9101090759
DETROIT FREE PRESS
910303
Sunday, March 03, 1991
METRO FINAL
1F
Photo ROB STAPLETON Associated Press
:
Susan Butcher and her team pull away from the start of the
Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome Saturday
in Anchorage.
Defending champion Susan Butcher waves at well-wishers Saturday
as she begins the Iditarod.
MITCH ALBOM
Copyright (c) 1991, Detroit Free Press
THE REAL AND THE FAKE ARE EQUAL AT IDITAROD'S START
IDITAROD DIARY, CHAPTER 3: In which The Last Great Race on Earth begins.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- The streets were still dark when the horrible noise
began, a yelping, screeching, howling sound that swelled to a frightening
volume, until you wanted to cover your ears and run for shelter. It was the
sound of dogs whose blood was boiling, the sound of dogs yanking on their
chains, jumping over one another in anticipation. The sound of dogs,
thousands of dogs, ready to run.
I walked these streets Saturday morning, between the hungry beasts, feeling
the raw power that is Alaska on the morning of the first day of the Iditarod,
the Last Great Race on Earth. I breathed in the cold air, the energy of the
mushers, the naked power of these furry animals. I felt a kinship with my
ancestors, a sense of history, a surge of passion.
Then I felt a squish beneath my feet.
So now I smell like a dog, too.
"You feel lucky?" I asked Joe Runyan, the 1989 winner, as he wolfed down an
Egg McMuffin while the inspectors checked his dogs.
"I feel good," he said. "The dogs are ready."
"Last fast food for a while, huh?"
He grinned. "Yeah. Not many McDonald's on the Bering Sea."
All around were the trucks of his competitors, rolling kennels that house
the dogs who will pull these mushers more than 1,100 miles the next two weeks,
through mountains and rivers and forests. Seventy-five teams were in these
Anchorage streets, some all business, others in it just for fun. Not far from
Susan Butcher, the defending champion, was a businessman from North Carolina,
in his first and probably only Iditarod attempt. Across from Rick Swenson,
the only musher besides Butcher to win four Iditarods, was a lawyer who grew
up in Michigan -- in Farmington, for Pete's sake -- a guy named Jim Cantor,
who was wearing a gray suit over his long underwear, a costume he'll don for
the first 20 miles.
"How did you get into this?" I asked. "Did you have mush dogs in
Farmington?"
"Nah. I had a Labrador retriever."
There is a stockbroker in this year's Iditarod and there are mushers who
spend all year with dogs, training hundreds of them in tiny villages in
northern Alaska, just for this moment. The race will soon separate the real
from the fake, but for now, the morning of the start, they are all together,
the challengers, the hermits, the bearded, the demented. One guy actually has
10 poodles racing alongside his huskies.
"It's the Year of the Poodle," he told me.
I looked at his team.
Obviously it's the year of the puddle, too.
And suddenly, the announcer was calling and the teams were pushing through
the packed snow on Fourth Street, in single file -- "THREE . . . TWO . . . ONE
. . . GO!" -- and the dogs, tethered together at the neck and body, sprang
into action as if someone laced their water with amphetamines, galloping
through the streets, the first steps on the odyssey toward Nome. . . .
Hunger, hallucinations, death
What can happen out there, on the last frontier? Well, that is both the
lure and the danger. You can, for example, fall though the ice on the Yukon
River and be lost forever, frozen to death. A cheery thought. You can be
thrown from your sled, crack your ribs, and only pray that someone finds you
in the snow. You can lose track of the trail -- maybe a snowstorm wipes it
out, maybe you are so punchy from lack of sleep you simply make a wrong turn
-- and you are lost for days, your food runs out, your hungry dogs begin
eating the leather that binds them together. This happened 15 years ago to
Norman Vaughn, a well-known explorer who has been to the South Pole and back
but nonetheless got lost during his rookie try at the Iditarod. He was saved,
five days later, by snowmobilers who discovered his tracks.
