Saturday, May 26, 2012

200,000 miles on a dog sled


Try to imagine this in today's world of space travel, fast cars, airplanes, trains, even round-the-world boats.  I spent the afternoon yesterday with a man who by our rough estimate has gone in the neighborhood of 200,000 miles driving dog teams.  That's eight times around the world at the equator.  Those miles include 20 Iditarods, seven Yukon Quests, several races in the range of 300 miles and thousands upon thousands of miles training as many as three teams a day. And then there was the one trip to the 8,500-foot level on Mount McKinley.

I met Sonny Lindner during the 1979 Iditarod.  He was quiet, focused, and didn't talk much, but had a winning smile and a good sense of humor.  It was after the race when my book came out that we became more like friends.  I remember a day we were driving around Anchorage and had stopped for gas.  A fellow came up to him hat in hand and asked Sonny if he would autograph the hat.  Understand that a guy like Sonny is Alaska's version of a sports star akin to NBA, MLB and NFL stars elsewhere.

After Sonny had signed the hat, the fellow asked him how he could get started in dog mushing and Sonny looked at me and said, "well the first thing is, you should read his book."  That answered one question.  As a writer you always wonder how the people you write about feel they were portrayed.  Enough of that.

In 1983, I was invited to Sonny's home town to participate in a fundraiser for his and another musher's racing efforts that year.  I was asked to bring something that could be auctioned off to help that process.  I found a photo I had made of Sonny during one race, had it printed at 11 by 14 size and mounted and took that along.  At the auction, one fellow paid $75 or $100 for it.  Surprised I asked him why he would pay that much for a picture of Sonny and the guy said he hadn't bought the picture for Sonny, he bought it because one of his own dogs was visible in the team.

During that party, Sonny invited me to go along on a trip to train dogs in the Alaska Range for a week.  I worried about my job for all of five seconds and off we went.  Next day we drove to Paxson where the Denali Highway meets the Richardson.  We stayed in a lodge there and ran his team a couple of times a day, Sonny in front with half the team and me following with the other half.

All the other dog teams I had ever driven were made up of the last five dogs in the lot, the ragtag ones that usually were left behind if something serious was involved.  This led to several adventures, as many off the trail as on while an inexperienced musher tried to impose his will on less than perfectly trained sled dogs.

A trained team of an Iditarod contender is a different story altogether. As we ran up into the mountains, nobody tried to jump off the trail, nobody attacked his teammate; all they did was paddle along, at a pace of about 10 or 11 miles per hour.  Only the quiet shush of the sled runners,  the breathing of the dogs and the slight crunch of the snow under their paws disturbed what otherwise was that perfect wilderness silence, and in that moment I finally realized what running dogs was all about. 

During our conversation yesterday, we looked over some photos from the race and there was a whole page of northern lights images. He looked at them, a couple in particular where the lights shined red and orange in addition to the usual green and yellow.  He said it was like that on the Yukon River during the Yukon Quest race this year and that he had strained his neck looking at the sky for so long as that perfectly trained team pulled him along on the river ice.

The more you hear, the more you learn, the easier it is to understand why someone might want to go 200,000 miles behind dog teams.



1 comment:

  1. You have a rare and precious link to Alaska with verbal images that are unmatched.

    ReplyDelete

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

Sports malaprops

Commenting on an athlete with hearing impairment he said the player didn’t show any “uncomfortability.” “He's not doing things he can't do."

"… there's a fearlessment about him …"

"He's got to have the lead if he's going to win this race." "

"Kansas has always had the ability to score with the basketball."

"NFL to put computer chips in balls." Oh, that's gotta hurt.

"Now that you're in the finals you have to run the race that's going to get you on the podium."

"It's very important for both sides that they stay on their feet."

This is why you get to hate sportscasters. Kansas beats Texas for the first time since 1938. So the pundits open their segment with the question "let's talk about what went wrong." Wrong? Kansas WON a football game! That's what went RIGHT!

"I brought out the thermostat to show you how cold it is here." Points to a thermometer reading zero in Minneapolis.

"It's tough to win on the road when you turn the ball over." Oh, really? Like you can do all right if you turn the ball over playing at home?

Cliches so embedded in sportscasters' minds they can't help themselves: "Minnesota fell from the ranks of the undefeated today." What ranks? They were the only undefeated team left.

A good one: A 5'10" player went up and caught a pass off a defensive back over six feet tall. The quote? "He's got some hops."

Best homonym of the day so far: "It's all tied. Alabama 34, Kentucky 3." Oh, Tide.

"Steve Hooker commentates on his Olympic pole vault gold medal." When "comments" just won't do.

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"Biyombo, one of seven kids from the Republic of Congo." In the NBA? In America? In his whole country?

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"They're gonna be in every game they play!"

"First you have to get two strikes on the hitter before you get the strikeout."

"The game ended in the final seconds." You have to wonder when the others ended or are they still going on?

How is a team down by one touchdown before the half "totally demoralized?"

"If they score runs they will win."

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"Somebody is going to be the quarterback or we're going to see a new quarterback."

"That was a playmaker making a play.”