Reviews for One Mush:

"A hero of mine & a hero of our times. How could he not be? His story of raising himself up from humble & difficult beginnings to finding, pursuing & accomplishing his dream is as inspiring a story as you will ever read" - Jimmy Buffett

"... wonderful story telling. This is a Jack London book!!" - Rachel Manley, Governor General's Award winner

"It's an amazing story, beautifully written and the description of Newton's Quest is fascinating.. a cracking good read." - Peter Proudlock

"Great read, insightful inspection of the race and its participants...from one of dog mushing's finest authors." - Hugh Neff, Quest & Iditarod Veteran Musher

"One Mush, is a great read about an event so unlikely that it probably couldn't pass as fiction." - David A. James, Fairbanks News-Miner

"Wondrous...Each facet of this fascinating story is told with an eye to detail, a full appreciation for the singularity of this tale...This is a book to read slowly." - Jamaican Literature.com

"I like it. It's good. It's real" - Chris Blackwell, music mogul, producer

"A 'Mush' - read." - Porthole Cruise Magazine

"..being a disciplined musher, I had a friend hide it for me as I knew I would never get my taxes done on time. Great read, nicely paced, entertaining & informative" - Linda Fair, Author

Chapter 8

RICK

“Pudden cyaa bake widout fiah”

Jamaican patois: You need the right tools for the job

July, 2005

Before he traveled to Jamaica to help set up a proper kennel Alan knew he needed two things. Dogs for one.

When Devon arrived back in Jamaica he suddenly realized he didn’t know what kind of dogs he needed to find. He phoned Alan, “What kind of dogs are we going to look for?”

“Just find any kind of dog for now but don’t get too many. We’ll get a few more after I get there.”

Professional help for two. He knew that two trainers working together were more effective than one working on his own. His son John was going to accompany him to Jamaica. He had the knowledge but not the experience. Alan thought of a sprint musher he’d met in the 1990s, at the Walt Disney Iron Will race in Como Park, Minnesota. Rick Johnson had retired as a driver but was still a well-known gangline and equipment maker for dog mushers around the world.

Alan phoned Rick.

“He started talking about some guy in Jamaica who was starting a dog team. I thought ‘Yeh right man. Not gonna happen. Have another shot of Scotch,’” recalls Rick,. “I was waiting for some kind of punchline.” The punchline never came. The conversation ended. There were a couple of emails and Rick realized that Alan was serious.

“Hang onto your shorts!” Alan finally typed in his last email in August. “He wants us to go down to Jamaica to help him.”

His first morning in Montego Bay, Rick had breakfast with Danny’s son, Daniel, who had picked him up at the airport the night before.

“Have you met my dad yet?” enquired Daniel Jr.

“Nope.”

“He’s crazy.”

“Oh really.”

“Oh yes. He thinks up all these goofy tours and gets them going and we just run them.” Then Daniel Jr. leaned forward and spoke in a confidential undertone, “Do not drink with my father,” he warned.

Although it sounded somewhat like a challenge Rick heeded the advice during his stay in Jamaica. He wasn’t used to turning down challenges. It all started with the kid behind him in high school.

During one of their classes a teacher asked for volunteers to ski jump. “This guy behind me – who was bigger than me – grabbed my hand and raised it.” Even then he had to be convinced to go to the top of the slide where they informed him there was only one way down.

As Rick stepped out of the box and into the tracks on the jump he heard the only instructions he ever received about how to ski jump. “Don’t forget to keep standing at the end.”

He crashed. The challenge had been made and he was determined to meet it. Crashing infuriated him. Rick tackled the sport with a vengeance, until one of his crashes mangled his shoulder. Jumping was no longer an option so he took up downhill skiing moved to Aspen, Colorado.

“Even then I liked being in the air…I really liked being in the air.” He hooked up with a few friends and they started “really pushing the animal out there.” They heliskied, went backcountry skiing in the mountains and charged headlong down double-groomed ski runs “designed to only do one thing – go really fast.” Eventually he realized there was nothing left for him to challenge in skiing and the only future left he had was seriously damaging himself.

One of his skiing friends was a hairdresser, Annette called “Nettie”, originally from Minnesota who was as fearless as he was. When she decided in 1968 to return to Minnesota she left behind a pair of false eyelashes. Rick, looking for a reason to leave skiing behind, used the eyelashes as an excuse to follow Nettie “to return them.”

They had a slight brush with dog mushing history close to Aspen when they went backcountry skiing in Castle Creek Valley – where the popular 1950s television series Sgt. Preston of the Yukon was filmed. However, it wasn’t until 1972 in Minnesota that Rick and Nettie considered dog mushing themselves – not as sport but as a means of self-preservation.

