Slim Randles
As I lay there in my super-duper borrowed-from-the-Army mummy bag, I had time to think about things. Mostly, I pondered how stupid I’d been to take a dog team out across the North Slope of Alaska in November.
As I can now contemplate, 50 years later, it was a dumb thing to do, making the first crossing north to south from Prudhoe Bay’s frozen oil fields to the Brooks Range. Brooks Range roughly translates to “that frozen rockpile there to the south.”
But even then, in the deadly silence of the arctic, I knew my doing this was … well, me. I guessed at the time it would cost me my life, but I don’t know if I could’ve done otherwise. I HAD to do it. Ever since that first dogsled trip nearly a year earlier, I knew I was entangled in driving a dog team for good purposes. And good stories.
That first trip, from what was then McKinley (now Denali) National Park was to prove there were good dogs in the Anchorage pound. My whole eight dog team came from there. And we succeeded in finding homes for each of the dogs in my team except one, and I kept him.
This time, however, the trip was to raise money for the Jesse Lee Home for Children in Anchorage.
But there in the tent, there was just this silence. The wind blew mercilessly over the little arctic tent I had pitched there. The team dogs had long since tunneled down into the snow to sleep off the storm. And this silence. Well, it was a secret and I realized it at the time. Those foolish people who do what I did discover, too late, that life disappears and is just gone. No more deadlines at the paper. No more family. And no one would ever really know how I died because I was alone in this little tent on the frozen Sagavanirktok River somewhere near Franklin Bluffs.
Then, after a few days of thinking I was the last person on earth, I heard the helicopter.
If you helicopter fellows are still around, thank you once again. The last 50 years have had a lot of love and laughter in them.
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Brought to you by Slim’s first book “Dogsled, a True Tale of the North,” available at your library or from amazon.com.
