[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 18] [Senate] [Pages 23579-23581] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]TRIBUTE TO SUSAN BUTCHER Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, this past August, Alaska lost a great hero and the Stevens family lost a cherished friend. Susan Butcher was the four-time Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Champion and the first and only woman to mush her team to the summit of Mt. McKinley--with her friend and Iditarod race founder, Joe Redington, Sr. She is the reason we say ``Alaska--where men are men and women win the Iditarod.'' Susan left behind her husband David Monson and daughters Tekla and Chisana, and friends and admirers everywhere. In the solitude of the unforgiving Arctic terrain, this tough, focused, intelligent woman traveled and ran many thousands of miles with her dog teams over the years--a distance greater than a trip around the world. In David's words, she was the most driven woman on the face of this earth. Susan's skill as a musher was matched only by her great and abiding love for her dogs. If her dogs were happy, Susan was happy. Whether on the trail or at home, Susan always took care of her huskies before tending to her own needs. With only her ax and a parka, she once fended off a moose attacking her team along the trail. The moose killed two dogs and stomped 13 others. In another harrowing experience, she was rescued by her dogs when her sled broke through the ice on a remote river in the Wrangell Mountains. After that escape, Susan said she looked at every moment of her life as a gift. Susan did it all--living a life without many regrets and always great humor. Susan was blessed with a wonderful partner when she married fellow musher and lawyer David Monson. He gave her the love, laughter and relentless support that carried her through their years together. They expanded their family beyond their 100 huskies with the birth of their daughters Tekla and Chisana. Susan embraced motherhood with even greater passion, energy and devotion than she had in her life as a musher. And the girls blossomed in a home and cabin filled with books, music, Native Alaskan culture, and, of course, dogs. In December 2005, Susan was diagnosed with leukemia and began the toughest fight of her life. At the time, her husband David said ``We're going to do everything we can to make sure she has the best care. She does have the best attitude. Someone said this might be a tough disease, but this leukemia hasn't met Susan Butcher yet.'' Throughout her treatment in Seattle, Susan actively campaigned to help others by increasing donations to the National Marrow Donor Program and support for leukemia and lymphoma research. Over the past 20 years, Susan often traveled to Washington--bunking with our family--sled dogs, cat, kids and all. Presidents Reagan and George Bush, Sr., invited her and her lead dogs to the White House. She drove her team in the inaugural parades--the last time in 2001, with both her daughters in the sled. With her lead dog, Granite, she was welcomed by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to her Supreme Court chambers, and to the Pentagon by her friend General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Susan had a gift for inspiring others to never give up, to test their limits, to see their way through to the finish line, and to always try the path less traveled. It is no wonder her favorite poem reflected her New England roots--Robert Frost's ``The Road Not Taken.'' On a winter day in 1994, near her home in Eureka, AK, the reporter Skip Hollandsworth watched Susan and her dogs: ``She whispers a command, and in unison the dogs pull forward. The sled slips across the snow. Soon, Butcher and her dogs are like a mirage in the distance. A few moments later, the cold, silent land swallows them up.'' ``Sometimes when she leaves,'' David says, ``I wonder if she ever wants to return home.'' Some day in the years ahead, Susan and David's beautiful daughters Tekla and Chisana will graduate from high school. We hope they and their friends will find the same inspiration to challenge themselves as Susan's words instilled in our daughter Lily's Holton Arms class in 1999. Mr. President, Alaska lost one of its brightest stars when Susan Butcher passed away. We will always remember this remarkable and courageous woman. I ask unanimous consent that Ms. Butcher's commencement address to the Holton Arms School be printed in the Record. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: The Holton-Arms School Commencement Address--June 1999 Thank you very much. I'm very honored and excited to be speaking here today. And thank you to the class for asking me. It's especially exciting for me to be here because of my great friend, Lily Stevens, who I watched grow up since she was just a tiny little girl. I certainly would be surprised to hear if any of you were going to follow me in my chosen occupation as a dog musher. So I don't think that's why you have asked me here. I live in Alaska about a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. I own a hundred dogs, and I travel about 6,000 miles a year by sled and dog team. So my life is very different from what we see here. I thought, when I was asked to speak on achievement, that it would be easy to do. But getting to the soul of what motivates a person to excel cuts to the core of each person's dreams, desires and beliefs. Sometimes