Читать книгу Inside The Rainbow - Sandy Sinclair - Страница 5

Sanak Island on a rare calm day

“We're not going to Alaska in that little thing,” screamed Marie, when first she saw the Motor Vessel GARLAND. It did look rather small alongside the Victory ship moored nearby on the waterfront. She never surmised that, for the next year, that little thing would be the biggest thing we'd long to see and whenever we did see the little thing that event would become the biggest celebration for everyone.

"That little thing" was the hundred twenty foot tramp steamer that moored in Seattle for ten days, before making the stormy twenty day freight run to the Aleutian Islands, the most westward part of North America. Our destination was one of those islands. That remote island was totally isolated, not only from the lower forty-eight but from all Alaska as well. It had neither an established radio contact nor any telephone communication. That GARLAND would be our only contact with the outside world. She’d bring us our mail and the supplies that we’d ordered months before through the faithful ol' Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

We’d been married but two months before and the ink was barely dry on our college diplomas when we faced the monumental task of ordering all the supplies needed for living a full year in the wilderness.

Marie and I met while attending Eastern Washington College of Education and after a whirlwind romance, I convinced my new bride to embark on a life of adventure and travel, as I envisioned we would teach our way around the world. Our friends were starting their careers in nice comfortable local schools, so it took much negotiation for her to agree to make our first stop the wilds of Alaska.

After making letters of inquiry, we received two job offers from Alaska. One was to teach in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Eskimo village of Ukivok on King Island. This community was perched upon pilings driven into a sheer rock face out on a speck of land between Siberia and Alaska. The villagers and teachers were delivered to King Island by the BIA supply ship North Star or even by a Coast Guard Ice Breaker if it was on duty in the locale. Everyone stayed there all winter without avenue of escape until spring, as they were ringed in by frozen sea ice.

The other offer was from the Territory of Alaska to teach on an equally isolated Aleutian Island. It was a big decision but after much consideration we both put our signatures on the dual acceptance letter we dropped into the mailbox. Our fate was sealed, we chose Sanak.

When we received our teaching contracts in the mail from the Territory of Alaska, we immediately started buying the things presumed needed, using borrowed money. That soon created a big mountain within our Seattle apartment. An even bigger problem was to get it all shipped north to our school location without any slip-ups. The situation was so insecure as there was no agent on which to give our list with the responsibility to have it arrive safely at the destination. No one sold shipping insurance for a secured delivery to such a remote location.

We had no clue about what food to order for a year nor did we know what clothing we might need. We weren’t sure if the Aleutian weather was sub-zero or mostly rain. We didn’t even know what was needed for our living quarters. All the written material about our assignment was stated in general terms. We wrote asking why the information was so tentative. Their answer was that the island was so remote that no one from their department had ever been there. Our pre-job indoctrination was merely second hand information. We took the job. They said "Good Luck!"

We got medical advice about pioneer living from our old family doctor who gave us big green pills from his own supply. My NRA rifle instructor rebuilt an old 30:06 especially for me. We got wilderness advice from my ninety year old uncle who had run pack horses up Chilkoot Pass during the Klondike Gold Rush but most decisions came from my naïve, “know-it-all” macho, judgment tempered somewhat with the common sense of Marie’s country girl upbringing. I was prepared to add my old bellows camera, some sheet film, photo chemicals and photo paper as I had been well trained in old style black and white studio photography.

The complete ingredient for every meal became a big deal, as we wouldn't be going down to the deli for any last minute items before dinner. Every need had to be anticipated accurately, acquired quickly, packed securely and delivered to the dock ahead of our scheduled departure.

Marie and I hurriedly sent our mountain of stuff, delivered by a commercial trucker, to the docking address of the GARLAND, hoping the trucker knew where he was going as that shipment of supplies was our sole lifeline. We were still busy with last minute details and receiving "good luck" messages from family when we got a frantic phone call from the Garland’s chief mate saying there had been a mix-up in the previously announced schedule given to us and we would be leaving within the hour. I called a taxi and we rushed to the harbor. We had no idea if everything was aboard or if we'd bought wisely, as we neared the gangplank that evening. "Oh Well," I said trying to reassure Marie, "We can always request anything we forgot sent up on the next month’s trip.” Little did we know that we'd not see the GARLAND but a few times that next year.

My bride saw the little tramp steamer for the first time that evening on the Seattle waterfront when we boarded, provoking her negative outcry. I was absolutely sure that this was the right thing for us to do, as I boldly stomped up the gangplank. Marie just stepped aboard.

