Susan Butcher Interview

When did you know that you wanted to live in some place like Eureka, Alaska?

My first memories are not of knowing anything about Alaska, but of wanting to live in the wilderness, loving the country, and at that time, at least in my youth when I was in a city, hating city life. I really didn't get along well with what I saw going on in the cities. I thought it was bad for society. I thought it was unhealthy for individual humans. I thought it was especially unhealthy for my dog. And so I always knew that I loved country life, and the farther the wilderness, the better.
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You wrote an essay at the age of eight: "I Hate the City." Tell us about that.

In the first grade, my mother saved those two-liners that I did on these big pieces of paper that said, "I hate the city. I love the country." As I got a little bit more sophisticated, they became compositions explaining what was negative about society that had created these cities, and what was positive about country life, and how it kept the stress off of people and animals living in the country. It was really interesting that I would have those thoughts so strongly.

How do you account for that, at such a young age?

It is interesting. It does not come from my family.

I feel that we are born with things that are really innate in us. I was born with a very strong love for animals and a sense from that. Animals of course were initially living in the wilderness. So from that, wanting to get back -- not so much "get back to nature," but to get back to seeing where our instincts come from, where we came from. What was really going on in man, other than what you could be taught in school.
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What were you like in school? What were you like as a kid?

I am dyslexic. Not severely, but enough so that it caused me trouble in school. I was very good at mathematics and sciences. So I was a good student on one hand, although I was the typical student with a learning disability who fidgeted a lot. And wanted to be doing things more physically, including the way I have learned to learn. If I visualize it, if I can watch somebody doing it, or understand it that way, it's much better than book learning for me.

Who was important to you, early in your life?

I could not find role models that I liked. There were people who were adventurers, who had done wonderful things. But they were all men, and not that that kept them from being my role model, but perhaps they were doing it for different reasons. I couldn't find people who were doing what I wanted to be doing for the reasons I felt I wanted to be doing them. I would say someone like Jane Goodall certainly caught my attention. People like that.

I was probably frustrated with the lack of female role models as a child. And wondered why I wanted to do so many things that, at that time, weren't very typical for a woman to be doing. And so... I think I had to learn at about fifteen that I was going to have to set my own path.

How do you account for this independence of spirit, this determination to live your own life, on your terms, at a time when that was fairly unusual for someone in your position?

I really feel I had a strong sense of myself from my earliest memories. I knew very much who I was and approximately what I wanted to do. I didn't know I wanted to be a dog musher. And I feel there are many things in life I could have done and had as much satisfaction as I am having. But I knew the type of things that I wanted to do, and I also knew that I wasn't going to let anybody come in the way of that.

When I got my second dog, and I was living in my mother's house in Cambridge, she said, "You will not get a second dog, I won't let you have two dogs in the house." Instead of saying, "Okay, I won't get a second dog." I got my second dog and moved out. This was not a negative thing towards my mother. I was very lucky to have parents that supported my ability to be responsible. I wasn't into drugs. I wasn't a bad child in those ways. It was obvious that I was a workaholic and someone who wanted to live a fairly clean life and not get into that type of trouble. So they could trust that if I wanted to do something, there was a good reason for it.

My parents were not thrilled that I didn't go on to college and that I went up to Alaska to mush dogs. Finally, they saw though, how happy I was up there, how dedicated I was to what I was doing, and that they probably weren't going to see me back in Cambridge. They often asked how I thought I was going to support myself because I was just getting more and more broke. I was having a lot of financial trouble. But I never asked for any help financially and always managed to squeak by and finally found a way to make a living, becoming really one of the first professional dog mushers ever -- not something that was going on at the time that I entered the sport. And so it was a matter of believing in what I did. And going for it.

Ever have any self-doubts? About either yourself or what you were doing?

I think we all experience self-doubt. I am not going to tell you that I don't have insecurities or low self-esteem sometimes. But "self-doubt" -- what that word means to me -- I really don't remember experiencing.

I didn't have fears of what I was going forward to. I felt I knew what it was that I wanted, and I felt that what I wanted was worthy.

Was there a moment when you knew that you wanted to do?

There was not one single moment that told me I wanted to become a professional dog musher. It was more a thing that, throughout my life, I knew I would be working with animals. I knew I would be especially working with dogs, and I knew I would be living in the wilderness. I just chose a Siberian Husky as a pet dog. I went to pick it up from the people, and they said, "Oh, you know, the mother was an Alaskan sled dog, and she was actually a leader. Wouldn't it be fun if you taught your puppy how to pull a sled?" From there, I went on to being enthralled with it, and the first time I read about the Iditarod, which was the first year it happened, I just said "I'm going to go up there and run that race." Again, even at that point, I certainly didn't know that I would be doing it fourteen years later.

