Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  When I think about how Donna described Kitty, saying that she was aloof and tolerated others but lived to run, lived to race, and lived to lead, well, that pretty well describes Donna’s husband too.

  “TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT NOT RECOMMENDED”

  Before I left at the end of my first visit to go back to Seward, Jeff grabbed a blank Post-it note off the refrigerator and found a pen.

  “Peter,” he said, and I was surprised to hear him say my name. “I’m going to write down a list of clothing you will need when you come back. You do want to come back, make a few long training runs with us?”

  “Yes, I really do.” Maybe I’d passed Test #1. Though I got the feeling the tests never ended around Jeff.

  “You have the Internet in Seward?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Well, you click onto the Cabela’s site, then put the Trans-Alaska suit in the search engine. Order one of those. Where we will be going, it could get extremely cold, at least forty below. Also get a pair of the Trans-Alaska boots, they’re rated at one hundred below. The problem with mushing, your feet don’t move around much.” Jeff wrote down the two items.

  “Oh, and get a couple pairs of Polartec gloves.”

  As he wrote, I looked at what was tacked on the front of the King refrigerator. The fronts of refrigerators are some of my favorite reads. There was an Algebra I, Chapter 3, test by Tessa, the middle daughter. She had got an A, a 96 out of a possible 100. There was a chart, with a pink heart for each day, Monday through Sunday, in which Ellen, their second-grader, writes in how many minutes she has read each day. Monday she marked in fifteen minutes. There was a card someone had sent them with a quote on the front: “If you’re not happy with what you have, how could you be happier with more?” There was a picture of Cali, their oldest, her latest school picture from Healy. She looked twenty years old, and sophisticated, though she was in the ninth grade. And there were four pictures made into one from the family orthodontist in Fairbanks showing Tessa’s shining grin. There was a close-up of her bite, a shot of her uppers, and lowers, all straight and white—no braces anymore!

  Jeff said that I would be welcome back when I got my cold-weather clothes, just to call a few days in advance to warn them. So I packed up and headed back to Seward. When I got home, I ordered my equipment, then Rita, Julianne, and I went back to the Kings’ around the end of November. They had invited our family, and other friends, to share their Thanksgiving. The night we arrived, Jeff said the next morning we were going to take a forty-something-mile run down the Denali Highway. It is closed in winter but offers an unusually smooth, wide trail for early long-distance training. We would come across a large sign in glowing orange and yellow a few miles down the road, east out of Cantwell, that would offer us a chilling warning, a warning totally unheeded by Jeff and another musher, Bruce Lee, who were on the road for training this day.

  The sign said, “Travel beyond this point not recommended. If you must use this road expect extreme cold/heavy snow. Carry cold weather survival gear. Tell someone where you are going.”

  I had been to a few out-of-the-way places in Alaska by now on my trip but hadn’t seen any such signs. Jeff told me about the road while he and his head assistant, Shawn, harnessed up the dogs. Shawn would be running a team of young dogs for Jeff, call them the junior varsity, in this year’s Iditarod. They were scouting for the team of tomorrow, and this run would be a little workout.

  Jeff said that a few years ago a couple and their grandchildren had driven down this road during an extremely cold winter. They had run off the road and got stuck, and eventually their gas ran out. They didn’t have survival gear, and all four of them perished. They had traveled too far down the road to walk out. I wondered if we were going farther down the road than they had. But with Jeff and Shawn, I felt supremely confident, especially in my new clothing. I had the feeling I could sleep out in this black Trans-Alaska suit and not ever need a sleeping bag. The trails these guys go down in races and even in training would never have a sign this dramatic, though those trails are far more dangerous.

  We drove out to the road, parked, and got ready to go. It was maybe ten below zero and perfectly still. Golden sunlight was shining down on us with a dark blue sky above. Jeff’s dogs, I’d already noticed, didn’t jump around much. But as always, they were ready to rock. Jeff had brought an extra sled for me to ride and attached it to the end of his. He told me we would go through this big valley; the frozen Nenana River would be on our left.

