by Jill Homer
“Oh, that was you,” he said. “I saw the hole. What are you going to do?”
I told him my toe-wiggling plan. “I want to make it to Yentna Station,” I said. “Then I’ll assess.”
I grabbed my bike and started walking with him toward a wind-swept clearing known as the Dismal Swamp. “I lost my gear bag,” he admitted to me. “It bounced off my bike or something. All of my spare clothing and a sleeping pad.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m hoping someone grabs it,” he said.
We trudged through the knee-deep powder and let the shame of our rookie mistakes swirl around the void of conversation. Through the howling wind, I heard what sounded like the hum of a mosquito. As it grew louder, a yellow headlight approached. A snowmobiler pulled up beside us and shut off his engine.
“You two okay?” he yelled.
The little voice of reason in my head screamed “No! No! Tell him no! Take a ride!”
“We’re great,” I said. I looked over at Sean. His face was expressionless.
“And you know where you’re going?” the snowmobiler asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re headed to Yentna Station tonight.”
“Still a ways from here,” the snowmobiler said. “Do you know where to connect up with the Yentna River?”
“Yes,” I said. Sean nodded.
“OK then,” the snowmobiler said. “You two take care.”
I turned to watch his red taillights disappear into the shadows. I wondered if I had just made a mistake. Without exchanging another word, Sean and I kept walking. We crossed into another cluster of trees where the trail was firmer. I sat on my bike and started pedaling. Sean, who had skinnier tires than I did and not as much flotation, was still walking. I stopped and turned to him. “Sorry,” I said. “I really have to hurry as fast as I can.” And with that, I pedaled away, into the shadow-drenched night, alone.
I descended onto the Susitna River in a state of peace, my body released from anxiety by single-minded purpose. The pedals turned in smooth circles; the tires crunched over the uneven snow. I could ride over the loose surface, but the trail was still soft enough that movement was difficult and slow. Sweat trickled from beneath my hat and froze midstream on my cheeks. I felt hot, not cold. I wiggled my toes and marveled at the furnace of warmth my body was capable of maintaining amid subzero wind. Water sloshed around in my boot. The air temperature pushed into negative double digits, which felt significantly colder in the driving wind, and still it could not touch me.
Every ten minutes or so, I would jump off my bike and run down the trail for a minute or two to crank up the body furnace even more. As I ran, I noticed a headlamp bobbing several hundred yards ahead of me. I assumed because I was getting off the bike and running in intervals, I would not catch up any other racers, but soon I realized the person’s light was not moving. I caught up to the dark-eyed grimace of Billy Kotzich, another Iditarod cyclist who was aiming to ride 1,100 miles to Nome.
“Do you have a bike pump I could borrow?” he said in a hoarse voice. “Mine won’t work. I kept letting air out of my tires and I think I let too much out. I don’t want to ride with the tires this low.”
I breathed out, irritated. I did not want to stop, but I had to help him. How could anyone start out a 1,100-mile race and not be absolutely sure something as simple as an air pump worked? The rookie mistakes were stacking up, although I wasn’t about to admit my mistake to Billy. He pumped at an achingly slow pace. I shivered as the roaring wind sucked heat out of my body like a vacuum. I checked my thermometer. The temperature had dropped to nearly twenty below zero. For the first time that night, I could not feel my right foot. I started jumping up and down.
“You cold?” Billy asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I really should get moving.”
“Okay,” he said. “I think I have enough air to get to Yentna. Hopefully I can fix my pump there.”
He got on his bike and we rode together for a hundred yards, but I quickly started to outpace him.
“Can’t keep this pace up,” Billy yelled out to me. “I have to keep steady if I’m going all the way to Nome.”
“I gotta make some heat,” I called back. Still annoyed, with a right foot that had lost all sensation during the break, I couldn’t envision Billy or Sean, both lacking crucial equipment, making it much beyond Yentna. I, on the other hand, felt amazing — fast and fresh and strong despite the cold. If only I could warm up my foot. As soon as I was well out of range of Billy’s headlamp, I hopped off the bike and started running again. The cold wind stung my nostrils like a shot of menthol vapor. It scoured my lungs and pricked my nerves in a way that made me feel more alive than I had felt in a long time. The night sky glittered in a gown of stars. I ran faster, until my blood ran hot and my right foot started to tingle. I jumped back on the bike and wiggled my toes, hoping for quick passage to Yentna Station.