So at dusk on August 29, 1951, a harvest moon lighted the deserted docks as the GARLAND'S skipper gave the sleepy Seattle waterfront the traditional long melodious steam-whistle. That was the total celebration. No one came to see us off. No confetti streamers. No cheers of "Bon Voyage." A crewman just slipped off her mooring lines and away we chugged. We were off to Alaska and teach in what would be the last of the little red schoolhouse era.

When the crew learned where we were going, they swarmed us with horror stories:

“Why, didn’t you know that Sanak is the worst freight landing on the whole Aleutian run?”

“Just last year the teacher candidate got as far as Seward and turned back after learning what life on that island was going to be like.”

“One year the teacher was killed when a fishing boat blew up right in Sanak Harbor.”

“Another year a man and wife went out there as teachers. The wife went hunting for wild flowers along the cliffs and was never found again, not even a trace.”

“Another went crazy and burned all the school books.”

“Still another had to deliver his wife’s baby because there was no way to get medical aid when her time came.”

“It has a reputation as the hard luck school.”

We figured this was just the normal initiation given all Cheechako schoolteachers, but later found every one of those Sanak legends to be completely accurate. One grizzly old sailor confided that we'd each earn the title of Sourdough after a year, but until then Marie and I would carry that lowly label of Cheechako.

The GARLAND slowly moved past an anchored Liberty ship in Elliott Bay, and headed North. Our fully loaded craft had canvas covered cargo strapped down about her foredeck, and stacks of lumber on her fantail. She soon slowed down and nuzzled up at the Richmond Point dock to take on fuel. For an hour, the strong smell of diesel came into our cabin, so we went out about the deck and watched the harbor lights ashore. We were excited to be finally on our way as it had been a stressful week with all the preparation of ordering, packing and shipping all our "truck" for a year's living. That had been overwhelming for a couple of newlyweds. We only hoped that everything got aboard, as we never were able to double-check our manifest with whoever was supposed to be in charge of cargo.

As the only passengers, Marie and I had the stateroom. It was a tiny closet-sized cabin with two boxy seaman bunks, no sink nor toilet. There was no place to put our two sea bags full of personal gear, so they shared the bottom of each bunk along with our feet. I took out my little ukulele and started playing the only three songs that I could strum. Though tolerant of my low-level musical skill, Marie was sick and tired of those three tunes before the trip was over.

On the night traverse of the Inside Passage, between Vancouver Island and the west coast of Canada, we saw running lights of freighters, commercial fishing boats and recreation boaters heading south to the warm comforts of industrialized civilization. We were heading north to the cold wild west.

I brought aboard a copy of the latest newspaper from our hometown: THE DAILY OLYMPIAN, August 29 1951. Little did we know that would be the last world news we'd see in print for a year. I read to Marie some of the sub headings:

KOREAN CASUALTY COUNT: 81,422 The Defense Department today reported a new total of American battle casualties in the Korean War, an increase of 415 since last week.

(Marie remembered some of our classmates who were drafted in the fall, trained, served in the war, wounded and back on campus with crutches before the year was over.)

COULD AN A-BOMB STOP HURRICANES? New Orleans-Mr. Ellos, a New Orleans insurance man pointed out that the cost of an A-bomb is less than the toll of the recent hurricane "Charlie" that killed 210 people in a week-long rampage. "That A-bomb idea was discussed," said Stevens, the weather bureau's chief forecaster, "but not seriously."

LESSONS FOR IRAN Britain and Iran were bitterly sparring over an oil dispute, yet a new pact was reached in an atmosphere of great tension. It was feared that Iraq might balk for a time but that agreement lowered the prospect of trouble developing in the Middle East.

KENNEDY ASKS FOR INVESTIGATION OF THE ARMY! Kennedy, (D) Massachusetts, asked congress to examine methods used to admit men to West Point after 90 cadets were expelled for cheating on tests. These cadets made up much of their champion football team.

THE BLOODIEST HOLY WAR IN HISTORY IS COMING! Moslem's of Pakistan are threatening a “jihad” holy war against the Hindus of India. 10,000s had just been killed there.

400 SLATED TO DIE ON HIGHWAYS THIS LABOR DAY WEEK END! That was a predicted number to die in automobiles this week in the USA. This would bring the total, during the last 50 years, to over one million. That is more US deaths than in all our wars we've fought.

MOVIES AT THE AVALON THEATER Bing Crosby and Jane Wyman in "Here comes the Groom" along with a second feature, "Father's Little Dividend" with Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, plus a news reel and a cartoon. Marie found comics were actually funny as I read them.

In every minute of our existence on this planet, good things are happening as well as an equal amount of terrible things. Reporters, playwrights, song writers, artists, and photo journalists ply their trade using a selection from those thousands of choices that happen every day. So I asked Marie which stories should we acknowledge from all those? She chose the sports page and the funnies.