At that time they had two dogs – one of whom had a bad habit of eating the living room furniture when he wasn’t taken for his daily walk. They were leash-walking the dogs up a hill behind their house but the dogs were pulling so hard they ended up running up the hill every day.

“We can’t keep this up,” panted Rick one day, “it’s gonna kill us.” Then they heard about a fellow who built dog sleds and purchased one that they named ‘The Golden Goddess.’

A couple of weeks later they heard there was a race being held. “We entered the 2- dog class. We didn’t have a clue about how to drive dogs but we did meet a lot of people who knew what they were doing and we started learning that weekend.”

After a year Rick wrote in his training journal: “We now have 17 dogs but will soon be down to a reasonable number.”

“It went downhill from there, man, “he laughed. “ Next thing you know, we bought a dog truck, then a kennel of dogs. All of a sudden we had 35 dogs in our back yard.”

They needed a larger farm but weren’t sure they could afford it. Nettie was employed but in the 1970s a woman’s wage wasn’t considered in the family cash flow when applying for a mortgage. Only Rick’s income would be taken into account. They didn’t have a lot of what they considered to be assets. To their surprise the bank approved the mortgage, accepting the dogs as collateral.

He did try a middle distance race but found that he still liked going fast so stuck to sprint racing for his 35-year mushing career. In the 1970s and 80s, Minnesota was the beginning of the professional sprint circuit. Teams would start racing there in early winter, then work their way north, racing in Canada and finishing the season off in Alaska, in Fairbanks and at the Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage.

Rick and Nettie never made the trip to Alaska but shared their trails with the best the sprint world had – Alaska’s George Attla, Gareth and Roxy Wright, the Streeper brothers from Fort Nelson, British Columbia.

By the late 1990s Rick started to notice a few changes. One was, his body couldn’t take the abuse of racing any more. Another was that the other mushers weren’t getting any younger. “There’s a lot of gray hair. Not many kids.” The cost of maintaining a team increased while the value of race purses and sponsorships dropped. More people were selling out than buying in. Even in Alaska the sport faltered. Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous race tottered on the edge of insolvency before being saved by a Canadian businessman from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

When they got Alan’s phone call Rick and Netty had already sold most of their dogs, retired from their regular jobs and were happily living on their farm making tuglines for other mushers. Their dog driving was limited to running their team purely for pleasure. If the lure of a two-week all-expense paid trip to the Caribbean wasn’t enough, Rick was intrigued by the possibilities of what a Jamaican dog sled team might do for his sport.

At their first meeting, Danny turned to Rick. “Just tell me if this is feasible.”

“Well,” responded Rick, “the temperatures here scare the daylights out of me. Where I’m from we don’t run dogs over 50 degrees (10˚C). Anything over that, forget it. Even on days when it’s freezing there are days I won’t run dogs because the humidity is too high.

“In Jamaica?” Rick hesitated for a moment. “What can I tell you? I don’t know.”

While dogs had been trained in extreme dry heat in Australia there was no precedent for training dogs in a tropical climate where both temperatures and humidity were high.

“Overheating a dog is one of the most frightening things there is,” Rick explained later, “I don’t want dogs falling over and dying on me. I’m almost afraid to touch a dog far less make him move forward. If a dog overheats, they may survive but they’ll never run again. They’ll just overheat faster.” Like Alan, he felt the unknown factor in their training might be the fact that the dogs were from Jamaica - they were acclimatized.

There were already three dogs in the kennel at Chukka Cove. Devon had gone to a private kennel, Animal House, in Lydford, close to St. Ann’s Bay. A man approached him from the enclosure where a number of dogs were running free.

“What do you want dogs for?” asked the man. Devon tried to explain it to him. At first the man smiled. Then he laughed. Finally he gave him a price and showed him two dogs – Ronan, later renamed Smiley, and Salome, eventually changed to Jimmy, for the JDTs major sponsor. I have another one, he said, but it’s my personal dog and aggressive.

“Okay. We’d like to see him.” When the man reappeared he was being dragged by a powerful dog at the end of a chain.

“That’s one we might be interested in,” said Devon. Bruno became the third dog to join the Chukka dog sled team. Devon decided that was enough for now and he would wait for Alan to select any more dogs.

Alan and Rick started the dogs slow. Walking them on a leash with a stick or small weight dragging behind, worrying all the time – “How are they doing?” “Are they overheating?” They hooked a couple of dogs up to a three-wheeled cart but would only let them pull for a short distance. Then they realized the dogs were fine. It was the trainers who were overheating.

The biggest hurdle was that rather than training puppies to grow up into sled dogs, they were dealing with adult dogs who had already developed bad habits. The challenge was going to be convincing the dogs to overcome their life experience, learn to trust their handlers and work together as a team. Even something as simple as treating a dog to a cool treat was a problem.

