Looking for Alaska (41 page)

Jeff said he had been preparing a secret weapon for this flat, boring stretch. The dogs and he need inspiration at about that point, close to six hundred miles into the race. Everyone needs to stay motivated. Jeff had been experimenting with hooking up some speakers on his sled and playing music for the dogs. Jeff studies every angle. Pavlov, a noted animal behaviorist, who played music to milk cows to improve their milk output, discovered animals respond favorably to good music. Jeff wanted to play his dogs some Marshall Tucker Band, among others, to pick up their steps, fire up their high-performing spirits.

People all over Alaska followed the intricate details of each day, some checking in for several updates a day. The
Anchorage Daily News,
the
Fairbanks News Miner,
provided daily details of each musher. There were features on the unusual, the inspirational. One guy running the race was HIV-positive. There were citizens analyzing the difference between run times between Rohn and Nikolai. You can overhear someone in Barnes & Noble in Anchorage buying a book on yoga saying to the person making a mocha, “Can you believe Rick Swenson [a five-time champion] was less than an hour behind Swingley into Ophir?” The high school student with long blond hair making the mocha might respond, “I don't know about that, but Ramy Brooks sure is hot.”

Following the Iditarod becomes a ten-day addiction, even two weeks if you know someone back in the pack. You want every source you can find. The Iditarod Web site has times and departures. You keep your map of the route handy, preferably on your refrigerator. You click on Cabela's Web site and read columns from the outstanding Joe Runyan, the John Madden of mushing commentators. Reading Joe Runyan's pieces on Cabela's daily race coverage was an excellent way to get a feel for the ever-changing dynamics of the leaders. Joe is an Iditarod winner and comments with an authenticity that only comes from having raised dogs, mushed, competed, and won. Plus, the mushers, a tough, sometimes stoic group, trust Joe far more than most media types. For example, here's an excerpt about the Yukon River: “The Yukon River is big, expansive, and complicated with dead-end oxbow sloughs and wide channels that divert for miles in endless excursions from the main channel. A musher should heed the warning ‘Follow the markers.' ‘Just follow the river, you can't get lost' is the worst piece of advice that you could take under your hat. From the surface of the Yukon, it is immense, like a lake. Hidden behind islands, one could never imagine that an entirely different part of the braided system of channels comprising the Yukon exists quite apart from the reality you envision. It is not inconceivable at all, in the moonless dark, to be entirely turned around. Great stories of adventurers traveling the river and finding themselves at a previous village several days later are not uncommon.”

One night Joe's “Evening Appraisal” read, “Jeff King is still driving a very fast team and will depart almost arm in arm with Rick Swenson. When I talked with Jeff, he conceded that Swingley held a significant lead but pointed out that he had leaders that could travel even in the winds purported to be developing on the Bering Sea coast.”

And since Alaska is the world's largest small town, Alaskans not only follow their top choice, but several other mushers they know, dislike, have dated, or been married to (keeping track of their prize money), and perhaps some of their uncle's or neighbor's or friend's dogs.

From Kaltag the trail veers off the Yukon River through mountains and valleys to the coast and Unalakleet. The first one to Unalakleet receives gold from the National Bank of Alaska. Next comes the Eskimo village of Shaktoolik, where the trail goes out onto the frozen ocean. There are still 229 miles to Nome and the finish line.

After all this racing across the totally unpredictable Alaskan wilderness, there could be only minutes separating the top teams. The race at this point calls for every racer's all-out push. Thousands of dollars in prize money separates first from second from third. The champions' hearts are showing, refusing to give. The word from the knowledgeable was that Paul Gephardt's lead dog was such a competitor that he refused even to lie down when the team stopped to rest. He just sat up, powerful chest and front legs supporting his huge heart. He would be named top lead dog at the awards banquet in Nome.

From Shaktoolik it's down the windswept trail of sea ice to Koyuk, then Elim, Golovin, and White Mountain. Mushers must take an eight-hour break here, seventy-seven miles from the finish. Then it's on to Safety and Nome. Every time a musher comes down Main Street in Nome the fire sirens go off all over town, whether it's noon, 2:31
A.M
., or 4:44
A.M
.