  The first few miles I was a bit uptight. Jeff acted like an athletic six-year-old on a jungle gym, hyper and invincible. I remember he’d said that he’d traveled one hundred thousand miles on a sled in the last twenty-plus years of mushing. Jeff mentioned we’d probably see caribou, then a minute later, we came upon a small herd in the snow-covered roadbed. They ran at us, then turned off. The most dramatic group was about fifty animals down in a small area below a lone hill. When they finally saw us, they all leapt up and ran, powder snow swirling around their legs and hiding them, as if they were just bodies sliding surprisingly fast atop the snow. The sun turned the outlines of their beautiful hides to gold. Jeff turned around, stood on one foot, and pointed to some large tracks on our left in some fresh powder. He said the tracks were a couple of wolves following the caribou, and their food, as they wandered and dug up nourishment with their wide hooves.

  We got to a hill, quite an incline, where the weight of Jeff and especially me slowed down our progress. Jeff got off and ran beside the sled. I thought it looked easy, and hadn’t Jeff told me last time to watch him, to do what he did? So I jumped off, but we must have been moving faster than it appeared. My boots seemed to weigh twenty-five pounds each. I tried to run, stumbled, tried to regain my balance, but fell. I hit the snow, rolled, and was up. Jeff and Shawn both stopped their teams but didn’t laugh or say anything. We went up hills, rode the brake hard coming down, then turned around and came back. This time most of the caribou were gone. The temperature was dropping; the dogs seemed just warmed up after our forty-two-mile run. I could see how this occupation could capture a person, ignite his passion. Moving silently through the wilderness with a team of willing, sleek, intelligent dogs as your companions, your extra eyes and ears and nose and feet and fur, was exhilarating.

  The dogs were unharnessed and put in their compartments in the camper-type kennel built into the red Dodge truck Jeff had won by winning the Iditarod in 1998. The sleds went on top. When we got home, Donna, who was from Connecticut, was sitting at their kitchen table talking with Rita. Donna, originally trained in the intricately demanding field of medical illustration, was getting a couple of her prints ready to ship. She now paints wildlife from around Denali and other places in Alaska. My favorite is one she did in 1993 of a blond grizzly bear mother lying on her back in just-sprouted green grass and fireweed. She’s just finished nursing. Looking at this sweet scene between a mother and her babies, you would never think this grizzly could ever be deadly—though observing humans at our gentlest would never warn anyone of our own vicious abilities to defend what’s ours.

  One of the Kings’ daughters was surfing the Internet. Jeff was talking to someone in Norway about some kind of special dog food. These mushers are always searching for every competitive edge. They read Pat Riley’s motivational book and study the effects of various temperatures on the performance of plastic, which they slip over their runners. They experiment with supernutrition. Jeff hired a woman from Kodiak who has a set-net site in the summer to work for him in the winter. One of her duties was to be a masseuse for the dogs. Jeff told me he had a new idea, a secret weapon he might try in this year’s Iditarod. He told me he might tell me about it after he’d tried it.

  Jeff excused himself to go down to their little village’s Volunteer Fire Department and EMT building, which doubled as a community meeting hall. He remembered an atrocious car wreck from last year at Thanksgiving when a small car filled with people had crunched into one of the
bridges that cross the Nenana River. Donna appeared as Jeff left and sat down with me at the kitchen table. Their parakeet skidded to a landing on top of my head. The family had at different times commented that maybe their bird had special feelings for me. Donna was holding a piece of tracing paper; she was working on a public arts project to be submitted to the school in Healy that their daughters attended. She and another artist from Fairbanks who did ceramic murals proposed to work on it together. In Alaska 10 percent of school construction budgets are spent on art for the school. The local people decide on the art.

  Something, the page with her design inspired by nature sketched out on it, a gust of wind, that the woodstove did not need to be stoked, made her think of the past.