It took me five more hours to travel twenty-five miles along the soft river trail, although it felt like minutes. I was joyful, awestruck by the intensity of the open landscape, and amazed at how simple it was to be warm and alive and pedaling a bicycle into the heart of a frozen wilderness. I’m not sure how many times I stepped off the bike to run during the last twenty-five miles. The abstract notion of time and miles, along with a survivalist sense of urgency, were all swallowed by the simple pleasure of being.
Yentna Station appeared as a tiny, flickering gold light amid the twisting black spruce trees that lined the wide river. I felt strong enough to consider continuing down the trail that night, without rest. I just needed to change my socks, dry my vapor barrier as much as I could, and acquire some sort of plastic bag for my wet boot.
I stepped into the small log structure just after 2 a.m. A handful of racers snoozed in the front room, lit only by red flames flickering inside a wood stove. A dim light glowed in the next room. I assumed the race official was waiting in there. But no one stirred; only the popping fire interrupted a reverent silence. I sat next to the stove and yanked at my ice-crusted gator. It was still too frozen to unlatch, so I sat and watched the flames until the ice around the buckle melted, then ripped at the Velcro until it let go in a shower of ice flakes. I pulled up my pant leg and began to work on the boot. The laces were frozen as well. I clawed at them with my fingernails until I had worked enough of the ice away to undo those. With great effort, I pulled away the tongue of the boots and tried to yank out my foot. Nothing happened. I chipped more ice away from the laces, loosened them some more, and tried again. Nothing. I stood up, pressed my hands on the top of the boot, and pulled with all the strength my leg could muster. Still my foot wouldn’t budge. I plopped down on the wood floor, breathing hard.
My foot was stuck inside my boot.
With a sinking sense of dread, I realized my foot was probably frozen inside my boot. As I shook my foot, it made no sound. There was no water to slosh around. The force I was fighting was in all likelihood a solid block of ice.
I lifted my leg and propped the boot directly on top of the stove. That the hard plastic might melt seemed a minor concern. I glanced toward the lit room. No one moved. Perhaps even the checker was taking a nap. Good. I wasn’t ready to explain why I was lying on the cold floor, roasting one of my feet on the stove top. Hot blood pounded in my head, like a fever, and I thought I might pass out. But I stayed awake, listening to the clock in the kitchen tick away seconds as painfully slow as any I had ever known.
I fought with my boot several more times. Finally, about thirty minutes after I first entered the building, I managed to wrestle a ghost-white appendage out of my socks, which were still frozen to the inside of the boot. Despite finally achieving its freedom, my foot felt strangely detached from my body. I pulled it close to my face. All five of my toes were the color of chalk, but if I tried to wriggle them, they still moved. “A little frost nip,” I thought. “It could be worse.” I pulled on my down booties and walked into the lit room to ch
eck in.
The checker set me up in a sleeping spot right next to the stove, the same section of floor where I had spent the previous thirty minutes trying to thaw my boot. I didn’t tell him I had actually arrived a half hour earlier. I ate a hastily prepared meal of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, then crawled into my sleeping bag. I pressed my still-cold toes into the pit of my left knee, and drifted to a thin, troubled sleep.
About three hours later, at 5:30 a.m., Geoff sauntered in the door. He was the next person to arrive after me, Billy and Sean. Even on foot, he had managed to make it to Yentna Station a mere three hours after I did. He was ahead of about half the field, who were still somewhere behind the first checkpoint — likely sleeping in bivy sacks in the brutal cold. At that point, the temperature outside was twenty-five below. Geoff coughed loudly. The sound woke me up.
“Hey,” I said as I peeked out of my bag. “How are you feeling?”
“I feel horrible,” Geoff said, and coughed again. “How about you?”
