My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [60]
Daily passed us during the media ambush. Bidding the cameraman good-bye, I gave chase, steadily gaining ground as the trail twisted through sloughs and spindly shoulder-high spruce.
Nearing the Kuskokwim River, I saw a cluster of weathered shelters. Seeing the pole racks overlooking the bank, I guessed it had to be an old fish camp. The place looked deserted now, but in a few months those racks would undoubtedly sag under the weight of drying salmon.
“Who are you?” The voice came from the trees.
I blurted out my name.
“Great, I’ve been looking for you.” A photographer I knew from the Anchorage Times dashed out from behind the camp. He fell in behind the team on a snowmachine.
As we approached McGrath, the trail snaked through thick woods then abruptly dropped onto the Kuskokwim. Daily, taken by surprise, dumped his sled coming off the hill. When my team piled into his, dogs were sprawled everywhere. The photographer grabbed a shot of us as we straightened out our dog teams in the glow of the setting sun.
A Times reporter was waiting for me when I parked the dogs in front of Rosa’s Cafe. “How does it feel to go from first to last place?” he asked.
God, we’re such lemmings. I remembered being in this same place, asking similar predictable questions. Joe Runyan was the first musher to reach the Kuskokwim village that year, followed by Babe Anderson, the local favorite. Like the other reporters pestering the leaders that day, I hadn’t grasped the real story.
Neither Runyan nor Anderson had yet taken their required long break. They had chosen to push their teams through the Burn, all the way to McGrath, before starting the 24-hour clock. Consequently, their lead was illusory. Most of the other mushers in the race that year were, at that moment, in the process of completing their layovers at checkpoints en route. The incredible part was—they, too, were even then falling behind.
“The real story is behind us,” Runyan said. “Joe Redington, he’s your story.”
From Skwentna to Rohn that year, the front-runners had pushed each other, exhausting their dogs as they slogged through miles and miles of soft snow. Temperatures had dropped while Redington was nursing his flu. The trail, packed by the plodding race leaders, hardened to a racing glaze, perfectly timed to catapult Old Joe and Cannonball Herbie Nayokpuk once more into the fray.
“I feel like an old fox chased by fifty young hounds,” Redington said later that night, stomping his hook into the snow outside Rosa’s. Redington’s astonishing leap into the lead, 400 miles into the race he had founded, made for a good story, but no one considered him a serious contender, not at 70 years old.
Nayokpuk commanded more respect. The Inupiat musher from Shishmaref, then traveling close behind Redington, hadn’t been a threat since undergoing a heart operation several years before. But his announced retirement hadn’t lasted, and Herbie ended up finishing a respectable eighth in his comeback attempt. His overall record boasted finishes in every top-five spot—except first. At 54, Nayokpuk remained a long-shot contender.
Two hundred miles later, the Old Fox was even farther in front. By then, the story about his effort was assuming gigantic proportions. Could Redington pull it off? Debates raged in every cabin, seafront bar, or urban office in Alaska. An enterprising songwriter released “The Ballad of Smokin’ Joe,” which got heavy play on Alaska radio stations. Everyone was pulling for Joe.
Redington remained the leader in Ruby, the gateway to the Yukon River on the Iditarod’s northern route. Adults in the village cheered, and their children ran alongside the sled as Smokin’ Joe’s team trotted up the hill.
As the first musher to the Yukon that year, Redington earned the feast, which became a great media event. Photographers and cameramen jostled for position as the unkempt, wind-burned musher