This is a cute video I made when I was in high school. Old-school quality... You can tell how much I loved epic music. My dad, Jerry Troshynski, narrates.
Boots
It was twenty miles from the Kennel, the apex of my forty mile run. I'd been across this lake many times, my team hugging the shoreline in a well-coordinated line of pairs. The dogs were seasoned now, at least more seasoned than they had been. Every dog in the team was only one year old, except Poydras, my reliable leader, my good boy. Putting up with all the hooplah of nine doofusy, excitable yearlings, with a stoic disposition, one ear up and one ear down. In the February air the breath of my team gathered up and clouded. I was a yearling, too, really, only fifteen and no more seasoned than them. It was my first winter that way, and I was learning. I had sat through tangles that lasted three hours. I'd worked night and day with the dogs, even camped under the moon and stars with them. I scooped and fed and watered. I cared for them. It was the best winter of my life, and this was the last run before the end.
I felt confident, which was the first of my mistakes. The next run I did would not be a run, but a race. Not training, but the real thing. My team was fast and together and unbeatable. I was right about that in some ways. I wouldn't be the one to prove it, though. But that is a story for another time.
On this day, this last run, I knew I was coming up on a lake. A frozen white I knew well. The trail was burned into the back of my mind, Gee here, Haw here. Left turn off the embankment down onto the snow-covered ice.
But one more thing I knew well, too, was the right hand turn I always saw, just before the Haw that took us onto the lake. This right hand turn went into the woods along the shore, up a hill and who knows where. I'd seen this trail over and over, and I was curious. I knew it met up with the lake trail on the other side of the hill. I saw the exit. It was a little trail option, less than an eighth of a mile, if that. I wondered what it looked like, up that hill, through those trees.
And since I was confident, and since I was curious, I didn't pay attention to the fact that there were no fresh tracks along that trail, not even from a snow machine. I didn't look up to where the trees were closer in. I was unbeatable, after all. I Gee'd my team over, and they took the right. We began to climb the hill.
In any good disaster, there are a few elements leading up to the climactic crisis.
When I came to the kennel that morning-- early enough to help with 5 am chores-- someone had taken the boots I normally wear. The boots we use on the trail are monster boots, puffy concoctions to put Frosty and the Michelan Man to shame. They come from Northern Outfitters. Mushers swear by them- Certainly my mentor, Martin Buser, did. He's run and won a few more Iditarods than I have, so his word on this holds water. The whole insulating system is a one-layer beast, made of thick synthetic foam that requires next to nothing underneath. With the boots, no socks. With the bibs and parka, maybe a set of long johns, but nothing more. Everything I wore mushing belonged to Martin and his family. Since his young sons (who were about my size) were just getting into mushing too, the family had invested in kid-sized arctic wear, including boots. They generously shared the gear with me. Today, though, one of the boys was using the smallest set of boots, the set I normally wore. For this run, I'd need to wear the only other pair available, another size up.
That morning, too, the kennel handler, Andy, had packed my sled. He had run the race I was about to four times himself, and he was fanatic about getting ready. "You have to pack like it's for the race," he told me, so he set up my sled full of everything I needed: sleeping bag, axe, snow shoes, dog food cooker, dog food, people food... And a pair of polypropylene socks he said he swore by. "But I don't need socks," I pointed out. It didn't matter: he stuck them in a ziploc bag and stuffed them into my sled.
When I set out on my run, the temperature was cold, but not too cold. Fifteen above, a comfortable cool. My dogs were happy and wired: my run was set to be fairly short, compared to the eighty mile treks we'd been taking. Why shouldn't I explore? Why shouldn't I take the right turn?
The dogs lunged up in speed to hear a new command. They are explorers, too, and a new trail is a thrilling one. We began to make the climb. Maybe then I noticed there weren't tracks on this hill, just fresh snow. A little trail breaking: good for them, I thought. And a little ahead were trees. It was the woods. What could I expect?
What I didn't expect, when I reached the top of that short climb, was the overgrowth. Every fall, as the snow begins to build, mushers go out into their trails and tend the routes. Trails that never see summer foot prints must be "brushed out." Willows and poplars crowd in during the warm months and try to take back the winter courses. Old trees fall and bar the way. Undergrowth springs up and remains dense and prickly after autumn kills it off. Snow machiners will sometimes clear the main paths; but it's the mushers who must tend those back woods trails that no one else will travel.
No snow machiner had come here. No musher cleared the way. This was a little turn option no one bothered with. At the top of the hill, it was no longer a trail.
To the dogs, this meant nothing. They stand two feet at the shoulder, at most, and to them it was just a new game to duck under the sapplings weighted down by snow, bowing and crowding over the only way to go. I, too, tried to duck, but even at my modest height of 5'2", I couldn't crouch low enough to avoid the whip smack of the hundred branches clawing out. Brush hit my face, my arms, my eyes. I had to keep my eyes open-- where were we going? I had to see! And there was nowhere to stop, and no way to stop. The dogs were too excited. Too revved on this new type of game. All I could do was dig in and hang on and--
A branch hit me square in the face and somehow the shock of it knocked me back, off the runners, off the sled--
But the number one rule in mushing, the first, second, and third requirement, the mantra you chant in the back of your brain is "Never Let Go of the Sled."
