Impossible Owls Read online

  At the briefing, Jay gave us some basic squadron vocabulary—“tallyho” if you’re able to spot whatever another flight member points out over the radio, “no joy” if you’re not—then showed us where the Iditarod Trail climbed over the Alaska Range, at Rainy Pass. That was where we’d be crossing the mountains into the interior. “Be prepared,” Jay said. “It’s kind of a maze up there, that stinkin’ pass. You take a wrong turn between those mountains, you wind up at a dead end, no room to turn around, and at that point it’s pretty much uh-oh time. Just watch your visibility, and if anybody doesn’t like what they see, give a shout on the radio and we’ll put ’em down till you feel comfortable.”

  “Guys, my dad’s not kidding,” Steve said. Steve was Jay’s son, on leave from Afghanistan and flying with us in Sunshine, Nugget’s yellow twin. He told us that the mountains were littered with sheet metal from old wrecks. “Nobody ever cleans up old wrecks in Alaska.”

  Flying through the pass was awesome. I mean in the sense of inspiring genuine awe. You are a dot moving among white clouds. White cliffs break through the clouds and you fly beside them. You’re not high up by mountain standards, twenty-five hundred feet, maybe a little more. But it feels like you’re in the sun’s own kingdom. For much of the crossing, the snow makes it impossible to tell where the ground is, and then when you spot it, it’s crazy, striations of ice and rock like the inside of a marble. It doesn’t seem to exist in any measurable relation to where you are. (Even crazier: the occasional glimpse of mushers and dog teams moving against this background, lowercase i’s crossing a sheet of crumpled paper.) Little canyon-like channels go wriggling off the main path. It’s like passing into another world.

  We touched down at the Rainy Pass checkpoint, a smooth plain below a small wooden lodge. White with purple shadows. It was cold, and the snow was knee-deep where it hadn’t been packed down by volunteers’ snow machines. We watched the dogs sleeping in piles of straw. We flew over Dalzell Gorge, the steep, twisty run where the trail descends toward the interior, dropping hundreds of feet in just a couple of miles. We flew over the freaky bleakness of the Burn. We flew over a herd of wild buffalo, then landed on an icy lake, just for a pause, moments before a musher, who knows which one, came bursting out of the trees on the far side. I got out my phone and snapped pictures.

  We flew north, ahead of the race. Airplanes—even Super Cubs, which would be pressed hard in a race against a riding lawn mower—go faster than sled dogs, so “following” the Iditarod means traveling out in front of it, stopping, and waiting for the mushers to come to you. Then you do it again, and so on till the finish line. Our first stop was the village of Takotna, where there was a lodge and a race checkpoint from which we could watch the mushers glide through.

  When we landed for fuel at McGrath, we heard that a Cessna 182 carrying three people had crashed after taking a wrong turn in the mountains. The pilot and both passengers were killed. They were following the Iditarod and bound for the same village where we planned to spend the night.

  * * *

  It turned out that Martin Buser, the musher whom I’d watched start the race, had come up with a strategy that was blowing people’s minds. He wasn’t stopping. Conventional Iditarod tactics call for frequent voluntary rest periods in addition to the two eight-hour breaks and one twenty-four-hour break mandated by the rules. Iditarod sled dogs are bred for stamina, but they need food and sleep. Mushers, who will be almost unimaginably sleep deprived by the time they reach Nome, need at least token periods of semi-unconsciousness.

  Buser, though? He ran from Willow to the Yentna checkpoint and stopped for just twenty-one minutes. Then he ran to Skwentna and stopped for half an hour. He ran to Finger Lake, in the snow country just before the mountains, and stopped for twenty-six minutes. Then he ran practically all the way over the Alaska Range on no rest. Through Rainy Pass on no rest. When he reached Rohn, just before ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, March 4, he’d driven his dogs nearly two hundred miles in less than twenty hours, and he hadn’t stopped for longer than it took to have a vet eyeball them at the checkpoints. It was demented, was the feeling on the trail. What the pound-sign-percent-asterisk-dollar-sign was the guy thinking?

