Hey all!
So I had a dream last night about my first day of work on the dogsled team and I woke up laughing. I was inspired to start writing down some of the stories I have from my nomadic years. I experienced all sorts of mishaps and adventures. So this is the beginning of a new category "Adventures In Meaghan-land", and probably the beginning of my memoir. Haha.
I showed up to the place bright and early on a freezing January morning to prove I had the chops for the job.
Bundled from head to toe, Jerry took one glance at my 115-lb frame and tossed a pair of large insulated coveralls at me. "Roll 'em up if ya need to, but you won't freeze to death on my watch."
I zipped myself into the too-big coveralls, feeling like a little kid in her big brother's hand-me-down clothes. But oh man, was I warmer.
He handed me a shovel and I spent a few hours getting to know the finer points of shoveling dog crap into a wheelbarrow, breaking the ice on the water bowls, how to chop up 50-lbs of horse meat with a shovel (different shovel) and how to harness up the dogs.
This last task was of course the trickiest. At the sight of the harness, the dogs started howling and barking at a fever pitch. I love dogs, but there is something intimidating about manhandling a strange dog that is going bezerk. Funny enough, it was as though I wasn't even there. You could do whatever you wanted to these dogs once they saw the harnesses, they were so focused on getting lined up. After wrangling the dogs into their gear, we hooked them up in specific order to the quad and got ready to roll.
And roll we did. Out into the badlands of Bend, past the snowy knolls and sage. I was enjoying the crisp air and the sound of paws crunching the snow.
All of the sudden we stopped. Jerry turns to me and tells me the pups are off trail. He directed me to run up to the front and pull the lead dogs back onto the trail. I accomplished the task easy enough when BOOM... we were off to the races. And I wasn't back on the quad. A vision of me being stranded 20 miles out in the middle of nowhere was interrupted by Jerry hollering at me, "C'mon girl, you better get your butt back on here!"
Sprinting in way too big coveralls is really interesting. It's like a really fast waddle. The dogs whizzed past me in slow motion. I eyed the quad racing at me and hurled myself at it. I felt Jerry hoist me up by my coveralls and I landed belly down across the back. Whew!
With a grin, Jerry turns around. "Boy am I glad you got back on. It would've taken about an hour to turn around and come back for ya."
"Boy, am I glad too," I laugh as I right myself.
Once we got back to the ranch, we took care of the dogs and headed inside to the smell of eggs and elk steak cooking. I was told that room and board was included in the job as I sat down to eat. It's amazing how ravenously hungry one can get after chasing down a sled team. Jerry wrote my number in permanent marker on the white board next to a few others.
"Welp, it's permanent so I guess we'll take ya, " he said with a grin. "You guys shoulda seen it, she's like a flying squirrel..."
Thus began one of the most entertaining jobs I've ever had.
xoxo,
Meaghan @ Urban Farm Designs
