Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Yeah. Well. A thing about me as a pilot is that I do not, ever, want to see forward through the side window. Especially not while plummeting toward a frozen lake. It’s like, friend, why create the hurricane. I figured that, as an alternative technique, I would just basically try to guess where we were going.

  “How’s your speed?” my pilot(’s lifeless form) inquired.

  The ground seemed to be making an actual screaming noise as it rushed up toward us. Hmm—maybe a little fast. I cut the throttle. Nugget heaved and started falling at a different angle; more “straight down,” as the aeronautics manuals say. We were out over the lake. I had a sense of measureless whiteness lethally spread out below me. Either the landscape was baffled or I was. There were trees on the bank, but we were dropping too fast; I couldn’t relate them to anything. My references had gone sideways. At the last moment I pulled back on the stick.

  There was a chiropractic skrrrk of skis entering snow. There was, simultaneously, a feeling of force transmitting itself upward into the plane. Nugget bounced, like a skipped stone, off the ice. We were tossed up and forward, maybe fifteen feet into the air …

  … and came down again, bounced again, came down again, and, unbelievably, slid to a stop.

  “Guess what,” Jay said, popping up. “You just landed an airplane.”

  I’ve never felt all that caught up, personally, in the miracle of air travel. I played a little Wing Commander once upon a time, but I was never one of those pre-9/11 kids who used to lurk around open cockpit doors hoping some head-tousling type would kick him a set of plastic wings. Still, there are moments when your adrenal glands just aren’t even going to pretend to hold back.

  I HAVE CONQUERED THE MYSTERIES OF FLIGHT, I hollered inwardly, across the valleys of my emotions. LET THE AIR ITSELF BOW DOWN BEFORE ME.

  “That was pretty good,” Jay said. “Let’s try it again.”

  EEP, NO, I bellowed to the valleys.

  * * *

  Anchorage, Alaska’s one real city. Fairbanks is a town, Juneau is an admin building with ideas. Anchorage is Tulsa, only poured into a little hollow in a celestially beautiful mountain range on the outer rim of the world.

  When you’re there, it truly feels like you’re at the end of something. Like a last outpost. You’re in a coffee shop, you ordered a green tea, you can see white mountains from the window, and on the other side of the mountains is wilderness that hasn’t changed since 1492.

  That’s an exaggeration, but not as much of one as you might think.

  It’s Saturday, March 2, the start of the Iditarod. Here’s how this works: In the middle of the night, large trucks beep-reverse in and dump snow over an area of downtown. Race volunteers wearing little lanyard-clipped name badges spend the night smoothing snow down over the streets. Early the next morning, mushers and their dog handlers roll into the staging area in pickup trucks, the beds of which have been fitted with multi-compartmented dog carriers. The compartments on the carriers are arranged in a tic-tac-toe grid with little doors that open to the outside. Your reference here is a wall of PO boxes, only behind each door there’s a sled dog lying in a petite bed of straw. Some of the dog carriers have cards hanging from their side clamps with clothespins attached to them. A quick investigation reveals that each clothespin has a dog’s name markered on it: Cutter, Lyra, Harp, Sable, Chisel, Bree. Soon the mushers are opening compartment doors and pulling out dogs. The dogs have their toes examined and their lips peeled back so the mushers can check their gums. There’s a scholarly air, on the mushers’ part, to these inspections. You get the impression that they’ve checked the dogs out of a library. The dogs shake nonexistent water off their coats and are chained, one by one, to the trailer hitches and free grab handles on their mushers’ trucks. Dog handlers drop food in each dog’s particular vicinity. The food is in some cases raw meat, which leaves soggy pinkish traces in the snow. Human food is being vended to the growing crowd of spectators via several small pavilions, which bear signs like ALASKA REINDEER SAUSAGE and, impenetrably, REINDEER BRATWURST LOUISIANA. The air smells of hot meat and hay. I spot Jay talking to a woman near Linwood’s truck, so I go over to say hello, and it turns out she’s Libby Riddles, the famous Iditarod champion from ’85. A shivery breeze keeps blowing up Fourth Avenue off Cook Inlet, maybe six blocks to the west, but the day’s sunny; it’s thirty degrees Fahrenheit. You can see your breath, but it’s pleasant. The crowd milling under the giant carved bear that towers above Grizzly’s Unique Alaskan Gifts does sport some heavy-fur wearers, but that’s a cultural thing; it’s celebratory. All the heavy furs I spot are on men. There’s a stout, bearded race official going around in not only a heavy fur coat but also an astounding brutalist apartment block of a fur hat. The hat has a bobcat’s entire face on it. The face has teeth. I make a note to check whether it would be possible to gauge the hierarchy of race officials based on the food-chain status of the dead animals whose faces are on their hats, but though this feels like a searing reportorial lead at the moment, the results of my follow-up investigation will prove disappointing.

