Travelers' Tales Alaska (22 page)

I had to get away, to return to a place where I could once again find inspiration for my soul. I made arrangements to fly to Fairbanks, where I had worked for a summer three years before as the student rabbi for the town's Jewish community. My friend Dave had been working up there as an environmentalist and wilderness guide and raised dogs on the side. We
decided to meet in the early spring for a dogsledding adventure north of the Arctic Circle, our second mushing trip together. I spent most of March trying to find the appropriate gear in Manhattan for a trip to the Last Frontier, but by the end of the month I had everything pieced together and I'd arrived in Fairbanks. Dave met me at the airport in his rusty shambles of a truck, and within fifteen minutes we were back at his cabin, unloading the sleds from the vehicle's roof and hooking up our dogs to their tug lines for a practice run through the dark and icy night.

It had been two years since I'd last stood on a dogsled. On our first trip, a five-day foray into a starkly beautiful area known as the White Mountains, everything was a challenge for me: putting harnesses on the team, learning the verbal commands for my lead dogs, making turns without falling off the sled into the snow. This time most of it came back to me within minutes. It was night, but because I had to be back in New York the following week, we didn't have much time to wait for me to regain my bearings. It had been warm that past week, so by the time we got onto the trails the daytime melt had frozen and they were rock hard. We wore headlamps to make our way through the darkness. Whenever the dogs looked back toward me, their eyes flashed in the beams like blue moons. It took us just half an hour to mush around the outskirts of Fairbanks to Hidden Hill, a small Quaker community where some of Dave's friends lived. They served us fresh salmon and homemade pumpkin pie.

Sated from my meal and anxious to get back to the dogs resting outside, I thanked our hosts and put on my boots. The air that had stung my face during our run to Hidden Hill was refreshing as I walked out of the cabin. (If you dressed warmly enough, the cold months in the Alaskan interior were bearable—unless you had to deal with wind.) Stars filled the sky,
an immense swath of blackness. It was a different world from New York. It seemed a more
real
world. A dozen pairs of eyes stared at me silently. My feet crunched into the snow as I walked toward our sleds. Suddenly the dogs erupted into a frenzy of barking and lunging. The vague animal forms grew clearer as my vision adjusted to the night. There were our two teams, thrashing and howling in wild expectation of the trail. I recognized only a few of them from our last trip; Dave had borrowed several of these new dogs for me from a friend.…

Mushing through a cold Alaskan night was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The sensation itself, similar to skiing or surfing, is not what is remarkable. It is the scene. You stand alone on a sled in darkness. Other than your headlamp, only the moon lights your way through the woods and over the streams and rivers. Frigid wind blasts your face. A team of animals, silenced by their exertions, pulls you forward over snow and ice with a focus that makes it seem as if nothing
in the world but running ultimately matters to them. Little matters to you, either, but the moment.

The following day, while Dave took care of some last-minute errands related to our sleds and camping gear, I drove around Fairbanks buying food for our trip. Dave had prepared two long lists for me, one for us and the other for the dogs. First I went to the supermarket. I got the basics for a cold weather journey: rice, beans, butter, cheese, meat (for him), fish (for me), and crackers that were hard enough to survive the rough and tumble of the trail. We would have to pack all of it, labeled by type of meal, tightly into our sleds. They would double as freezers. Liquor was a trickier issue. Beer did not have enough alcohol content to hold its liquid form, so unless we wanted to drink ice we had to purchase harder stuff. The spirit we settled on for our Arctic excursion was rum. When I was finished gathering our supplies, I concentrated on our teams. Dog food had never seemed so complicated. Because of all the energy the dogs would burn during the trip, Dave spelled out very carefully what I needed to buy in order to replenish them: beef fat (for a quick jolt of energy), dry dog food (to be mixed with warm water to help rehydrate them), and several fifty-pound sacks of ground and compressed meat with a bold label on them that read
CONDEMNED CHICKEN CARCASSES: NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

After my tasks were completed, I had a couple of spare hours to see some of my former congregants. I'd been in touch by telephone with a few of them over the past three years. I visited Leah and Mike, who proudly showed me their new house—and I used a flush toilet for what I knew would be the last time in a week. I also met with Richard and Margot, who gave me a tour of the very first synagogue the Jews of Fairbanks had owned, which they had just bought (when I lived there in 1992, we held our Sabbath services in
the chapel at Fort Wainwright, the town's sprawling army base). Richard wept as he walked me through the building. While it was nice to catch up with old friends, seeing everybody again felt somewhat strange. The context was completely different. In my time of need, I wasn't turning to the Jewish community for spiritual revitalization. I was turning to the wilderness.…

We left Fairbanks the next day. After several more hours of loading a dozen barking dogs one at a time into the transport track above the truck, and then hauling and securing our two sleds over that, we headed north up the Dalton Highway, a relatively narrow road that extends all the way to the hulking oil-drilling rigs at Prudhoe Bay on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Our destination was the Brooks Range, a majestic wedge of mountains that cuts across the northern half of the state. In three or four hours we reached the Yukon River and stopped for coffee at a small truck stop run by an elderly Christian fundamentalist couple. The only traffic we saw was an occasional tractor-trailer on its way to or returning from Prudhoe Bay. The air was much colder than it had been in Fairbanks, so we both put on additional layers of clothing and checked on the dogs, who looked out at us from their wooden cubicles (which they had begun to gnaw apart). As we drove on into the night, ice fog began to set in, frosting the tundra and imparting a ghostly hue to the landscape. Near midnight, over ten hours since we had left Fairbanks, we pulled into another truck stop at the “town” of Coldfoot. The place was a genuine frontier outpost: miners, trappers, and other assorted adventurers mingling over burgers and beer. Dave and I ate dinner, bought a new headlight for our vehicle, and got directions to Nolan, an active gold-mining camp about thirty miles north of Coldfoot and the site of our starting point.…