I looked around. Everyone was still sleeping. “Um, not great,” I said. “I stepped in some overflow on Flathorn Lake. I think I might have frostbite.”
“What? Really? Let me see.”
I got out of my bag and pulled off my down bootie. My toes had taken on a slate gray color, but they weren’t black.
“Those don’t look too bad,” Geoff said. “Do they hurt?”
“Actually, they don’t hurt at all.”
Just then, a group of three cyclists clomped down the stairs. They were preparing to go back out into the frigid morning. I felt awake and strangely energetic, but uncertain enough about my toes that I wasn’t prepared to leave quite yet. Geoff and I decided to take their place in the room upstairs. I dragged my sleeping bag up the rickety staircase to a small room that already had one other occupant. Moonlight streamed in a tiny window through tattered curtains, revealing the spare furnishings of a single full-size mattress, a thin brown quilt, and a single wooden chair. The room was at least eighty-five degrees, a dry sauna directly above the wood stove. Geoff lay down next to the man fast asleep on the mattress. I spread out my sleeping bag in the narrow space between the foot of the mattress and the wooden wall. “I’ll just wait here until morning,” I decided. “Geoff and I can head out together.”
For the next hour, I listened to Geoff cough and moan in the suffocating room. I felt restless but otherwise normal. Then, almost imperceptibly at first, a sharp sensation began to poke my right foot. It started as a hot tingle but quickly grew to a crescendo of unhinged pain more intense than anything I had ever felt. The pain held my foot in a searing blaze I could do nothing to extinguish. I simply writhed and bit my knuckles and leaked hot, silent tears on my sleeping bag as Geoff continued to cough through the first stages of pneumonia. I could scarcely comprehend what was happening; I had no concept of what it meant to thaw frozen flesh still attached to a living creature. For the next two hours, there was no race, no frostbite, no bicycle and no grand Alaska wilderness; there was nothing but sickness and pain. I envisioned a Civil War triage tent in a hot southern battlefield, where patients strapped to beds screamed in a chorus of agony. The imagery would have been humorous if it weren’t close to reality.
Slowly, the white fire began to flicker and fade. My mind felt numb after twelve hard hours of cycling in the cold wind, the adrenaline-charged lake mishap, and the intense pain of thawing my frozen toes. Despite a stubborn desire to stay in the race, my stronger instincts simply bowed in resignation, as if to say, “You’re done.” All at once, I felt peace and dread. I knew that if my pain was any gauge of the physical damage I had done, I was in big trouble.
I lay back down and waited for daylight to reach the room. By then, it was well after 8 a.m. Geoff seemed to be awake but didn’t show any interest in speaking or getting out of bed. The man next to him was still snoozing. I sat up and pulled off my bootie. As I suspected, bulging purple and yellow blisters had formed around my toenails, and the tips of my toes were turning black. Even then, I held onto a fading hope. I pulled my bootie back on and tried to stand. Pain shot up my leg as soon as I put my weight on my foot, and I had to lean on my left leg quickly to keep from toppling over.
“You going back out?” Geoff wheezed.
“No,” I said. “I’m just going downstairs. I need to tell the checker about my situation.”
The race official’s name was Rich Crane; he was a longtime volunteer on the Iditarod Trail, often helping out with the dogsled race, and I assumed he would naturally be an expert on frostbite. I explained what happened, pulled off my boot, and showed him my toes.
“I have seen worse,” he said. “But those are definitely damaged. I can’t promise you’ll keep them if you go back out there, especially now that they’re warm. Can you walk?”
“Kind of,” I said. The truth was, I had hobbled so badly just to walk down the stairs that I was surprised I didn’t fall. Even my ability to put pressure on bike pedals without intense pain was doubtful, and that was assuming I wouldn’t have to do any more walking — something the soft, unpredictable Iditarod Trail usually demanded in large amounts. And still, I held on to that tiny hope. I had put everything into that race. All of my money, all of my time and all of my focus for an entire winter were single-mindedly funneled toward the Iditarod Trail Invitational. To turn my back on the race was more than just a defeat; it was an admission that my year up to that point was a complete waste of time. And for something as stupid as dipping my foot in a lake? I couldn’t accept it. I just couldn’t.