Why dog sled racing?

Well, of course, it was the typical thing. Everyone thought that because of my love of animals and my love of the country, that I would become a country doctor, a veterinary doctor. And so, I went to Colorado State University, took courses, became a veterinarian technician, and took courses above and beyond technician work in the veterinary field. But I was not a student, mostly because of my dyslexia, but also because of my love of doing physical things and of being outdoors. And there really was not enough of that. I would have been happy to have gone straight into veterinary school. But they wanted you to take English I, and History I, and everything else, and I was too impatient for that. Having worked for a vet for three years, I adored it. I love veterinary medicine. It's very interesting to me. But I could see it wasn't what I wanted to spend my whole life doing -- being inside of a building doing veterinary work. I wanted to be outside.

I would say that when I moved to Alaska and started dog mushing, it wasn't so much that it brought me sublime happiness -- but total contentment. And I never missed anything else.

I lived alone for nine years following my dream. There were some very lonely times; there were some very difficult times. I was often living alone, with my closest neighbor forty miles away. It was tough times for me. But I was never discontented.
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I was very, I have to say, happy. I remember trying to explain this to my family, that I had obviously found something very right for me.

From the first moment that I landed in Alaska, I felt at home for the first time in my life. So there really is something -- and I don't want to become mystical about this, but it's something that I don't completely understand -- which is that there was this person born in me that absolutely should have been born in Alaska, or should have been born fifty years before or one hundred years before, where I could have been a pioneer. That's all there is to it. I was born with the pioneering spirit.
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What does the Iditarod mean to you?

Had the Iditarod not been happening, I would have just been dog mushing throughout Alaska and doing adventures using the dogs. The Iditarod race was started by a man named Joe Redington, Sr., and it was a great vehicle for me, a chance to have a livelihood through the prize money, through sponsorships, through the dog sales.

Did it ever occur to you that this is something a woman doesn't do?

It never did occur to me that this was something a woman shouldn't do. There were no competitive women racing at that time in long distance racing. We have sixty to seventy mushers every year, and more than half of them go on a camping trip to complete the course. There were three women who had completed it by the time I started, but I had a very different idea, and wanted to go in there competitively because I had a very strong competitive nature. I was astounded and very unhappy my first year, when I found that there was some resistance from my fellow mushers because I was a woman.

But what I did was to basically ignore it, and just go forward. It wasn't until about six or seven years later -- having fought the problems and some of the prejudices that were very strong there, knocking me in the face, and I was just refusing to look at them -- that I was speaking with a woman, saying "I am so tired of certain things" and explaining them to her, and she said, "Don't you understand that by going and breaking trail and setting standards, that you are bound to butt into these things? And it is harder for you to do it?" I had never even thought of that before. I did not specifically seek to be a pioneer for women. I was always very aware that I was a woman, and I was very aware that I was the only woman being competitive. But I also saw it as that I was a human being, and that's how I wanted to be accepted, and I didn't see why people couldn't accept that right away. It wasn't until I became accepted as well as I have been now, that I realize the struggle that I went through.

What does it take, one, to be a dog musher, and two, to be competitive in something like the Iditarod?

To be a dog musher -- what we call recreational mushers -- is not a big deal. It really just takes time, and if you don't want to go a thousand miles in March, like we do, you don't have to put a lot of training into it. You can use the dogs for your enjoyment or when you want to travel, and they don't have to be heavily trained because they are such incredible animals.

But to be a racer is a totally different thing. The competition is extremely fierce. Getting fiercer every year. You have to have more dogs. You have to have, in essence, a bench. If you are going to need twenty dogs for the team, you have to have say, at least thirty because you have to have some reserves. If you are going to buy them all, you only have to own perhaps thirty. If you are going to raise them all like I do, you have to own somewhere around one hundred, so then you just are quadrupling the formula. And most important is the care that you are giving these dogs.

They are no longer dogs; they are professional athletes, so they need sports medicine in addition to regular veterinary medicine. They need the best nutrition possible. They need training on a daily basis from the age of one or two days old until the time that you retire them. It's a totally different story between racing and recreational mushing.

How would you describe your relationship to these dogs?

My relationship is extremely close. They are my friends, my family, and my workmates. They get my attention around the clock. They are of total importance to me because -- certainly during those years that I lived alone -- they were often my only friends. Now I have my husband and a few young people working for me, but the dogs are still often my closest friends. And then they are my livelihood.

We work together as a team on a daily basis. I train twelve to sixteen hours a day, usually seven days a week. And only when I am away, perhaps thirty days a year, am I ever off of that schedule. So I am really spending all of my time with these dogs. And I raise them all from puppies, so they are my family; they are very much like children.
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