I see by the news that the Iditarod Race is in full cry up in Alaska. There’s a ceremonial false start right near Anchorage — kind of a parade, really, with celebrities everywhere. Then next day, safely out of downtown, the real thing begins: a roughly thousand-mile slog under fairly strict rules through almost everything Alaska has to offer in late winter.
Like many great ideas, the race commemorates another, a heroic 1925 relay of dog teams rushing diphtheria antitoxin to stem a deadly outbreak in the otherwise inaccessible town of Nome in the far north on the Bering Sea. But like most great ideas, it’s also generated some ritual over the years — like the ceremonial start, extensive media coverage, and corporate sponsorship.
Back in 1984 (I think) I read that there was to be a so-called Iditaski, in which cross-country skiers would follow the Iditarod Trail for about one hundred miles out of Anchorage and then circle back to the start — about 205 miles in all. Sounded good to me. I’d been training every day and already had about five hundred miles on my odometer in my daily journal. But I was also going broke (it was a very bad year in our house), so I needed sponsorship as well as a diversion.
Luckily, a friend of mine published a magazine for cross-country skiers. I was able to get my air fare paid, my entry fee waived, and lodging with a local banker and his wife. Naturally, I called my best buddy, Dudley, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who reliably answered with an enthusiastic affirmative to every cockamamie idea I proposed. In early February we loaded everything into a Dartmouth coach and headed for Logan. The driver actually drove up onto the sidewalk in front of our airline and helped us unload – skis, pulks (sleds with rigid shafts instead of harnesses), winter clothes, and camping gear. We were on our way.
The folks of Anchorage couldn’t have been more hospitable. We dined like kings at our hosts’ house, got some necessary sewing done, and were ferried to the pre-dawn start a couple of days later. No ceremonial start here; just a countdown to “Go!” and we were off across Knik Lake. It was impossible not to notice that the eventual winner, a package handler at a local warehouse, was already climbing the bank on the far side of the lake before Dud and I were halfway across. Clearly, we were not headed for a podium finish.
I always used Fischer skis. I’d like a nickel for every time I saw that name slide forward under my nose over thousands of miles of trails. I discovered inadvertently that when the word changed from dark red in front of my eyes to dark green, I was seriously dehydrated. Dud and I slid on and on that day — there was a checkpoint every 25 miles — and just at dusk found ourselves on an open flat, probably a lake, with nothing in sight but the faint holes in the hard snow from ski pole tips and weird little black spruces looming out of the gloom here and there like Giacometti bronzes.
Dud asked if I could carry his pack for a while. He always brought more stuff than he needed, and had a rucksack in addition to his pulk. “Geez!” I exclaimed when I took it from him. “What the hell you got in here?” The main item was a two-quart thermos of hot tea. So we had a tea time right there in the gathering darkness, put on our headlights (the old-fashioned kind with the 4 D-cell batteries in a case inside your shirt), and soldiered on.
During the night Dudley (he was a master fixer) excised, dusted with antibiotic, and wrapped up an infected blister on my left heel. Next day he did the same for a friend he found blistered and about to quit at a checkpoint. Still later, at a squatter’s cabin, he examined and referred an Iwo Jima survivor with facial paralysis to a doctor in Anchorage who could enable him to close his eye for the first time in forty years,
For me, there was marvel after marvel. The northern lights were almost enough to ski by. The planet Venus was bright enough to cast the shadow of my mitten onto the snow. We stared, amazed, at the Alaska Range in alpenglow one evening, then skied all night down a frozen river at 26º below, We came across a warm cabin checkpoint about three in the morning with fresh sweet rolls about eight inches across, with gallons of hot tea. I had almost no idea where we were, or when we might get to the finish; but wherever we were at any given moment felt about as good as it could be.