“Jamaican mongrels don’t know what an ice cube is,” Danny watched the process with amusement. “They don’t know how to eat one.”

“Those dogs that were rescued (from the JSPCA or Animal House), we have no idea what they went through,” said Nettie when she came to Jamaica later that year. “Now it’s another change in their life and they’re wondering…what now?”

Alan, John and Rick traveled with Devon to the JSPCA compound in Kingston and Animal House in Lydford to educate Devon in what to look for in dogs and to continue building the team. They looked for the body characteristics that identified a potential candidate for the team – good body length, longer legs, the angle at which the legs ran out from his or her hind end, good posture, which indicates a positive attitude, and strong front shoulders.

Other dogs came from people who were moving from Jamaica and couldn’t take their dogs with them. Chukka, Marbles, Tallowa and Isabella came to the kennel this way.

A site was identified behind the horse stables where a kennel could be built but doghouses didn’t exist in Jamaica. The local tradesmen had to be shown how to construct even a simple one, Some modifications were required because of the climate. The structures were raised above the ground to allow air to circulate below the houses, keeping them cooler. A framework was built above the houses and covered with a sun-blocking material to shade the dog yard.

The paddock adjacent to the kennel was identified as the dog arena where teams could be trained. Alan and John walked the property and determined where an approximately one-mile loop trail for the dog tour could be located. They mowed grass and cut out underbrush. The trail took the tourists through a grassy meadow behind the kennel, through a grove of trees to the coast, to a landing where they could stand in the spray of the crashing waves and release sea urchins from the tidal pools that confine them.

Then to the location where the motion picture Papillon (Warner Brothers, 1973, starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen) was filmed and they could rest on the same rock where Hoffman’s character sat pondering his freedom and how he might be the first to escape from this dismal paradise (Devil’s Island).

Finally, the tour went around the Polo field and back to the kennel.

It also became apparent that Devon, with his other responsibilities as operations manager, wasn’t going to be able to do the whole project by himself. Alan suggested that he start looking for someone who might be able to help.

Devon never had any doubt about who he wanted. “There were lots of other people around, but there was just something about Newton that I knew he would be the best person to be a part of the dog sled team.

“He has a very gentle nature about him. He has spirit. I can’t explain it but sometimes I just got this feeling that ‘this is the person I want for this job.’ I knew he would fit into this position. There was no doubt in my mind. Newton was the only person I thought of…nobody else.”

He asked Natalia, one of the office staff at the stables, to call the horse riding operation at the White River, in the mountains above Ocho Rios. Newton was working there as a tour guide. He was saddling a horse when Miss Helen, the site manager, came out of the office.

“Newton,” she ordered him, “Stop working.”

“Why?”

“I got a phone call from Chukka Cove and they told me to tell you to stop working,” Miss Helen stated.

Newton suddenly felt very frightened. He wondered if his job was on the line but couldn’t think of why. “I didn’t do anything wrong!” he pleaded.

“That’s what they told me to tell you,” she responded. “ To stop working. You’re supposed to wait in the office until someone calls.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he repeated.

“Newton, I need you to take care of some dogs,” explained Natalia when she called back, “Can you take care of some dogs?”

Newton was prepared to agree with any suggestion at this point. “That’s no problem,” he replied. His first jobs were feeding the dogs, cleaning the dog yard and leash-walking the dogs around the dog arena, “They liked sneaking away through small holes in the fence.”

Later, in a conversation with Alan he first heard mention of a dog sled tour.

“ There was a rumor that Chukka was going to start a dog tour but I didn’t have a clue what a dog tour was all about. I couldn’t figure out how it was going to work. What are the dogs going to do?

“The only thing that came to my mind was leash-walking the dogs. I said to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s going to work out.’

“I watched Alan and Rick train the dogs to pull sticks and weights and that just got me more confused.” He saw them putting harnesses on the dogs ‘They’re going to have to drag the dogs,’ he thought, ‘This isn’t going to be fun.’ When the three-wheeled cart was put behind the dogs for short runs, with Alan and Rick hitching up only one dog at a time, ‘the dogs are not going to pull that.’

That’s when Newton found out what his real job was going to be. He was put in front of the team and asked to run - to give the dog something to chase. At first he was fast enough on his feet then he had to start riding a bike and eventually an ATV.

Rick watched in amazement as Newton charged around the newly cut tour trail ahead of the dogcart, “I used to think that if Jamaica couldn’t use him as a dog musher, by the time we were going to be finished they could use him in the Olympics.”

Rick’s two weeks were coming to an end. Alan and John would finish off the kennel and continue training Newton and Devon for another three weeks. Danny kept turning up almost every day, asking, “What do you think?”

Finally both Rick and Alan agreed. “We think it’s feasible Danny. We think you can do it.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

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