Covenant House President Gets Ride of His Life in Alaska

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You would think that the last place a winter-fatigued New Yorker would want to visit in early March would be Alaska. But Covenant House President and dog lover Kevin Ryan made the trip to take part in the 2015 Iditarod’s ceremonial start March 7.

When he landed in Anchorage the day before the famous 1,000-mile dog sled race, irony of ironies, there was no snow. Apparently it had all been shipped here.

“From my hotel room I could hear the trucks working through the night bringing in 11 miles of snow to downtown Anchorage for the course,” Ryan recalled. “We were the 64th team to depart and by the time Cindy Gallea, my musher, left, better than half the course was slush. It was very rough going.”

Ryan had been invited to take part in the ceremonial start to the race as an “IditaRider.” It’s kind of like being invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game. It was an honor bestowed on Ryan in his role as president to help raise awareness about ongoing homelessness in Alaska, where Covenant House, the Catholic-run shelter for teenagers and young adults under age 21, serves more than 100 homeless youth a day.

Covenant House has served more than 3,800 individuals a year since the first Alaskan shelter opened in 1988. GCI Alaska, the state’s largest telecommunications wireless network, has been a major supporter of Covenant House and is also a sponsor of the Iditarod. It all came about when Ryan visited Alaska last August to do a site inspection of the facility. During that visit Ryan told one of his hosts he was training to run in the New York City Marathon.

“Somebody offhandedly said something to me about how impressed they were with the marathon and I said, ‘Not at all, the most impressive race is the Iditarod!’ It was that short and that off-handed,” Ryan explained of how he came to be invited.

Ryan got to travel the first rather bumpy 14 miles of the famed route, which wasn’t without mishap due to the treacherous conditions. About halfway through the course they had an unfortunate encounter with a tree.

“Cindy was doing everything in her power to steer us away from the tree but because the dog took a turn to the inside and because there was no snow she wasn’t able to shift her weight and have the sled tack left. So as we cut this turn the sled just headed right for the tree,” Ryan explained. “She braked as hard as she could and it was probably the difference between hitting it at 15 miles per hour and hitting it at 5 miles per hour.”

Gallea, a nurse practitioner from Minnesota, is an experienced musher who was appearing in her 13th and final Iditarod. During their time together Ryan said he was able to talk to her about Covenant House.

“She is a wonderful human being,” Ryan said. “Her two passions are nursing/medicine and her dogs. She decided to let this be her last Iditarod because she’s going to get a Ph.D. in nursing medicine. And she was saying to me, ‘You know if you open a Covenant House in the Twin Cities I really want to be a part of that.’ And just as it happens we are looking at the possibility of opening up a house for trafficked girls in Minnesota!

“And so I just thought how providential is God that I am on a dogsled team in Alaska in the Iditarod and talking with someone who I think could well become part of our launching a Covenant House movement in Minnesota. I got to tell you, honestly, the experience itself was amazing but being with Cindy made it transcendent.”

The day before the big race Ryan had the opportunity to visit the kennels and meet some of the dogs that would be pulling the big sleds. For a dog lover—Ryan, appropriately has two adopted shelter dogs at home—it was a wet, sloppy kiss-fest. “I haven’t been kissed that much ever,” he said. “The dogs were slobbering all over me.”

The kids of Covenant House also had a role to play. Sixteen were selected to act as handlers at the start of the race. Ryan explained that once the dogs have been harnessed, there is about a 30-minute wait before the run starts. During that time the anxious, excited dogs have to be handled, talked to and petted to calm them down. The Covenant House kids fulfilled that role.

“It was really cool to have the kids be a part of that,” Ryan enthused. “One of the boys, he was the last one to bring a dog to the front, everybody else had their hands tied up so there was no safety net for him. He had to get this done. So I said, ‘Are you OK? And he looked at me very seriously and said, ‘I’m working very hard to be someone that others can rely on.’ He saw this as a rite of passage for himself.”

Being homeless in New York City is certainly not easy. It is dirty, dangerous and uncomfortable. Being homeless in Anchorage is all of that but there is an extra element, the long, usually harsh, unforgiving winter, which can be life-threatening.

“It’s cold and dark and those problems more than anything else pose a threat to our kids,” noted Ryan. “At Covenant House we say that once a young person has been on the street 72 hours all bets are off because they become desperate. But in Alaska kids don’t have 72 hours. I think if a young person doesn’t have a place to sleep that night they become desperate. Arctic homelessness is unlike homelessness anywhere else.”