Jaye Foucher, The Shredding Sledder

Jaye Foucher, with one of her canine colleagues. (Sean Hurley, NHPR)

When it comes down to it, all I really know about dog sledding comes from Yukon Cornelius:

Yukon: Mush! Don’t you speak North Pole talk. Mush!

Yukon Cornelius is a claymation figure from the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer stop motion animation. He’s also the source of much of my knowledge regarding the North Pole. But as Ashland resident and dog musher, Jaye Foucher, tells me:

Jaye: We don’t actually yell mush.
Sean: You don’t?!
Jaye: No.
Sean: Oh no.
Jaye: Maybe some newbie beginners yell it, thinking that’s what you’re supposed to.
Sean: I would. I would get on and I would just –

But as I’m to complete the thought, I realize that my dream of shouting Mush! has turned, you guessed it, to mush. But there’s a slight consolation as Jaye explains the origin of the word:

Jaye: Mush comes from a French word, which I assume is pronounced marche, It means to move forward and that’s what the French-Canadian mushers would say to their dog teams to get them to start.

Jaye Foucher has been mushing for the last 8 years. As I met with her she was preparing to leave for Minnesota to compete in the annual Beargrease Dogsledding race.

Sean: Do you know any, much about the Beargrease Race?
Jaye: Yeah, I know a little bit of the history. It’s to commemorate the life of John Beargrease, who was a son of a Chippewa chief and he used to, in the late 1800’s deliver mail, by dog team, along the Lake Superior Shores. So, it’s to commemorate his life. And in fact every musher has to stop at this one place along the trail and do a little memorial with one of his descendants.
Sean: That’s very nice.
Jaye: Yeah.
Sean: And what does that consist of?
Jaye: I have no idea! (laughs)

Dogsledding isn’t really a hobby. It’s a lifestyle. Taking care of 25 dogs is huge undertaking. Simply going out for a 10 mile training run takes up an entire afternoon. Which is why it’s a little shocking to learn that Jaye is also a rock guitar virtuoso:

SFX: 14 second song lick from Jaye Foucher’s song “September”.

That’s Jaye “shredding”, as they say, on the song September from her CD “Contagious Grooves”. As I’d hoped to get some sounds of her sledding, we met at the abandoned railway depot in Ashland where she was preparing for a training run along the wide snowy way of the tracks.

Sean: So how you doing?
Jaye: Good!
Sean: This seems like a very elaborate process.
Jaye: Yes, it’s a lot of work. A lot of set up time.
Sean: How long does it take you actually to get rolling, taking it all down –
Jaye: Half hour, forty five minutes. It depends on how many dogs I’m running, whether I’m putting dog boots on…

That king of all dog sled races, the Iditarod, is Jaye’s long term goal. She’s hoping to be ready by 2010. Interestingly, in her former incarnation as a rock guitar virtuoso, Jaye rose toward a similar eminence:

Jaye: I definitely had a decent amount of success and a taste of what it would be like and I had a couple of auditions for pretty big artists, but at the time, I was getting to that point where I really had one foot in the door there, was right when I was getting into dog mushing.

Jaye doesn’t tell me who she auditioned for and for that reason I assume she means something only a little bit bigger than a local bar band. But for the sake of due diligence I engage in a little Google reporting and discover that Jaye auditioned for two of the biggest names in music:

Music: Prince’s “When Doves Cry”

While that isn’t Jaye, but she did audition for Prince himself. She also auditioned to be a part of Michael Jackson’s touring band, but lost out to Slash, the former guitarist for Guns ‘n Roses.

It seems like a huge distance to me – moving from the intensity and glitz and pressure of high caliber musicality to the calm and wind swimming paths of the old railway beds in Ashland. But to Jaye they seem quite similar:

Jaye: I think there’s probably more in common with the rock musician and dog musher in many ways, you know. Both of them are really money sucking things to do (laughs). I was a broke musician and now I’m a broke dog musher. I guess I just really got used to the broke lifestyle.

Oh yeah, and if you’re wondering what dog mushers say in place of mush:

Jaye: We usually yell “Ready!” or “Let’s go!” or, I mean that’s what I yell. Usually I say “Ready!”

Music: Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”

For NHPR, I’m Sean Hurley