November 18, 2012

Back now from three days in Eureka & scraping for the footholds of the normal life I have to resume after three days of dogs, dogs, a new alternator & more dogs. We loaded the kennel into the new dog boxes for the haul, puppies in tow in various states of sleepiness, sprawled across our coats or laps or bags, limp from exhaustion on the way home & sort of unfurled like loose ribbons. In Eureka, almost at the end of the Elliot Highway, there live four humans & roughly ninety dogs. Our visit was coupled with the visit of three other humans & their thirty dogs as well, so all in all, we had seven people & 130 dogs or so. Good numbers. Wind thrashed through our entire visit, though on the trails, for the most part, the trees socked us in & kept us warm enough to sweat up the hills. The trails suffer from a lack of snow compared to the embarrassment of riches we have on Stampede at present, but for me, they were endlessly thrilling for a number of reasons. Running the Squid Acres dogs, I saw a focus & intensity in the team during the night run that seemed a kind of kindle to a shared fire—there is a contagion of acumen there that bridges between the team & the driver that leaves no room for the human to lull into complacence. See a practiced dog team running a narrow, forested trail through the deep gloaming & into the coalblack night, over tussocks & dirt & overflow, & you simply have no choice but to offer up your deepest respect & humility. It is an honor to work with animals that possess such singular tenacity. Goddamn, it makes you grateful. & prior to that, during the day run, I drove our dogs & saw another breakthrough. T-bone, who has been so perplexingly stubborn about flopping down & giving up just before the end of every run, pulled steady the entire time, settling into his beautifully smooth trot in concert with Solo. Littlehead, meanwhile, proved an inexhaustible cheerleader up every hill. As they grew tired, I would jump the runners & run beside them to call them up, & in every instance, Littlehead would sneak a peripheral glance at me to acknowledge the request before firing up & hitting overdrive, the rest of the team following her lead. These are young dogs, & all of their training has been at our hands. To see them begin to assume those responsibilities & hone in on their roles is beyond gratifying. To see how folks who have set up perfectly a focused winter of mushing construct their day was also an extraordinary insight. There were any number of memorable quotes from our stay, but at one point, thinking about when to embark on the night run, Paige simply said, in all earnestness, “time is irrelevant.” & in the world of training racing dogs, it is. You go when they need to go, feed them before you feed yourself, think about sleep as a kind of lucky abstraction. It’s good training that way. The thing about Eureka is that it’s a perfect manifestation of a dream predicated on a singular passion. Its remoteness elevates the dogs, makes them primary, renders it such that all of your living arrangements are both literally & figuratively built around theirs. If you’re there, you have to run dogs. The thing is, we were lucky enough to visit with people that are living their dreams without compromise, way out in the middle of nowhere, leading rich & surreal lives. Generous, good people that foster the best qualities in each other & work so tirelessly toward their passion. & so what a wellspring of muted thrill to glance across the cab on the drive home at my sleeping wife, the sounds of dreaming puppies batting their paws in the back, & to realize that in our way we are doing precisely the same thing.