John Balzar: Lure of the quest

Hodder Moa Beckett

$24.95

Reviewed by Geoff Chapple*

Alaska's best-known sled-dog endurance race is the Iditarod. The Yukon Quest is also a sled race, but its route is further north, it's colder, its passes are higher, and the hours of sledding in darkness with helmet lights are longer.

By Balzar's account, this race, cleaving to the old trails of the Klondike Gold Rush, is a lesser-known but tougher race than the Iditarod. It's the one Alaskans do for mana.

The sledders here are a spectral crew - one at least is a two-pack-a-day smoker, another is scarred by a plane crash. They're trappers or misfit wanderers, many of them self-confessed potheads wearing duct-taped shoes and patched furs. Some of the dogs, by rumour, have wolf blood in their veins, and dogs die on this trail.

As each sledder slingshots out of the starting chute at Whitehorse, en route for Fairbanks 11 sledding days distant, Balzar seems set to unleash a ripping yarn.

What he does do is a good deal more complex, scattered even. Despite the cover blurb that proclaims "One man's story of the 1025-mile dog-sled race across North Americas frozen wastes," Balzar is not in the race. He is the press liaison man. He is an Outsider, a term of specific meaning in Alaska that confers low status on anyone who simply flies in and wants to join the locals. Balzar is no sook. He drinks the compulsory Jack Daniels, spits, swears, learns how to handle a dog team, gets frost-nipped after removing a glove to roll a fag, and helps de-ice a stranded aircraft with his plastic press card.

But he's simply hopping from town to town, trying to sketch the Quest by snatched interviews with exhausted men. They're not the talkative type, least of all the type to share with an Outsider the pleasures of sledding along stoned under the Aurora Borealis. Or the particular despairs that are to stop 12 of the 38 racers during the race.

Besides, the race is an isolated affair. The dogs pull the sleds around 14 km/h, camp where they will, and the racers are soon hours, often days, apart. Thus we're in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner country, where mind holds matter at bay, but Balzar seldom gets inside the sledder's head.

The exception is the description of Aliy Zirkle's epiphany, one presumes because Zirkle, a woman, made time for the interviews. Balzar produces his best race reportage as Zirkle sits beside a campfire, recalls the beauties of the day's travel and feels balance return to her life. Balzar has a tendency to lecture. "It strikes me that authenticity is an important means for distinguishing adventure from adventurism today ... " Thanks John.

The journalist from California was occasionally befriended, usually tolerated, but at the same time seems subtly expelled by the Alaskan dog-sled culture. He cannot restrain himself from bright peripheral babble on the animal rights movement, the ethics of trail sponsors, tourism ...

But the silent Alaskan loners remain in essence undefined. Rightly so, perhaps. They and the dog teams that howl beneath the stars are, after all, the pure product of these dark and icy trails.

*Geoff Chapple is a freelance writer.