by Robin Romm
Tap the bricks on the back wall of the Leaky Cauldron and one day you’ll come back for a visit, and your stepdad will tell you over toffee ice cream how hurt he was to be the only white cab driver who didn’t cross the picket line last month, how sad it made him that the guys he thought were his friends were scabs, and you’ll struggle not to mention the matrix of domination or identity politics. You’ll genuinely struggle just to say, “That sucks. I’m sorry.”
One day you’ll come back, pass out stories to a group of kids who are and are not just like you, and when you stretch across one you’ll say, “Pardon my reach.” And they will look at you like you are from another planet because, congratulations, you are.
But Jo didn’t ask me how to get out. She had a different question for her future self: “What was the hardest part of leaving?”
I told her what no one told me, though I’m not sure that was a good idea. I told her, “I didn’t know how hard it would be to get back.” I told her that all those people behind you saying, go, go, go, well, if you listen, if you go, one day you turn around and they’re gone. I tell her that when they’re pushing you, they’re pushing you away, too. I say she might spend the rest of her life trying to get back across the chasm she’s leaping now. I don’t know if she listened. I hope she didn’t.
Single Lead *
BLAIR BRAVERMAN
The day after I first won a dogsled race, my kennel partner dumped me. At that point we had been teammates for three years, ever since I showed up on his doorstep one January night and introduced myself as another dogsledder. Scott was thrilled, and welcoming. He was a big guy, heavy, and had spent the past decade getting passed on the trail by young, light women—“jockeys”—who had been picked by other mushers to run their dog teams. And now, here he was with a jockey of his own. I was happy to play the part, taking over training for the B-team dogs he didn’t have time to run from his kennel of twenty-three huskies. He was getting older, and had been hoping for a teammate; I was twenty-four and a student, not ready for the responsibility of owning my own dogs. The arrangement seemed perfect for both of us.
I had first learned to dogsled six years earlier, when I spent a gap year at a boarding school in the Norwegian Arctic. Then, like many mushers, I fell deeper into the sport by working for other people—for men, mostly. I’d been a handler, an assistant who does everything from training dogs to scooping poop, chopping meat, repairing equipment, and helping out at races. I worked my way through different kennels in northern Norway and Alaska. Since most mushers are self-taught, every kennel has its own wildly different philosophies and techniques, and for a while I’d been happy to start over each time, relearning each musher’s commands and strategies. I had worked for a second-place Iditarod finisher and a ten-time champion of the longest dogsled race in Europe, who gave me his bib: number thirty-seven, smeared with dirt and meat. But before meeting Scott, I’d never been given my own team to train. I’d never been given a chance to race.
That year Scott and I worked together nearly every day, running dogs and caring for them, cleaning the kennel, fund-raising, and eating his homemade tomato soup in the dark evenings after our training runs. With Scott’s encouragement, I trained the B-team for short-distance races of twenty to forty miles. I would debut at a six-dog race in Wisconsin, forty miles split over two days. I told myself that I just wanted to try it. Dogsledding—in which nearly everything can and does go wrong, and problems have to be solved alone—had always scared me nearly as much as it captivated me, and the kindest goal I could make for myself was to cross the finish line with happy dogs, and myself and the sled in one piece.
Dogsled races start in total chaos and pass into silence, and this first race was no exception. My sweet, manic dogs skidded to the starting chute, held back by a half-dozen volunteers; the crowd cheered and lights flashed and the huskies leapt and screamed, throwing all their weight against the lines, desperate to start running. The sled shuddered with the force of the dogs, and the referee mouthed a countdown that could hardly be heard through the commotion. And then the moment came, and the volunteers let go, and we swept through the crowd and straight into the woods. Within a minute, the only sound was the whisper of sled runners on snow. My dogs’ legs punched up and down like pistons as they charged down the trail.
