Mush Music
I have to admit that I’ve stolen this headline. It appeared in the Ulu News, a daily newspaper devoted to the games (ulu is an Inuit blade instrument—all the sport medals are in the shape of ulus), over a photograph of bright-eyed, lean, shimmering husky dogs and their family of owners (a brother and sister team from Alaska, eleven and fourteen years old respectively, compete together as well as against each other): Family Version of Mush Music.
I have few truly happy childhood memories. Although I’ve always sought good times and interesting experiences, what I mean by this is that I’ve had very few of those “no cares in the world, I’m a child and I’m going to enjoy the wonder of being a child” moments. Especially when I was eight and nine.
My mother had just run away, leaving me and my slightly older brother to the care of our quadriplegic father. Needless to say, he was not immediately equipped for such a task and so we were bandied about to various relatives in New York state and West Bloomfield Michigan. After a dramatic return of my mother and an attempted kidnapping (more on this in an upcoming memoir—too little space here, sorry), we were packed up once again, driven back to Canada, and plopped onto a secluded French-Canadian farming community in Curran, Ontario to live with a family I’d never met before. My father refuses to speak about these people, except to insist they were good friends of the family, when I know that it all reeked of foster care.
Those two years were traumatic years for me and my brother in many ways. I don’t mind revisiting them, though—must be my morbid writerly imagination—whereas my brother has managed to completely wipe out the majority of his childhood memories and cares not to have them resurrected. Sometimes his wife asks me questions, mostly so she can figure out a timeline issue or locate some cause for my brother’s quirky ticks, as she knows that I am the one who will remember incidents, people, places, and conversations from the past. However, my brother does have one vivid memory from that time in Curran, Ontario, and it is a happy one. The memory is also a happy one for me.
Dog-mushing. I had no idea it was a sport. But I loved dogs with a passion many damaged kids possess (especially those not permitted to own animals), and so did my brother. Our neighbours, four families, lived in two semi-detached houses. We lived with one of these families until my father managed to arrange for his arrival, and then we lived in an abandoned gymnasium with temporary Styrofoam walls to indicate our rooms. I used to let in all the dogs and cats at night to run in our gymnasium without our neighbours’ knowledge. In the nearby barn, the families kept chickens, rabbits, and goats, and later on a pregnant husky dog.
They bred huskies for dog-mushing, and when a female husky became pregnant, we children would be asked to construct popsicle sleighs for the puppies, for when they are born—no time is wasted in acclimatizing the animals to their role as pullers, and to my recollection, the puppies take to it right away, love it, as if they were born for the pulling and the running in the snow. It was pure magic to watch the tiny creatures, with their sloppy legs and paws, and salivating tongues, wiggle and jump, and scurry about dragging the popsicle sleighs we had made along.
But the best was when they got a little older and my brother and I were permitted, with a chaperone, to take a ride in an adult sleigh as the puppies began training with their mother. Now that was pure bliss. Speeding down the highway, wind against out cheeks, laughing and yelping as the sleigh went up and down, bouncing along to the rhythm of the dogs. One of the few moments of my childhood where I remember being absolutely happy, without a care in the world but the present bliss of fur, cold, and magic.
And so I almost started sobbing today when I discovered the dog-mushing competition schedule had been rearranged to deal with the warmer than usual Grande Prairie weather and that I had already missed my chance to see them. I had been saving the pleasure for today, when I could get out to Evergreen park and spend the entire day there watching the athletes harness their sleighs, gather their team of dogs, and race. I was dreaming of the ear-blasting noise of hundreds of dogs barking with excitement.
Some might interpret this turn of events to mean that I was not meant to sully my childhood memories by standing on the outskirts watching others steer and ride the sleighs. I just think it was bad luck. It does make me eager, though, to plan a winter trip for next year where you can pay for an afternoon of dog-sledding. I’ll take my brother with me.
