And it was pretty damn accurate. The largest discrepancy being the first rest time at Tolsona Lodge. I’d been told by Ryne that I was a “bad sled dog” and to go rest in the truck. When I wandered back down to the team, Ryne and the dogs were bubbling, and if they weren’t going to keep resting there was no point in staying.
After that, it became very trancelike. I ran a lot in the dark, in a fairy godmother bubble of light, just watching dog butts, just staring at tug-lines and waiting for dogs’ gaits to change (indications of injuries or illness). In my light bubble I let the thoughts percolate. Lots of creative bar names were born: The Straw Dog, The Dropped Dog, The Bagged Dog, Water for Dogs. Other than that, there were catalyzed memories from my summer job packing horses and mules under similarly crepuscular schedules, where the constancy of covering ground took precedence to everything. Tack up, move, unload, tack up, move, unload. It is an antediluvian mode of living that does not tarnish the beauty of the world around you but your appreciation of it is undeniably altered because ultimately there is a job that needs doing. With sleep deprivation mixed into the equation, it’s trancelike.
Then, at the checkpoints, on top of being a bad sled dog, I was (am) very much a learning musher. I had poor rhythm, I was slow to feed, I wasted a lot of the dogs’ resting time. To be completely honest, the first 150 miles of the race felt like a job I was struggling to do at par while my boss stood over my shoulder. As a rookie, I needed Ryne there. She was my coach. She watched dogs that I wasn’t, noticed details that I couldn’t, told me things I did not know, and saved me from making more rookie mistakes than I already had when she wasn’t looking. Yes, Ryne was my coach, but she is also my boss and these are her dogs. And hell, man, it’s not a psychological cinch to switch from a work mentality to a play mentality just because people tell you that now you are supposed to be having fun. That said, I do the jobs that I do because I think that they are fun. But the pressure to find more fun in doing something I already do for work, I could not find it in the first half of the race. I won’t speak for all handlers, but that is one of the emotional realities.
Because we weren’t racing, the main job was to take care of the dogs. Mose’s gait had changed on the run from Tolsona to Lake Louise, though his tug-line stayed tight as ever. He’s a stalwart dude. When I checked his wrists and shoulders, he was stoic. Still warm early at the checkpoint, he wasn’t limping. I was taking my time feeding when Ryne told me to look up. There was an old looking eddy of green light above us. When the lights act like water, it’s about as good as it gets. I stared up a second and then finished with the dogs, walked into the lodge, drank a sprite, a water, and a coke at the bar, and then went to the truck to sleep for two hours. Mose got up from his rest limping. We left him behind. The lights had gone out.
It was after the Sourdough checkpoint that the dogs really started to stand out. Beyond Sourdough was beyond what the dogs had run this year in training. For the rookies, the furthest they’d ever run. Veterans: Dracula, Thresher, Elmer, Tobin, Yoshi. Two-year-old rookies: Fly (Firefly), Spit, Beesly, Tuna, Mose, Mozzie (Mozzarella), Muenster.
Back at the race start, tucked into our corner of the parking lot, we dropped the dogs to let them wiggle around and started to gear them up. I’d drawn bib #20. With teams leaving at two minute intervals, that meant we had 40 minutes from the first team leaving. Well ahead of go time, after a quality poop, Dracula began what can only be termed as jack-in-the-box barking. So termed because it appears that this dog’s mind goes completely vacant except for the jack-in-the-box jingle, on repeat. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, etc. “Look at her,” said Ryne. “She knows exactly what’s about to happen, too.” Dracula lead for the entire 300 miles. I owe her one.
