fall training

It’s amazing what water can do, even if all it is doing is slowly creeping up and up and up. First up the driveway and the dog yard, then up the basement walls into the sheetrock and insulation. It undercut fences and driveways and dog yards and all the places we loved to train. It seems so strange that time has even passed, that minutes have turned into hours, hours into days with nothing but our heads down, working. First, we worked to save the things we love: we worked to evacuate the dogs,we moved a little less than one ton of dog food not once, but twice, we built walls, we set pumps and schedules and watched and waited until the water finally left – and it did, thank goodness, so now we work more. Now we’ve been working to rebuild the things we love: our home, our dog lot, our routines, our life.

For the first few days after the water began to vanish, there was so much work inside: sheetrock to be torn down, insulation to be removed, all our gear reorganized and moved upstairs. None of the work particularly hard or demanding in itself except for the quantity of it and the weight of all that had happened, resting on our shoulders. We, of course, know we are lucky. Our home was damaged, not destroyed. Our dogs were moved, not lost. These were problems that could be fixed and yet it still seemed (seems) like so much.

As we worked inside trying to rid ourselves of the wetness we waited, trying to figure out what we do with our dogs. They were in temporary housing at the Seavey’s dog lot and we needed them back home. A few days after the flood we walked the dog yard and in some spots sank up to our knees in mud. We brought in a couple loads of gravel, but the bobcat was making a mess in soggy land and the stone simply wasn’t going far enough.

We fretted about what to do: we were supposed to be training our dogs, not letting them sit idle but we now faced difficult decisions. It was hard to look at the home we’d moved into, sink before our eyes. Where we once let our dogs run wild and loose in the back yard, there were now holes, ruts, and layers of silt. The back part of our dog lot where the water entered from was completely destroyed. In some spots, it created huge ruts. It undercut the chainlink fence in our back yard. Where the fence once connected to the earth there is a gap of some eight or nine inches. When we were removing the dogs the day of the flood, before the worst had even occurred, two people helping us sank up to their waists from holes carved by water.

Even though the rain was lessening, the ground was still saturated. Often times I’d take step, my boot sticking to the mud and when I’d finally pull it free, a small puddle would emerge in my boot-print. This wouldn’t do. This was not a place to bring dogs home to. If we brought them home, they would, we were sure, be swimming chest deep in mud: that is no way for any dog to live.

Then, it seemed, a miracle happened: We got a phone call from friends who wanted to help.

Team Zoya (Zoya D, John S, & Greg G) offered their assistance in a time that can really only be described as overwhelming and exhausting. The physical labor is tough, that’s for sure, but the tougher part are all the questions that come after the flood.: How do we do fix ___? How do we rebuild ___? Again and again and again, one question after another after another from when you wake up until you go to bed. How were we going to fix our dog lot? How were we going to bring our dogs home?

Our dogs are our friends, our family, our way of life. Looking out onto our empty dog lot was heartbreaking. At night, despite the fatigue of a full days work, we’d ask ourselves: How were we going to fix our dog lot? How were we going to bring our dogs home?

The answer is, without the help of Team Zoya, we don’t know. Because of their generosity, we were able to bring in the immense quantities of gravel needed to provide a good home for our dogs, out of the mud. We had 160 yards of gravel brought in late Friday night. We worked, continuously for the next 72 hours stopping briefly only to sleep, drink coffee, and run to the gas station so we could refill the bobcat we rented.

Once the gravel was down, we began the labor intensive task of pounding stakes into the ground — a task made more difficult because it finally decided to be sunny in Seward and it decided to be cold. At night we watched our breath rise out of us, and faced the impossible task of trying to drive stakes into frozen ground. It takes many, many, extra swings with a mallet to overcome the crunchiness of frozen, water-logged earth. But we overcame and my arms, I think, are twice as strong as they used to be!

We woke Monday morning to blue skies (again!) and went to pick up our dogs. We had spent the last two days, inbetween spreading gravel and driving posts, cleaning their houses. Several houses filled with water and were covered in silt. Others were starting to grow mold. We took our time and washed them with a dilute bleach solution and set them out in the sun.

When we finally brought the dogs back to the yard, you could see a sigh of relief in them. Many dogs we let run around the yard first and you could see their excitement at being home as they ran to pee on their favorite tree/bush/pole, smiles spread wide across their faces. In the photo above, Apache relaxes in the sun in the dog lot.

 

We are excited still about this winter. Snow has begun to creep down the mountains and we are excited for the things to come. We ran our first team of dogs this morning for the first time in over two weeks. It looked as if they’d never missed a day of training. We’re looking forward to seeing how our team will perform and are gearing up to enter some of the earlier races in the season.

Looking ahead at racing season, we’re trying to start filling out the paperwork and pay the entry fees. Hopefully we will both run the Sheep Mountain 150, The Knik 200, The Northern Lights 300, and then Travis will head to Iditarod.

There are a lot of people we would like to thank for helping us through the flood and their recognition should not go unnoticed. First, we’d like to thank The Seavey family for generously taking our dogs and for feeding them when we could not get to them due to high water. We’d like to thank Greg G, Zoya D, and John S, for their assistance in rebuilding our dog lot. We’d like to thank Rolf Bardersen and Ressurection Rentals for coming to our aid not only with pumps to help get the water out of our home, but with a bobcat to help make a channel to ensure that the water would drain away from our home , and for delivering a bobcat for us to rent in the middle of the night after the flood so we could finish building our doglot so we bring our four-legged friends back . We’d like to thank Cole Petersen and C.A.P. Construction for generously helping us time and time again, both during and after the flood with equipment, suggestions on repairs, and friendship. We’d like to thank Roger & Andrea Stokey who came to visit our home during the worst possible time and who rose to the occasion helping us tear down dry wall, remove insulation, clean mud out of the basement, the garage, and the fireplace, and for giving us relief at the end of all our long days in the form of good food and good company. We’d like to thank all our family and friends who stopped by, called, or emailed to make sure we were, in fact, ok and for all the well-wishes and kind thoughts sent our way.

It is always nice to know that we have a community around us both near and far who love us and want to see us succeed.

Thank You