Ramy Brooks passes historic Gold Dredge No. 4 outside Dawson, Yukon Territory, on his way to winning the 1999 Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. This Saturday, Brooks will be running his sixth Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. (ERIC ENGMAN / Fairbanks Daily News-Miner)

Brooks draws strength from wins and losses

By LEW FREEDMAN
Daily News sports editor

HEALY - The bobbing headlamp on the horizon haunted Ramy Brooks as he tended to his resting dogs on the lake beyond Carmacks, Yukon Territory.

Mark May was coming fast. Too fast. Brooks felt a numbness and it was not from the cold afternoon. He could see the championship of the 1999 Yukon Quest slipping away, and he didn't have the will to fight it.

Weary, accepting, he was broken. Glumly, he thought, "He's moving faster and it looks like there's nothing I can do about this."

But then he did.

On the edge of surrender, Brooks quelled the weakness in his spirit. He snacked his dogs, tossing them small pieces of salmon and sausage. He shifted leaders. And when he whistled, the dogs rose swiftly. "All right," he said, and the huskies trotted down the trail.

Too fast for May. Brooks raced on to Braeburn and into Whitehorse, beating the runner-up to the finish line by 10 minutes. What loomed as the greatest crisis of Brooks' mushing career became his greatest mushing triumph.

"I was able to work myself through it," Brooks said.

Because he had been through worse the year before on the Iditarod Trail.

That time, fighting a nightmare of depression provoked by the deaths of two close relatives, he was reduced to tears and 17 hours of torturous self-doubt in Galena. It took pleas from friends and relatives to prevent him from selling his dog team and forsaking mushing forever.

In the end, the tribulation made him mentally tougher, and holding on during the Quest proved it. Some victories can't be measured in time or numbers. But when you are member of the grandest family mushing dynasty in Alaska history - the grandson of Gareth Wright, the son of Roxy Wright - numbers count, too. By winning the Quest, Brooks put a third generation champion into the books.

A family man

Brooks, wife Cathy, daughters Abby, 4, and Molly, 2, and 75 dogs live on 34 acres among the spruce, aspen and birch trees off the George Parks Highway about 95 miles south of Fairbanks. They moved to Healy, population 650, for the weather, because, he said, it isn't as intensely cold as Fairbanks.

"It's gotten to be 60 below here, but it warms up during the day," Brooks said. "Forty below is the coldest we had this winter. Only for a couple of weeks."

Only.

On a recent February day, Healy was comparatively tropical. It reached 28 degrees in the dog yard where the team of huskies Brooks plans to run Saturday in the 2000 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is staked. A surprisingly sturdy 172 pounds, Brooks, who on the race trail seems smaller than his 5-foot-8 height, wore a short-sleeved T-shirt under a lightweight purple jacket. With dark brown hair, hazel eyes and a soft-spoken demeanor, Brooks, 31, appears boyish.

This is a homestead-in-progress, a piece-by-piece expanding operation carved out of the wilderness with sweat and determination. A place well-situated for 70-mile training runs through backcountry that offers him gorgeous views of Mount McKinley. And serenity.

There is a small, two-story house with unfinished walls and bare floors, a handler's log cabin, a well building, outhouse, sauna, tool shed and fencing around the dog houses. All built by hand with the help of friends and relatives.

"It's come a long way," Brooks said.

When the family moved here in May 1998, there was no road through the forest, no driveway. The first shelter was a leaky pup tent - "The Fred Meyer special," according to Cathy Brooks.

Next came a wall tent, succeeded by a weather port. The roof made it on the house by winter. Electricity was not added until November 1999, and running water hasn't arrived yet. Mom and dad have hauled 100 gallons of water at minus-60.

"After my 12-hour shift," said Cathy Brooks, an office manager for the Healy Clean Coal Project. "It is not a marriage-strengthening exercise."

There aren't enough hours in the day. In the morning, Brooks is "Mr. Mom," as Cathy calls it, before the kids, who are as small as puppies, go to home day care. He is gentle with the children. When Abby refused to eat her spaghetti for the dessert cake reward, Brooks did not lose his temper, but softly talked her into accepting his feeding. The Brookses make sure to read the girls a story every night.

Cabinets are scheduled for the kitchen walls and dining area that currently feature an Iditarod Trail map and a framed legislative proclamation praising Brooks for his Quest victory.

"You have to remind yourself it's coming," said Cathy, who grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania.

It has been a do-it-yourself lifestyle for a family immersed in a do-it-yourself sport - for decades.

Part Athabaskan, part Yupik Eskimo and part English, Brooks grew up with dogs in Rampart, Eureka and Fairbanks. By the time he was 4, he had regular dog-yard chores for his mother, who won three Fur Rendezvous Open World Championships, multiple women's world titles, three North American crowns and the Alpirod before retiring four years ago.

Most of the responsibility involved shoveling doggie waste products.

"I had a weak stomach," Brooks said. "I can remember not liking to clean up the kennel."

