Mushing & Poetry, Chapter 1

 I.

I have worn goggles precisely once in the ten years I’ve run dogs. We have run tens of thousands of miles together, in conditions that would repulse & repel the most sanguine hopes of those only casually acquainted with winter. Winds, whiteouts, blizzards, rain, frost, temperatures from -60 to 40, rivers decaying with the advance of spring, sinkholes hidden under fresh snow. I have availed myself of the wolf & wolverine ruff on my parka, turned my face against the howling gales, run alongside my leaders or snowshoed out our path, a walking hieroglyph across the tundra. But only once have I needed goggles. 

I put them on as we climbed to treeline past the jalopies & abandoned school buses & hulking scraps of metal cast aside by mining operations. The officials at Central, a “town” consisting of a bar, a few houses & an abandoned hot spring that is inarguably haunted, had told us there was a weather window on Eagle Summit—20 degrees with a light wind. 

En route, Rob Cooke’s team first & then my own, we navigated a ten foot wide, two foot deep & 150 foot long stretch of overflow. Cold water lined on both sides by impassable puckerbrush, the tenuous sheen of ice over top visibly fractured or floating. We wore garbage bags on our legs, duct-taped to our thighs. Fare forward, I thought. T.S. Eliot on a goddamn dog sled. 

& once through, garbage bags removed & stowed in our sled bags, we ascended. The wind was not light. In fact, it began to roar, the way you hear the incessantly violent turbulence of the ocean waves roiling along the shore from behind a dark skein of dunes, or the way you close your eyes when a 737 lands & the sonic surge of the brakes overwhelms you with that fleeting question of whether or not they are adequate against the thrust of the massive plane. Just past the thin line of spruce at the edge of tree level, we could hear all of that wind gather in its wild gesticulations, finding on that face of the mountain a witch’s pot in which to make a frenzied display. The snow at that temperature thick & wet, blown in sustained parallels to the ground at 40 mph. Unable to see even past my wheel dogs but for a nanosecond before another snowflake blasted my eyes, I fumbled in my bag & found my goggles. 

In their orange glow, what I saw was not particularly welcoming. We were about to eject from treeline, haw in an about face perpendicular to the upslope of the most formidable headwall on the Yukon Quest’s 1,000 mile trail, & present ourselves to the mercy of the wind & snow. If there was a fulcrum somewhere between what you know yourself capable of & what you wonder after without even a forepang of understanding, I believe we found it just then. My swing dog Kabob began howling a furious onward marching order as we progressed. 

*

Keats, in his letter to Brown, laid out his definition of Negative Capability, or “being comfortable in the Penetralium of mystery…without any irritable reaching after fact.” His odes specifically always conjure for me the apex of that idea. The stanzas building the literal rooms of the house, the unnamed & innumerable ghosts haunting the halls & shadows. The poem constructs the possibility of the haunting, defines what will prove liminary to it, contingent upon it for meaning. The words accept the intimations of that ineffable space, carry its heft & show its wound. The referents conjure the sense. The referents always the notes the conductor ushers in, & the sense always that moment to moment clash with anteriority that shocks us into feeling. 

What Keats wanted after was an embrace of selfhood’s limn—a forum for the transaction between the greater world’s inexorable & glacial heft & the disintegration of the ego’s defenses. That crucible of highest vulnerability wherein, in humility, the poem supplicates itself at the feet of the world & then stands & walks into it. The words, the lines, become in their intercourse with what is elementally other suddenly not the poet’s; or rather, both the poet’s & the world’s, hinged in amphibology, to borrow a phrase from Levinas. They extend & are engaged. Cause a rut that is snowed over, blown in, erased but marginally visible. 

*

Birch Creek. A herd of caribou danced & bucked past, their curious habit of stepping a hesitant foot into their terror as if to affirm it before paroxysms of panic force them to flee. The sun setting at 3 pm over the west bank, another oxbow bend in a series seemingly beyond number. A raven flies straight in a mile what the river winds ten to find. At night, you see the headlights of competitors through the thin, jutting peninsulas of land carved & left & you think yourself close, but you are miles behind. An absurd boustrophedon writ by a prankster. 

The dogs curled in straw off the trail, the cooker still flicking blue methanol flame to melt snow for more water. A gyrfalcon lazes past, glances along the trail for neglected snacks. On long training runs the ravens always follow dog teams, swooping low to lead the way, waiting for a pause in the run with the keen recollection that scraps of beef or salmon are always left behind by a picky eater. 