The next morning, we met most of the eight-man crew and were even welcomed by the skipper. He allowed us to visit the wheel-house, except during docking. The salty old black cook was our favorite, as he always had some funny comment to add to any conversation. We took some pictures around the boat that expressed our feelings, of enthusiasm (mine) and of docile acceptance (hers). One of Marie on top of the deck cargo looking wistfully back towards home.

Item from Marie's diary: Aug 30th The cook asked us where we were headed and when we told him Sanak,, he just rolled his eyes and left, not saying a word. All the people who tell us stories about Sanak have never been there. I am anxious to find out about the place for myself.

At each port of call, we picked up more passengers. A nurse named Mary Light boarded at Ketchikan and Father Popoff came on at Juneau. During those years of mistrust about the Communist, I figured he was a Russian spy masquerading under religious cover.

From our newspaper, I read that North Korean and UN forces were starting peace talks at a place near the 38th Parallel, yet at the same time our troops were being killed by Communist artillery fire on nearby Fool's Hill. I suspected, Father Popoff had to be part of a similar Russian Communist deception here in our part of the world. But in truth, I found that the Korean War was the furthermost thing from his mind. He was the much beloved Russian Orthodox priest respected by all in the westward islands.

We were ready to cast off at Seward, when two taxis sped down the dock, screeched to a stop by the GARLAND and unloaded four sets of teachers. They were heading out to their respective Alaska Native Service teaching stations along the westward chain. It was no wonder that the crew labeled the September run of the GARLAND "The Schoolmarm Special."

Passengers were soon sleeping all over; in the mess hall, on the tables, on the seats, in the passageways, and even one guy in the cargo hold. I was asked to give up my space so the nurse could share the stateroom with Marie. However, everyone made light of the inconvenience. We all became one big, low budget cruise boat.

This old sea dog got seasick going across the Gulf of Alaska, while my farm-bred wife who had never been to sea, was bright eyed and cheery. Marie was the only passenger who never missed a meal. So much for any macho bragging rites in our marriage!

All the ANS teachers were federal employees from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. They were an independent rugged lot, who over the years had developed a close-knit camaraderie. Each couple lived a very lonely professional life in their isolated native villages, yet when meeting every two or three years aboard ship or at conferences, they'd grab each other by the shoulders, call out their nick-names, and swap Alaskan stories. It was like old home week for them on the Schoolmarm Special.

The one connecting link they had, that we Territorial teachers did not have, was their weekly radio schedule. Being a US Government institution they had a special radio frequency set aside daily for official school business, but always some personal messages managed to slip in.

One giant ANS teacher from Nikolski and her “Casper-milk-toast” husband, had just returned from gambling in Reno and were still at it aboard the GARLAND. A lone thirteen-year-old native boy wanted to join in their game. They let him play and soon had him in a sink or swim decision. He moaned that what he put in the pot was all he had. We watched, as the hard-nosed teacher said, "Put up or shut up!" The next hand, she parted him from all his gambling money, and added, "Your school play-days are over, kid. This is the real school of hard knocks!"

Sept 6th Left Kodiak at 10:30 They still couldn’t get our radar fixed. We are plugging thru the fog without it. We now have 24 passengers, 10 teachers, 1 missionary, 1 nurse, 1 Russian Orthodox Priest (he looks just like Joseph Stalin), 2 Aleut natives, 2 young boys, a Cannery Supt, his wife and 5 kids. Now all the crew know us but don't call us by name, we are just called "The Sanak Kids."

As we headed west from Kodiak, we started letting people off at each Aleut village. Mary Light, the missionary nurse, was dropped off at Afognak. The Russian Priest was headed for Karluck via Squaw Harbor. The Barnett's were dropped at Belkofski. None of the native villages had docks, so small fishing dories would come out to the anchored GARLAND. A native fisherman would stay in his dory, maneuvering it along-side the bouncing ship in the big swells, trying to get close enough for the crew to safely drop supplies, mail and people into the small space between the dories pointed bow and their pointed stern. When one would get its load, the next one would maneuver into position. It was a perilous situation and had to be done with tremendous skill and a little bit of luck.

Sept 7th Sandy talked with the Russian Priest. After much communication, he understood him to say, that in the outlying villages the teacher is always No. 1 and the Priest is No. 2. The missionary thinks the Priest is going out to start trouble in the villages by collecting money. The friends of the Priest on board tell us they think the missionary nurse is going out to start some trouble between Orthodox believers and the fundamentalists. In the newspaper, I just read in the religious section that an Arab boy had just found some old scrolls in a cave near the Dead Sea, but experts say they don't think they are authentic relics. Wouldn't it be great if they could shed some light on what really happened back in those days?