Rich could tell I was mulling options I did not have. “In the end, it’s your decision,” he said. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
At that moment, Tim Hewitt, a longtime and incredibly successful veteran of the 1,100-mile foot race to Nome, turned around from the table where he had overheard Rich and me talking. He stood up and walked toward us. His white hair stuck out in spikes like a frozen crown. His face was wrinkled and wizened; the hardships of four walks to Nome were etched in his frown. He looked at me with a piercing gaze. I inhaled deeply and held my breath, as though I was waiting for the words of a prophet about to hand down a revelation.
“You know you can’t go back out there,” he said. His eyes were filled with flecks of empathy and sadness. “You know you can’t.”
I nodded and didn’t even try to hold back the hot tears now flooding my eyes. Everything Tim said was right, and Tim was one who would know. It was over. He understood that truth, and as one of a tiny group of athletes who had put all of his heart and effort into this tiny, obscure race in a remote part of Alaska, he understood exactly what that meant.
“I know,” I said.
Sunlight streamed into the room as I sidled up against the window. Flakes of frost peeled off the pane and an outdoor thermometer registered twelve below. The air outside was so clear that the snow-swept surface of the Yentna River shimmered. In a distance too close to bear, white peaks of the Alaska Range pierced an indigo sky. After months of preparation I could nearly touch those mountains, and yet I had never felt so far away.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass, hoping to numb the pain-seared blood that still coursed through my veins. Every capillary tingled, reverberations of the thawing process. The only parts of my body that I couldn’t feel were my toes. I looked down at the alien digits, nearly consumed by purple skin and puss-colored blisters. I tried to wiggle them and they only quivered, like a moldy slab of meat that had been left out of the freezer too long. They no longer felt like part of me. Imposters. Parasites. If I could only work up the courage to limp into the kitchen, I could carve them off with a butcher’s knife and free the parts of me that still ached to continue the journey. But pain and fear kept me pressed against a window in the cramped building, consumed with a helpless sort of yearning.
Behind me, a pair of boots stomped down the rickety staircase. I turned see the pale face of George Azarias, a rookie cyclist who rolled in late that morning.
He wore a thin black hat and a gaze that seemed perpetually focused far into the distance. I pulled my bootie over my disfigured foot. “Headed back out?” I asked.
“Aye,” he said in a slow Australian drawl that betrayed the depth of his fatigue.
I mustered a weak smile. “I’m really jealous,” I said. “I wish I could go with you, but I have to fly out from here.”
He smiled back. “I heard. Sorry about that foot. But we go on, don’t we? We go on. You’ll be back next year, then?”
I shook my head. “Probably not. I’m not sure what comes next, but next February seems a long way off.”
“I suppose,” he said, and laughed. “Right now, McGrath seems a long way off.”
I looked out at the narrow trail stamped into an expanse of snow and wondered what made me want it so bad. “It’s closer than you’d think,” I said.
George exited out the side door, letting a rush of invigoratingly frigid morning air into the room. I attempted to stand up. Pain erupted from my foot and I collapsed back into the chair. A dark oily spot appeared on the tip of my wool sock — a broken blister. I stared in disbelief as it spread, wondering which truth was more ridiculous — the fact that something so trivial could disrupt a monumental adventure, or the fact that something so serious could arise from a trivial bike ride. My foot just rested on the wood floor, lifeless and leaking. I was beginning to see that the line where my body ended and my experiences began was no clearer than the horizon in a blizzard, and no more permanent than a footprint in a storm.
Chapter Two
Picking Up the Pieces
“Jill, can I see you in my office?”
“Sure, Charles,” I said to the voice on the speakerphone. “I’ll be right in.”
I grabbed my crutches and leaned against my desk as I stood up. My right foot was wrapped in white gauze. Over that, I wore an oversized, brightly colored sock that my mom had mailed from Utah in an effort to lift my spirits. The gift was strangely effective, as though loud pink stripes really could erase the oozing decay surrounding my toes.