Brooks grinned. Shovel brigade is no one's favorite part of dog mushing. But he also rose early to train puppies before school. Brooks was 5 when he competed in a one-dog class race in Fairbanks, and he and a friend pictured themselves as future big-race champions.

In 1983, when Roxy Wright, Brooks and his sister, Tammy, moved by dog team from Rampart to Eureka, they traveled together. Brooks and Tammy, who is two years younger, shared a sled until they had a spat. Tammy switched to Roxy's sled, and Ramy, then 14, took off, solo mushing for 20 miles against his mother's wishes.

"He went off in front of us and I never saw him again until Manley," Wright said. "There were open creeks. Some kids take their parents' cars. He took my dog team."

Well into his teens, Brooks worked part-time in grandpa Gareth Wright's dog yard. Wright, a three-time Rondy world champ and twice North American champ - an astonishing 33 years apart - developed his own bloodline of racing dogs, Aurora Huskies.

Dogs and the Wright family share a link dating back to the start of the 20th century. Gareth's father, Arthur, ferried supplies to the 10,000-foot level of Mount McKinley when Hudson Stuck led the pioneer ascent of the mountain in 1913.

Gareth, 71, was born in Old Minto in 1928 and grew up in Nenana. As a youngster, he used the family's four dogs to deliver groceries for customers shopping at the Northern Commercial store. By age 12 he and the dogs cruised a trapline, which brought home mink, fox and muskrat.

In 1947, Wright saw a poster advertising Fairbanks sled-dog races. He thought, "Man, that's what I'm gonna be." By 1950, Wright was a Rondy and North American winner.

If Roxy Wright thought she was raising another champion, Brooks had other ideas. He felt he was missing out on too much. He wanted to be up-to-date on TV shows, to go downhill skiing.

"When I was 15," Brooks said, "if you asked me if I was going to run dogs, I would have told you you were crazy."

He rebelled.

At the start of this year's Kuskokwim 300 at Hanger Lake outside of Bethel, Brooks prepares his sled and his team. He's tied up next to his uncle, longtime sprint dog musher Curtis Erhart, who was making one of his first forays into longer-distance races. (RICHARD J. MURPHY / Anchorage Daily News)

Spending time Outside

After divorcing Roxy, Brooks' father Mike moved to Montrose, Colo. In the fall of 1986, Brooks joined him for his final year of high school.

"I had never been out of Alaska," Ramy Brooks said. "I wanted to see something new."

The sabbatical lasted six years.

After high school, Brooks spent time in Arizona and California and at Western State College in Colorado. Then, on Thanksgiving Day 1988, he joined the Navy.

Brooks spent four years studying to become a nuclear power expert in Orlando, Fla., San Diego, Idaho Falls, Idaho, and at the University of Washington in Seattle. He confirmed a distaste for big cities.

During Christmas leave in 1991, Brooks' mother asked him to run puppies. He realized he really missed mushing. Navy downsizing got him an early discharge a few months later - without ever being stationed on a ship.

In Pennsylvania, Cathy Brooks was friendly with the Molburg family, which publishes Team & Trail magazine, and was introduced to mushing. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in agricultural studies at Penn State, but she yearned to move west and learn more about mushing. Told Fairbanks was the center of the dog-sledding universe, she moved there. She and Ramy met at a party following the North American in 1993 and married in July 1994.

Brooks' return to his roots also coincided with Gareth Wright's belief that his superior breeding plan would immediately produce champion Iditarod dogs.

"At that time," Wright said, "I was an egomaniac. I felt I could just put somebody in there who could win."

The financially strapped grandson and the grandfather looking for the right musher joined forces.

"When Ramy started he knew nothing about racing," said the silver-haired Wright, who lives in a large log home on the banks of the Chena River and these days has just one dog on his property, a white poodle named Sassy.

"He didn't know how to feed dogs. He couldn't go without sleep. But every race he was in, he was in the money and every race he was in he completed. He had the tenacity."

Brooks' first 1,000-miler was the 1993 Quest. He placed 15th and won $2,400. A year later he was the Iditarod's rookie of the year with a 17th-place finish.

Quiet, intense

Brooks is polite, unassuming and isn't known for playing head games with other mushers. But none of that should be read as weakness.

"He's a quiet guy, but he's an intense racer," said Peter Butteri of Tok, who placed third in the 1999 Quest behind Brooks.

Brooks never tolerated losing well. As a child he had to win at board games. Cathy Brooks said it's hard to even play the card game Uno with him now. Brooks said family members typically are competitive at noncompetitive events. Last summer while transferring chum salmon from a boat to a truck with aunt Shannon Erhart and her husband, Curtis, they raced to see who could do it the fastest.

Roxy Wright said Brooks may have picked up such tendencies from her.

"People say that I'm one of the most competitive people they know," Wright said. "It's the drive to do the best I could. That's one of the things I tried to teach my children."

So Brooks did not enter 1,000-mile races just to see the scenery. In his early races, Brooks tried to stick with the front-runners as long as possible to study their routines and styles. He decided checkpoint efficiency is paramount.