  Bobcat-hat-face is going around doing little knee dips over dog teams that are starting to be hooked up to their sleds’ riggings. It’s maybe half an hour before the official 10:00 a.m. start of the race. Volunteers circulate with clipboards; near the starting line, the bulge of the crowd is impassable. The Iditarod is a huge deal in Alaska. Sled-dog racing in general is a big deal; the Iditarod is the best-known race, but there are others, like the thousand-mile Yukon Quest, that draw major attention. Among the tiny population of the state, the top mushers are famous. You can walk into a hardware store in Anchorage and go, “Did you hear about DeeDee,” or “Just saw the news—Dallas might lose his nose,” and no one will answer, “Who, creep-o?”

  I’ve been YouTubing pretty diligently, so I spot some familiar faces. There’s Lance Mackey, maybe the greatest long-distance musher of all time: four straight Iditarods from 2007 to 2010; also four titles in the Yukon Quest. Do you know him? He got nominated for a couple of ESPYs a few years back. Won his first Iditarod after beating throat cancer. He’s a redneck icon in Alaska, a sort of ratty, scrawny, patchy, permanently beat-down-looking guy, tiny pinched head like the head of a curious tortoise. I heard somebody describe him as “the white Snoop Dogg,” which fits. The first time I saw him I took out a notebook and wrote, “My best friend he shoots water rats and feeds them to his geese.” He’s got crazy star power even though he seems to be physically disintegrating. Near the end of this year’s race, he will bite into a piece of fudge and lose one of his three remaining original teeth.

  There’s Aliy Zirkle, last year’s runner-up, a red-cheeked and physically imposing forty-three-year-old who always seems to be laughing. About half the fans I talk to are pulling for her, many of them out of a feeling that a woman is due to win. At race HQ they’re selling shirts that read, “Alaska: Where Men Are Men and Women Win the Iditarod,” but only two women ever have, and none since 1990. “It’s time, you know?” people say. I’m pulling for Aliy because she makes the Iditarod look fun. (Which, Jesus.) Some glimmer in her happy eyes seems to say the whole race is a game. She’s married to a musher, Allen Moore, and they trade their best dogs back and forth, depending on the event. He won the Yukon Quest with the majority of the team just three weeks ago and now she’s racing them in the Iditarod.

  I also spot Mitch Seavey, the 2004 champion, who’s fifty-three and wiry, with a bacterial mustache and angry little wisps of stray hair jabbing out around his cap. Something about the prickly briskness of his movements as he tends to his dogs suggests both a high-school chemistry teacher and a bird building a nest. I had read his book, Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way! Unconventional Sled Dog Secrets of an Alaskan Iditarod Champion, Volume One, and found it fascinating both as a guide to the art of sled-dog training and as a window into the vaguely paranoid self-regard of one M. Seavey. Lead, Follow fixates often on the idea that its author’s thoughts and stances are offending u
nspecified “wackos,” who wield unspecified powers and who deserve whatever offense they get. You know how some small-town guys like imagining that everything they say is driving people on the other side of the political spectrum, none of whom they personally know, crazy? Mitch scratched in 2011 after nearly severing his index finger with a knife at the Ophir checkpoint. Then he sued the knife maker, which has led to a lot of eye rolling within hard-core dog-mushing circles. He’s feuding with at least one Alaska newspaper over its coverage of the lawsuit. Mitch looks like, and is, the kind of guy who holds grudges.