I rotated Tobin, Elmer, and Thresher in lead with Dracula. Those three boys lived in lead or swing for the race. Tobin, a 3-year-old, is such a hard driver (puller) that he’s a very valuable lead and swing dog. He holds out any slack that tends to develop in the line. His faults are that he lacks some confidence, is extremely left-handed, and will completely stop to poop. If Tobin has the open space, he’ll try to run on the left side of a road or wide trail and if he’s unsure of where to go and there’s a trail leading left, then the team is going left. When he poops, if the lead dogs aren’t driving hard, or if he happens to be in lead, the team will scrunch up fast. Suffice it to say, I’ve learned a lot from Tobin. Thresher, what a good little man. He’s smart and reliable, he’s finished a number of 1000 mile races for Ryne. It brought me comfort to have him with us. I had Mozzie and Muenster, the cheese brothers (Dracula’s sons), in the middle of the team. Consistently strong pullers, no hitches, they were the backbone of my gangline. Then there was Yoshi, a cute, little 6-year-old with a svelte trot and no real complaints. Alongside Yoshi had been the 80-some-pound tank of Mose. Next were the fire siblings, Fly and Spit. Fly seemed more or less unfazed by the whole event, a happy dog. Spit ended up making it within eight miles of the finish line, but it was a little too much for him near the end and he got plopped into the sled bag with Elmer, who had started limping halfway into our very last run. Finally, The Office siblings, Beesly and Tuna, were paired up and looked great together until Meiers Lake — where Ryne noticed visible swelling on Beesly’s back leg. To play it safe, little Beesly stayed with Ryne. Running alone after that, Tuna held the line as tight as ever, good boy.
I share a lot of training miles with the two-year-old dogs. I was introduced to them when they were yearlings, harness broken, but still learning. When we met, their amount of experience was more or less equivalent to my own. Since then, we’ve been learning together. When I talk about trying to find rhythm, being bad at resting, having a boss over my shoulder, I might as well be talking from a rookie dog’s perspective. I don’t think that’s too much of an empathetic stretch. So I’m not being treacly when I say that it’s been a unique privilege to watch Fly, Spit, Mozzie, Muenster, Beesly, Tuna, and Mose develop into badass, professional-grade, bonafide sled dogs. To delve into each dog’s transformation would take more than a paragraph or two. Another time, perhaps.
On the TV at Meiers Lake Lodge some chubby Louisiana Game Warden was giving bayou boaters a ticket for not having enough life jackets in their vessel. It was mesmerizing. A lot of people in the room were watching with me. Ryne, with her back to the TV, was sleepily struggling to calculate when I should leave.
“Twenty-one hundred hours is?” She paused, calling upon her degree in accounting for help. No help.
“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three…twenty-four. 9:00 PM?” I counted on fingers, unsure.
“So leave at 2:30 AM.”
We left Meiers Lake with half a bale of straw, planning to camp in the middle of the 70 mile leg. We started along the pipeline. No stars…sleepy. It was around this time that whenever I gave the “Ready-Let’s-Go” command my voice started sounding prepubescent. What is happening to me? I drowsily thought. Am I reverting? Is this a Freudian thing? Will I be ten-years-old at the end of this race? Am I ten now? Wake up, Tucker. Wake up.
We left the pipeline. The trail breakers had done some serious work navigating us around open water via ice bridges and a couple wicked 180s. Awake, we came to what is called “The Hump”. We climbed in the dark. Watching dogs dig in and pull, just chug and chug when you’re all in the thick of it, it’s a kind of grace. Huff, puff, over the top into a high tundra terrain, I think — it was still dark. And then we camped, and as the sun finally rose everything began to feel pleasant, peaceful, and fun. The weather was friendly enough so I employed a technique which I’d read about earlier in the winter called a “shiv and biv”, where you just fall asleep in the snow with all of your gear on until you wake up shivering. Supine on my parka, I dozed off next to the dogs and slept well for an hour.
I woke up staring into a senseless blue sky, completely lost. Yes, this is where we are, I realized, and began to fiddle around. Soon came the distant tones of Lauro Eklund talking to his dogs, not because they needed the encouragement, it was conversing. We could see him coming a good ways off. He rowed along smoothly using one ski pole and floated up next to us.
“Great view from The Hump with the sunrise, beautiful. How long you been here? You got 31 miles? Ah well, we’ll probably find a place to camp a little further on. I heard from Jake that it’s all downhill from here! Ah well, see ya soon.”