  Then at Rohn, way earlier than most top mushers would even consider doing this, he declared that he was taking his twenty-four. And this move, which he later told reporters he’d spent eight months plotting out (I pictured the lonely candle in the window, Buser bent over the table with graph paper and a set of miniature pewter dogs)—this move, I think it’s fair to say, baffled Iditarod experts for the whole first two-thirds of the race. The Iditerati were confounded. Because while Buser was sleeping in Rohn, everybody else passed him, and passed him by a lot, by hours. But everybody else, and this was the rub, still had to take their twenty-fours. When they did, Buser would end up hours ahead of them. He’d have a huge lead, because of all the rest he’d skipped at the beginning. But could he cover the last nine hundred miles of the race without a significant break? Could his dogs handle it? The volunteers were shaking their heads at the checkpoints.

  Late Tuesday afternoon we landed at Takotna, in the Kuskokwim Mountains, about 170 miles northwest of Rainy Pass. There was fresh snow, deep snow, on the river, and two of the Cubs got stuck, their skis sunk too far to slide. A couple of villagers had to come down with snow machines to drive Jay and me back to where Steve and the Frenchmen were waiting with the stranded planes. The villager who drove me was Frankie. While we drove along the river she told me that she and her husband had a gold mine and that was how they made their living. They mined at Takotna in the summer and spent the winters in Homer. Every March, Frankie came back to Takotna to help with the Iditarod.

  But then everyone helped with the Iditarod in Takotna. According to the printout of a report about the village by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game that I stole from the dormitory where we spent the night, there were thirty-three households in the village and fifty-two people, evenly split between whites and Athabascan Indians, though Takotnans I talked to said that the number of full-time residents was really closer to thirty. Takotna could be a thousand times bigger and still be a pretty small town. But as an Iditarod checkpoint, it’s legendary. This year, thirty of the sixty-six mushers opted to take their twenty-fours here, and that’s only partly because it’s an ideal strategic resting spot, a little over a quarter of the way to Nome and safely past the rigors of the Alaska Range. It’s also due to the hospitality of the villagers, which is truly above and beyond. Every musher gets his or her choice of meal, and if that doesn’t sound impressive, please mull over the logistics of supplying and staffing a temporary restaurant kitchen in a remote Alaskan village of thirty-odd people that isn’t reachable by road. It’s a point of pride, even of identity, for the villagers. Kids get off school. Everyone works in twelve-hour shifts. When we arrived, none of the mushers had come in yet and here and there volunteers were counting the blue plastic bags that held the teams’ hay bales and making tiny checkmarks on their clipboards.

  There was a dining hall set up in the community center, and because Jay had made a donation to the village we were allowed to have dinner there, in a crowded warm room with long tables. Green-and-white plastic gingham tablecloths. I ate roast moose. Comprehensive Subsistence Harvests of Takotna, a report compiled by subsistence resource specialist Seth Wilson, a printout of which was just lying around in the dormitory where I’d already dumped my duffel bag, estimates that moose accounts for 77 percent, pound-wise, of wildlife harvested for subsistence purposes in the area, putting it well ahead of spruce grouse (4 percent), black bear (4 percent), and beaver (3 percent), and in easy lapping distance of pretenders like wild rhubarb, chinook salmon, and blueberry (1 percent each). You could fill a tiny plastic cup with Kool-Aid or Tang from the dispensers in one corner. I drank Kool-Aid and talked to Colin, the downy-bearded young guy who ran the local medical clinic. He could patch up bumps and bruises, he said. If anything serious happened, th
ey’d have to fly you out.

  Colin had a fascinatingly odd way of maintaining intense eye contact while simultaneously all but squirming with agony over the fact that he was being noticed—the way, say, your fifteen-year-old goth cousin might do. This was something I noticed time and again in the inhabitants of remote Alaska, this total, helpless acuteness in the presence of a stranger. It was as if isolation had kept them from numbing themselves to the fact of other people. You walk down the sidewalk in Manhattan and maybe you know on some level that every single person you pass is a constellation of memory and perception as huge and unique as whatever’s inside you, but there’s no way to really appreciate that on a case-by-case basis; you’d lose your mind. You get anesthetized, living among crowds, to the implications of faces. The terra incognita of every gaze, Saul Bellow calls it. Whereas if you walk up to a remote Alaskan, I mean just buying a bag of chips in the village store, a lot of the time the response you get is this sort of HELLO, VAST AND TERRIFYING COSMOS OF PERSONHOOD. The apertures are wide open.