So as my feet and head and body went flying back in shock and disproportion, my hands clamped down with all the life I had.
Then I was dragging.
I've heard it called "Super-Man"-ing. I thought of it (even as it occured) as being Indiana Jones dragging behind the Nazi Military Jeep in the Lost Crusade. Either way, my iron grip hands were clinging to my upright sled, and I was dragging behind. Snow pounded, clung, dug at me. I scraped along the scraggy trail at a fifteen MPH clip. My dogs were in ecstasy, the joy of running wiping clean any care they might have had for their stupid two-legged pack-friend struggling along behind them.
There's a weird moment when you are dragging, without the ability to pull yourself up, where you have time to think of many things. The comparison of your present situation to super heroes and movie stars. The stupidity of the choices leading to this moment. And now, the feel of the trail tugging on your feet. Especially at your boots, which are too large.
There was little I could do. The speed of the dogs picked up: I could feel us begin to head down hill. The friction and G-force working against me defied my fifteen-year-old abs and arms, no matter how muscled they'd become since I started working with dogs. My boots were beginning to be pulled off my feet.
It happened fast, then. There was a distinct popping feeling, and my boot was gone, sucked off my foot and taken by the trail.
Maybe this powered me; maybe I knew if I didn't stand up my other boot was gone too-- However it happened, the next thing I knew I was standing again, wearing one boot and staring at a bare foot riding a runner on the snow. It was a ridiculous sight. I looked behind me. No boot to be seen. Nowhere to stop still-- I had to be able to tie the team to something solid, and these woods were all sapplings and brush. We were still careening down the hill at car-chase speed. I was using my bare right foot on the drag to slow us down, mindless of the cold against my toes, but mindful of the sheer stupidity of this whole situation.
The hill came down, hard, onto the lake. Still there was no where to stop, certainly no trees big enough at which to tether a team. No chance I'd try to hook down into ice and hope that would be enough. I wasn't going to make that mistake too.
The lake was big. The trail crossed the middle, here. I wasn't about to deviate from the set course, now that I had rejoined it. I had enough of exploring. But it was below freezing and my foot was remarkably bare to the world. I was twenty miles (two or three hours) from home. I needed my boot.
The team had settled down a bit, trotting at a sedate ten MPH. Still there was nowhere to stop, not reasonably, and every foot I traveled I knew was a foot I'd have to walk back. I thought about turning them around-- And thought of the disaster trying to U-Turn nine yearlings on a lake would be. I couldn't walk without being crooked. That wasn't going to work.
"Hello?" answered Martin cheerfully. I imagined him in his office, taking care of daily paperwork.
"Martin?" I said. "I lost my boot."
There was a pregnant pause.
"What?" he finally asked.
I explained what had happened.
There was another small silence as he absorbed this.
"Well," he said. "You better go get it!"
He told me to tie out the team and feed them, to make sure they couldn't run. I was able to say I had done that much at least.
This was the tricky part. A dog team, given its own means, will happily take off without you. The team could really care less if you are attached to or involved with the sled. Thus the mantra: Never Let Go of the Sled. Now I would have to break the second most important mantra: Never Step Behind your Sled. Step behind the sled, no matter how attached or hooked or anchored the team may be, and inevitably your dogs will chose at that moment to break all bounds and disembark on a trip of their own, leaving you alone and bootless on the trail.
Then again, I couldn't mush twenty miles home without a shoe. That was asking for trouble, and throwing away a pretty expensive piece of equipment besides. As the man said... I had better go get my boot.
Lucky for me, Andy had ignored my protest about the polypro socks.
There was no way I could clunk my way back up the trail with one boot on and one boot off. To move fast, I had to remove the other boot. To try to give myself some kind of barrier from the cold, I'd need to use the socks. I pulled them out of the sled and looked at them dubiously. "These better work as well as you claim, Andy," I thought, and took off my other boot.
The socks were thin. Remarkably thin. Light; and warm. My one bare foot was grateful for a cover, little though it may be. I didn't have time to luxuriate. Both socks on, I began to run.
As I trotted back over the trail, I looked down. Amongst the pawprints and sled tracks, over the snow machine tread, I left size-seven bare foot prints in the snow. I laughed and laughed in my head. What would someone think when they came this way? "The smallest sasquatch in the world came walking over the lake today. I saw its footprints in the snow."
I came to the far shore, to the hill my team had flow down. A steep climb now. I dug in, a steady pace. The top of the hill, looking left and right. Ducking under brush and trees. And then... Down hill again? I had reached the beginning of the trail. No boot. I stood breathing hard, hands on my hips. This wasn't good. No choice-- I turned around and made my way back. Had to look again. Slower this time, walking now. Looking hard... And there. Off the trail, ten or fifteen feet. In a big clump of devil's club, of course. Thorns prickling every direction. I tip toed my way in, reaching with bare fingers for the very edge of the boot. Reclaimed. Victory. And of course I yet again only had one boot, so I couldn't put it on.So I carried my boot back to my team, who had mercifully stayed put. They wagged their tales in happy confusion and greeting, and barked to know if we could go again. Both boots on, my sled re-packed. I hooked the team back up and headed home. This time, I stayed on the trail.
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