I dont know whether the following made the editors cut for “Iditarod: The First Ten Years”. Its an excerpt from a draft of something I submitted and apt to the mood of a dark and windy December night. The book is finished and printed so the powers that be wont mind if I prune out a few lines and share them. Its a testimonial to how little the race, or the trail, has changed in all these years. It was written years prior to last years race: One of them, weary, worn, and disheveled–frostbitten and nearly incoherent, when congratulated at the finish line said, “Im not the winner – Im the survivor”, in obeisance to fellow mushers who had quit the trail, unable for a multitude of reasons to reach its end – victims of circumstance in a time before trail preparation had evolved into a priority. A time when the norm for a days travel might include unbroken trail, bare ground, rock, jumbled ice, and predictably – broken sleds and battered bodies. Sometimes just an unbearable accumulation of bad luck, lost trail, or the misery of frost split fingers caused otherwise strong hearts to wilt – or endless miles of bottomless trail to cause disheartened dogs to signal “enough”, and mutiny. Even, or especially, in the closing days of the race, the fearsome catabatic winds of the Topkak blow hole and nights fraught with mind-numbing exhaustion and hallucination offered up more reasons to quit than to continue. In the end however, what drove them all, was the certainty that whoever survived to the finish would be forever proud – and whoever survived first would never be the same again...
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 06:25:36 +0000
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