it goes beyond words. So I will speak for myself, and try and tell you how and why things have worked for me. It's really exciting to see such youth and promise before me. And it certainly takes me back to my high school graduation in 1972, when I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was very good in math and sciences. But I am dyslexic, so I struggled very hard in school. My strong loves were the wilderness, animals, science, and sports. I had a hobby for the last couple of years of working with my two Alaskan huskies, trying to teach them to be sled dogs. I feel that I was very lucky because even at that young age, I knew my true passion. It was to live in the wilderness and work with animals. But what sort of a career was that? So I started with veterinary medicine, which I also loved. I moved to Colorado where I went on with further schooling, and to enhance my career. By then, my mushing was becoming more than just a hobby. I had eight dogs and was starting to run in smaller races. In those days though, the Iditarod race didn't even exist. There was no such thing as a professional musher. And yet my dream still was to go and live in the wilderness with my dogs. Shortly after I turned 20, the Iditarod was run for the first time, and I said ``that's for me.'' I packed up my dogs, my cats, and my Volkswagen Bug, and I drove up to Alaska--all my belongings and against all parental advice, but not without their blessings--I lived way out in bush Alaska, teaching myself the art of dog mushing. Still at that time I had no clue that I was going to be able to make this passion into a career and a livelihood. In the summers I supported myself working on a musk ox farm and through fishing for salmon. I can only say that when I reached Alaska and was working out there, I knew this was perfect for me. I was content in my soul. I knew that I had found my dream. The relationship that I was able to develop with my dogs was deeper and stronger than anything that I could have possibly imagined. Perhaps I can describe that to you a little bit in this story. I worked very hard to try and develop a trust with each one of my dogs individually. And a number of years ago, when I was with my dog team in the Wrangell Mountains and I traveling on a trail that I had been using all year long that crossed a frozen river, my lead dog at the time kept veering off to the right. I kept calling her back to the left, telling her ``haw''--that's the command we use. But she kept going off to the [[Page 23580]] right. She had never disobeyed me before, so I couldn't understand. So I let her have her lead, and just as she pulled myself and the team off to the side of the trail, the entire river collapsed. She had a sixth sense that saved us from drowning. It's this mutual trust--mine and their guidance, and their ability and instinct in the wilderness-- that has not only gotten us to the finish line many times, but has also saved our lives. Success did not come easy for me at all. I struggled for many years with barely enough money to feed myself and my dog team. I was working seven days a week, at least twelve-hour days, trying to train myself and the dogs for the races. I did fairly well in many of the races that I entered, but it took me nine years before I was able to win. I lived alone for nine years in a 16' x 19' log cabin. Today my husband and I have built quite a complex, and we have a couple of diesel generators now. But back then I had nothing. I had no electricity, no phone. I hauled my water from the creek, and I had very few neighbors. In fact, there were only eight people in 2,500 square miles. So this was my childhood dream come true! I was absolutely dedicated to the care and the training of my dogs. All my focus was on becoming the best long-distance sled dog racer in the world. I had put together a great team that was very fast and well cared for. But I kept coming in second in more races than I cared to remember. Clearly, some essential element was missing. It was vision--the winning spirit. I didn't actually see myself as a winner. I believed wholeheartedly that someday I would win the Iditarod, but I didn't see myself as a winner today. I often finished with the strongest, fastest team--in second place. I often finished an hour or--in two instances, a split second--behind somebody else. In 1986, I learned how to pull together. I told myself that not only could I win, but that I deserved to win, and that I would win today. I saw myself crossing the finish line, and I lived and breathed that vision for a year. I told myself the 1986 race was mine. I was able to hold that image eleven days into the Iditarod, when with just 44 miles to go, I was neck-and-neck in a sprint for the finish with a musher named Joe Gamey. I had slept less than 20 hours in 12 days. I had run up every hill between Anchorage and Nome. I was exhausted. Joe made a big push and he passed me, gaining a 2-minute advantage. I was demoralized. I said to myself, ``Well, I guess second place isn't that bad.'' But then, through the blur of fatigue, I again saw myself winning the race. I got off my sled and I ran, pumped with one leg, and pushed the sled until I was able to pass Joe and win my first Iditarod. Once I learned that lesson, I won a lot of races. I quit fishing and musk ox farming, and I dedicated myself solely to my dogs all year 'round. To maintain consistency and excellence, you are always looking over the horizon, past