"Those People are Crazy." Part Three

Some mornings I wake up terrified of the future.

When I was a kid we lived in California for a minute. For whatever reason I liked to sleep in my bedroom closet. I'd hole up in the dark all day with a 13 inch TV/VCR and a sleeping bag...

Some mornings I just want to crawl back into that closet...

My first litter of pups was born on August 14th 2011.

Only five of seven survived.

Two were born with open chest cavities, organs exposed to the open air; wee little beating hearts, tiny pulsating intestines. The only thing that could be done for them was to let them slip away in a bucket of warm water.

The lessons dogs teach.

My vet said one in a litter wasn't entirely uncommon but two was "weird". I started doing some research and discovered that exposure to certain chemicals during the second trimester can inhibit the closure of the chest cavity. I racked my brain trying to suppose what Squirt could have gotten into.

Then it dawned on me.

Paint.

I'd painted dog houses while she was in her second trimester.

Initially all the dogs were put away but then my ex-husband opened the door and suddenly I had a stampede of dogs headed straight for me. Squirt stepped in some dripped paint as she sprinted by. Dog feet are very absorbent.

Four boys and one girl.

Tears fell from my eyeballs as each healthy puppy was born. I wasn't exactly sobbing, but there were tears nonetheless. One needed help clearing his airway. One was long and skinny, and I wasn't real sure what to think of him. The girl was a tiny thing and the other two boys were almost as big as my foot.

Puppies!

My vet came out when they were three days old to remove dew claws, and showed me a couple different ways to perform the procedure. (Removal of dew claws prevents potential injury of the fairly bloody and painful sort; even in house dogs. You never know what dew claws might get caught on.)

They'd been born in the house and stayed indoors until their eyes opened. Then mother and pups were whisked away to an outdoor kennel with a slightly oversized straw-stuffed dog house inside. Once they began to walk they were let out a few times a day for some exploration time in the yard and the trees just beyond.

When their adult teeth came in I began training them to pickets, chains on a rebar swivel set into a pipe in the ground. I'd put them all on the chains while I cleaned out their kennel. They hated it at first, they wanted to go back to their kennel, but as soon as they realized they had grown too much and had more room on the chains than they had in the kennel they decided they were done with it, and chains were OK. They were done sharing a dog house.

By the time they were 7 months old it was already spring. I barely had time to harness break everyone and I had no leader to help train.

We took a few chaotic puppy runs with the sled down the slough, entertaining the neighbors at the expense of my ego.

Much of the following winter went the same way. All of my training videos consisted mostly of blooper reel fodder. I don't know where I found the stubbornness to even keep trying.

Then, while watching mushers pass by on the 2012 Yukon Quest, I met a guy named Dan down on the Chena River. We chatted a bit, and he shared his cookies and tea with us. Lance Mackey stopped to chat with him on the river and I snapped a few photos of them.

"Tea and cookies? Don't mind if I do!"

Later I posted one of those photos to facebook, and before you know it, Dan's wife Cathy is asking me for a copy of that photo. We became friends and one day Dan asked me if I'd like one of his older leaders to help me train my pups.

"Heck yeah!"

I wouldn't be on the trail at all without that dog. (He taught me a lot about what he expected in a hookup routine too.)

Gause was a little shy but all it took was the flash of a harness to get him out of his shell. He and I started taking out pups in pairs. Then we'd combine those pairs so I'd run five at a time.

One of the first things we did was run over a neighbor and his dog.

Last winter I started running seven at a time.

"Seven.."

I know, it's not very many dogs in the whole scheme of things. A big Quest or Iditarod team is double that size and I've seen some pretty incredible footage of mind-blowing strings of 20-40 plus dogs hitched to trucks.  

But when I look back on all the times I ate snow, all the tangles, all our failures, I'm amazed...

I never really imagined I'd run any amount of dogs for any distance with any real success. I think back on those little puppies these dogs once were and I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around it; the orchestration of such organized chaos. How the hell did I manage this?

Something about running the dogs together like that focuses their attention and hones your relationship with them. I thought I was close to my dogs but the more we run together the more undivided their attention becomes. We are as one. I grunt and they know what I want. I snap my fingers and point and they follow.

I said earlier that I somewhat regret having bred Ossum. For all his awesomeness, it turns out he has his flaws too.

When he hit two years old he started exhibiting symptoms of hypothyroidism. Poor coat, skin allergies, poor cold tolerance, etc. I had him neutered and medicated, alleviating most of the symptoms. However, I can't bed him down on any kind of straw or grass without him breaking out in itchy rashes.

Ossum lives indoors full time now.

