’t wait. But Cooley had talked about it. And the Mormiles couldn’t be too far ahead, could they?

  All I found waiting was a tattered Iditarod banner, flapping in the wind. And a beer Daily had bought me on his way out the door.

  “How long ago did the last team leave?” I asked the weary checker, hope flickering an instant longer.

  “No more than twenty minutes,” he said.

  Calculations raced through my mind. It was 20 miles to Nome. Except for Cooley’s dogs, the teams ahead weren’t anything special. They’d be lucky to do six miles an hour. That gave me …

  “They rested here two, maybe three hours,” the checker added.

  Hope died. Dead last. I was going to finish dead last.

  A musher was sighted on the outskirts of Nome. The news was broadcast on KNOM radio at 9 A.M. Sunday, March 24, day 22 of Iditarod 1991. The banners and other decorations that greeted Swenson were no longer present, long since torn down or damaged in the numerous storms of the last 10 days. But the Burl Arch marking the Iditarod’s finish line remained standing downtown. That was all that mattered.

  No other dog teams were in sight as Terhune climbed off the frozen beach and turned his dogs down Front Street. At long last the old paratrooper relaxed. The fifty-third musher into Nome was a satisfied man.

  He found Dawn and his two grown daughters waiting near the arch. They were holding a long handmade banner. “Welcome Jon,” it read.

  Gunnar Johnson mushed into town 45 minutes later.

  The others weren’t far behind. Johnson’s desertion had sparked a general exodus from Safety. To hell with waiting for me. The race was on again. A wild contest developed in the final miles. Charging across the icy drifts outside Nome, Daily thought he had the edge. Bogus, looking inspired, loped like a frisky pup. He dusted the Mormiles and surged ahead of Mark Williams. But Tom Daily’s eight dogs were simply outpowered by the fourteen dogs pulling Urtha Lenthar’s sled.

  Lenthar, Daily, and Williams finished within one minute of each other, notching the fifty-fifth, fifty-sixth, and fifty-seventh positions in the record book. Not long afterward, Catherine Mormile won the race that mattered most to her — beating her husband, Don, and the Mowth’s old dogs to the arch by almost 20 minutes. Cooley, our unofficial participant, let the others go ahead and followed Mormile into town, finishing at 10:43 A.M.

  Bellies warmed by a hot meaty broth, my dogs slept on the lee side of Safety while the other teams raced for Nome. I lingered at the bar, sipping the beer Daily had bought me, sinking ever deeper into depression as I listened to the live radio coverage. The voice of Nome’s checker, Leo Rasmussen, pierced my funk.

  “If Brian O’Donoghue would ever leave Safety,” I heard Leo say on the radio, “maybe we could get this over with.”

  I briefly wondered if there was any way to sneak into Nome, hide the dogs, and keep Rasmussen waiting forever. That would show him.

  The one thing I had in my power to do was scratch. Let Mormile keep the damn Red Lantern. That was tempting. For the first time in the entire race, I seriously considered scratching.

  Pondering the ramifications, I ordered another beer.

  Two and a half hours later, I’d run out of reasons not to go. The wind kicked up as I prepared to leave. Drifts had erased every trace of the trail.

  “Perfect,” I said, dragging Chad to the closest marker, the first in a line of flapping streamers, which stretched toward a cluster of subdivision homes.

  Golden Dog was in a contrary mood. He ignored my commands and repeatedly dragged Harley and the team away from the markers. I wanted to win this last battle of wills, but Chad was equally determined to follow snowmachine tracks leading to nearby homes. Forty-five minutes after leaving Safety, the bar remained in view behind us. The checker came outside and stared. This wasn’t going to work. Demoting Chad, I placed Rainy up with Harley. The lesbian quickly sniffed out the trail, and Safety finally faded behind us.

  Wind, fog, mist, and blinding snow — we encountered the whole gamut on the Iditarod’s final 20 miles. The dogs paid no mind. They were too hardened to flinch.

  Passing through a cluster of homes near the beach, I saw a couple sitting on chairs next to a marker. It was an older man and woman. They flagged me down.

  “We were waiting for you,” the woman said, petting Rainy and Harley. “Could we offer you a cup of coffee or a bite to eat?”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I guess there’s some folks waiting for me.”

  I was flattered that strangers would take the time to welcome me. The wind was dying down, and the day appeared brighter.