  For most of the Iditarod, mushers will run teams of up to sixteen dogs, which they’re not allowed to swap out; dogs that get sick or injured can be dropped, but they can’t be replaced with new ones. For the start day in Anchorage, however, the mushers can bring only twelve, to minimize downtown chaos. A key detail about the start day in Anchorage is that it’s purely for show. It’s not timed and doesn’t count toward the outcome of the race. The word that gets used is “ceremonial.” It’s a chance for city folk to clap for the mushers before they enter the genuine wild. The official, timed start will happen the next day, near the small town of Willow.

  Still, there are sixty-six teams entered this year. With twelve dogs each, we’re looking at nearly eight hundred dogs within about a five-block radius. The dog factor is crazy, tremendous. Dogs are scratching themselves, snarfing down meat, yawning, whining, wrestling, pissing, drum majoring their tails. Iditarod sled dogs are mostly not the Siberian huskies you may be picturing but smaller, faster mixed breeds, engineered for speed rather than hauling power. Downtown is giddy with barking. I note falsetto yaps, screams, howls, baritone woofs. There’s something jungle- or apelike about the cacophony. The presence of so many dogs drives all the dogs crazy. When the handlers start pulling out sleds and clipping the teams to their towlines, the collective canine intelligence realizes that—ohmigosh, ohmigosh—it’s about to go for a run. This is when the dogs truly begin to freak out.

  There’s a serious case that animal-welfare people make against the Iditarod; namely, that it’s long and cold and dangerous and sometimes fatal, and who are we to subject living creatures to those conditions for our own entertainment? A dog will in fact die during this year’s race, buried in a snowdrift one night at the Unalakleet checkpoint. What you can’t deny, though, is that these animals, having been bred to want to pull sleds, really want to pull them. The dogs are hysterical, they’re in raptures. I watch one little guy, a black-and-tan with a shaggy belly, hurl himself forward against the restraint of his own tug line about fifteen times in a row, barking up a storm, as if he’s decided to get the sled going all on his own. He stops every now and again to look incredulously at his teammates. What—is—the—holdup—here—people? This is happening all over the place. It’s like standing inside the mind of a saint right before an out-of-body experience. The dogs’ ropes all have to be braced by straining handlers to stop them from just taking off.

  Around 9:40 a.m., I make my way to the starting line. My own lanyard-attached media badge gets me through the crowd and into a kind of holding pen adjacent to the starting chute, which itself is just a roped-off area of the street. The Iditarod starting line is a flag-surrounded banner hanging above Fourth Avenue. Seven flags correspond to the nationalities of this year’s sixty-six contestants: the United States (obviously), Canada, Norway, Russia, New Zealand, Brazil (!), Jamaica (!!). A PA guy’s warm booming baritone is priming us with factoids about the race. Every year, the first person through the chute is an honorary musher chosen for his/her contributions to the Iditarod. This year’s honorary musher is the late Jan Newton, who died in August. She was a volunteer who helped run the checkpoint at the tiny village of Takotna. She was known as the Queen of Takotna, the Official 2013 Race Guide says, and she was famous for her pies. That’s how big a deal the race is in Alaska: You can be famous for baking Iditarod-associated pies. “Her contributions to the race are remarkable and have elevated her to a position of legendary prominence” is the Official 2013 Race Guide’s line on this. Her sled will be driven by this year’s Junior Iditarod champion, Noah Pereira.

  After the honorary musher, the starting order is determined by an elaborate lottery-style number draw at a pre-race banquet. The numbers are drawn from a sealskin Eskimo mukluk. I was at this banquet; it ran for five hours. Every single musher made a speech. That’s more than sixty speeches. It was brutal. The only speech I liked was the one by Scott Janssen, a funeral-home director by trade who’s known as the “Mushin’ Mortician.” He introduced himself by saying, “Hi! I’m Scott Janssen, the Mushin’ Mortician.”

  Once the honorary musher’s sled goes skritting out of sight, it’s time for the real race to (ceremonially) start. Bib No. 2, to the excitement of Iditarod fans everywhere, has fallen to Martin Buser, a Swiss-born four-time champion (1992, 1994, 1997, 2002) and race icon who not only named both his sons after Iditarod checkpoints but was sworn in as an American citizen under the burled arch that serves as the finish line in Nome. He’s fifty-four and maybe not quite a top-shelf contender any longer; Norman Vaughan, who went to Antarctica with Admiral Byrd in 1928, completed the Iditarod at the age of eighty-four, but only one musher over fifty has ever won it (Jeff King in 2006). But Buser’s known among mushers for his shrewdness, and the fashionable intelligence can’t help but speculate about the implications of such a seasoned veteran leaving first.