I am waiting for my vacuum sealed egg sandwich to thaw in the cooker, sitting on the insulated bucket I carry for the dogs’ meals. I lean my head against the handlebar of the sled, just for a moment, & awaken ten minutes later, the flame long gone, the water starting to ice over at the rim. 

I am 700 miles into the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. I take a bite of the still-frozen sausage patty & say aloud “who gives a fuck” to no one in particular. Solo lifts his chin & casts a disapprobriating glance at me, eyebrows arched, as if to request the continuation of silence. 

*

I have run this trail before, the other way, from Fairbanks to Whitehorse. The race alternates direction every year. I know the map, I know the checkpoints, I recall aspects of the landscape vividly. The mileage between checkpoints is familiar, the straw indenting the snow trailside at expected intervals tells me roughly that I am halfway between chances to sleep under a roof. Knowing the facts of a trail, though, means nothing at all in the instant of its travel. 

Look at the map where the mouth of the Kandik conjoins with the Yukon, for instance, & you imagine a wide enough river valley to make easy passage in any direction. Denude it then of snow, take hulking masses of ice the size of trucks & crash them jagged & violent & utterly unforgiving into a mile-wide plain of jumbled glare ice. Rut it with vermicular lanes of frozen dirt jutting up from high sand bars or riverine islands locked in the ice. Such that only every quarter mile or so do you see any intimation of a sled having passed through at all—the carbine tips of a claw brake thrust down in a fading hieroglyph of someone else’s terror, their haunting narratives strewn in these inchoate sentences across a dozen miles. 

On ice stopping at all attains to an almost magical accomplishment; everything must go right, the dogs all listening, distractions few, energy relatively calm. We carry axes upright on ice to chip out a V in which to throw the snow hook—a tenuous prayer sometimes answered. 

At the mouth of the Kandik Solo was in single lead. There is no other dog that could have done for me what he did. We were cartoonish in our careening, manic in our discernment of possible trail routes, verging the entire time toward an utter lack of control. The darkness was consuming, with a wind forcibly removing the breath from my lungs. We would see a sled scratch twenty feet to the right. “Gee,” & we would cut through jumble ice & stobbed willows, bouncing & catapulting toward a semblance of trail. & then , once there, another scratch track fifteen feet to the left. “Haw.” Repeat. Until snow appertained thinly & the runner lines faded into view. 

It happens that way so very often along the trail. Your exhaustion absents your reason, or the darkness swallows it or the wind carries it away. The wide river becomes the endless desert devoid of demarcation & you commit to utter faith in your lead dog. You cannot hesitate your way through a thousand miles. You cannot stop to catch your breath, open a map, run your frostbit fingertip over its contours & make of the formless horizon a gateway to the discernible. You just keep going is all, compelled by something inexplicable. It is a contract you make with the world without knowing you’ve made it. A contract with your dogs. Fare forward. The river “a mighty brown god” & you coughing up its current borne along amid all of its flotsam & tangled detritus until you eddy out into a checkpoint, keen on pretending you knew just how to get there all the while. 

I suppose, too, there is some veracity to that. One’s impulse, after all, guides one to believe entirely in the dogs, in the feeling that you’re all on the appropriate trajectory, a comet blazing across an ink-black void. If impulse after impulse dots your wake with intended targets, confidence accrues, a way of interacting with the uncertain begins to establish itself. You make perhaps not a shape of who you are in the world, but at least where you are in it, how you got there. Your will a kind of songline leading to a chorus you haven’t learned yet. You know the map, the topography, the general idea, but the trail is utter discovery, the subsuming of the known into the phenomenal. 

Levinas, I think, would have loved this about dog mushing, or mountain running, or long pursuits through terrain at best neutral to human passage. The totality of the exhaustive preparatory stages immediately flails & falters when confronted with the infinities the trail exacts. 

I have always felt at the end of a long run or race or expedition that sense that humility & an unfocused faith in circumstance coupled to provide my safe passage. I know in every instance that it could go spectacularly awry. I could slip off a mountain, my dogs could accordion in on themselves in a rolling & vicious fight, the weather could conspire against us, the ice could give. & that could all happen to the most humble traveler (& has), but it seems to me part of the point is the erasure of your own particular significance against a backdrop that amplifies just how precisely miniscule you are. Your will urges you to forge on but does nothing to permit your passage. 

This, come to it, is precisely what a poem achieves, allowing your transaction with the world to mean everything to you while perhaps meaning nothing at all to it. Your surrender to alterity doesn’t mean anything. & that’s why it means everything.