Specimens, Days

Meaning has always seemed a shifting thing—mercurial & relative, given entirely to circumstance. I used to think of meaning as a sort of static wellspring, a thing you encounter after a long journey prompted in its name, a grail, an El Dorado. Something pre-original that waits indifferently for your arrival. At this time yesterday, the sun had faded well below the range, & in the soft & muted vestigial light I could just discern ridgelines north & south, the swale of the valley where the river cuts across miles of tundra. On either side of the trail, caribou & moose prints, wolf scat with hare fur in it, weaving animal tracks running criss-cross & vermicular across a land too looming & too vast to ever comprehend. The dogs on the line running into that quiet dark, & we on the runners behind them, following suit. & the light fading until full dark enveloped us.   What the dogs always teach are the fundamental lessons of humility &...

Back now from a trip to the Lower 48 to see family before winter sets in, & returned home to find that Kristin’s grandmother passed away just after the entire family gathered & then dissipated. But how curious a thing, to think that whereas a funeral tends to gather & congregate mourners all under the cold pallor of death, in this case, everyone came together to celebrate life in advance of its cessation. She was cogent, alert, conversational, with a warm & smiling countenance during our visit. The family raised their glasses to her birthday & six others besides, a graduation, an anniversary—to the accomplishments & milestones of lives well lived. & maybe the silence upon our departure was like the deep sigh when the last guest steps out into the night & the door closes on a warm home. Maybe it was like the last glance out the window at the canopy of stars swelling & pulsing overhead before letting close your heavy lids. In any case, there by her s...

I want to thank everyone for the supportive, constructive comments on the previous post & more importantly for the collective will to effect positive changes to the way things look moving forward. I have every respect for the ITC, for the volunteers, the veterinarians, mushers & dogs involved in the race, & it is out of that respect & love for the sport & the Iditarod that I hope we can all agree upon changes. I hope it’s also clear that I encourage & support every opinion to be voiced through this & any adversity, regardless of whether or not I’m in agreement. We all assume the burden of these things individually, even when the brunt of them is not our own, & we process them in ways that are often incompatible or contrary. Even still, I believe that every person inclined toward utterance in the wake of Dorado’s death wants the same thing: the prevention of repeating that tragedy in the future. & I think everyone can agree that nothing is more effect...

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o...

They’re interesting feelings, both. Watching your dog team pull the hook & rush through the narrow sliver of trail lining down toward Fish Creek, the darkness of the -30 degree night enveloping them as swiftly as you can muster a futile, broken “whoa.” Or wrestling through a balled up bundle of dogs doing their best to rip one another apart, while your ankle is wrapped in gangline & the sled is unmoored. In the case of the former, I ran only 300 yards before seeing the glow of their eyes emerge from the oildark night—no tangles, no aggression, no miles-long dashes. You hear stories from friends about lost teams that end in unthinkable loss or injury or at the very least healthy dogs some dozen miles distant from their driver. For me, this time, they sat resting in the deep, unbroken snow &, with a leader change, called up as soon as I asked them to. Their undiminished spirit & enduring good health almost forgave Basin & Kabob’s shared commitment to exploring ever...

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. Ru...

There was a point there, sliding on my ass down a hundred-yard snowfield rippled with minute waves of ice & buried rock, when I wondered if perhaps I ought to reorient myself in order to avoid slamming into the jagged boulder looming below. & there was a point while loping across another pitch of snow sidelong wherein I noticed I might well slide a mile off course if I didn’t hit the footholds. There was incessant rain, beating down from the report of the starting pistol until the finish line, & a fierce firn wind weaving through the willows, the Devil’s Club, the sedge-green grass. & the feeling on the far shore of Eagle River of wholly numb legs wobbling underneath me. I completely ate shit a half dozen times, tripped & recovered a dozen more, stubbed my twice-broken toe, stepped knee-deep in beaver ponds, slid & slopped through mud, leapt over twenty piles of fresh bear scat & clutched looming thistles to right myself, committing the ensuing mile each tim...