Husky News

For a solitary soul, Laura Daugereau sure can talk. Ask her an initial question, and she speaks for 11 ceaseless minutes, discussing the outdoors, home-schooling, Christianity, humidity, dyslexia and, of course, dogs. Oh, how she loves her dogs. That’s why we are having this conversation.

Laura Daugereau of Port Gamble will be the first woman from Washington state to compete in the Iditarod. She trained her dogs in Montana. Kim Bertdrand/driven sled dog photos

“So, what else would you like to know?” she asks after the entertaining opening monologue.

Um, how do you pronounce your last name?

She laughs. “Doh-jur-rou.”

She is the first woman from Washington to compete in the Iditarod, and it’s kind of an achievement, she supposes, but really, she just wants to finish the race “with dogs with wagging tails and wide eyes.”

Daugereau is a musher, and for the next couple of weeks, she will be in frigid, hazardous, desolate bliss. She has made it, at last. More than 1,150 miles of frozen river, jagged mountain ranges and blinding winds await.

“I guess sleep deprivation is an issue,” says Daugereau, a Port Gamble resident. “After I reach about the 950-mile mark, what am I going to feel like?”

It was a rhetorical question, but I couldn’t help considering an answer. How is she going to feel? Like Amy Winehouse after a bender? Or just, well, lifeless? (Which might actually feel better than Amy Winehouse after a bender.)

“Anybody who finishes the Iditarod has won the race,” Daugereau says. “Somehow, I got invited to the party. So it’s going to be kind of fun.”

Daugereau left for Alaska last week. During the past few months, she had been training in Sand Coulee, Mont., a 38-square-mile chunk of land that 494 people call home.

It’s colder in Montana, so the conditions are better for training her 44 dogs. Even so, she still rises at 3 every morning to “beat the heat.” By noon, she has already completed a four-hour training run with the sled dogs, fed the dogs and cleaned the kennel.

She partners with Iditarod veteran Rick Larson, fine-tuning the essential skills of a musher: training, planning, racing and caring for the dogs.

“To be a musher, you’re on the outskirts of society,” Daugereau says. “You have your 40 dogs, and usually the only people you come in contact with are other mushers. It’s not for the average person.

“It’s definitely a solitary lifestyle. You do get lonely, and your dogs become really good friends. If people saw me talking to my dogs, they’d probably think I was crazy.”

Bella is Daugereau’s sidekick. She’s a rather sedentary Alaskan husky. She’s the traditional pet. She prefers resting on the couch over pulling a harness. Just about everywhere Daugereau goes, Bella accompanies her.

Daugereau, 25, has loved dog sledding since she read a book about it at age 10. When she was 13, her father took her to a symposium featuring the late Susan Butcher, a four-time Iditarod champion. Butcher picked the teenager out of the group and offered to let her run some of the dogs.

Daugereau was nervous because she had never been on a sled, but after Butcher calmed her, she went on her first joyride.

She was hooked. The next year, Daugereau’s parents let her move to Alaska to work in a racing kennel. Burdened with dyslexia and home-schooled for a while, she wound up graduating with a 4.0 grade-point average, obsessing over dogs all the while.

When her schedule allows, Daugereau visits Washington schools, Bella in tow, trying to inspire children. She also has befriended students at Chestnut Hill Academy, a Philadelphia boys school with a program for dyslexic students.

“I just want kids to realize that you don’t have to wait to go after your goals,” Daugereau says. “Then it’s too late, sometimes.”

She can say that now because, after 12 years of dreaming, she is in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. The journey finally makes sense: the 14-hour summer days she spends working in the family business — construction — for money to support her obsession; the stress over securing enough sponsors to pay for the estimated $25,000 cost of an Iditarod; the reclusive lifestyle. It all has led to this moment.

Despite her chatter about just finishing, Daugereau has a goal: Complete the race in 11 days and 20 hours, which she thinks would put her among the best Iditarod rookies. Four of her dogs have finished an Iditarod before, so she thinks the goal is possible.

Whether or not it happens, she will return to Montana with her dogs and disappear again. On the edge of civilization, life can be so simple.

Daugereau went to church recently on a sloppy Montana day. In a rush, she hopped out of her car, ignoring the mud pile beneath her. Splat! She ruined her dress.

“If the church is any good,” she told herself, “they won’t care.”

She grabbed her Bible and trudged toward church, stopping only to appreciate the rows of muddy boots resting at the doorstep.

She walked inside, certain this was the ideal place for a musher to worship.

Source: The Seattle Times