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Those Who Can Only Wait and Watch

For every musher out there, someone was left behind to watch from a distance

by June Price

03/12/2005

For every musher out on the Iditarod Trail moving toward Nome, there are others left behind to follow from a distance. I met two of them today in the phone room.

Vicky Linville is working a shift in the phone room, carefully answering questions for people calling from all points of the world. Most want to know where the front runners are or how many dogs they still have in harness. Others want to know where a personal favorite is, even if they’re far back in the pack. It’s those callers Linville emphasizes with most. She has been and is in their shoes.

Debbie Moderow, Linville’s sister-in-law, is on the trail. Moderow came tantalizingly close to finishing the race in 2003. In fact, Linville and other family members flew to Nome to meet her. She never arrived.

"We’d flown into Nome," remembers Linville, "and taken a flight back out to meet Debbie along the trail. We flew over her and then landed about a mile ahead of her to wait for her to pass."

Debbie Moderow, whose husband is a member of the Iditarod Board of Directors and finished the race last year as a rookie, never came. They waited. No Moderow. They waited. Still no Moderow. Finally, concerned, they took off to search for her from the air.

It didn’t take long to find her. Just up the trail, they spied her dogs in a tight circle about her. They’d shut down and were refusing to budge. Hoping rest would do the trick, Moderow lead them to a nearby cabin and tried to get them to follow other teams out as they passed. The dogs still refused to budge and Debbie Moderow’s Iditarod was over.

Like Debbie, Vicky, who lives in Connecticut, is back this year and plans to greet Debbie as she crosses under the Burled Arch in Nome. She notes that Debbie is driving essentially the same team that her husband Mark ran last year, a team largely trained by Debbie. Vicky, who’s worked the phone room for three years and hopes to get more involved with dropped dogs in the future, doesn’t mush but follows the sport faithfully because of the family involvement. In fact, Vicky was Andy Moderow’s Idita-Rider the year he ran and finished the race. She rode in the tag sled this year with Debbie’s husband Mark on the runners.

It seemed only natural to ask Vicky if she mushed. She laughed. She’d tried it ... once. It was in Nome. She quickly discovered that sled dogs seem to come equipped with only two speeds, fast and "stop so fast the musher goes over the handlebar." Thus ended Vicky’s potential career in mushing.

A more familiar face to most wandered through the phone room a couple times before I was able to flag him down. I’d spied Jerry Scdoris, whose daughter Rachael’s quest to be the first legally blind musher to run and finish the Iditarod has been well documented by the media, in the parking lot dropping some dogs out of their dog truck. As it turns out, he’s sleeping in it! So much for all those theories of a well subsidized race.

"I’m not going out on the trail," he said firmly, feeling it would only add to the furor. Thus, while others fly out regularly to check on his daughter, Jerry Scdoris is hanging around the Millennium Hotel and trying to stay busy as he checks on her from afar.

He’s also, as noted, sleeping in their truck, giving lie to the public image of a well heeled team. He was aghast at the cost of following the Iditarod Dream and admitted that even if he was sleeping in a truck, they were far luckier than most. They have sponsors. He couldn’t imagine how those without do it but admires them tremendously. He was somewhat wary at first, understandable given the media coverage, but warmed up as we approached his role as father of a musher.

Why Paul Ellering as her VI, or visual interpreter?

"He’s a father," declared Scdoris. "He’s a woodsman and good musher and he has kids of his own." He paused a moment. "And he wouldn’t be intimidated." Given the media crush at the checkpoints to this point, that element in itself might be cited by many as a reason to choose Ellering but Scdoris returns to the concept of Ellering as a father. One gets the impression Jerry wanted someone who would emphasize with his own feelings as well as Rachael’s competitive desires, perhaps tempering both with wisdom.

As for his direct role in Rachael’s run, Jerry says he made her a "bullet-proof sled." By that, he explained, he meant one designed and built to hopefully withstand the worst that the Iditarod Trail can throw at it. It wouldn’t be fast but it would be sturdy. He said it was largely of metal and heavy, hence perhaps serving to slow down the energetic dog team and hold Scdoris to the trail that dealt so severely with others.

I also discovered that Rachael’s decked out in what Jerry called "protective armor." The protective father in him again. She’s wearing the garb of motor cross racers, hence protecting her body from trees that seemingly like to eat mushers for lunch. The only place it doesn’t protect, sighed Jerry, is the area just below the rib cage, the exact area in which Rachael is sporting a huge black and blue mark in the latest photos from the Trail. Like all the others who wait, however, all Jerry can do now is wait and watch, looking at the photo of his daughter in a newspaper.