He still loves to run in harness but its hard to race a dog that's allergic to straw. It's the standard in checkpoint and dropped dog bedding. It probably won't stop me from using him in short races though.

As all of the pups hit two years old they too started exhibiting symptoms of hypothyroidism, though none of them have the straw allergy (thank goodness). I've neutered as many as I could afford and still have two males to neuter and a female to spay. All my neutered boys have beautiful coats and keep their weight well. One of the in-tact males has some periodic skin issues and the other in-tact male has a poor coat. But none of them are exhibiting as many or as severe symptoms as their father did. My in-tact female stopped exhibiting symptoms altogether, but I still want to spay her.

I don't want to perpetuate poor genes. Whatever breeding I do I want to be for the improvement of the dog. Plus, I can't really afford $50.00 on medication every 90 days for each dog. Especially not now...

This morning I woke up terrified of the future.

Terrified of losing my dogs, losing everything we worked together to accomplish so far. All that effort.

The family business, my one and only big 'sponsor', has closed its doors after over 30 years. We now have zero dependable income heading into winter.

Our lives have been ruined by the Utopian ideals of over educated, under experienced, failure-to-launch, basement dwellers who cried that life just wasn't "fair" enough; an entire generation who misunderstands the definition of "fairness" in its entirety.

I didn't vote for this.

Hooray for mob rule. Fairness at its finest.

Oh, how I just want to crawl into that nice dark isolated closet of my childhood...or into a cave, under a rock maybe...

 

"Ahhh, that's better."

As a result of the current crisis I'm looking for a job, a real job. Writing, photography, graphic design, all my work from home tactics aren't enough now...

"Those People are Crazy" Part Two

My story isn't all that profound or inspiring. Many mushers use mushing to overcome some huge personal obstacle,  handicap, or illness. For some mushers, dog mushing is the thing that saved their lives.

I suppose dog mushing is saving my life too, just in a more understated way I guess. I've quit smoking, started exercising, etcetera. 
Maybe I'm just not quite aware of my personal obstacle yet...

I got Ossum at 17 weeks from a guy out in Salcha.

We drove out to meet him on an evening in February.

He had piles and piles of puppies. A yard full of boisterous dogs. Every one was friendly and excited to see new people. Puppies jumped up and begged for attention, cute and silly. Except Ossum. He sat very neatly just outside the group of puppies who were all competing for my attention.

"I want that one." I pointed over the furry heads of his siblings.

Awesome.

Something I say a lot.

It took me three months to find a name that dog would come to. Every name I tried he flat out ignored. People always ask me how he got his name. I always tell them he named himself, because he did.

Like I said, it's something I say a lot.

One day, after exclaiming somewhat loudly "AWESOME!" to something I'd henceforth deemed "awesome.", the dog came trotting into the room from wherever he'd been and whatever he'd been doing  to look me in the eye and say "Yeah? What's up?" 

Fo' shizzle. 

His first trip into a feed store was into Alaska Feed Company. I like to take pups there on their first trip because it's quite often not that crowded. Like many sled dogs born and raised outdoors, Ossum balked at the threshold into new and unfamiliarly textured terrain--linoleum. At that point he was only familiar with, snow, dirt, plywood, and carpet.

He belly crawled through the door of the store and stopped on the rug, refusing to go any further. The gals working there tried to coax him further with treats but no go.

I ended up carrying him to the far end of the store, presenting him with the daunting task of walking back to the rug across the strange shiny surface. When I set him down he looked like he totally thought he might fall through it.

Early on I recognized in him a need to understand, at least vaguely in a dog way, the mechanics of things; the door knob, the water faucet, the TV.

His first adventure into Coldspot Feeds he became spooked by the cart my ex-husband pushed up the aisle behind us. I picked up the pup and took him over to a parked shopping cart off to the side while my ex loaded up on dog food. I knelt on the floor beside the dog and the cart pointing at the cart's wheel. I grabbed the wheel between two fingers and gave it a quarter turn, moving the cart just a few inches. He balked at it slightly, looked at the wheel, looked at the cart, and then totally relaxed.

Wheel moves cart.

He pranced through the store like he owned the place, not afraid of no stinkin' carts.

Dogs, sled dogs in particular, absolutely need to be exposed to all manner of strange and bizarre sights, sounds, and sensations. Just a few weeks ago the internet went crazy with rage over a photo of a very well known and respected musher tossing a puppy into the air like you would a baby.

Katie bar the door, here comes the mob with their torches and pitchforks.

Why isn't that puppy wearing a parachute!?!

Any "mushing fan" who has read a book or two has read stories about dogs being blown up into the air or off the trail by high winds. A dog who is not psychologically prepared for something like that may not want to run in the wind ever again.

