Yesterday morning it was 14 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Do you know how cold that is? Well, Gino was about twenty yards away from me walking toward the bunkhouse and I yelled “Good morning!” to him. Before the final “ing” got out of my mouth, the first “G”, and a capital “G” at that, had frozen solid, dropped out the air, and landed in a snow-bank midway between us. The Head Musher looked at me and said “Well, at least it’s not windy!”
About a week ago, as I was preparing for this trip, I constructed a Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion crib-sheet for my wallet. None of this mathematical formula stuff where you subtract 32 divide by twelve and take the square root of the result. At a glance, I can see the conversion of any temperature between zero Celsius (freezing Fahrenheit) and minus 18 Celsius (zero Fahrenheit).
I realize now that I was suffering from a serious case of optimism. So, I have added to my chart Celsius temperatures down to -29 and the corresponding Fahrenheit temperature, -20. I figure anything lower than that and my eyeballs will be frozen so there’ll be no need for a chart.
Next to the temperature, the most important topic of conversation here is snow. The big snow storm that hit Chicago and left Rahm Emmanuel thanking God that he is not (yet) mayor, dropped only about an inch of snow in the greater St. Jacques area. Compared to Connecticut and Massachusetts, Northern Maine and Southern New Brunswick have very little snow. “Very little” is a relative term, however, and can sometimes mean “a lot more than you’d think”. But, the scuttlebutt is that the Fort Kent area really needs snow for the Can-Am race which is only a month away.
The other topics of conversation, and you’ll be shocked to hear this, are: dogs and how to train them, dogs and how to feed them, sleds and how to ride them, and trails and how to navigate them. I try to provide crucial input to the discussions using golf analogies but am generally ignored. Luckily, I was a lawyer for 30 years and this kind of treatment brings back fond memories.
There are roughly 35 sleds dogs currently inhabiting Baisley Lodges, twenty-three of them belong to Gino. He turns them loose for exercise every day, at 9:00am and 5:00pm, in four separate shifts. He walks around the perimeter of the property like the Pied Piper and the dogs go with him, running ahead, running back, wrestling in the snow, until finally he yells “Shift change!” and they head back to their place of domicile which has a large sign on the front that reads “Howl-a-Day-Inn”.
The stalwart dog throughout the years we have been visiting Baisley Lodges is not a sled dog but rather a German Shepard named Mosqua. Mosqua is now eight years old and starting to slow down but he is still the alpha male of the property. While he is outside, he carries a stick in his mouth in case he finds someone (like me) who will throw it across the yard so he can retrieve it. As the day wears on, arms wear down and the stick wears down until you can barely see it in his mouth. When it finally gets too small, he heads for a small tree, uproots it, breaks off a branch suitable for his purposes and the game starts over.
No other dog touches his stick. The larger dogs know better. The pups don’t, but Mosqua’s low, rumbling growl delivers the message, first in lower case letters “Don’t touch the stick!” which causes the pup to stop in his tracks and say “Surely you can’t be growling at me? Why I’m…I’m…I’m me…and the ruler of everything for as far as the eye can see!” Whereupon the message gets re-delivered in capital letters “DON’T SCREW WITH THE STICK!” and the pup saunters away, looking over his shoulder at the 125-lb master-of-the-universe while re-assessing his place in the cosmos.
In the evenings, Mosqua can be found curled up on the couch (he takes up two of the three cushions) next to Gino, where he receives periodic pats on the head accompanied by the words “Hey buddy!” By the end of the evening, he has moved to the floor directly in front of the wood burning stove and all five feet of him is stretched out soaking up the warmth. When there’s a lull in the conversation I say to him: “Mosqua, you’re a great dog!”. His eyes remain closed but his tail thumps the floor like a base drum.
So far the Head Musher and her team have run 10 and 14 miles on consecutive days. Today is a rest day but, no doubt, by mid-afternoon the dogs will start getting rowdy and anxious to run. The runs will gradually get longer and longer, although how long and how quickly are a matter on some debate. A decision on this issue is above my level of competency, pay grade, and exceeds the bullet-repelling capacity of my Kevlar long johns.
Later,
The One-Man Pit Crew