  “You know, since Jeff and I married,” Donna said, “and moved out to this land on this little lake, we have lived the whole last hundred years of technological advancement, but we’ve done it in the last twenty years.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, we’ve gone from homesteading this land, building our house from the logs on the place. We used generators for our only electricity. We hauled our water, heated with wood. We were hunter-gatherers. Now we have electrical lines, phone lines, the Internet, computers, a hot tub, even bright lights that will come on and illuminate our dog yard in case a bear wants to think about eating some dog. Still, sometimes it gets fifty below, but we can handle it.” Donna is as strong as Jeff is, and that’s what made it possible to live this life they had constructed together.

  That night, the night before Thanksgiving, I heard someone coming up the stairs from the basement where the girls were staying while the addition was finished. That someone was running, so it had to be Jeff. He sat down with me for a brief moment, as a courtesy. You got the idea that sleeping was sometimes an intrusion into Jeff’s world. Already today he’d made the long run up the Denali Highway. Then he had made a shorter run beginning in the dog yard with a couple puppy teams. Helge, red-cheeked, thin-faced, and a natural comedian, took one team, Jeff the other.

  It was 8 P.M. Since we’d gotten home from the Denali Park run, Jeff had made several calls to the contractors doing the addition. He’d also just gotten a call from a Native guy in a village near Bethel. Jeff had told him he had a few dogs for sale and gave him advice on setting up a breeding program on a small budget. Natives are increasingly wanting to get back into a prominent position in what was once their exclusive world of dog mushing. In the 2000 Iditarod race, the 1976 Iditarod winner, Jerry Riley, an Athabascan, would race, as well as Mike Williams, the Yupik from Akiak, an evangelical Christian and Native leader, who would be returning after two twenty-third-place finishes. Emitt Peters, the 1975 winner as a rookie, was running again. And there were the two Inupiat Eskimo young guns, John Baker of Kotzebue, who had finished fifth in 1998, and whaler Russell Lane of Point Hope. Native Alaskans are now getting some sponsors. It costs more and more to devote your life to long-distance racing—across the toughest field in sports.

  Jeff is a favorite around Bethel, the “capital city” of the Kuskokwim delta, because he has won their race, the Kuskokwim 300, several times. He told me that if I wanted to see what a hard-core, old-time Alaska dog race was like, often run in some of the most brutal conditions (i.e., lots of overflow), I should go to the K-300. I did and saw Jeff come in second to the gray-bearded Charlie Boulding.

  Jeff made smoothies for his girls and for us and hugged and kissed his daughters good-night. He asked if we had everything we needed at our log cabin up on the hill, and we left. Before we did, he told Donna that they should jump in the hot tub, talk about their respective days. After that, maybe they could paint some trim in the new addition? We really appreciated being a part of Jeff and Donna’s extended family on this moon so far away from our orbit.

  “THESE ATHLETES EAT RAW MEAT, RUN NAKED, AND SLEEP IN THE SNOW”

  The next time, I came back alone to go with Jeff, Helge, and Morten on an almost-one-hundred-mile, two-day training run. A couple lived out by Gold King Creek, a large Alaskan wetlands between the Wood and Totatlanika Rivers, who occasionally let long-distance mushers, a few snow machiners, and people from foreign countries craving the true wilderness stay the night with them. It would be forty-eight miles out there and forty-eight miles back. Jeff would take three teams, two filled with experienced dogs that could make his Iditarod team and one with young dogs, rookies wanting to make the team. When we left their dog yard, the forty dogs that couldn’t come howled and leaped at the ends of their chains. They barked and yipped and hated being left behind. All but Kitty, who tried to sniff each dog that was leaving. She seemed to be trying to think through each of Jeff’s decisions, why had he taken this dog and not that one. Falcon, the other retired lead dog who’s free to roam unchained, sat and watched from atop Red’s doghouse.

  Jeff told me as we loaded up all the dogs that Kitty had been a significantly better leader than his present leaders, Red and Jenna, the pair who had led him to his 1998 win. Kitty was unrivaled as far as Jeff was concerned in her commitment, drive, and resiliency. She weighed fifty-four pounds in her prime. Jeff said Kitty never looked sideways, never looked back, was always looking intensely at what was around the next corner. Nothing he ever encountered was too tough for her; her superbly adapted genes still flow in his dog yard. Jeff uses the males Persian and Rhombus, her direct offspring, and he hopes to get a litter from one of her daughters, Cheyenne. Cheyenne no longer belongs to Jeff, but mushers wheel and deal dogs; they will let their supermale breed with your superfemale for a price, or let you keep this litter so they can keep the next, or any kind of trade or deal that can be arranged.