*   *   *

Doug Swingley won the 2000 Iditarod with the fastest time ever, nine days, fifty-eight minutes, and six seconds. He won $60,000 and another new Dodge truck. Jeff's team got some flu bug early on, which caused him to stop and take his twenty-four-hour layover much sooner than he had hoped. After almost twelve hundred miles of some of the most radical landscape in the world, Paul Gephardt was just five hours and two minutes behind Doug for second. His prize money was $52,500. Jeff and his team came in seven hours and forty-two minutes behind Doug, just two hours and forty minutes behind Paul. Ramy Brooks, 1999's Yukon Quest champion, a young charger, was just thirty-six minutes behind Jeff. Charlie, his long gray beard flying in the wind, came in fifth. Every musher and every dog that ran, raced, covered so much of Alaska, will never forget his or her own accomplishment. Running the 2000 Iditarod will become one of his or her most powerful memories, quietly recalled, drawn upon for inspiration.

After the racing season of 2000 ended, later that year, before the short Alaskan summer, Kitty just couldn't go on any longer. She passed away, having faded slowly, a supreme creature who had lived a life any racing dog would have loved.

12

Maximum Security

I never thought we could get trapped in Seward by avalanches, but in January, we did. It showed us what can happen when there is just one road out. An avalanche occurs, blanketing that road with piles and piles of snow; the one road gets closed down, and you're a prisoner. Although we had been stranded now four or five days, we had power most of the time; Seward has its own power generators. Just knowing we absolutely could not leave Seward, though, got to me. I was on edge and so was Rita; we are people who need to move.

Several communities between here and Anchorage—Hope, Moose Pass, and Girdwood—were in worse shape than we were. They had lost their electricity, and people with private generators were running out of gas. A group of women had driven to Girdwood, a ski resort community not far from Anchorage, for one of their birthdays and had been unable to get out. One of them kissed the chartered helicopter that finally came to get them. In Seward we'd gotten maybe four feet of snow in the past four days, maybe more. Alaska has plenty of outrageous weather that never makes the news, but after the whole Kenai Peninsula was blocked by avalanches for a couple of days, we even made some national newscasts.

Alaska is such a surprising place. Many of the things I thought about Alaska before I got here turned out in reality to be the opposite of what I'd expected. I thought summer would be a time for soaring, easy travel, for going all over the place. But the opposite was true. Summer was a time to let the sunlight soak into your life-giving batteries, to warm your face, to stay around the home place. It is the time to gather your fish and berries and earn your living wage.

It is when Alaska changes its relationship with sun, when winter comes and things freeze, that true freedom comes. It is a freedom of movement and a freedom from fear. As the sun gets farther away, it grows colder and darker. There is so much water flowing or standing still in Alaska, over 3 million lakes of over twenty acres each and more than three thousand rivers, not counting the ponds and small lakes and creeks and springs and swamps and other wetlands. All of these things make travel difficult when the water is not frozen. But the cold freezes the water, even the salt water.

Before Alaska freezes, the bears are not hibernating. Who knows when you might run into one in the dense undergrowth, lying around a kill site, waiting for its moose meat to age. Unfortunately, though, sometimes, when just the right conditions occur, winter traps us.

Out in a neighborhood called Questa Woods, where Julianne's friend Danielle lived, there looked to be seven feet of snow on some of the roofs. People stood on the roofs shoveling off the snow; it was taller than they were. I had heard someone call it Snow Acres. Whether you were up against our mountainside or out in the middle of the valley could make a drastic difference in the snowfall you received. In the valley, they may have had a third as much snow as we did even though they were only five miles from us.

We were told that this year the millions and billions of tons of snow that had floated to earth were resting on a slippery, icy base. What had not avalanched already could go at any time. Still we were unafraid. I had never known anyone who had been affected by an avalanche until this week. Like an unending snowfall, the avalanches kept falling. Workers would clean them up with dozers and other heavy equipment, and more snow would take its place. Avalanches would cover the road in places where no one could remember them coming down before or right next to where they'd cleaned up the last one.

