A Bit More on Mushing & Poetry, Sort Of

I sometimes think about expeditions as if they were locksafed in the annals of history, untouchable relics of a forgotten age. Every human who was the first (white, educated, wealthy man) to trod where countless others without those designators had trod before, sometimes for millenia. The “discoveries” made manifest in historical expeditions explicitly included other extant humans, already living in the distant reaches of lands considered remote. The guides & porters, the sherpas, the anonymous scouts yoked into service because they knew the land already. There is the obvious political absurdity to the enterprise of discovery, but on another level entirely, I am intrigued by the notion of how it confers greater import if acted out against a historical backdrop than if that discovery is merely personal. Which is to say that our own discoveries in travel are maybe no less eye-opening & expansive, no less bewildering to our sense of scale than those promulgated in centuries past. Because someone else has been somewhere we have not does not devalue our confrontations with novelty. 

I think of form, of meter, of the lyric tradition. How every new poem is in conversation with every poem preceding it, fixed in that inescapable relation whether consciously or not. It would be asinine to argue the merit of discovery awaiting the writer cusped on her writing, though. Shakespeare shying from the sonnet because Petrarch already wrote one, Keats avoiding the ode after reading Sappho. Our discoveries become additions to what poetry is collectively capable of encountering, just as our experiences traveling new country tack tale upon tale to local histories, even if the world never hears them. We walk trails rutted out over decades, centuries, epochs, & permit ourselves the embrace of the new in their unfurling banner of particulars. Well worn with time but thrumming with the pressing urgency of now. 

If you have run down a mountain, then you know that for certain stretches of talus or shale or stone, there is a new measure to your footfall, a set distance from each step to the next, that provides the cadence of safest passage. It usually means speeding up for a spell, looking three steps ahead, incisively executing a moving algebra without a thought, & then the trail levels or runs back to dirt alone, & you slow & resume your normal pace. Which is to say that the trail can dictate what it needs from you, can impart physically what wisdom it has collected over the ages, in the elegant design flashing before the eye that magnetizes each step to its historical precedent. This is where the caribou find purchase, or where a bear’s pad splayed out. This is where the trickle of water pools & widens before sieving into the dirt. Where the granitic underbed will not crumble. 

Following a trail with a dog team is ostensibly no different, should conditions withstand sudden flux & alteration. Trail markers glaring orange & black stretching down the arteries of river, winding up mountains blown to frozen dirt, carved into sastrugi & snowbank. Trail markers crossed over one another before dangerous spells, doubled up for turns, knocked over where sleds couldn’t slow or stop. & when they are gone, there are the pawprints, the never-ending arrows of sled runners pointing downtrail. Straw in packed-down recesses trailside. Pockmarks from ski poles. Or, more simply, the muscular river swelling its way over all those miles, unconcerned with who or what finds passage upon its ice. 

On the Yukon Quest trail, it is impossible to avoid the ghosts of the past. The old cabins with crushed in roofs, the mining tailings, the boats seized in ice & splayed against the battering rams of driftwood. You leave the present at the start line & meander through centuries, yourself become a kind of relic. It could be any year at all in the north, until the thundering snowmachines & steady hum of idling diesel engines catches up with you at the checkpoints. 

I never used to think about the Quest as an expedition in the sense of those sepia-tinged journeys of discovery. I thought it a dog race, an homage to historicity written across a thousand miles, a celebration of what humans & dogs could do together. I think advancing in years allows us to more fully comprehend how our own travels are more in concert with expedition than lark, more in tune with adventure than simple recreation. 

& so, at the start line, thirty below, with the slant of ineffectual sun cutting unapologetic across the bluffs of the Yukon, there arises all the din bestowed by gravity & joy. You have bundled hundreds of dog booties, your fingertips raw from the velcro. You have spent dozens of hours meticulously sawing blocks of meat, carcasses of salmon. You have counted out batteries & matches & handwarmers & you have spread unguents & ointments & oils over forty drop bags. You cooked yourself every meal & then cooked yourself two more for every camp. Your logistical nightmare, itself a weeks-long endeavor, is complete. There is only the trail, only your accounting with your prior self, only your ability to care for & work with your dogs. You are about to pull the snowhook, about to scrawl your name across a thousand miles in snow, knowing that spring will come, then summer, & the world will bear no trace of your having passed through. Three, two, one, & of a sudden, after all of the planning, every acquaintance with tradition & history, there is only the long & holy conflagration of now. The trail is there, yours to travel. The country doesn’t care. The river doesn’t care. But goddamn, in your marrow & in your heart, you do, with all of the aching urgency of time. You pass around a corner, & are gone, discovering.