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INDIAN - Usually, D'Antoine Webb loves to talk. But at the first sight of "his" sled dogs, the Baltimore teen seemed to enter a trance. Just last month, the teen won a citywide essay contest designed to promote the programs of Baltimore's Police Athletic League and motivate its participants - inner-city youths who benefit from the organization's 27 after-school programs serving 7,000 children. The contest certainly motivated D'Antoine, who couldn't remember ever traveling any farther north than his hometown. When he heard first place was a trip to Alaska and a ride in the sled of Baltimore Iditarod newcomer Dan Dent, he got to work. Wednesday afternoon was his first chance to greet the dogs that would be pulling him to glory - helping him, as he wrote in his essay, "to escape the city life" and to "look danger in the eye while it calls my name." After walking the last leg of a narrow, winding road leading to Dent's Alaska headquarters, D'Antoine, 14, found himself in a snow-covered scene out of a postcard. And then he saw the dogs. Thirty-four of them, all in a row. Giving a distracted, faint "hello" to Dent and the others who'd come to greet him, D'Antoine headed straight for the dogs. "I love dogs," said D'Antoine, giving one of them a vigorous petting. "I love 'em to death." Reading about the sled dogs' faithfulness and strength, he said, was a big part of why he wanted to see the Iditarod. "I just wanted to be up here, to be with them," he said. He seems to feel at home in Alaska. "This," he said, gesturing around him at snow-covered mountains, "is me." By the end of his visit, he was walking a confused Flake around on a leash. He even got the sled dog to perform a city trick. "I didn't know Flake knew how to sit," said an amused Dent. Like the other "Iditariders," most of whom bid in an auction for the chance to ride in the ceremonial start of the race, he'll get a trial run today and learn some rules for safety's sake, though his part of the journey will be only about the first 11 miles. After introducing the excited teen to the 16 dogs that will be taking his team - from the largest, "Sly," to the evocatively named "Puker," - Dent took a break from his Iditarod preparations Wednesday to explain a little about a musher's tools, from impressively large beaver fur mitts to the sled in which D'Antoine will make his trip. The day gave D'Antoine plenty to write about in one of the postcards he promised to send students at his school, Pimlico Middle School. D'Antoine climbed on the runners, in racer's position, as Dent showed him the pouch where he will be riding Saturday as well as the essentials that will be packed in there for the rest of the ride, from an ax and gun to a cooking stove that looks like an aluminum box. For D'Antoine, who lives in a row house in west Baltimore where drug dealing on the corners is a part of the background, the trip offers something more than exotic scenery, Dent said. "This is a chance to show that you can do whatever you want with your life. Whatever you want, you should reach for it." To win the contest that brought him here, D'Antoine not only had to tell why he wanted to come, he had to research the stories of Balto and "the greatest Maryland musher and Arctic explorer," Matthew Alexander Henson, who, like D'Antoine, was black. D'Antoine said he was already interested in coming here because he'd seen Alaska in the movie "Iron Will." The winning essay took him only a couple of hours to write, a proud D'Antoine said. D'Antoine reports big plans for after he goes home. On a phone call home, D'Antoine promised his mother, a nurse, that he's going to take her to Alaska someday, he said. And he already has an idea for how to do it. When his adventure is over, D'Antoine said, he plans to make money by writing a book about it. He promised it will come out in a year. But for all his adventurous ideas, D'Antoine is a typical teenager after all, a fact obvious in his request for a trip to an Anchorage landmark well-known to local teens and that D'Antoine was dying to visit before he left town. So, he'd just won an all-expenses paid trip to Alaska. Where do you think he wanted to go next? "I want to go ice skating at Dimond Mall." * Reporter Sonya Senkowsky can be reached at ssenkowsky@adn.com See related stories from:
Sunday, January 17, 1999
Friday, December 4, 1998
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