  On the way to the trail we drove through Healy and headed toward Fairbanks. A good bunch of caribou that had been spooked by something stood in the road. There was almost no traffic now, though in the summer this road carried many Alaskan travelers. It was fifteen below on the truck’s thermometer as we left Jeff’s place; it rose to twelve above in Healy, then dropped back to fifteen below as we went down toward our starting place. Near Healy I saw an old blue pickup with a homemade dog box in back. It was owned by a beginning musher, or perhaps someone who had little money to put into motorized transportation, someone who spent most of his or her money on dogs, a fairly common addiction. Hand-painted on the back, it said, “These athletes eat raw meat, run naked, and sleep in the snow.”

  We pulled in behind a lonesome roadhouse; everything everywhere seemed frozen, brittle, and isolated. Jeff handed me a ten-dollar bill and told me to go inside and give it to the owner for allowing us to park the truck and trailer in their parking lot, and for plugging the truck in too. Kate Wood and Larry Mead’s log cabins, where we were headed, were almost fifty miles from here. I knew it was possible to cross what was ahead, even though I had no idea what awaited. I never worried about anything thanks to Jeff. He exuded confidence that oozed out to all around him. When we left the roadhouse, the thermometer in Jeff’s truck said minus twenty-eight.

  I found an unexpected spirituality associated with Alaska’s winter. It made me feel purified, high, strong, and intense. I’d been around Jeff enough now that I was feeling quite relaxed. I had no idea what test he had in store for me. Would I be taking my body and mind to its limits? I was sure he wouldn’t push me too hard. While my forty-something-mile jaunt had been a gliding, relaxing run on a snow-covered flat and wide road, this was like being dragged through miles and miles of a war zone that had been bombed for a month behind a jeep going as fast as it could. The jeep would have much worse traction than the sled we’d used before; these thirteen dogs pulled each sled with fifty-two paws, and the traction was provided by their tough pads and their strong claws. There would be no stopping quickly, even if I did fall off.

  Jeff yelled out for all of us to be really careful because in the first few hundred yards we’d cross a road with possible speeding vehicles. Every dog was barking with high anticipation. He didn’t mention what it would be like to
come up on the road at a right angle at full blast-off speed before the dogs settled down. The road, which did have a pickup on it a second before we crossed, served as a jump, not quite high enough to prepare you to fly over a couple parked buses, though it felt like that. Somehow I held on. Jeff glanced back quickly when we were in midair, as if to say he had forgotten to mention hitting the road and he was glad I had hung on. Then, without warning—which is how all the seemingly hundreds of obstacles in the trail appeared—the dogs, who knew where they were going, made a full-out ninety-degree turn to the right. My sled was tied to Jeff’s, so at times it acted like the end of a whip. The sled dropped into ruts, frozen as hard as concrete, and flew on top of them, and then I flew off. Boom, thud, roll, stop. My breath was almost knocked out of me. There was no give in the snow on the beginning of this trail to Gold King. The frost heaves were dramatic, as they came up in the most uncomfortable, unruly ways. The team stopped, but they didn’t want to. They wanted to burn this icehouse down. I got back on the sled, and we took off again.

  About a mile or so later, nothing had smoothed out. We were running through an area that was all frozen wetlands, beaver ponds, muskrat trails, little streams, rivers, bog. The banks of these frozen slabs of ice served as catapults on the way down and immovable walls for us to hit on the way out.

  Watching Jeff from behind was like skiing behind a champion slalom skier. He shifted his weight with the contours of the snow-covered earth we mushed over, from the left runner to the right. When it came time to turn, he bore down on the edge. The sled’s runners were narrower than I had thought, with a piece of rubber on top to stand on.