  I took a walk through the village. Couple of roads twisting down a couple of hills, some pretty rough-looking houses. Moose antlers over the doorways. Things happen to the color blue during an Alaska twilight that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Imagine that the regular, daytime blue sky spends all its time floating on the night sky, the way you’d float on the surface of a pool. Now it’s submerging itself. You could see it vanishing upward. The cars looked derelict, half-buried in snow. Snowdrifts rammed up doorknob high against the houses. Every now and again a snow machine would go screaming by; the drivers always waved. Snow three and four feet high on the roofs.

  But it was such a warm place. I mean, fine, we’re all jaded here, but you could feel it: this fragile human warmth surrounded by almost unmanageable sadness. Outside the checkpoint building, the Takotnans had set up a row of burled tree stumps beside the flagpoles, and now two guys with chain saws were carving long crosscuts in the stumps. Each night during the Iditarod they’d pour diesel into one stump’s cuts and then light it, making a torch as wide as two people embracing that would burn for hours and hours. Mushers coming down the river toward the checkpoint would see the torches from—I don’t know about miles, but a long way off. Eight or nine villagers, along with a few volunteers, stood around the fire. Jay was there, talking about airplanes with Bernard—you could tell from the way he’d bank his hand at the wrist and slide it through the air. Christophe went around taking pictures. A little gang of kids played king of the hill on a snowdrift. The night just dwarfed all this. I mean a sadness that’s unmanageable in the sense that you can be in the middle of an outwardly happy scene and suddenly feel yourself ringed by it, feel it closing in, to the point that you have to excuse yourself for a while and go back to the dormitory where you’ve dropped off your duffel and regroup by reading whatever Seth Wilson–penned subsistence-harvest reports happen to be lying around in color-ink-jet printout form on the table.

  The first mushers started arriving around nine that night. You’d see dogs’ eyes shining green down the trail with the reflected light from the fire, then their bodies would emerge around them. Finally the musher would come sliding up. The mushers looked haggard, frost-rimmed. I hadn’t seen them up close for 180 miles, and the distance told. I kept thinking about a story Linwood told me at the Baldwins’ house, about how he’d arrived at a checkpoint one year at fifty below and one of his ears had turned black from frostbite. He hadn’t even noticed. The volunteers had to break the news. Volunteer pilots rushed him back to Anchorage so the hospital could save the ear. This year had been warm by Iditarod standards, teens and twenties, and when the dogs came to a stop they’d turn their heads upside down and flip over and shimmy in the snow to cool off. The mushers signed the checkers’ clipboard and then bang, they were off their sleds, putting down straw and scattering food for the team. Not wasting time. The volunteer vets came out in huge parkas and knelt by particular dogs. There were hasty conferences. “Is it a shoulder?” “A bicep.” “A bicep!” “He looks okay; I just want to get his breathing slowed.”

  Aliy Zirkle rolled in at 9:35, smiling; scowling Mitch Seavey followed ten minutes later. They both declared their twenty-fours. The crowd was thinning out. I stayed outside and watched Lance Mackey tend to his dogs. He was being shadowed on the trail by a personal camera crew, because Canada Goose, his primary sponsor, had decided to finance a documentary, tentatively titled Lance!, about his run through this year’s race. He started bedding down the team, looking bleary as hell, eyes kohled with red, beyond exhausted, unclipping harnesses and shucking out handfuls of straw, and here are two guys in shiny Canada Goose jackets orbiting him with a video camera and a boom mic, ten inches from his face, bright light on the camera, surreal. Hardly anybody was still out. A wonder-struck volunteer named Cindy watched him with her hands sort of romantically clasped, and he kept half eyeing her while he rubbed ointment into one of his dogs’ chests. “How’s the show so far?” he asked.

  “Well … you’re my first … this is my first Iditarod, so … pretty wonderful.”

  “Oh, is that right?”

  “Your dogs are beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s … it’s wonderful to see the magic of what you do.”

  “Stupid-ass harness, anyway,” he murmured to the dog, in sympathy.

  “You must be tired,” Cindy said.

  “I could use a little nap,” he said. “Actually fell asleep on the sled. Went out for about ten minutes back on the trail.”