Dogs need to be exposed to all kinds of people too. Sometimes it's not enough that you have ten kids and the puppies are always handled. Just because you have ten kids doesn't necessarily mean the dogs will be good with all kids. They are just good with your kids. They need to be exposed to a constant flow of strangers. They need to meet people who move too fast, people who move too slow, people who talk with their hands, people who dance, silly people, serious people, loud people, quiet people, people in weird costumes. You just never know what your dog/dog team might encounter. They need to experience water, wind, ice of all thicknesses, and obstacles of all shapes and sizes. It's hard to fathom everything your dogs need to be mentally prepared for, but that doesn't stop us from trying.

The training starts on day one. Puppies are rolled gently onto their backs. Their legs and feet are massaged lightly to accustom the dogs to a future of being touched and massaged and manipulated not only by their musher, but by veterinarians too. All dogs must be compliant, pliable, and perfectly comfortable...with basically everything.

Ossum was, and still is, incredibly compliant. But our first attempt at harness breaking had me questioning my sanity in this entire endeavor.

I put him in harness and he acted like he was going to fall off the face of the earth. He just wanted to crawl everywhere on his belly. I remember crawling backwards on my hands and knees down the trail, coaxing him forward as he slowly pulled a little sled toting a super dry, light, log, whining all the way.

I thought, gads, I hope the neighbors can't see me...

I hung up the training harness for a week and set my ex-husband about finding me an old snow machine track I could cut into smaller pieces. I'd seen it done before but I didn't have any snow machine track at the time and got impatient, settling on the sled, whose sound might have made Ossum uncomfortable.

The following weekend we tried again. This time I also hooked Squirt to the piece of snow machine track to help Ossum along and give him extra confidence.

That day I started to see little flickers of the possibilities.

When Ossum was 9 months old I decided to breed him to Squirt.

It was a lapse in judgment I hope to never repeat. Again, I was impatient. I wanted a dog team darn it! I wanted to get down the trail as soon as possible.

But I should have waited.

Dog mushing is, if nothing else, an exercise in patience...

(To be concluded in part three.)

(Back to Part One)

"Those People are Crazy." Part One

Okay, so my road to riches probably isn't paved in dog milk soap and moose cheese. My road probably isn't paved in anything. It probably isn't even a road. It's probably a trail to poverty paved in unpublished novels, old broken cameras, and dog poop. 

Anyway, I digress.

People always like to ask, "What made you decide to become a dog musher?"

(Mostly it's dog mushers who like to ask other dog mushers that question.)

My reply is "I don't know what took me so long."
Our reasons tend to be similar in statement.

"I wanted to test myself."
"I wanted to see what I was made of."

"I wanted to go on a journey of self discovery."
That's one we all seem to have in common. That and a love of our canine traveling companions.

Pure and simple.

A love of dogs and a distaste for most "civilized" humans.

Go any deeper and there's a loss for words that can accurately describe the psychological underpinnings of a dog musher's motives. The one word that comes up the most, however, is "crazy" among various other synonyms.

If one were to study the dog musher in his or her natural habitat, as if it were a unique genus of the species, one might note that he or she is never quite sure exactly what time of day it is. Time is irrelevant. There is only dog time. Breakfast howl, dinner howl, moose thirty, grub time, food o'clock, poop forty-five.

Their dwellings tend to be small and cluttered, some without many modern conveniences. Furnishings are sparse and predominantly occupied by the elder dogs.

Their manner of dress tends to be sensible and frugal; fabrics are often incorporated with dog hair fibers to be referred to as "Chiengora".

"Dog hair has a high r-value."

The dog musher is ingenuitive and inventive; he or she can make, fix, or break almost anything. He or she can poop anywhere, sleep anywhere, go anywhere, and do anything.    

Unlike Homo Erectus Domesticus, Homo Erectus Progredere  is extremely cold tolerant, like their dogs, regarding 20*F to be "too hot".

Crazy indeed...

Alaska's history is thick with dog mushing lore. All of our major highways were once nothing more than well traveled dog team trails. (I, however, am not going to give a history lesson here, for I am still but a student.) We didn't get real highways until WWII.

I grew up exposed to dog mushing, obviously, being raised in Alaska.

A world renown international race, the Yukon Quest, begins (or ends, depending on the year) in downtown Fairbanks. In the old days, before the internet and the GPS trackers, we had to wait for the sports segment of the news to see the standings, and by the time the news came on those standings were 14 hours old or more. I remember my dad saying "Those people are crazy." And I always figured my dad was pretty crazy, so that was saying something.
Crazy seemed like the thing to be. Crazy sounded perfect. Better than boring.  

