My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [13]
Deadline Dog Farm’s meat was in the very front of the truck, so I had to help clear out everybody else’s load before I could begin collecting mine. Stacks and stacks of frozen 50-pound blocks were passed out, forming new piles in the waiting pickups. Minutes ticked away, and I fought the urge to scream.
I finally rolled into work four hours late and physically destroyed. I was exhausted and close to the breaking point, but luckily nobody said a word, and it was a quiet shift. All I had to do was swing by the cop shops, write up the crime blotter, and slap together a graph on historic weather records. Another day in training.
By January the time demands of my race preparations were out of control. Dan Joling, the managing editor, agreed to let me cut back to contributing a single weekly column for the duration. The column, “Off to the Races,” described what it was like to be a rookie preparing for Alaska’s Great Race. The Associated Press distributed a condensed version statewide. Of course, my pay dropped accordingly, but time was the currency that mattered at this point.
One day in mid-February, less than three weeks before the race, I found a message waiting at the News-Miner. Virginia, the newspaper’s business manager, wanted to see me. There had been a mistake, she said. As a part-time employee, I no longer qualified for free health insurance. To maintain my medical coverage, I’d have to come up with several hundred dollars in premiums.
“Cancel it,” I said.
I wasn’t the only one putting dogs ahead of the job.
A year before, Jon Terhune, an abrasive oil company machinist from Soldotna, had approached his plant manager at Unocal Chemicals. Advising the manager of his wish to enter the next Iditarod, Terhune asked what could be done. A month of unpaid leave was subsequently approved, so long as the machinist took the time off in conjunction with his vacation. In July, on the first day entries were accepted, Terhune signed up, becoming the twenty-fourth musher on the list.
The former army paratrooper was a dour man, with little patience for fools. One day in 1969, Jon, his first wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Heidi, had thrown everything they owned in the family’s station wagon and left the East Coast for good. Traveling westbound out of Albany, they saw cars on the other side of the highway backed up three lanes deep. The Terhunes learned from the radio that the traffic was caused by people heading to a big music festival. Nancy wanted to turn around and join the procession to Woodstock.
Her husband refused to even consider it. “That’s the reason we’re leaving,” he said, pointing to the traffic. “It’s getting to be a rat race.”
After settling in Alaska, Terhune began raising malamutes as a hobby. He got into mushing in the mid-1980s, running castoffs from Harry Sutherland. After Nancy died, Terhune found an outlet in the sport. Dogs offered companionship with none of the hassles people inevitably brought into his life. Breeding a few dogs, buying a few more dogs, Terhune gradually built a racing kennel. In 1990 he ran the Kusko 300, a grueling race through Eskimo villages in the Kobuk Valley. It was hellish. All the other rookies dropped out. Terhune spent ten hours searching for the trail in a whiteout and slipped far behind the veteran racers. But he never considered giving up. Not Terhune.
On the home stretch Jon was so tired he fell asleep on his sled, and his team trotted right past the finish line in Bethel. Startled spectators and race officials scrambled after the snoozing racer, whose team continued on its own to the far side of town.
A year later, Terhune entered the Kusko a second time. He viewed it as a final Iditarod tune-up. Instead, the race almost ended his Iditarod hopes. For starters, it was too warm. The race had to be rerouted around open water,