OPINION: Dog, and oil, surprises on vacation to Lake Superior

Published on July 29th, 2010

By EARL FINKLER

MEDFORD - There's nothing like a road and water trip to spice up the wonderful days of summer. In early June, Chris and I piled camping gear and our husky Avu in the back of our Honda CRV and headed for Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes. It is about a three-hour drive north from Medford.

Once we arrived at the small town of Bayfield, we switched to a ferry across the bay to Madeline Island, the largest of the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior. Avu enjoyed the boat trip, but still hunkered down under a walkway so she could feel safe with all the vehicles and people aboard.

We put up our tent in a scenic state campground, which was also popular with Wisconsin mosquitoes. Then the three of us went to sleep - Chris and I on our air mattresses, with Avu on her blanket next to the side of the tent.

That's the way we started. But around 2 a.m., Chris woke me up. She had noticed Avu was now sleeping on my mattress and that I had somehow shifted to Avu's blanket. How that happened will always be a mystery. But I was comfortable sleeping in Avu's place, and she definitely was comfortable on my mattress. Incredible!

Late in the next afternoon, we enjoyed a science presentation by two park rangers. They took a small drum of oil and then put some hard boiled eggs in it for a while, to see how they would do in something like the oil from the blown out well in the Gulf of Mexico. After 15 minutes of soaking, it seemed like the oil did not sink in -yet.

Then they stuck some bird feathers in the oil, and tried to clean them off. No way. No matter how hard they scrubbed, some oil remained on the feathers. The rangers said they found such exercises in lesson plans for science classes.

The next morning, Avu and I made an early run into the small town of LaPointe so I could have my morning coffee and read a two-day old local newspaper. A local man, Jim Ryder, came by and asked what breed Avu was. I said she was half Greenland husky from Barrow and half something else.

He smiled and said he had his dog team of 12 Greenland Huskies staked out in his back yard, not too far away and would love to have me meet them. My eyes beamed - but I wanted Chris to share the experience. He said he'd wait, so we zoomed back to the campground and told her of the exciting opportunity. She was just getting ready for the day, but also wanted to see Greenland huskies again.

It was incredible, at least half of them looked just like Nuna, our Greenland husky who passed away just before last Christmas. We petted them and just circulated around the lot. They were barking and jumping, just like Geoff Carroll's huskies do sometimes in Barrow when there are visitors or it's feeding time.

Ryder said he assembled his team from some other mushers and also from the Canadian north, and breeding. He said he does dog sled tours in the winter on the Lake Superior ice around to the islands. And he's also trying to get his team in on the Serum Run in Alaska, which commemorates the original 1925 Serum Run from Nenana to Nome.

A wonderful vacation, thanks in part to so many wonderful dogs, including Avu of course.

- Earl Finkler is a former resident of Barrow and host of the Morning Show on KBRW, Barrow's radio station.