In 1993, when he entered the Copper Basin 300, it took him 45 minutes to an hour to put booties on 12 dogs.

"Now I can booty 16 dogs in 13 minutes," Brooks said. "That's a half hour more I can sleep."

Brooks got better in every way. In his next Iditarods, he finished 16th in 1995, 11th in 1996, and eighth in 1997.

In 1996, forced to drop most of his team, Brooks nursed the minimum five dogs the last 229 miles between Shaktoolik and Nome. It wasn't enough merely to have good dogs, he learned. A musher needs dogs with the same gait.

"You can't have one dog loping when the others are trotting," he said.

That year Brooks said he saw a polar bear after leaving White Mountain.

"I shined my light over and there were two big green eyes watching me," Brooks said.

Most people insisted he was hallucinating, but Brooks said Elim residents warned him a polar bear really was in the neighborhood, and he remains certain he saw it.

Cracking the top 10 was a natural progression and seemed to position him as a potential winner in 1998.

But Brooks' 1998 Iditarod was not about winning. It was about survival.

'You can live through this'

When Brooks mushed into Galena, 700 miles from Anchorage, he was 10th - and a mess. Sleep-deprived and grief-stricken, he was distraught.

Eleven days before the Iditarod began, an aunt, Glenda Brooks, died. When Brooks left Fairbanks for the Iditarod, his grandfather, Ray Brooks, was in a hospital intensive care unit. In his last visit, Brooks squeezed the ill man's hand. His grandfather died the day before the race started.

DeeDee Jonrowe was at the Galena checkpoint. The year before, the Willow musher placed fourth after overcoming the death of her own grandmother in an automobile accident that also severely injured Jonrowe and her husband.

When an upset Brooks told Jonrowe, "I don't even want to be here this year," she counseled him.

"I told him I had been through the same thing," Jonrowe said. "I was wondering, 'Why am I out here? What's the meaning of life?'

"I told him, 'You can live through this.' "

Brooks' emotions were more jumbled than the Bering Sea ice pack. He questioned being away from family at such a critical time. He was ready to scratch, sell his dogs and abandon racing. He telephoned Cathy - who jumped on a plane.

"He shelved so much of that stuff," said Cathy of why Brooks broke down. "He didn't really deal with it. It was going deeper and deeper inside him."

Brooks phoned his mother and several other people. The leaders departed. Brooks, wrung out, sat in Galena for 17 hours. Finally, when veteran Joe Garnie gave him a nudge and said, "Let's go down the trail," Brooks responded. Far off the pace, but still in the money, Brooks made the rest of the journey with Garnie, Tim Osmar and Bill Cotter - good trail company. He was renewed.

"Once I got going, I was OK," Brooks said.

Placing 18th was a greater achievement than placing higher other years.

A role model

When Native mushers pull teams into villages along the Iditarod trail, kids beg for souvenir booties and adults applaud a little louder.

"In Alaska, mushers are heroes," Brooks said. "It's like being Michael Jordan. To me, that's a responsibility I don't take lightly."

Gareth Wright said whenever Brooks races, phone calls trickle back to him praising his grandson as a gentleman. Jonrowe called Brooks "a special young man."

At times, Brooks has been the only Native musher in the Iditarod, and he is proud of his heritage. Attuned to the high incidence of alcohol abuse in the Bush, he has carried packages of signatures of Alaskans pledging sobriety in his sled, an idea initiated by Akiak musher Mike Williams.

"He volunteered to do it," said a pleased Williams. "People look up to him."

Brooks has also done public service announcements for the Alaska Native Health Board in a campaign to prevent kids from starting to chew and smoke tobacco.

"I'm not against having a beer or something, and I'm not going out here to preach to anybody," Brooks said. "But we don't go out drinking. If you're going out drinking or taking drugs, you're not going to have the focus to make your dreams come true."

Make no mistake, Brooks' dream is winning the Iditarod. In their heyday, his grandfather and mother won the biggest prizes in mushing - and Brooks has captured the second-most significant race of his era.

Yet while there may be a century of dog driving in his family scrapbook, Brooks is a thoroughly modern musher.

It's not just about wearing synthetic clothing or driving lighter, faster sleds. The writing on the gray truck parked in Brooks' yard reads, "Ramybrooks.com." He has a personal web site, the better for marketing. Moreover, when Brooks plots strategy and studies mushers' speeds between checkpoints, he uses a Macintosh computer.

Applying the sophisticated tools of 2000 to a 1900 sport is what it takes to win now, he said.

"That's part of the change that's come," said Brooks, as he walked through his yard glancing up at the nearby Alaska Range. "If we don't want to change anymore, we'll die out."

Ramy Brooks could say the same about himself. His pain in the 1998 Iditarod made him change, made him adapt.

"I just think I can draw on the strength of getting through that ordeal," Brooks said. "The more things we experience, the stronger we get."

Some lessons are learned in the mind and some are absorbed by the heart and soul.

* Sports editor Lew Freedman can be reached at lfreedman@adn.com