17 feb 2005
The Beargrease
by Nanci Olesen
To learn more about the Beargrease, which
is run this coming weekend, go to http://www.beargrease.com.
I used to help my brother when he ran
a dog team in the John Beargrease Sled
Dog Marathon. The race has a long history
of excellence and heartbreak for mushers,
their dog teams and their extended families.
Fifteen years ago the race was 500 miles
long. It was run in January then, and there
were about 30 mushers in the northern United
States who qualified to compete along the Lake Superior shore to see who was the
fastest.
For a week in the winter, I would
leave Minneapolis and head to Duluth
with gallon zip lock bags of homemade split
pea soup and beef stew and brownies and
coffee to feed to the humans: the musher
and his handlers. I was along mostly as
a cook for the handlers and musher, but
everybody did everything to help, so there
I would be, stirring a vat of fish head
stew, that'd be the DOG's supper, over
a propane burner, by the back of a big
dog truck, near a huge snowbank, out at the end
of a parking lot, way off of a road somewhere
along the Beargrease Trail, at three in
the morning.
I did this year after year. When I became
a mother, I would set up elaborate child care schemes so that
I could get away from the work of poopy
diapers and night time feedings and around
the clock croupy babies to go up north so I
could stir fish head stew, and sleep on
a mat for two hours in the pool room of
some bar along the road and then get up
to chop frozen beaver meat for the dogs
and fry up some eggs for my brother.
You have to know what your musher needs:
sleep, food, reports on the progress
of the race. You have to be calm, confident
and have a lot of stamina. You have to
not mind how very smelly the whole thing
is: the smell of the dogs, the smell of the
strange stews they eat, the smell of
the musher and the handlers as the
days go on, and you have to not mind how
very, very cold it is. My brother would arrive
at a checkpoint in the night, his face
full of icicles, his dogs in need of rest,
and we would all kick in to high gear, getting the
dogs bedded down on straw, changing their
icy booties, giving updates on who was
where. We lived the race.
Nowadays, my brother mushes in the Northwest Territories of
Canada, where he lives in a remote wilderness homestead
with his wife and his 5 and 8 year old girls. Each girl has her own dogsled
and can wrestle two or three huskies into harness
and take off down the trail on her own. Five years
ago my brother was running his seventh
Yukon Quest. In the middle of the
race, he realized that he could no
longer pour his life savings and his entire
winter season into the running of these
world class races. He wanted to be home, with his 35 dogs, his
daughters, and his wife, on the shore of
Great Slave Lake, mushing and participating
fully in family life.
At home in Minneapolis, my kids and I tell each other stories
about Uncle Dave's dogsled races. We look
at pictures of their cousins, mushing their dog teams. I've managed to
get two out of three of the kids out of school, into trucks and planes
and, for the last two hundred miles, into a bush plane, to try their hand
at mushing the trail behind their cousins' log house.
Whenever we get good snow in Minneapolis, we drag our plastic
sleds to a big hill in our city neighborhood.
I lean into the wind so I can feel how I felt when I used to
ride on the back of the dog sled into the checkpoints. I hear news of the
race on the radio. It's all I can do to keep my mind
on my family and my work in the city. I know that there are dogs
and mushers and handlers out there along Lake Superior, who are cold and who
smell bad and are eating soup in the middle of the night by their truck,
running the Beargrease.
—Nanci Olesen
producer and host, MOMbo: 1990-2007 |