It took a few minutes for my heart to stop pounding—for my adrenaline to calm as I settled into the cold and quiet of the run. I told myself I didn’t care about the final score, that I’d take my time and focus on a clean run. But as my mind centered on the trail, I was gripped by another desire, one that honestly surprised me: I wanted to win. I wanted to tear around every corner, sprint up every hill, pass every single team that I could. I called up my dogs and leaned hard into the turns. Pretty soon we had passed three other teams. We were doing great.
Ten miles into the twenty-two-mile race, I was running behind the sled when my leg punched through the snow. The dogs didn’t stop; I fell forward onto my stomach, the air knocked from my lungs, dragging behind the sled as it surged forward. For a while I tried to haul myself back up onto the runners, but my arms weren’t strong enough, and I kept slipping. And since I’d spent plenty of time getting dragged behind a sled before, and the dogs were about to crest a long downhill that would break them into a sprint, I tried a technique that had worked for me in the past: I flipped the sled into a snowbank, hoping the resistance would slow the team long enough for me to climb back on.
Sure enough, the dogs stopped. I stood and was just flipping the sled upright again, trying to ignore the sting of snow down the front of my pants, when another team passed me. In that moment, my dogs took off after them—and I, unprepared and already shaky, lost grip of the sled and watched it disappear down the trail without me.
Letting go of the sled is one of the worst things a musher can do; in all my years of dogsledding, I had never lost a team before. But I knew well what would happen. The dogs, who wanted only to run, would keep going—and I would wait here alone, knee-deep in the soft snow, without even the snowshoes I’d packed in the sled for emergencies, until somebody in town noticed I was missing and sent a snowmobile to pick me up. My first race, and my dogs would cross the finish line without me.
I started trudging down the trail, trying not to cry. Every few steps, the snow gave way beneath me, and I fell to my knees. But standing still was even more depressing than moving, no matter how slowly. So I staggered forward, trying not to think of my dogs, all the hours we’d trained, my friends waiting at the finish line. The sky was a crystal blue, light sparkling off the trees around me. A perfect day to drive dogs, if only I’d had them.
And then, up ahead, I heard barking. I started running through the snow and came around a corner—and there was my team.
Another musher—all I could see of him was his bib number, thirty-two—had stopped his dogs and mine as well, and was waiting on the trail for me. I was so grateful I could hardly speak, but he waved off my thanks. My team followed his for a while, and then his dogs kicked up a gear and we fell back, and I had never been happier to stand solidly on a sled, with my beautiful dogs, passing through the woods. We finished close to last, but that day it didn’t matter.
After that first race, I became more determined to prove myself. I studied strategy, canine psychology, nutrition. I trained out of Scott’s kennel every afternoon, and over the rest of the winter, I finished two more races in the middle of the pack: nothing too great, but not embarrassing either. And when Scott took me aside at the end of the season and asked me to be his kennel partner—an equal in the operation—I accepted the position with honor.
Scott still had his first pick of dogs; I built my B-team from his rejects. But the dogs were strong. As soon as the first snows fell, I ran them on twelve-, twenty-, or thirty-mile runs almost every day, seeking out the hilliest terrain, tucking weights in the sled to build up their stamina. I worked with the dogs one-on-one, too, teaching them to lead the team and to respond to increasi
ngly subtle commands. By the time the next season of races started up, in January, we’d be more than prepared.
I knew my B-team was fast, but it never occurred to me that they were faster than Scott’s A-team. I never felt that he and I were competing against each other. We were partners, and he’d been in it longer, and I felt that my job was to help him win—and to do as well as I could for myself, too. Number thirty-two had taught me that I never wanted to win at the expense of helping out other mushers—it felt like we were all on the same side, pushing through the wilderness together. I’d also started dreaming about longer races, more demanding tests of skill, but Scott told me I wasn’t ready for them. I wasn’t sure if I believed him—I suspected that he wasn’t interested in longer races and didn’t want me to progress without him—but it wasn’t worth arguing.