This is the race that I will cover, by airplane, by foot, by curiosity
mostly. And maybe stupidity. After all, why venture into the depths of the
Alaska wilderness, where the temperature can drop to 40 below, to observe an
event in which even the best mushers can suffer frostbite, dizzy spells and
hallucinations? They can be staring at 30 miles of wide-open, blinding white
landscape and suddenly they imagine a tree, or a house, or the horizon
turning into a stick trying to hit them in the face. "That happened to me
several times," said DeeDee Jonrowe, a wavy-haired veteran Iditarod racer whom
I met on Thursday. "You start ducking and swiping at this stick, you keep
thinking it's going to smack you, but it's just the horizon line, fooling you,
playing tricks with your head."
Hmmm. Sounds like the '60s to me.
Of course, much of what you see out there is real and inspiring, like
buffalo in a snow field, and much of it is natural and awesome, such as the
Alaska mountain range, or the illumination of the Northern Lights, reflecting
pink off the frozen earth. Then again, some things you don't want to see --
like a charging moose, that big dumb animal who is a dog musher's biggest
enemy. And mine, too. (Let's face it. I am hung up on this moose thing. And
if one of them attacks me, I am not giving up my wallet.) Butcher, the master
musher herself, had to drop out of the 1985 Iditarod -- while she was leading
-- after being attacked by a pregnant moose. She held it off with a stick for
half an hour until finally another musher came by with a gun and shot it dead.
That filthy beast killed two of Butcher's dogs, trampled them to death. Most
mushers carry guns now. I don't blame them.
It's you or the moose.
And then there are the mishaps with your own dogs. Some are tragic. Some
are comic. Jonrowe -- whom I really like, because she seems like the kind of
woman who would laugh as her sled went off a cliff -- tells the story of a
recent race in which she was forced to stop her team when it went off course.
On that day, she had 14 male dogs and two female dogs in her team.
The females were in heat.
"In the time it took to turn the sled around, Custard (a male) and Susitna
(a female) couldn't resist each other, and they started to do what nature
tells them to do. I kind of went 'Nooo! Custard!' But it was too late. And
once they get started, naturally you can't separate them. I had to sit and
let nature take its course. It took 25 minutes and cost me first place."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"What can you do?" she laughed. "I waited until they were finished, let
them smoke a couple cigarettes, then we moved on."
"Weren't you angry?" I asked.
She smiled, as if explaining the Golden Rule to a child.
"It's the dogs who win the race," she said. " Above all, you have to
respect them."
On to Nome
Back at the start the dogs were charging, leaping, howling as if someone
were crushing them in a vise. So juiced are the animals at this point that
the first 20 miles, mushers make them pull two people on two sleds. Just to
tone down their adrenaline.
"What are you doing up there?" I yelled to Bill Peele, the 55-year-old
North Carolina rookie musher who saved up three years of vacation time from
his job to experience this race just once. He was standing on the roof of his
truck, with a camera, as the early teams pulled out.
"I'm just trying to take this all in," he said.
"You nervous?" I asked.
"No. I just want to make it to Nome in one piece."
And that pretty much sums up my attitude. Because some strange things keep
happening. Before sunrise, standing in the street, I once again encountered
the mysterious, one-eyed man who is my liaison to the two Japanese
journalists who will share my plane tomorrow. The man held a cigarette that
glowed in the morning dark. He grinned.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
"Uh, yeah," I said.
"Be careful out there. It's tougher than it looks."
He tapped out his butt and limped away on his cane.
The dogs kept howling. I tried to ignore them. On Friday, I found a man
who agreed to take me on a brief sled run, so I could better understand the
power of these beasts. I hopped on, and the dogs looked back at me as if to
say "Great. Another tourist." And -- ya! -- they took off. And then they took
a wrong turn and the musher yelled "whoa" and ran up and bit one of the dogs
on the ear. . . .
But that is a tale for the days to come, provided I can find a phone line
out there between the snow drifts. For now, we buckle the hats and tug on the
boot strings, we feel for that polypropylene underwear and, knowing it is
there, get warm all over. We are following the call of the wild, the yipping
and yelping that cuts through the darkness. The sound of the dogs, ready to
go.
As soon as I change my shoes.
* TOMORROW: Into the wilderness.
RACING; DOG