My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [115]
With absolutely no warning, I drew alongside another parked Iditarod team. I didn’t recognize the sled, but it was fully packed. The musher was nowhere to be seen. Dusted with snow and curled in tight balls, the musher’s dogs were sleeping in front of the sled in a straight line.
Dazed, wondering who I’d caught, I stomped my snow hook into the ground. When I looked up, the other team was gone. A line of driftwood rested in its place.
I didn’t need my headlamp anymore. The slow-falling snowflakes taunted me, jittering unpredictably, straining my eyes in the blue predawn light. It was approaching eight A.M. We’d been mushing down the lousy road for what seemed like days. The coffee baggie was half gone, and I was feeling queasy.
At last, a light gleamed in the distance. A red and white bar light. A checkpoint called Safety. “Let’s go home!” I whispered. Chad raised his head. Ears shot up along the line. The dogs shifted gears, recharged with purpose.
I clung to the hope that others might be having similar problems. Surely I’d catch a few other teams lingering in Safety. I knew Terhune wouldn’t wait. But Cooley had talked about it. And the Mormiles couldn’t be too far ahead, could they?
All I found waiting was a tattered Iditarod banner, flapping in the wind. And a beer Daily had bought me on his way out the door.
“How long ago did the last team leave?” I asked the weary checker, hope flickering an instant longer.
“No more than twenty minutes,” he said.
Calculations raced through my mind. It was 20 miles to Nome. Except for Cooley’s dogs, the teams ahead weren’t anything special. They’d be lucky to do six miles an hour. That gave me …
“They rested here two, maybe three hours,” the checker added.
Hope died. Dead last. I was going to finish dead last.
A musher was sighted on the outskirts of Nome. The news was broadcast on KNOM radio at 9 A.M. Sunday, March 24, day 22 of Iditarod 1991. The banners and other decorations that greeted Swenson were no longer present, long since torn down or damaged in the numerous storms of the last 10 days. But the Burl Arch marking the Iditarod’s finish line remained standing downtown. That was all that mattered.
No other dog teams were in sight as Terhune climbed off the frozen beach and turned his dogs down Front Street. At long last the old paratrooper relaxed. The fifty-third musher into Nome was a satisfied man.
He found Dawn and his two grown daughters waiting near the arch. They were holding a long handmade banner. “Welcome Jon,” it read.
Gunnar Johnson mushed into town 45 minutes later.
The others weren’t far behind. Johnson’s desertion had sparked a general exodus from Safety. To hell with waiting for me. The race was on again. A wild contest developed in the final miles. Charging across the icy drifts outside Nome, Daily thought he had the edge. Bogus, looking inspired, loped like a frisky pup. He dusted the Mormiles and surged ahead of Mark Williams. But Tom Daily’s eight dogs were simply outpowered by the fourteen dogs pulling Urtha Lenthar’s sled.
Lenthar, Daily, and Williams finished within one minute of each other, notching the fifty-fifth, fifty-sixth, and fifty-seventh positions in the record book. Not long afterward, Catherine Mormile won the race that mattered most to her—beating her husband, Don, and the Mowth’s old dogs to the arch by almost 20 minutes. Cooley, our unofficial participant, let the others go ahead and followed Mormile into town, finishing at 10:43 A.M.
Bellies warmed by a hot meaty broth, my dogs slept on the lee side of Safety while the other teams raced for Nome. I lingered at the bar, sipping the beer Daily had bought me, sinking ever deeper into depression as I listened to the live radio coverage. The voice of Nome’s checker, Leo Rasmussen, pierced my funk.
“If Brian O’Donoghue would ever leave Safety,” I heard Leo say on the radio, “maybe we could get this over with.”
I briefly wondered if