That year, in the first race of the season, I finished ahead of him. I didn’t even mean to. I came around the bend toward the finish line and spotted his team there at the side of the trail, and though I slowed to wait, he waved me past him. That night, for the first time ever after a race, he didn’t congratulate me.
Two weeks later, at the next race, we flew—I could feel the energy of the dogs, fit and joyful, running a steady gallop mile after mile. The wind burned my nose and cheeks. I knew before finishing that we were on fire; and sure enough, we finished in first place of out twenty-two teams, finishing the forty-mile course in three hours, fifteen minutes and fifty-seven seconds. The next day Scott called me on the phone and told me we were over. “It’s not because you beat me,” he kept saying, though I hadn’t said anything. Anyway, it made him look good: a first-ever first place from his kennel. But something irrevocable had changed. Maybe he sensed that I won for myself and not for him. “This is a disaster,” he told me, before forbidding me from ever his visiting his dogs again—the B-team dogs I’d been working with daily for two and a half years, who I loved as I had never loved dogs before. There was only one more race in the season, a one-stage forty-miler that I’d already registered and paid for, and that my parents had bought plane tickets to come watch. Scott smirked: “That’s not my problem.”
His sudden anger shocked me. But when I talked to a few friends, other female mushers, none of them were the least bit surprised: every single one of them had a similar story involving male mushers they had worked for. It seemed like my situation was actually pretty typical.
Dogsledding is one of the only sports—along with sailing and equestrian—where men and women compete against each other. As such, it’s been lauded as one of the friendliest sports for women. And that’s true, to a degree. With the dogs pulling the weight, it could seem that physical differences among the mushers are less important than in other sports; what matters are endurance, connection with the dogs, tolerance of extreme cold, the ability to keep a cool head while alone in the wilderness. A team sport where only one member of the team is human. It seems like an equal playing field, or at least about as equal as a sport can get.
And yet the higher one goes in the sport, the fewer women there are. Women make up around half of the participants in entry-level races, but by the 1,000-mile Iditarod, 75 percent of the finishers are men. The pure sexism is predictable: I’ve had friends get offered knee pads to give blow jobs in the snow, or encounter male mushers who refuse to let them pass on the trail. World champion Sigrid Ekran tells stories of men saying her voice was too high for the dogs to listen to, or that she’d never be able to handle herself in the cold. I suspect most female mushers have heard those things; I certainly have. Dogsledding is a microcosm of sexism in an old-school, underdog culture, but it’s also an opportunity—for the wild, for the hardworking, for animal lovers who would challenge themselves and rather be out in nature with a pack of dogs than deal with other people. It’s a hell of a sport for ambitious women.
But many of them don’t get a chance to prove their naysayers wrong. It seems that most women remain handlers; or they get dogs but don’t race; or they race, but they don’t rise through the levels. I suspect this has to do with the fact that it’s a very hard sport to do without assistance. Straight male mushers typically have a built-in handler in their female partner; at a public marriage proposal before one race start, as the musher kneeled before his girlfriend, a friend paraphrased the proposal: “Be my handler for life, wife.” A wife’s support is assumed. But I have female friends, serious mushers, whose husbands don’t even come to their races.
I’m lucky. My boyfriend—now my fiancé—is my handler, and his support is uncomplicated: he loves being part of my team. But still, people tend to assume that he’s the musher of the two of us. Race volunteers report to him, and hide their surprise when he points them in my direction. And when he says he’s my handler, the amount of praise he receives is unsettling to both of us. Together we built a small kennel of six dogs on farmland in northern Wisconsin, along a network of forest service trails that stretch for hundreds of miles. When an Iditarod musher who was getting out of the sport offered me his kennel—fifteen more brilliant dogs, all his equipment, and a shitload of both responsibility and opportunities—I weighed my options, swallowed hard, and said yes.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to be “good” at this sport, and what I am and have been working toward. For a long time, as I trained, my idea of good was never measured against anyone else. The truth is that dogsledding, even competitive dogsledding, has little to do with opponents. It’s about hours or days alone on the trail, collaborating with—never controlling—six or ten or sixteen huskies, dealing with factors like thin ice and blizzards and errant moose. Making judgments in extreme situations, when your body is so numb that it’s hard to think. It’s about dogs that love nothing more than running, and the chance to come along for the ride.
