Winterdance, by Gary Paulsen, documents the author’s serious poetic lark with the Iditarod dog sled “race”. Paulsen is a successful writer for “young readers”, but this book is most certainly aimed at a more mature audience. Paulsen and his wife, probably of necessity, gradually began living closer and closer to the land, in northern Minnesota. Hunting game led him to tapping in the winter, and running traplines led him into running dogs to more easily get to the traps. He stops eating meat after seeing one too many slaughterhouse horrors, but discovers he can’t let the dogs go so easily. This is where we pick up his story.
No doubt my obsession with Ironman racing led me to see eerie parallels in his quest to run the Iditarod, but then, there is much in common between the two. Both are endurance events, both involve physical training (the dogs, not the driver) to prepare the body to do something it’s not naturally designed to do well. Success in both depends on the accretion of not only experience, but also multiple small details. A grim focus on the relentless NOW is required; looking forward or back saps the insatiable drive needed to go on.
Paulsen’s growing desire to get to Alaska and run the race equates to someone who has never done a triathlon (or any swimming, cycling, or running race), and dreaming of doing the Hawaii Ironman as his first. The odds of doing something wrong are about 1:10.
Disasters he skates by (literally) include: driving to Alaska in a jury-rigged pickup with armor plating for floorboard, which had rusted out; getting nearly blown off a cliff in a white-out blizzard during his “training camp” a few months before the race start; getting pulled off course at the very start of the race because he suddenly switched lead dogs, then several hours later leading 1/3rd of the race 60 miles off course, and watching the driver behind him lose his lead dog to a moose kick.
Despite Paulsen’s insistence on giving little actual narrative direction, nor any reasoned explanation for WHY he is putting himself through all this, his memoir succeeds in sucking the reader in to a true page turning tale. Laugh out loud humor, evocative prose which equals the best of any arctic exploration story, and his respect and awe for his fifteen dogs all combine to provide a gripping portrait of a man obsessed, and, in the end, successful on his own terms.