Looking for Alaska (40 page)

We'd been on the trail three hours. Jeff said the team was running in excellent form. Their gait was a really fast walk, except for Jenna and another small female, who ran sometimes and fast-walked when we slowed just slightly. Jeff said he was getting a positive feeling about this year's racing, but he would know more after some shorter races. Jeff said he might run the Copper Basin 300 the second week in January, he wasn't sure yet. He planned to run the Knik 200 on New Year's Eve; he always did, as it was near their home. That race did give him confidence; that week there was a slight cold snap at Jeff and Donna's and it got down to fifty-seven below. One of their daughters was having a slumber party and Jeff had to stay and fix the plumbing. Morten ran the team instead and won. Jeff would race in the Kuskokwim 300, one of the toughest races and one of his favorites, on the last weekend in January. Then just before the Iditarod, which begins the first Saturday in March, he wanted to run the Tustamena 200 on the Kenai Peninsula. It too would go well; he would win. Paul Gephardt, a musher many people thought was a future star, came in second. People around Alaska were talking knowledgeably about Paul's amazing lead dog with the awe that comes when a superstar is in your midst.

Right before we got to Kate and Larry's cabins, a bit over four hours after starting, we reached the top of a big hill. The trail ran through a stand of evergreens, a healthy, dense cluster. The dogs were not tired, they were speeding up. The trail was level and the powder up here was deep. Jeff let out a holler of joy based on the thrill he must have felt moving so effortlessly through the clean, cold spirits of winter. He yelled out some command; the dogs could clearly feel his thrill, it's transmitted to them. I was holding on tight, hyperalert because we were traveling so fast. The dogs and us, as a single unit, were soaring through the powder.

We came out of the wilderness to a little open runway for a Super Cub. Jeff told us to get ready, we were about to make almost a ninety-degree turn and then we'd be there. He obviously didn't want to slow down the dogs. I didn't slow down, my sled whipped out in the brush, I bent down, leaned left, and made it. Whoa, what a rush. Jeff told me as we both braked, easing toward the log cabin we'd sleep in, that last summer a grizzly had come around here. A Super Cub was parked out on the grass strip. The bear liked red, the color of the plane, or didn't like planes, whatever—it stood up on it hind legs and tore up the wing fabric covering, did $15,000 in damage. Alaska insurance agents get these kinds of “animals and equipment meet” calls more than you might think. The guy who owned the plane taped up the wings with duct tape and flew it to Fairbanks to be repaired.

Kate Wood and Larry Mead had their own kingdom out here near Gold King Creek. In some way, that whole concept of your own kingdom is why people love living in Alaska. You can carve out your own world and be completely (or however completely you want) surrounded by the natural world. Kate came to Alaska from Maine to go fishing for grayling. Her boat broke down, she had this feeling that she didn't care if she went back to Maine or not. No offense to Maine or anyplace else, but there is no comparison when it comes to Alaska, she told me. A year later, Kate, a registered nurse, sold her farm in midcoast Maine and moved up. Kate and Larry became partners and have had this place for several years. You can't call it a B&B; it would have to be a B&B&L&D, plus. Kate served us a dinner that night made on her woodstove, just Jeff, Morten, Helge, Larry, and me. It was exquisite food. There were homemade breads and cakes and pies and jellies and relishes and meats. Here was a place where there was time to cook, to bless your creations, to share them with strangers who don't stay so long. I remember Jeff saying this would be the best of both worlds, the thirty-five below and the potential brutality of the trip, and then the pampering of Kate's homemade food and Larry's sawmill, where he milled his own lumber and had used it to build their sauna. Jeff said he had nothing to prove anymore, he could tough it out enough in the races, he didn't have to beat up himself or his dogs anymore in training with Kate and Larry's place available as a halfway point. Amen, brother.