  Rounding a bend, I confronted several dog teams, headed right at us. I realized we must have crossed the trail of another race as three teams passed, head-on, going full bore. I was startled by a face I knew, Iditarod musher Peryll Kyzer. She’d not only finished an impressive eighteenth; she was already running another race.

  “Hi, Peryll,” I shouted as she flew past on my left.

  “Brian!” she said. “Welcome to Nome.”

  A few miles ahead the trail neared a plowed road leading to Nome. I knew the area well. It was the place where I had once had a pair of cameras freeze up while I was shooting Nayokpuk leading another musher through a storm, which subsequently halted the race for days. I had also been waiting here as Butcher charged into view, en route to her third straight victory. And it was at this same spot, 40 hours later, that I had witnessed Redington cap his bold run as Smokin’ Joe.

  With the race lost to Susan and the other young hounds, Redington had waited at Safety for Nayokpuk. The two veterans traded stories over coffee, then Old Joe issued a challenge.

  “Now we’re going to race,” he said.

  The lead switched several times during the furious 22-mile sprint that followed. Redington emerged victorious, crossing the finish line 1 minute, 16 seconds, ahead of Nayokpuk.

  “This is fantastic,” Butcher said, greeting the pair under the arch. “This is the best race within the race.”

  Iditarod’s 70-year-old founder had failed to take the big prize, but Smokin’ Joe’s style couldn’t be beat. He earned $9,000 for the fifth-place finish, which equaled his all-time best.

  In the morning, Nayokpuk awoke with a tingling in his left arm.

  “I just hate to think our race had anything to do with it,” said Redington, pacing the floor of the Nome checkpoint as his friend was being flown to a hospital in Anchorage. “But Herbie, he was pushing pretty hard.”

  Nayokpuk was hospitalized with a mild stroke. He recovered, but his Iditarod days were over. Thus ended the racing career of the Shishmaref Cannonball.

  As for Redington, he never topped that 1988 run.

  “In my mind,” Swenson said, years later. “There’s no question Joe would have won that race if he had a trail out of Cripple. It’s a damn shame.”

  As I pulled within sight of the road, I heard honking and whistling. People were cheering. The reception awaiting us grew wilder by the mile. A procession of snowmachines fell in on either side of us. Cars and trucks paced the team on the nearby road. People were clapping and waving from every drift.

  A man leapt out of the back of a pickup truck. Clambering down a snow berm, he tossed me a can of beer. “This Bud’s for you,” he shouted. “We kn
ew you were going to make it.”

  “Never any doubt,” I said.

  The dogs responded to the attention like pros. With nary a flinch or misstep, Rainy and Harley kept the team rolling across the frozen beach and through the crowds perched on the hard drifts at the edge of town. I was proud watching the team climbing the last berm onto Front Street. Once on the road, Rainy and Harley eagerly chased a police car, which lead us to the arch, lights flashing all the way.

  A crowd of a hundred people, maybe more, was waiting at the finish line. The bodies parted before Rainy and Harley, who led the team right up the middle. Leo Rasmussen stood at the end of the tunnel, a microphone in one hand and a clipboard in the other. The lesbian passed by him and ran straight under the twin burls. Jamming the hook down, I ran up and slapped the overhead arch.

  The time was 2:55. My name boomed through the loudspeakers. Rasmussen was saying something about my setting a new record: first musher to ever start first and finish last. Flashes popped. Familiar faces shouted things I couldn’t quite make out. Rasmussen inspected the sled, checking off one sleeping bag, hand axe, and a pair of snowshoes. He collected the packet containing our commemorative mail delivery, via dog team, from Anchorage. Then Leo presented the clipboard. I scrawled my name in the line reserved for the sixtieth musher to Nome. Next to the signature was my team’s total elapsed time on the trail: 22 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes, 55 seconds.

  Leo was holding an old kerosene lamp, which had been burning since the race started March 2. “Go ahead,” he said, “blow it out.”

  Nome’s checker then handed me a shiny red lantern topped with a brass dog. Cheers resounded on Front Street as I hoisted it above my head.

  It was official: the Iditarod was over.

  Epilogue

  It was payback time. From the instant I touched the arch, I began falling apart. The sun’s glint on the snowy street seemed overly bright. Surrounding voices merged into a locker-room din. I felt that hot glow of staying awake all night, utterly drained, yet too excited to slow down.