“We should have found that shelter by now,” he said.
Bowing to the elements, we hastily made camp. The dogs immediately pawed cozy niches in the snow. I staggered up the gang line, plowing through waist-deep powder, and tossed each dog a chunk of beef and a six-inch piece of Kobuk sausage fat. Not much of a meal, but it was too windy to fire up the cooker, and the dogs needed something. Right now, navigation was the problem. There was no telling what this storm might bring. Or how long this forced shutdown might last.
I flipped my sled on its side, dumping the contents. I’d packed everything in stuff bags with just this sort of emergency in mind. Placing the sled upright, I stripped off my snowmachine suit, shook it off, and stretched it across the bottom of the toboggan for insulation. Next, I unpacked my sleeping bag — a Tangerine Dream expedition-quality bag from North Face, supposedly warm to 40 below zero — and laid it across the suit. Kicking off my bunny boots, I slipped into the sleeping bag. Sitting with my back to the stanchions supporting the handlebar, I took off my headlamp and clipped it to an inside pocket, angling the beam to light the sled’s interior. Almost done now, I grabbed the open flap of the sled bag and pulled it overhead. Then I pressed the Velcro strips together and sealed myself inside. My sled bag had become a survival cocoon.
Wedged inside the tight shelter, I congratulated myself for buying sledmaker Tim White’s extra-long-model Iditarod toboggan. The situation would be far, far worse, I told myself, if I had skimped and bought White’s standard sled, which was six inches shorter. Focusing on the small triumph was more comforting than dwelling on the big picture.
At the beginning of the race, two scenarios scared me: falling through ice into open water on a cold night, or getting nailed by a storm in an exposed section of the trail. I wasn’t even a quarter of the way to Nome and already I felt like a lamb tied to the dark gods’ altar.
Living on the Lower East Side, the biggest threat from the environment had been being mugged. I always left the cab garage on Ninth Avenue with a camera bag slung over my shoulder, and $75 to $100 cash tucked in my right sock. I worked too hard to stuff $8 in another cabbie’s pocket. Instead I caught the subway at Times Square, which was still a lively place at five o’clock in the morning.
Over time, I grew careless. Trains were few, and long delays were common at that time of the morning. I began to stray farther and farther from the protected area near the token booth, seeking more comfortable places to sit, with better light for reading the newspaper. My favorite spot became the fourth or fifth step of an unused staircase at the far end of the lower subway platform. The staircase led to a closed section of the station. The top of the stairs was sealed by a fence.
One morning, a voice intruded on my reading.
“You know it’s not very safe here,” said a young black man, standing so close I could have reached out and touched the gold chains around his neck. He smiled, introduced himself as “The King,” and welcomed me to his dominion.
Two of his friends quietly approached from opposite sides of the platform as the King and I bantered. I calmly stood up and stretched, taking stock of the situation. The platform ahead of me was empty. Standing on the staircase I had the advantage of height. But I was also cornered by the hand rails and the fence behind me.
“What’s in the bag?” The King said, pointing at my camera bag. The bag contained three Olympus 35-mm camera bodies, several lenses, and a powerful flash — my entire life, or so it seemed at the time.
Instead of answering the King, I smiled. Not because I saw a way out. I smiled because I was an idiot, because my back was to the wall in the confrontation every city dweller fears, because there was no avoiding any fate, and because, mainly because, surrender wasn’t an option.
The King and his friends sauntered away.
My breath was loud inside the sled bag. So was the ticking of my watch. The wind was a divine fist, rocking my sled with each blow. Each gust sent tiny jets of snow through gaps in the Velcro. Illuminated by my headlamp, snow crystals rained down on my sleeping bag in shimmering streams. I pried the Velcro strips apart and squeezed them together more carefully, shoring up my defenses.
Madden had talked me into buying a dozen packets of processed salmon. He swore that it would taste like candy on the trail. And the salmon is so oily that it remains soft enough to eat, regardless of the temperature.
Two packets of the salmon were stowed in the sled bag’s inside pocket. I dug one out and cut it open with my folding Buck knife. The fish was cold and stiff, but it crumbled easily into bite-sized bits. I chewed slowly, savoring the intense flavor. Then I licked the greasy wrapper clean. Madman knew what he was talking about.
Carefully opening the sled bag, I checked the dogs. Those I could see were curled in tight balls, mostly covered with blankets of snow. Resealing the cocoon, I dug my toes into the sleeping bag and wiggled inside. Then I switched off the headlamp and huddled in the dark, listening to the wind.
Strange to say, I felt peaceful stuck on top of Rainy Pass. There was no escape. I was again cornered. So what? I wasn’t beaten. And I wasn’t close to surrendering. This was a delay. Nothing more. For the first time in weeks, there were no decisions to make, and no schedules to keep. The storm had me in its grip, and all I could do was ride it out.
Iditarod’s leader was furious.
Instead of taking his 24-hour layover in Rohn, Nikolai, or McGrath, where the other front-runners halted, Terry Adkins kept his dogs on the march, gambling on his mountain-conditioned dogs’ ability to grab an insurmountable lead. The veteran’s strategy hinged on two factors, both of which were beyond his control. To delay the pursuit, he needed a storm, preferably on the 90-mile trail to Iditarod, the ghost town that gave the race its name. He also needed the support of Iditarod’s trailbreakers, the volunteer snowmachiners who open the lead musher’s trail. The timing of their work was crucial. If the snowmachines got too far in front, their work could vanish in drifts. If they weren’t far enough ahead, the trail might not “set,” or harden, in time for the lead musher’s passage.
Adkins got his storm, but the trailbreakers were running too far ahead. He battled drifts in the final miles leading to Ophir. Continuing on alone was out of the question. He filed an official protest with race officials. He angrily told reporters that he might even scratch. The mushing Montanan, with more Iditarods under his belt than anyone else, vowed to make this race his last.
“It’s like living with a woman for 17 years and finding out she’s unfaithful,” Adkins told the Anchorage Daily News.
The complaints and threats were meaningless. Adkins knew it. Words weren’t going to part the white sea blocking the race leader’s trail.
When I poked my head out of the dark cocoon, the sky was clear, and the terrain was nothing like I expected. Ace and I were not, as I had thought, camped on a downward slope. Our teams rested in a flat, exposed bowl.
Ace could hardly believe his eyes. The survival shelter stood a few hundred yards away. I was more surprised when I looked at my watch. Nine hours had passed!
The dogs, and the gear I’d tossed out, were cemented around the sled in white mounds. There was no trace of a trail. But the route ahead was clearly defined by a line of fluorescent orange strips waving from bushes in the gentle breeze. I looked up the line of markers to the notch at the end of the bowl, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The pass.
I turned to Rainy. “You knew right where we were last night. Didn’t you girl?”