If we rode about twenty miles or so out of town, we could see what had us walled in. Although I knew all this avalanche stuff was true—it was in the
Anchorage Daily News
—I wanted to see it. I called the local State Troopers office often and asked for updates. The woman in the office was relaxed and witty. She told me one day early on that someone had called in to report that some vehicle tracks went into one side of the avalanche that did not come out the other end. Could there be a car and people trapped under all that? A state trooper checked it out; I guess he had to walk up and over it and look on foot. Turned out the wind had blown the tracks clear on the far side. The heavy equipment whose task it was to free us could only remove one snow pile at a time. There were hundreds of avalanches in the 125 miles between here and Anchorage; several had made it to the road, leaving behind anywhere from a few feet to sixteen feet of snow.

Avalanches give no warning sounds; they destroy almost everything in their path, splintering trees two feet thick, demolishing power lines, everything. When the fallen trees are caught up in the wet snow and the whole mess crashes down the slopes until it comes to rest, it becomes like concrete with metal bars in it for strength. Avalanches are most frequent on slope angles between thirty and forty-five degrees; they're called slab avalanches and can travel at speeds approaching ninety miles per hour.

This season, the base under all this heavy, unstable snowpack formed around Christmas. After that, it warmed up into the forties and those twenty inches compressed, melted, and condensed into an icy base of about five inches. Then it got cold and the base froze. This base was somewhat like a hockey-rink ice surface, most unstable to the snow above on the moderate slopes. The steepest slopes did not allow the snow to build up; the flatter ones were not steep enough to create an avalanche. Then some loose and dry snow fell, and on top of that a slab of heavy snow, the type we had been getting night after day after night recently.

It seemed as if we had gotten a couple more feet since Julianne had gone to school this morning. Now, around lunchtime, it was storming wickedly. We could not see past three feet in front of the window of the fourplex. Where we live in middle Tennessee, if they see snowflakes in the air just blowing around, they have been known to close school, let the kids go early.

Earlier, the snowflakes floated peacefully to the ground or to rest on slanted spruce boughs. Now winds blew from a maniacal place and were smashing Seward. The ravens on the dead trees at the bottom of the hill would have to seek shelter. The windows that took the strongest bursts of wind popped against their frames. As we “walked” on the ice-covered sidewalks toward the Marina Café for a late breakfast and were blown backward, I told Rita that no doubt school would get out early.

We decided to drive over to Julianne's school. Maybe we could beat the buses, whose drivers could barely see the road. The winds were blowing so strong and unruly and were filled with snow. A moose walked out of the willows, crossing into some deep cover. We might have hit it if not for our four-wheel drive. I am not sure what wind system this was related to, but parts of Anchorage had been punched with winds over one hundred miles an hour. A part of town called the Lower Hillside had gotten it the worst. Cordova had been slapped too, but nothing too unusual, with winds over eighty-five miles per hour. Our storm was not comparable to these; our mountains protected us yet still we were blasted.

We got to the parking lot. On a clear day, this school has one of the most spectacular backdrops of any school in the world, a section of flat-faced high mountains on the edge of the Harding Icefield. But today neither the mountains nor the school was visible. I did not see any buses lined up either. I spotted the school as the storm let up momentarily, then to its right I thought I saw something colorful in the field next to the school. Several classes were having recess, including Julianne's. I thought I saw her yellow and blue parka. The children, some in snow up past their waists, were running, sliding down slides, making snow angels, disappearing in the snow. Julianne and three of her girlfriends came over when they saw us and said hello. Avalanche-producing weather, blizzards, and power-packed winds just add to the possibilities for fun when you are in third grade in Alaska.

Before we left the apartment, I had called the Alaska Department of Transportation road system number, 800-478-7675. Each day they update the recording. The road from Seward to Anchorage was closed, the recorded lady said, blocked by avalanches in several places. I felt that this lady was my friend. That is when I knew I had been walled into Seward way too long. State officials urged citizens to stay off the roads and definitely not to go into the backcountry. The year before just off the Seward-to-Anchorage road several snow machiners who were high-marking were killed by avalanches. High-marking is the dangerous practice of riding a snow machine straight up the incline of a mountain, seeing how high up the peak you can get before you have to swoop back down, and it's named for the tracks you can see from below.