Before we ate, before we even met Kate, the dogs were all unhooked from the sled and bedded with fresh straw. Larry had water heated so their food could be mixed. Our cabin with four bunk beds had a woodstove going; it had heated the water. There was a wire “clothesline” for our frozen mittens and damp felt boot liners and wool hats. There was a place to hang our Trans-Alaska suits to dry; we could dress just in fleece pants and vests and coats. This cold is filled with clean spirits and dry landings; there is almost no way to get wet and cold unless you run into the dreaded overflow. It was warm and cozy inside their kitchen with Kate's big-mama cooking stove, and the living room and dining area had its own woodstove too. We sat up for hours after our meal, telling each other story after story. Larry told one about the time thirteen wolves surrounded the cabins and came down to the creek and out on the ridge. I don't quite remember how they knew there were thirteen, but they did, and Kate and Larry have no reason to exaggerate. When you're flushed by racing across the wild and filled with Kate's food and wine and herbal tea, there comes a state where the moment, the stories, the company, are just appreciated for their existence. The details are not stored in the memory. Jeff, Morten, Helge, and I took a sauna. My bumps, bruises, and sore muscles were warmed, toasty and sweaty. Morten and Helge jumped into the snow nude. Little thirty-nine-pound Jenna, who watched Jeff's every move, was allowed into the cabin with us. She was probably as close to Jeff as any of his dogs. She slept in the bottom bunk with him.

Jeff was forty-four years old. It had been a long trail for him, starting in northern California where he had grown up, even played quarterback at Shasta Junior College at five feet eight, 140 pounds. He'd bought his first land bordering Denali Park in 1977. He did not dream of being a professional sled-dog racer, one of the greatest winners ever. His plan was simply to live in Alaska, and to do whatever it took to stay. But watching him today hollering to no one but himself and his dogs, expressing his feelings of pure joy at running through spruce and powder, was to see why he loved this life. Put him in a race and he and his dogs want to beat you. But between the beginning of the race and the end he loves what he's doing, he draws great inspiration from the act itself. He will never regret the life he has chosen because once he found it, it is what he wanted more than anything else. Even if he gets as old as Kitty and he's limping around, he will remember. He will hear the excitement of the dogs. He may watch one of his daughters cross the finish line in Nome someday.

I wished we could have stayed longer with Kate and Larry at their kingdom with the hundred-mile view, but we made the run back to the road. We got back and the dogs acted as if they wanted more. That's okay—Jeff and these dogs had a couple thousand miles to go before the winter of 2000 was over.

THE RACE

March 4 arrived. It was a day of excitement all over Alaska. The “last great race” would have its ceremonial start in Anchorage. Sometimes crews actually had to haul snow into Anchorage if there wasn't enough snow on the main streets so the eighty-one mushers could begin. Most of the mushers were from Alaska; places like Point Hope, Seward, Fairbanks, Two Rivers, Big Lake, Willow, Moose Pass, Kasilof, Nenana, Trapper Creek, Healy, and Kotzebue. There was a wild-looking guy named Fedor Konyukhov from Moscow, and others from Outside: Germany, England, Michigan, Australia, Canada, Colorado, even a former professional wrestler from Minnesota. There was Charlie Boulding, with his chest-length gray beard and long gray braids, a former southern country boy who had the aw-shucks aura of a southerner at Woodstock. People said he had been Special Forces or an army Ranger, he was as tough as a frigid hell. Some said this was Charlie's year to win. He'd beaten Jeff in the Kuskokwim 300; his best finish at the Iditarod was third in 1998, when Jeff had last won. In 1999, he had beaten Jeff; Charlie had come in fifth, Jeff seventh. Knowing Jeff, if I had a million dollars to bet, I would have bet he did better than seventh this year. Although seven is a special number, it's too far from number one for Jeff.

