My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [49]
Could have been me. Would have been me if I hadn’t spotted the media stake out.
Covering the race for the Frontiersman, I hadn’t dared visit Rohn. Access to the remote checkpoint, near the junction of the Tatina and South Fork Kuskokwim Rivers, was mostly limited to charter flights, which I couldn’t afford on our budget. If the weather closed in, a person could get trapped for days waiting for a flight out. And that just wouldn’t do at all, because Rohn didn’t even have a phone from which to feed stories back to the office.
In the gold-rush days, miners traveling the Iditarod Trail found a roadhouse waiting in Rohn. Now the only structure standing was a small 1930s-era cabin, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. It was reserved for race officials and veterinarians. There was a wall tent, equipped with a stove, where mushers could sleep; that was it for services. Rohn’s drawing card was solitude. Off in the spruce forest, away from most reporters and the excitement present in most villages, sled dogs got more rest.
Perhaps a dozen teams were camped at Rohn when I checked in at the cabin at 3:20 P.M. on Wednesday. I immediately declared my 24-hour layover. Over the next few hours, Lee, Daily, Alan Garth, Bill Peele, and, shortly after 8 P.M., Sepp Herrman, mushed into camp. No one remained on the trail behind us.
The mushers tending dog teams bedded in the sheltering spruce here represented Iditarod’s broad spectrum. We had experienced dog drivers such as Ace, Daily, and Herrman—three men who had shared their lives with sled dogs. And we had mushing adventurers like Peele, a 55-year-old pharmaceutical company employee from North Carolina, and Garth, a social worker from England. They were each driving dog teams leased from Old Joe’s huge kennel 90 days or less before the race.
Fetching water from the river with the help of a rickety camp ladder, I served my dogs three hearty meals during our leisurely stay in Rohn. I amassed a huge pile of surplus booties from the camp refuse heap. The checkers also allowed me and the other stragglers to dry personal gear over the cabin’s wood-stove.
On the advice of veterinarian Bob Sept, I gave each dog a foot massage, rubbing ointment into every paw. After 275 miles on the trail, three of my dogs had troublesome cuts or splits in their pads. My sore-footed trio—Screech, Cyrus, and the White Rat—had possessed iron paws during training. Therein lay the cause. They weren’t used to wearing booties and, Cyrus especially, kept pulling them off.
I was really worried about Cyrus. The young dog had stopped pulling on the final miles up to the checkpoint, and he seemed listless, quiet even. It was possible I might have to drop Rattles’s poor puppy.
“Could sore paws alone account for such a personality change?”
You bet, said the vet, who gave me a small vial of ointment for the cuts. I dabbed the goo on those sore paws every few hours, placing booties on afterward to keep the dogs from licking their toes clean.
A time adjustment was factored into each musher’s 24-hour layover. Since I had mushed the first dog team out of Anchorage, my mandatory stop was extended by 2 hours, 43 minutes, which boosted my layover to almost 27 hours. That accounted for the rude surprise I found waiting Thursday morning on the checker’s time sheet. Though I had beat five teams into Rohn, they were all scheduled out ahead of me.
By noon, everyone was scrambling to go, including the checkpoint staff. The musher’s tent disappeared before I took a planned nap. Flames danced over roaring trash barrels as vets and checkers burned everything nonessential. The crackling fires and smoke gave the scene an apocalyptic edge. I was anxious to get moving.
Lee and Garth were the last out before me. As I helped guide Lee’s dogs to the trail, I kidded Barry that he had better push his dogs for all they were worth, because we would be coming at him like a steamroller. He laughed. We both knew my dogs were