"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 It's probably a trail to poverty paved in unpublished novels, old broken cameras, and dog poop.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...)