the finish line, to the next race and the next record time. I found that it wasn't enough to just say to myself ``Well, I want to win again.'' I had to reach deep within and challenge myself. No racer had ever run in four long-distance races in a year. So in 1990 I decided to try to attempt to run in five. I set my goal to win all of them, and to win them in record time. All of these were between 300 and 1,100 miles in length. And some of them were as close as just five days apart. I ended up winning four in record time and coming in a close second in the fifth. So I didn't reach my ultimate goal, but by challenging myself like that I was able to set four new world records. I try to examine each race that I run, even the ones that I have won, to see what little steps I can take to keep getting better. Let me speak now of failure, because I have had very many of them and each one of you will. It's how you deal with these failures and your setbacks that's the most important thing. In 1991, I was at the top of my game. My team was said to be the best team in the history of the Iditarod that year. I ran a very aggressive race. Mother Nature threw every curve at me and my team that she possibly could. For over 500 miles, me and my team broke trail through storms, leading all the other mushers, until we finally reached the village of White Mountain an hour in front of our next competitor. We were only 77 miles from Nome. The awesome power of nature is very humbling and it must be respected. I went out first into an Arctic blizzard for six hours, losing the trail, regaining the trail, searching to make it through to Nome and win another race, until finally I knew that I could ask my team for no more. Because I continually challenge myself to win, I know that sometimes I must fail. As I tried to become the best, I know that there will be setbacks along the way. This is the essence of competition--that there will be both winners and losers. But I have learned at looking at losing, it's just another step to attaining my final goal. Many times, the pain of failure is very raw for me. But I have great faith in myself, that I will turn my defeats into something positive. I have learned many valuable lessons from my defeats. But I think the best thing was summed up in the words of an old Athabaskan Indian. He told me, ``There are many hard things in life, but there is only one sad thing. And that is giving up.'' So I know that in the future, I will continue to try very hard, and in the end--I will prevail. Adversity is a very large part of life, and learning to overcome it can be very difficult. When I started racing, I believed that I would win when I made everything run perfectly, when I was able to train all year round, when I didn't get lost or break my sled. So when I would have trouble, I wouldn't completely give up, but I would often settle for second place. Now I know that winning is overcoming adversity. I don't win because I run a perfect race. I win because I deal with the problems that the dogs and I encounter better than my fellow competitors. I have actually learned to love adversity. In 1988, I had every type of trouble that you could ask for. My sled broke five times. I got lost and I ran into ground storms of 80 miles an hour as I crossed the frozen Bering Sea. I could hardly see my lead dog in front of me, let alone the next trail marker. But I won the race despite all the problems the dogs and I encountered. We finished fourteen hours in front of the second place musher, who couldn't make it through the storm. So I learned that no matter what the obstacles, I always had the chance of winning and should never give up. It is true that I raced in a totally male-dominated sport. I was a pioneer for women in long-distance racing. But you won't hear me talking very much about that. I think the most important thing was that I saw no gender barriers. And anyone who tried to put me in that box and say, ``well, Susan is the best woman racer,'' I would quickly correct them. I was not a woman racer, I was a racer. It was my plan to be the best musher, and I did that. Perhaps I have been able to say something here today that will strike a chord with each of you, or some of you. Many of my lessons have been learned from my heroes--my dogs. I'd like to share the story of one of my animals. Twenty years ago, I had a puppy born to my kennel, who didn't look like he was going to be much of a dog. He had a very poor hair coat. He had cowhocked legs, which is basically knock-knees in the back end, and he had no confidence whatsoever. Most mushers would have given up on this puppy and just sold him to someone as a pet dog. But on my runs in the woods with he and his littermates, I saw a special spark in this dog that was not yet ignited. It was a challenge that I couldn't resist to try and make him into a champion sled dog. So I worked with him very hard physically to bring him around, through special nutrition and training. But mostly I concentrated on his lack of confidence. I gave him a strong name--Granite. He soon learned to draw from my strength and confidence, and we became a very powerful team. Granite grew into a 58-pound, deep-chested dog who compensated for his cow-hocked legs with a very powerful gait. All that extra work paid off because he not only turned into a good sled dog, but a great leader. He ended up leading me to victory in the 1986 and 1987 Iditarods, both of those in record time, along