The public school system in Alaska back then taught a lot about Alaskan culture and history. Disney brought us the story of Balto, albeit wildly inaccurate. PBS's Nature corrected these wild inaccuracies in the 1999 documentary "Sled Dogs: An Alaskan Epic". (If anyone can find it on DVD I'd highly recommend it.) All these things fed my subconscious desire.

I had always said that the day I turned 18 I would throw away all modern conveniences and head off into the wilderness.

But before I even had a chance, life came knocking, literally.

I had my son, and as a single teenage mom I didn't have the time or resources to manage a bike ride much less pursue any kind of far fetched dog mushing dream, and running off into the wilderness to live off the grid with a small child seemed like the kind of thing mothers were judged for. (I suffered from teenage-mom-itis; a condition where, because no one thinks a teenage mom can ever be a good mom, one overcompensates and tries to be the best mom ever--avoiding anything that might be considered unconventional or perceived to be unsafe lest she be judged. Thanks, society.)

As my son got older and became less dependent on me to move him through his day I suddenly found that I had a little more time. And I wasn't a single mom anymore, I'd since been married, I had support.

My ex-husband had a dog sled when we met. Someone gave it to him when his wolf dogs were young and before we realized wolf dogs are far too intelligent to pull a sled just because you insist (silly human!). Wolf dogs aren't like dogs. They aren't eager to please, but they aren't eager to displease either. They are like your room mate, Bob. You couldn't train Bob to pull a sled, but you could probably talk him into doing it if he thought the video would go viral.
The dogs were so big they needed expensive custom harnesses, and so there the sled sat under the eaves of the garage...

Taunting me.

"Neener neener."

 One year Discovery Channel covered the Iditarod, the year Lance Mackey pulled a fast one on Jeff king. As I watched the documentary I remembered watching the GPS during that race and it was March all over again. I could smell snow in July.

You always missed little pieces and parts of these stories back in the days before the internet, so seeing them talk about the incident in this Discovery Channel format was sort of surreal. No one used to care about Alaska or what went on here. To the rest of the world we were a frozen wasteland that was part of Canada. Canadians were the only ones who knew better.

The internet gave us this extraordinary ability to collectively share emotion in real time, as events unfold. It's been a huge catalyst for many people. I finished watching that Discovery Channel special, threw off my robe and slippers, and said "Screw it, I'm going to be a frickin' dog musher!"

I was tired of sitting and watching. I felt like I was getting old and I wanted stories to tell my grandchildren.

The economy was decent, kid almost grown, the house almost finished after my ex-husband received an inheritance from his uncle.

I got my first sled dog from Lance Mackey's dog yard. She was a sprint dog with Streeper bloodlines that was just too small for his team. My ex-husband had brought home the free dog flyer from Coldspot Feeds. It was a rainy day in November when we went to pick her up.

She was small and yellow with half an ear missing.

Squirt was the spookiest dog I'd ever seen.

"I'm terrified. For real."

She seemed terrified of everything. Me, my ex-husband, my kid, the cats, loud sneezes, the 'pop' of a soda can when opened, new landmarks. Some sled dogs are just like that. Part of it is lack of socialization but a bigger part of it is genetics. She passed that "spooky gene" right on to her daughter, Luna. As one of five pups born indoors she was the only female and just as well socialized as the rest of her litter, all of whom aren't spooky at all. Luna isn't as bad as her mother, her father's genes must have taken the edge off, but Luna is still a little spooky. So it's not really an indicator that a dog has been mistreated as I've had a few people accuse. I once had someone tell me that they would rather put a dog down than have people think it was abused just because it was spooky.

I almost cried. I thought, really? This dog loves me more than anything else under the sun, and I love her too. You'd rather I put her down because she doesn't like you?

It's taken a few years but Squirt isn't nearly as bad as she used to be.

Squirt taught me a lot about sled dogs right off the bat. I could tell she'd been training in harness for at least a little while because the hair on top of her head was so thick.

When I wasn't doing something that must have been part of her old routine, she'd look at me like I was stupid. If something seemed familiar to her she was compliant and if something seemed foreign to her she was resistant. She made me ask myself what I was doing wrong, and go back to the drawing board, or message board, and figure it out.

I remember hooking her up to the sled for the first time. It was like she was humoring a child. She pulled the line taught and looked back over her shoulder as if to say "Okay, you're going to hook some more dogs to this thing, right?" And I thought, yeah, you're right. I'm an idiot. You can't pull this sled by yourself. Let's go inside and watch mushing videos on youtube.

So I waited a little while and started looking for another dog. This time a male puppy...

(To be continued...)