It was numbingly cold when we reached Nolan. I tried (and failed) to sleep in the truck's enclosed cabin, while Dave slept outside underneath the transport track. My sleeping bag did little to protect me from the frigid air, which turned my breath into white smoke: the truck's windows frosted over within minutes. Our dogs slept quietly to the side of the road, each one attached by his collar to the picket line that linked them together. At dawn we got started. Before we had a chance to put food into their metal bowls, the dogs started barking. Endlessly. Only their breakfast shut them up, which gave us a few minutes of relative silence to take down our sleds, check the gear, and move our truck into a more secluded area. The trailhead was on the outskirts of the camp, a few hundred yards away from us. Our plan was to make a giant loop through a section of the Brooks Range and return to Nolan and the truck in a week.

After I gathered the bowls, Dave and I put on the dogs' harnesses and hooked them up to their respective sleds. They were fresh and excited—so excited that they lunged forward and jumped into the air in anticipation of the run. Sled dogs like it very cold, so they are at their strongest early in the morning. I learned that the hard way. When we were both safely on our sleds, we removed our anchors and raced down the road. Dave led the way to the trailhead and called for his lead dogs to turn right into the park. My team followed. We careened off the road, barreled ahead another couple of hundred yards over taiga, then entered a wooded area. As the dogs dragged me helplessly around a spruce, my sled began to tilt precariously onto one runner. Suddenly it flipped over, and I skidded face first into a pile of snow. Luckily I had held on to the sled with one hand, and the weight of my body forced the team to come to a stop (if I hadn't, they most likely would
have sprinted on without me for miles). The dogs turned back and stared at me with expressions of befuddlement.

We were mushing in Gates of the Arctic National Park, and the Brooks Range was just one region within it. Dave had selected one of the more remote and spectacular chunks of Arctic Alaska for our trip, but after thirty minutes of mushing we ran into a major challenge. Because we had decided to make this trip in early spring, we knew that we risked encountering overflow, even in the colder areas north of the Arctic Circle. Overflow occurs when, due to rising temperatures, the upper layers of ice melt over their frozen foundation, leaving up to several feet of slush hidden beneath a paper-thin, icy veneer. [Overflow may also occur on rivers throughout the winter, when water flows through a hole or crack in the ice onto the ice's surface.] What looks like a frozen river can quickly crack under the weight of a sled, ruining supplies and sometimes drowning dogs.

Wiseman Creek, which we needed to cross at several points during the first few days of our trip, was filled with overflow. It was not very deep, but because no other mushers had used our route in several weeks, we had no idea about the present condition of the creeks and rivers ahead. That left us with two alternatives. Either scrap the entire trip and return to Fairbanks or push on with the clear understanding that we were taking our chances, that when we tried to make our way back to the truck the following week we might be stranded. Dave was ambivalent. He wanted to mush, but he was worried that we could run into trouble or that I could be trapped and miss my flight back to New York. He left the decision to me. I thought about why I was there, about my self-imposed mission. And when I reflected on just what was at stake for me, the decision was easy. We moved on.

Overflow turned out to be a constant annoyance but never bad enough to force us to turn around. In the early mornings the upper layers of ice were sufficiently hard to support our sleds, but by noon they developed the consistency of a Slurpee. The two of us had to run (or often, like our teams, slip and slide) along the side of our sleds; our weight, coupled with the drag caused by the overflow, would have made the sleds too heavy for the dogs to pull. It was grueling work, and we had to repeat it whenever we had to travel over hills. At the end of each day my arms had new bruises from breaking so many falls, and my boots were usually soaked with water. The routine was the same whenever we made camp. Remove the harnesses and connect the dogs to the picket line, away from the wind (though they are comfortable in temperatures well below zero, a bitter wind can harm them). Look for dead wood to saw into small pieces for cooking and heating. Melt snow for drinking water. Feed the teams. Set up the tent. Eat dinner, drink some rum, try to go to sleep. The mornings were miserable, with temperatures five or ten degrees below zero, even at the beginning of April. Any piece of clothing that so much as brushed against water the day before was frozen stiff when we woke up. My bare fingers were so numb (our heavy mittens were too awkward and cumbersome for the task) that hooking our dogs back onto their tug lines took ten times as long as it did later in the afternoon. But after the teams were taken care of and we'd had our hot coffee, the rush of air that refreshed my face as our sleds raced out of camp made the morning's travails a distant memory.

The strenuousness of our trip made reflection difficult, but there were moments when I was mushing through a valley or over a small inland lake that I was able to absorb the beauty and achieve an almost meditative state. My worries about the Jewish world washed away. My anxiety about feeling out of
place as a rabbi didn't seem to matter. I was a child of God in God's back yard, and everything was going to be all right. Taking care of my dogs was like taking care of six screaming babies, but I loved them. Even though their ceaseless barking and fighting with one another often drove me to the point of madness, I trusted my team. They were my lifeline, my link to the outside world. And I owed them my gratitude and respect. I also owed Dave. Despite all my adventures, my encounters with jail cells, grizzly bears, and mountaintops, deep down I was just another Jewish intellectual, and I knew it. Once again I was dependent on others for my well-being. I could not have made the trip without the guidance and experience of my friend. And neither of us could have made it without our canine companions.