Superlative.
That’s the only word I can think of to encapsulate our experience this weekend.
On Friday night, at about 8:30 pm, Carly and I packed our sleeping bags and all our gear, and pulled anxiously onto the #2 highway. Pointed northeast, we forged through ice, snow, and unexpected rain toward the remote and undisputedly wild Anglin Lake. We were going dogsledding.
It’s something I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. Childhood reveries filled with huskies and wolves frequented my vivid imagination, aided no doubt by the occasional Jack London novel or inspiring Disney movie. But I never really thought that, one day, these lifelong dreams might actually come true.
December 25, 2007: I’m on a treasure hunt at my parents’ house. By now, Carly has been holding the surprise of my Christmas present over my head for months. With each find, I obtain an actual puzzle piece and a poem, but remain clueless; each piece of the puzzle is pure white, save one with a shoe in it. And then Carly reveals the final piece.
Oh Cool, I thought, upon completing the puzzle. It was a picture of a dogsled team on the run. Of course, with my personal dream being so far removed from plausibility in my mind, I had no idea as to what the picture meant in terms of my Christmas present.
“Honey,” Carly said, pointing. “That’s gonna be you!”
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?” It seemed to good to be true.
“You’re going dogsledding!”
“No way!” More tears than words followed. Surely, only the best wife in the world would take your oldest, most cherished childhood dream, and then turn it into reality. I was humbled. Turns out that Carly had garnered support from both her parents and mine to pitch in for the excursion. Carly’s brother and his wife and my sister and her fiancé also chipped in. I was lost in awe at everyone’s generosity.
So, almost two antsy months of waiting went by, until this weekend. It was go-time!
Carly and I spent one night at a hotel in Waskesiu as we awaited the start of our mush. We took a late-night walk around the snow-doused village, lay down in a snow bank off the lakeshore to admire the stars. We were in wonder at the stillness of it all. That night, we polished off a bottle of Chardonnay as our excitement built at the adventure to come. After a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast, we were off.
Just twenty minutes away was Sundogs Sled Excurisons (
http://www.sundogs.sk.ca/), a private kennel and business, 28 Alaskan Huskies strong. Both of our jaws dropped as we pulled up to the small, solar-powered cabin in the woods, and remarked at the jumping, yelping, eager pack of dogs.
Brad was the owner and guide, who greeted us warmly and sent us inside the house. There, we met Tania, another guide, and Marcia, Brad’s girlfriend whom I already knew as a fellow school board employee. It was a pleasant surprise to hear that Marcia would be joining us on our excursion (something she’s never done, apparently). What a coincidence.
It was a beautiful day, at times above zero, I’m sure. I was so anxious to get mushing that I became almost agitated with anticipation. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go!” I wanted to say. But it wasn’t long before we were harnessing up the gentle canid beasts who were dead-set on running and gloriously bold about it. The snow hook quivered in the ground, trying precariously to hold the sled against the raw muscle power of eight dogs, hungry to charge away. Carly and I hopped in the sled atop all of our gear. Brad jumped on the back to control it. “Okay guys,” he yelled and a fantastic jolt took us barrelling down the trail. It was amazing how fast the dogs pulled the sled with the three of us and all our gear inside. We zoomed across the snowy trail, pushing ourselves exhilaratingly into a mild February breeze. The dogs seemed born to pull the way a fish is born to swim. Eat, sleep, pull. There was nothing else, and they’d not have had it any other way. Those dogs were never more content, not ever, than when they were pulling the sled. It was through the most rigorous exercise that they were most at ease, most relaxed. Any stoppage of the sleigh resulted in annoyed, almost ornery dogs, flustered at the very thought of staying still for an instant.
Brad was eager to answer my millions of questions as we rode the sled toward camp, a few miles away. Snowmobilers rounded corners in amazement of us, and waved enviously as we upstaged their fun exponentially. I sat behind Carly and so, through the narrowest of trails, she had to steer my feet clear of jack pine and spruce trees, which seemed to pop up out of nowhere along the way. This was the life!
Camp was an unassuming duo of canvas trappers tents, along with three snow quinzees off the shore of a small frozen lake. We pulled in and took the dogs off the sled for a well-deserved rest. Lunch time.
Carly had opted to take me on the catered version of the excursion. Awesome, I thought. We’ll be eatin’ burgers and hot dogs, brown beans. It’s true; I do love that stuff. But I was wrong – so wrong. So wondrously wrong. The word “catered” was not a misnomer. Lunch consisted of roast beef and cheddar, and ham and havarti sandwiches, grilled to perfection on the heat of a wood stove. Cookies garnished the meal in good fashion, and we washed it all down with the universal soul beverage: hot chocolate. Supper that night outdid the previous meal – tortellini (perfectly al dente), with a tangy tomato sauce, and Italian sausages. We chased the main course with brie cheese and crackers, and then were dumbfounded to see Marcia pull out a decadent chocolate cheesecake. I mean, here we were, in the middle of nowhere, in a tent in the woods – eating like royalty.