I used to dream, when I started mushing, of a single clean run. That was all I wanted. If I could have had just one clean run—without a tangle, or a dogfight, or crashing into a tree, or getting stuck in deep snow, or encountering wildlife—then I could finally prove myself. However much I loved it, dogsledding seemed fraught with problems, thick with adrenaline; it was terrifying to have to rely on myself in an emergency.
Last year, I looked back on that dream. It seemed then that most of my runs were clean; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d encountered any problem that really stuck with me. But I realized that I still had all of the difficulties I’d been afraid of when I first started out. Dogs got tangled, or they tried to chase deer in the forest, or I went the wrong way. Sled handles broke off in my hands. The change, I realized, wasn’t that I had learned to avoid problems. It was that the things that used to seem like problems no longer did. Now, I just dealt with them and moved on.
I thought that my goal was to trust my experience, and to be able to run dogs simply and without fear. And now I can do those things, and rather than relax in that comfort, I’m preparing for longer races, more difficult journeys—challenges that terrify me anew. I’m moving back toward the kind of fear that I was finally beginning to outgrow. Stepping past my comfort zone, even as that comfort zone grows.
And I’m immensely proud of that. Proud of all I’ve learned, and all the places that my dogs and I are going. I want to race because I want to keep learning, and to build my connection with my team, and to keep pushing into that fear, and to experience all the joy and power and grace that comes with it. This winter I’m training for a ten-day, 350-mile race, working toward it as hard as I can. And if I win, I’ll be nobody’s jockey.
* When a dog runs in front of the team alone, rather than with a partner.
The Chang Girls
LAN SAMANTHA CHANG
My mother’s father died the year she finished high school; she arrived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from China later that year with two suitcases and a dictionary. My father left his family at eighteen, escaping the Japanese occupation on foot. He never returned to his home. In the turbulence of postwar China, his mother and father vanished behind t
he Communists’ “bamboo curtain,” and he never saw them again. My parents met and married during the 1950s, in New York.
My sisters and I were launched into our American lives on the rocket fuel of my parents’ hope and desperation. If they had given birth to a boy! Ah, but they had not; instead, they had four daughters. It is impossible to know what our lives would have been like if we had had a brother. Possibly the brother would have been singled out as a focus for my parents’ dreams. Perhaps we girls would have been encouraged to stay close to home, taught in a thousand little ways to understand that we were secondary, and that any worldly goals of ours were not important. But there was no boy; we were “the Chang girls.” The four of us were brought up with the understanding that we would someday leave our small Midwestern town. We were to plant ourselves far away in larger, more bustling places, saplings from the family tree, and to grow the Changs into an American dynasty.
Our parents expected us to be strong, accomplished, and capable. Their word for capable, nenggan, translates as “can-do.” To make certain that we would never feel as helpless as she had as a newborn immigrant, our mother taught us practical skills. We learned to sew, beginning by threading a needle and continuing on the machine to seams, darts, hems, and facings. We spent many hours in the kitchen learning how to use a knife and the specific ways to cut each vegetable. Our mother believed that confidence in the basics would empower us and make us independent. At dinner, our father held forth on his somewhat skeptical views of office politics and the American economy in an attempt, I think, to plant our feet on the ground and dispel any idealistic notions we might have. Our parents’ nenggan was a kind of smarts unrelated to school, a savviness. But of course, we were all expected to excel in school too. For the most part, we did. We became honor roll girls, all four of us earning scholarships to Ivy League colleges, all four of us finishing an Ivy League professional and graduate degree. Meanwhile, our parents became feminists. “In this country, every woman must be able to earn a good living,” our father told us.