Out the door yet again, into winter…

 

Hello to you all far and wide. I am smack dab in the midst of the tenth and final dogteam course with Augustana University students. 

We have done these 15-day winter expedition courses here in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2017,2019,2022… and now this year. And this is the last hurrah. The grand finale.  Prof retiring, program at the school ending, and — perhaps —  a dwindling level of interest in such adventures amongst the coming generation.  All food for thought, and speculation. 

I am on the layover day between two six-day trips. The first one was stormy and we dragged in late yesterday. Pulling out again tomorrow.  Tonight, month’s end looming,  I post this passage from the first chapter of Kinds of Winter, describing a long-ago morning in February, 2002:

“I woke early, feeling rested and calm. I savoured the little luxuries of cabin life as I sat and read for the first time an obscure essay by Thoreau, “A Winter Walk.” “We sleep,” he begins, “and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning.”

Bare feet, porcelain coffee mug, the pulsating glow and soft hiss of gas lights. It would be several weeks, I knew, before life would again be so physically luxurious. I was finished getting ready, and I had made my peace with the long delay of the preparation days just past. A person can only do so much in a day, in a year, in a life. In middle age I desperately needed to accept that, or I would wind up rushing forever, in a foul and frustrated mood, with lacklustre results.

I was still nagged with worry about my sled, though. I had finally pushed it out the door of the cluttered workshop the night before. It was a long narrow sled I had built twelve years earlier. Its unorthodox slenderness (16 inches instead of the usual 20), along with its yellow nylon cargo bag, had quickly earned it the nickname “The Banana.” Kristen, who has always disliked driving it, has other names for it, by far the most polite of which is “that horrible yellow thing.” Its long ash runners are cracked and splinted. In a desperate last-ditch fix, I had bolted on a pair of three-inch-wide, half-inch-thick runner shoes of high-density polyethylene. When I finally launched it out the workshop door that night, it did not slither gracefully across the snow. It landed with a thud and stuck there like something inert until I put a shoulder to it and heaved it toward the dog yard. New cold snow, fine-grained and windblown, is more like dry sand than frozen water. I could only hope that milder weather would ease the laws of physics for the first few days, while we climbed heavily laden out of the basin of Great Slave Lake.

The main thing, I had to remind myself, was that I was going. If a man always postponed departure until every last thing was perfect, he would never leave home. Over the morning my innards gradually tightened, and the peace of that Thoreauvian dawn was replaced by tension. I had set out on enough big trips and long races to know that the easing of that tension would only come a few days down the trail—if I could find the trail. “Well, if we can’t find a trail,” I said out loud to the puzzled dogs, “We’ll just have to make one.”

At a few minutes past noon I stepped onto the runners and yanked the snub line free of the hitching post. The yelping dogs fell silent as they instantly shifted their efforts from insane barking to a smooth slow lope. We crossed the ten-mile breadth of McLeod Bay in just over an hour. It was the fastest, easiest ten miles we would make on the entire trip.

At Reliance, the home of our nearest neighbours sits on the prominent point across from the abandoned weather station. Beside the weather station is a cluster of buildings where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (mounted on dogsleds instead of horses at this location) maintained a detachment for nearly forty years. Those buildings are now a sport fishing lodge and retreat, but the lodge is open and occupied only in summer. The manned weather station closed in the early 1990s, replaced by an automated weather device that transmits its data via satellite. There is also an old trading post at Reliance, now occupied by mice and voles, and a cache of aviation fuel in drums that are delivered by barge. Little by little, year by year, the entire outback of the North is losing its year-round human presence, and on no route of mine would this be more apparent than on the trip south.”