As a part of the afternoon’s chores, we chiselled an 18-inch deep hole in the lake ice with a giant pick for water. When we finally hit the water, it rushed up into the hole like a geyser, and dozens of tiny freshwater shrimp came with it. “You can eat those,” Brad said, but shrimp is not my favourite. We hauled water back to the camp for boiling. How’d it taste, you ask? A bit lakey, I’d say, but refreshing nonetheless.
That afternoon, Carly and I made a hilarious-looking snowman, whom we named Conan the snowman. We’d given him an overbearing swoop of hair above his forehead, just like the talk show host O’brien. Later, Brad told us that “Kona” was the Inuit word for snow. Kona, Conan. Close enough, we thought.
It wasn’t long before we were out on the trail again. Carly was hilariously suited up in a giant parka by the way, which wore more like a dress than a coat.
I wore my own jacket and moisture-deflecting pants from Lululemon, courtesy of David and Megan Brown. Now, Brad let Carly and I have a turn at steering. Carly was up first. Wow, I thought. I really did marry the girl of my dreams. Carly steered that sled like it was her job, like a natural. Surreal.
My turn. I was so nervous. This is what I’d been waiting for. I picked up the snow hook. “Let’s go!” I yelled at the dogs, and was nearly jolted off of the runners. We slid effortlessly over the hard-packed snow as I stood, proudly at the helm of an eight-dog team that was youthful in its vigour, and timeless in its spirit. I felt as vulnerable as I did powerful on those runners. Without a helmet, protective pads, or a life jacket, a man at the controls of a dogsled is also at the mercy of the dogs, weaving through heavily treed areas, over hard-packed snow and ambivalently frozen lakes and streams.
I was at the pinnacle of happiness though, connecting transcendentally to some ageless act, something older and much much larger than myself. The sun shone warmingly on my face as I huffed, running up big hills beside the sled, and riding like a water-skier down daunting slopes. The boughs of pine trees curved downward under the heavy stay of snow, piled high. “Kali”, this snow was called. It was beautiful. And then, it hit! Instantly. A snowstorm. It came out of nowhere, as they so often do. And suddenly, I was being blasted with ice crystals, which covered my sunglasses and blurred my vision. But I couldn’t take them off, or it’d be my eyeballs that would be blasted.
“You okay up there?” Brad yelled through the wind.
“No problem,” I replied. What else would I have said?
It was awesome!
That night, we fed and watered the dogs, and the four of us ate and talked jovially in the main tent. Brad passed out written passages from Grey Owl, on the incomparable experience of running a dogsled team. His words seemed to explain the inexplicable. They were beautiful and true, and brought great meaning to everything we’d done. And as the temperature dropped drastically to the minus twenties, we spent a comfortable and wholesome night in reflection of the day’s events, in awe of our surroundings.
Later, Carly and I retired to our own tent, made our own fire, and despite our exhaustion, conversed romantically over a bottle of red wine, which warmed us like Brandy in the dead cold of winter. Dogs yelped and howled, and we slept 300 km from Avenue P, but right at home.
It wasn’t over then. The next day, after a hardy breakfast of bacon, porridge, and bannock with wild blueberries and homemade peach jam, Carly and I went snowshoeing on the frozen lake. Afterward, we went back to punch a new water hole in the lake, to help the next group out. Another kind of snow lay beneath the top layer of regular old Kona. “Pukak”, it was called, snow that has reformed completely under the surface into large, prism-like crystals due to natural thermal patterns. Snow would never just be snow again. Brad and Carly chiselled away with the newcomer group. And well, I was kind of minding my own business, in awe as usual at the untouched boreal forest that is so out of the sight and mind of the average Saskatchewanian. Always a dreamer, I strayed momentarily from the group.
“Woa!” I shouted. That’s odd. My right leg had just dropped about two feet into the snow on the lake. Everyone looked over at me, and I just kind of sat there, half-fallen over and one leg deep. Quite a sight, I’m sure. “Ah!” It was right then that water started seeping coldly into my boot. I pulled it out of the deep slush, and instantly, without any passage of time, my boot was a rock of frozen lake water. I’d stepped unsuspectingly into yesterday’s hole.
“Go inside,” Brad suggested. Good idea, no doubt. I hobbled over to the tent in a flash. I took of the boot, liner, and sock, and then stocked the fire as I changed socks and put on a slipper with two foot-warmers in it. My frozen foot thawed slowly but surely, and I dried my wet wear by the fire. How embarrassing!
When I was all dried out, it was time to head back to the cabin. But luckily for me, we took the scenic route, and I drove the sled the entire way there. The sun shone in spite of the frigid air as we sailed over all kinds of terrain, hard-packed snow, powder, and flatlands, steep hills carved by glaciers. As the sled undulated serenely through the deep, powdery snow, I remarked that the sensation was not unlike canoeing. I marvelled at how water could act so consistently, whether frozen or not. I must’ve mushed a full twelve miles before we got back to the cabin.
I was so sad to see it all end; it seemed to happen in a flash. We thanked Brad and Marcia, and then said goodbye to the amazing, hardworking, nearly wild canines that had helped an old dream come true. Shades of Caesar and a teary goodbye.
Surely, I thought, we’ll be back.
Time of my life.
So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who made it possible.
- Khodi