with countless other races between 300-500 miles in length. In October of 1987 while we were training for what we hoped would be his third consecutive victory, he became very seriously ill. I had to rush him down to Anchorage to a veterinary hospital to try and save his life. We set up a cot next to his kennel so that I could sleep with him there, day and night, tending him and willing him to live. After two weeks, the veterinarians told me I could take him home, but that he was never going to be able to run again, that he had permanent damage to his heart and liver and kidneys along with damage to the hypothalamus in the brain, which controls body temperature. But Granite had grown to be a magnificent canine athlete who loved to run and race, and all the dogs loved competition. They understand when they have won. They have as much pride as any human athlete. Granite was determined to get back on the team. Every time I would take other dogs out on runs, he would cry and howl, wishing that he could go out with us. Slowly but surely, his test results started showing improvements that the veterinarians were astounded at. They decided to let him start training with me and the puppies on little 2-mile runs. He soon advanced to running with the yearlings on 10-mile runs. And finally, by January, he was once again running with the main team, and the veterinarians okayed him for a 200-mile race. He towed that young team to record-setting victory. Then, 1\1/2\ months later he went on to do the impossible. He led me to victory in the Iditarod. And he did it by pulling me through a blinding snow storm that stopped all my competitors. So we finished 14 hours in front of the second place musher, as I told you--through that storm. That made Granite the only lead dog ever to win three consecutive Iditarods. All of us will fall on hard times, and it's often hard to find the key to help us with our problems. But if we can draw from our inner strength and desires as Granite did, we can overcome incredible odds. It's always important to look around us and see that there are those whose problems are far greater than ours. It's important to take time to give back to your community, to youth, and to those less privileged. As I am now a mother and a dog sled racer, I have taken more time to contemplate my past Iditarod years. So I [[Page 23581]] want to leave you with one last story that sort of sums up what I think of my career. I always felt that there was a division of duties between myself and the dogs. The dogs were definitely better in the wilderness, such as being able to sense thin ice or where there were wild animals around us, and helping me through the storms. But I was better when we were in Anchorage starting out and there were cars and traffic lights and all sorts of things in any of the villages, and I was also better at strategy and understanding competition. In 1989 I was racing towards the half-way point in the Iditarod. They give you a prize of $5,000 for being the first into that checkpoint, and nothing for being second, so it's quite coveted. Joe Runyon and myself were the best two teams in the race that year, and we had been vying for first place for miles. We had just left the checkpoint of Ophir, and it was about a 90-mile run over to the abandoned gold mine town of Iditarod. Throughout the day, Joe and I had passed each other. You have got to imagine that these are just two mushers out in the middle of nowhere, so when you pass each other--even though you're very competitive with each other--you definitely talk. And when you see each other and pass, you will have a little conversation. So just as it was getting dusk, I had put on my headlight so that I could see through the darkness--a battery-powered headlight, as had Joe--he put his new young lead dog, Rambo, up in lead. He came flying by me. He stopped--I had out my map and compass. He said, ``Where do you think we are?'' I said, ``I think we have just passed the Deshka River. Here it is on the map, so we must be about five miles from the town of Iditarod.'' He said, ``That's what I'm thinking too,'' and he passed me. I was using my lead dog, Tolstoy, at the time. I starting pumping with one leg and encouraging my dogs, saying ``Come on, let's get going.'' They just were flat. They were not going to pick up and go as fast as Joe's team. So I took Granite, who was in the team, and I put him up in lead. I encouraged him, and I encouraged the rest of the team. Still, they didn't respond. Five miles should have taken us about thirty minutes. We went hour after hour after hour. Three hours later, we were still on the trail. I could see Joe's headlight--it's very hilly country there--going up and down the hills, just a little ways ahead of me. All of a sudden, Granite turned around and he looked at me and he went, ``Now!'' And he kicked it into gear, all the dogs immediately responded to him, and he passed Joe 100 yards from the finish line at Iditarod and we won the half- way prize. So I learned that not only do I not know as much about the wilderness as my dogs, but I don't know anything about competition. And it is my job to love the dogs, care for them, feed them and nurture them, and hold on for dear life. So in parting, I want to say to each and everyone of Holton Arms' 1999 graduating class, I hope very dearly that each one of you is able to find your dream. And when you do--love it, nurture it, and hold on for dear life. ____________________