An equipment and food drop in Unalakleet along the Iditarod Trail during the 2000 Iditarod Race.
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HOTO BY
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ETER
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ENKINS

Even though he was from far away, South Carolina to be exact, veterinarian Sonny King was back. He was well liked by Alaskans because he had paid his dues working as a veterinarian on the Iditarod and he smiles, yet steadily improves. Doug Swingley, the gunslinger from Montana, had ridden in on his black horse, in his black hat and black chaps. In one breath he is talking humbly about being the seventeenth member of his dog team (everyone begins with sixteen dogs—no substitutions are allowed, but injured or exhausted dogs are dropped along the way at checkpoints and flown back to Anchorage), while in another breath Doug is predicting a win and a race speed record, Joe Namath-style. Doug won last year; so far he's run the Iditarod eight times and won twice. He holds the record for the fastest time, nine days, two hours, and forty-two minutes. I'm sure there are people in Alaska who root for Swingley, but since he's the only musher from a state other than Alaska to have won, you won't find many fans. People who know dogs say he has an incredible team and that he has pioneered long-distance training, some days running 150 miles. Even the president of the Anchorage Rotary Club was running the race. Jeff would never say anything publicly or to me, but I know Doug was one of his main motivations for wanting to win, to have an Alaskan, preferably himself, take back the mantle of the winner of the last great race.

On Sunday, March 5, the real race began in Wasilla. The eighty-one mush-ers would depart every two minutes, headed to Knik, where there was the Knik Bar. Every year Alaska folksinger and my friend Hobo Jim sang the Iditarod song he had written, “I did, I did, I did the Iditarod Trail,” for the rowdy crowd there. We saw Jeff start thirty-sixth, while Shawn Sidelinger, running the puppy team, started thirty-fifth. Bryan Imus, a rookie who had loaned Jeff his super-dog, Yuksi, started fifty-fourth. Doug Swingley started one behind Paul Gephardt, the carpenter from the Kenai Peninsula. Jerry Riley, the 1976 champion, an Athabascan from the interior, was telling people he was back. He was around sixty years old and tough enough to whip up on the twenty-somethings. Twenty-somethings don't win the Iditarod. Middle-aged humans excel; it seems to take experience to master it. The gray-pigtailed, happy-eyed Charlie Boulding, the sly fox, began last. The weather was considered warm today, in the thirties; Jeff took it slow, didn't care who passed him.

This year, an even year, the race went from Wasilla to Knik. After Knik there would be no way to drive to any place on the Iditarod Trail, and Knik was only fourteen miles from Wasilla. From there it is eighty-six miles to Skwentna, then through Finger Lake, a checkpoint in a tent. Then over Rainy Pass, at 3,160 feet the highest place on the mushers' trail, unless they started hallucinating several days into the race. Then to Rohn, which is a steep downhill that leaves behind the Alaska Range, of which Mount McKinley is a part. The trail from Rohn to Nikolai, a Native village of a hundred or so, is one of the toughest stretches. It's ninety-three miles through an area where there was once a large wildfire; they call it Farewell Bunn. Then it's west toward the Kuskokwim Mountains and McGrath. Racers must take a twenty-four-hour break; many take theirs at the checkpoint in McGrath. McGrath has been having problems with wolves coming around town and eating its dogs.

The musher from Montana has introduced a new tactic. Among the elite fifteen or twenty mushers, this race is like a radical form of chess. Teams that want to win try to make surprising moves to weaken their competitors and suck away their fighting spirit. One adage is, never let your competitors see you. Play every head game you can, even just enough to be a pinprick in their balloon of fight. In the last few years, Doug Swingley has been pushing and pushing. His team are such extraordinary athletes, so well trained. He tries to get so far ahead before he takes his twenty-four-hour break that few feel they can catch up.

From McGrath, it's on to Takotna, then Ophir, a ghost town. Cripple is the halfway point and the first one there collects some money, $3,000. From Cripple it's a long route to Ruby. First dog team to Ruby, the musher gets a gourmet meal prepared by one of Alaska's best chefs.

All along the route, at every checkpoint there are vets and race officials, making sure the dogs are fine and that no musher is in trouble. Before the Iditarod every dog must get an EKG and have blood work done by race-hired technicians. I went with Jeff when he had all his dogs tested in Healy. From Ruby they go to Galena, then Nulato, then to Kaltag. These 150 miles are run on the Yukon River.