  “Oh, goodness. Good thing your dogs know where to go.”

  “Ha! You’d think so. You wasn’t watchin’ ’em back at McGrath. Ran me right off the trail. Tried to give ’em a command and I might as well’ve spoke Japanese for all they was listenin’ to me. They were not. Listenin’. For shit.”

  Cindy made empathetic noises. Lance got up and strode into the checkpoint building. It was starting to fill up with mushers—standing in line for food, chatting with each other about dogs. Lance ordered a cheeseburger and talked to Aliy while he ate it. He took off his shoes and socks.

  I met Dick Newton. Jan’s husband. Remember the Queen of Takotna, with her pies? He introduced himself to me in the dining hall. “Introduced” is a strong word. He walked up to me and said, “Well, who are you?” Not in an unfriendly way. Just in a way that said he was eighty-two and still handled deep Alaska wilderness on a daily basis and maybe shouldn’t have to smile extra just because he met some kid who knew how to order pizza with an app. We started talking. He had weepy pale eyes and a grizzled John Brown beard and unkempt hair and liver spots. He wore a camouflage button-neck sweater with red suspenders. By trade he was a fur trapper. He could sell a marten pelt for two hundred dollars and a wolf pelt for three hundred. But martens were one hell of a lot easier to skin and haul around. He’d come to Alaska forty-plus years ago to work oil but gave it up because it meant spending months away from “her,” not specifying who that was. My heart felt like a helium balloon when he said that. Just reporting. Everyone in Takotna called him “my uncle.” He’d made the trip from the village to Nome via snow machine for twenty-one straight years, and he was going again this year, with a buddy. “Call ourselves Team Viagra,” he said. The distance from Takotna to Nome is way more than six hundred miles. Actually, his buddy hated the name Team Viagra. “But that’s how it is.”

  He’d known frenzied living in his time. In the sixties he did detective work in Sacramento, but he couldn’t make ends meet kicking down motel doors. “I gave it up for my health,” he growled. “I was starvin’ to death.” He kept finding himself on the wrong side of the law, without quite knowing how it happened. He described police chases, remembered hiding out in bars. Alaska had loomed for him as a possibility of freedom, a life of not being interfered with. In the nineteenth century, he’d have lit out for the Territory.

  “I kept seein’ the inside of them jail cells in California,” he told me. “But up here
, a fella can do just about anything he’s big enough to do.”

  He let me take his picture. “I don’t care,” he said. He wouldn’t smile or look at the camera. I got him to laugh by asking about books. He read a lot, he told me, but he never remembered anything he read, so he only had a few books in his cabin. They were good ones. He kept cycling through them again and again, always encountering them as if he were reading them for the first time.

  That night a storm blew in and didn’t let up. The whole next day is kind of a blur. We were stranded till the weather cleared. I remember Jay hopping behind the food counter at the checkpoint building, grilling bacon for the mushers. Linwood slid up to the checkpoint late in the morning, looking five years older and vacant; he gave Jay a hug, then me one. “I know now that this run is a celebration,” he said. “I’m not racing to win, I’m racing to be here.”

  Everyone was asking when Martin Buser would arrive. He pulled in a little after one o’clock and stopped for just eight minutes. His rivals were sleeping in the village; it was time for his big passing move. By the time Mitch and Aliy left town, they were nine hours behind him. Still no one could say whether his strategy made any sense.

  I remember standing on the riverbank, looking down at our planes on the river. It was still snowing. A small airplane emerged from the clouds overhead, and Dick the fur trapper, who was tottering past, squinted up at it and said, without changing his expression, “Ol’ Blackie. Come after all. Blackie, you crazy bastard.”

  There were dogs everywhere; of course there were. Sleeping in every hollow. They seemed different here than they’d been in Anchorage, calmer, more noble somehow. They’d watch you watching them, snow on their foreheads, faces shagged with ice. In the late afternoon, they started waking up in large numbers. There was no barking. Dog teams when they’re contented do these controlled, sustained group howls. A pack thing, I guess. They did that now, till Takotna rang with it. The sound prickled the hair on the back of my neck. That was how I spent the afternoon—walking through the village while the air filled up with the sound of the dog teams singing.