  Bobcat-hat-face, who’s emerged as some sort of super-important race marshal with the job of importantly standing in the starting chute, consulting with mushers, and pointing at things that want pointing at, is doing a little waist bend over Buser’s sled while Buser goes from dog to dog down the line, patting cheeks and communing. The ex-champ is ceremonially stuffed into so many layers of Arctic gear that all you can really see of him is his clear-eyed handsome Swiss face.

  “One minute,” the PA guy says.

  Buser gets in a few more canine cheek pats.

  “Thirty seconds,” the PA guy says.

  Buser shaking hands, receiving hugs from loved ones. Bobcat-hat-face steps back out of the way.

  “Ten seconds,” the PA guy says.

  Buser on his sled.

  “3 … 2 … 1 … GO!”

  Profound roar from the crowd. The dog handlers let go of the restraining ropes. The pandemonium in which the dog team was immersed one second ago disappears, replaced by a sense of sudden, efficient shared purpose. The dogs take off; the towline snaps taut; the sled, with Buser standing on the back rails, slides out beyond the starting line. The dogs are quiet, running. They build speed as they go until the sled is more or less sliding on its own momentum. They keep running down Fourth Avenue; I lose sight of them in the crowd.

  The next musher’s team enters the chute.

  And we are off.

  3. FLIGHT 985–WHISKEY

  We were a squadron of four Super Cubs, assembled by ACTS for Jay’s Iditarod expedition. The deal was, if you were a small-plane pilot looking to get some serious Alaska bush-flying experience, you could pay ACTS a fee of approximately a thousand dollars per day to fly along with the race. ACTS provided the planes. Also rural Alaska accommodations, Arctic-survival know-how, and (speaking only about the rear cabin of Nugget, here, but) trail mix. Good stuff, possibly homemade. It had the little M&M’s in it.

  I was the only non-pilot Jay had ever approved for the Iditarod. I don’t know why he let me come. He told me a story, early on, about taking along an Israeli fighter ace one year, a guy with jet-combat experience, “multiple unrecorded kills,” and asking him what was the most dangerous flying he’d ever done. “This,” the fighter pilot said. I thought of that guy often, mostly while calculating whether my empty trail-mix bag could double as an airsickness container.

  There were seven of us, including Jay and me, at that first preflight briefing in the ACTS hangar on Monday. We were spread out on a couple of couches. One of the couches was made out of seats from a 737, I think? Some
jumbo jet. Nugget would be 985-Whiskey’s lead plane, Jay declared; the other Cubs would fly behind, in echelon formation (the familiar upside-down V). Or in rare cases we might switch to trail (single file) or line abreast (a horizontal line, useful when scanning for wildlife). “985-Whiskey” was Nugget’s personal call sign and would double as our flight name for the expedition.

  Bernard and Christophe, French pilots who’d flown in for the trip, loitered behind the couches, watching Jay point out locations on a huge map. Bernard was sixty-seven, a retired Air France captain, regal of bearing; short, but imperially short, like a famous surgeon. His favorite pastime on the trip was to declare that France was (fart sound) and then laboriously list reasons why France was (fart sound), in tangled English. His actual favorite off-aircraft pastime, I mean back home, was freestyle skiing. He keenly wished for his wife to spend time freestyle skiing with him; she wouldn’t; his marriage was a little bit (fart sound). Christophe, his friend and former student, was younger, maybe in his late forties, and cool in a louche French way, with a weird personal ostrich of uncombed gray hair; he was cigarette thin and spent the whole trip with his neck elaborately engulfed in a camouflage-print silk scarf. He had this way of leaning on things. The heir to a rock-quarry fortune, he’d worked as a photographer but retired young to a life of intensively having cheekbones. “So I sink to myself, I ’ave zis job,” he would say with a shrug. “I should give it to one who needs it.” According to Jay, they were two of the best pilots in Europe. They knew how to land, apparently, on these glaciers in the Alps that you could land on. (Bernard complained about the paperwork associated with this.)