EAST MONTPELIER — The year 1985 has often moved me to invoke Shakespeare: “So fair and foul a year I have not seen.” But let’s focus on just the fair for the next few minutes. In the middle of an Alaskan February night, Dudley and I were skiing on a trail through thick spruce bush by the light of the aurora, the stars and our now old-fashioned headlamps. Somewhere ahead of us, it was impossible to know just where, was the next checkpoint on the Iditarod Trail. We really needed some sleep and something hot to eat. The checkpoint was probably only a wall tent with a spruce-bough floor on the snow, but it would have a stove and maybe some warm Gatorade. We plodded onward, our pulks hissing on the snow behind us.
About one in the morning, a night completely still and cold, I smelled smoke very faintly in the air. I told Dud; he couldn’t smell it. But about 15 minutes later we spotted a white wall tent, dimly lit inside, and pulled gratefully to a stop. I dug out the freeze-dried pasta, along with a saucepan and two soup spoons from my pulk, and we tumbled joyfully inside.
Unlike the previous checkpoints (there was one about every 25 miles) this one had no one up to greet us. A Coleman lamp was burning. The cast-iron box stove was only warm, and two young women, the checkpoint crew, lay wrapped in heavy Alaskan sleeping bags on cots at the back. The temperature inside was about freezing. I opened the stove. Chunks of spruce saplings lay smoking inside. Dud asked for the axe, picked up several fresh sticks, and started splitting them. I scooped snow into the sauce pan and started warming it up with what heat we had.
“What’s he doing?” asked one of the hibernators. I told her that the only way to burn softwood in a stove was to split it. “Oh,” she said. Clearly, not everyone we met in the bush was a sourdough. In 15 minutes the place was up to at least 60 degrees, and 30 minutes later Dud and I were gobbling pasta, meatballs, and tomato sauce from the pan. We decided not to try to sleep, but press on to Skwentna Roadhouse.
There’s no road to Skwentna Roadhouse, which wasn’t quite finished yet. The windows were double sheets of plastic stapled over the openings. Light ski planes were parked on the river ice out front. Anomalously, the main room was heated by a Vermont Soapstone stove. It’s a checkpoint for the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, whose track we were following, and, for us, the halfway point of our own 200-mile ski race. As we stomped in, the cook asked, “You want bacon and eggs or pancakes?”
“Yes!” we shouted as one. Lordy, how we ate! and then collapsed into bunks and slept like logs. In late afternoon we roused again, packed our pulks, and headed off down the Skwentna River. It was going to be another cold night. We were not at all troubled with difficulty in choosing the appropriate ski wax.
Just before dusk, the sunlight fading and the thermometer dropping (it got down to 26 below that night), Dud stopped, turned around, and said, “Look!” I did. There behind us rose the mighty Alaska Range, bathed in a half-dozen shades of alpenglow. The two of us stood there, transfixed, tears freezing on our cheeks. We knew we’d never see such a sight again. Then we turned and resumed our ski down the river.
In the middle of the night, another checkpoint, a rather posh log cabin with a stack of fresh, warm cinnamon buns and a huge carafe of sweet tea. Oh, my! Then off again. We hoped to finish the race sometime in the coming day. Along the way, we came to a sign on the riverbank: “Skiers Welcome. Chili.” We climbed a long set of rough wooden steps to a one-room cabin in which a couple of elderly Indianans had homesteaded. We gourmandized on chili, and Dud changed the old man’s life.
It’s what Dudley did; he was a fixer, a physician to the core. The old man had been wounded at Iwo Jima by a bullet that had severed the muscle to his eyelid. He couldn’t close that eye, and wore a wet paper towel over it to keep out dust. Dud sat him down knee-to-knee, checked him over, and announced he had a friend in Anchorage who could fix him. “He’ll split the jaw muscle and attach half to your eyelid. You’ll get used to clenching your jaw to blink, and the eyelid will work again.”
We left two very happy old folks behind and turned our attention to reaching Knik Lake, where we’d started, before the dark made us dig out our headlamps. And we were right. We never saw the Alaska Range like that again.