Then came another musher. “What mile are we at?”
And then one more. “Ya, I’ll probably camp just up ahead too.”
It is time to go. With bare hands I reach into the center of a whorl that is a little dog. It is soft and warm and does not want to wake. I whisper nonsensical sweet nothings. The paws are dry and hot and booties go on like nothing. We move along.
Chistochina had a wonderful checkpoint setup but the coffee was on the verge of toxicity. I woke up from a final nap groggy, wandered into a cozy garage-lounge with a nice fire going, poured out some caffeinated sludge and chugged it. “You awake enough for the final leg, Tucker?” Some friendly handler asked me from a couch. “The coffee tastes like I will be,” I managed to reply before wandering back outside. Again, we left.
Because it was so warm, my feet had been sweat-soaked for the first 230 miles and they were pruny as all hell. When I finally switched to my light, dry mukluks for the last run I felt like skipping. So I jogged every little hill that I could and for no real reason that I could detect the dogs started cruising. I had to hold them back. After one of their random surges I even let out an involuntary schoolgirl giggle. We’ll be there in no time, I thought. Easy.
But about two hours in, Elmer got a hitch in his step. Elmer is a solid dude, but he’ll pee in your house, and he’d definitely be the one to poop in your sled :[ He was happy enough to be unhooked, but when I stuffed his poop covered butt into the sled bag and hooked his collar in he protested.
“This is stressing me out, Tucker. I don’t want to ride in the sled,” he said.
“Come on, buddy, settle in. You have more experience than I do. You’ve finished this race in lead before. Riding in the sled is easy compared to that. Just sit down.”
“No, I’m going to stand. I don’t want to sit.”
“Elmer, work with me here."
“No."
The dogs had really been favoring fish skins mixed in with their water for meals and, holy god, the intestinal aftermath was potent. With just his head sticking out of the sled bag as we picked back up, Elmer started nervously farting. He must have been. Because I swear it smelled like he’d taken a massive, fishy dump in the sled. I started complaining.
“Elmer, why? Why? All over my sleeping bag, Elmer. My thermos, Elmer. Why?”
Right away came a couple of trail marker X’s indicating “Trail Hazard” AKA pucker up.
“Trail X’s, Elmer. Pucker up. Please, just pucker up. Good boy. You’re a good boy, though.” I scratched his head.
When there are a bunch of mushers ahead of you and no broken sleds or bodies along the trail, you know that everyone must have made it through some of the sketchier sections alive. I can’t help but wonder if it was as graceless and with as much cussing as my own navigation.
Well, we made it through alright, wishing luck to those behind, and then finally came to the home stretch along the highway. When I had to put Spit in the sled bag, I was deflated. You can’t help but feel that way when you’re responsible for these little personalities. The good news was that there was not a fishy dump inside of the sled, it was just a gaseous spritzing, and my sleeping bag was clean. My poor thermos, though, it’s seen better days. And that’s how we came across the line.
The vets were right there; the dog truck was right there. We got the two boys out of the sled for the vets to look over (they were both happy and fine) and started to gear down.
Ryne kept bugging me, “Your friends sent you something. You should open it.”
“What are you talking about?” I had my arm under Thresher’s belly as I was lifting him over the drop chain and I squeezed out a loud, fishy, godawful fart.
“Some random guy just came up, handed me this paper bag, and walked away,” Ryne said. “You should open it. I’m pretty sure it’s beer.”
Somehow my college roommate had suckered some poor, wonderful son-of-a-bitch in Glennallen to deliver a six pack to the finish line at three in the morning. Cheers, Micah.
Between the RynoKennel Facebook page and my mother, this is about as publicized as my life has ever been. So cheers to everyone who followed along, to our wonderful Glennallen hosts, the Bobowskis, to all the dog sponsors, to Ryne, Sam, Derek, Kalyn, to that beer delivery guy, and to, of course, the dogs.