The Aleutian schools from Kodiak westward in geographical order were: Afognak-ANS, Ouzinkie-ANS, Old Harbor-ANS, Alitak-ANS, Chignik-ANS, Perryville-ANS, Sandpoint-Territorial, Unga-Territorial, Belkofski-ANS, King Cove-ANS, and Sanak-Territorial. Further west from us came Ikatan-Territorial-(It only had 5 students and the teacher quit so that school dissolved), Nikolski-ANS, Unalaska at Dutch Harbor (an incorporated town with a regular school district, served regularly by the Reeves Airline) and finally Adak, way out on end of the chain, a modern well equipped U.S. Air Force On-base School.

The unloading at Perryville was especially memorable. Marie and I had been having long conversations with the Ragans, learning about their teaching life in various isolated villages. Marie really liked Mrs. Ragan who had brilliant red hair. She was caring for her two-year-old child and had recently given birth to an infant. It was especially rough water that day as we dropped anchor. We could barely see the ANS schoolhouse, near the shoreline through the wind-blown spray. Safety and security were within sight on that shore, but would they be able to reach it? Mr. Ragan slipped from his perch as he jumped off the GARLAND into a waiting skiff. But after recovering, the two-year-old was handed down to him. We held our breath as Mrs. Ragan with baby in her arms stepped out into mid air like Mary Poppins, just as the dory came up to her outstretched foot on the next wave. She bravely let go of the GARLAND's lifeline and crumpled into the arms of the rough looking bearded Aleut, in the bow of that bouncing dory. At that split-second another Aleut in the stern gave the 9 horsepower Johnson outboard full throttle and they sped away out of sight into the fog toward what we assumed would be a very wet surf landing along the shoreline just in front of the Perryville school. We never saw them again.

The many days of stormy seas, the inconvenience of eating and sleeping amid cargo, plus the never ending stories of teaching in the North molded special memories of The Schoolmarm Special forever in our minds. We all seemed to have so much enthusiasm for life and our career in those days, like highly trained recruits before their first battle. It was with real emotion that we said goodbye to each as they stepped over the side into a waiting dory which took them ashore to their positions in a native village.

Nothing can match this treasure of common trials endured together and thus the wilderness teaching fraternity was created. Fraternity through northern hardship may also be depicted by this example, the recent Diamond Jubilee of the Klondike Gold Pioneers, celebrated in Seattle. There were people who made millions, along-side former dance hall girls, mule train packers as well as the unsuccessful prospectors who had to borrow money to get home. From far and wide came the good guys and the bad guys, the lucky ones and the unlucky ones, but at that jubilee, social status was forgotten. They became brothers and sisters of the same fraternity. All had suffered through the same experience. It's true, each did it in his or her own fashion, but at this celebration, sharing the North had molded them equal. They’d all had endured!

We stopped at Unga and Sandpoint, our closest Territorial school neighbors, but we didn't meet the teachers. They had previously arrived on the August boat and were busy in their schools. At Sandpoint there was a cannery, so we tied up to a nice secure dock and were met by the self-appointed official boat-greeter of the village. This native matriarch had been looking forward all summer to meeting the new teachers of Sanak, the place she called "Her Peoples." This special lady was Katie Morris. She had lived on Sanak during her formative years and was related to many of the residents. In her broken English, Katie told us many names of students we would soon be teaching and gave us friendly advice aimed at doing a good job for "Her Peoples." She had little gifts to give to selected Sanak schoolgirls as well as a special package of smoked salmon for us. Katie was so happy to see that we were young and spirited rather than hardened veterans of the bush schools. By the time we got to Sandpoint, all the Aleutian schoolmarms had been delivered, except four: the Dieringers for Nikolski, the Barnettes for Belkovski, the Dodds for King Cove, plus Marie and I, who had been the only Territorial teachers aboard.

This was the first time anyone had made a special fuss over us, as we were clearly the poor cousins among all the Alaska Native Service teachers. Later, we learned why. All their schools had generators for lights, appliances, up-to-date two-way radio equipment, health services from the ship M V ALASKA HEALTH, well equipped classrooms, running water, showers and toilets. They had routine visits from the Russian Priest for Religious services, regular supply visits by the BIA support ship NORTH STAR, an elected village chief for law and order plus the fraternity of other ANS teachers for professional support. None of these luxuries were we to inherit. They knew that. We didn't.

Katie Morris, in her own way, made us the honored celebrities that day. She insisted that we write her about the current situation and offered us any assistance that was in her power to make things better for "Her Peoples."

“There’s your island,” said the second mate, two days later, as we wallowed in the heavy swells of the North Pacific. We both were up on the bridge straining our eyes through the fog, to catch a glimpse of our new home. At last we sighted a dim silhouette outcropping of rock in the distance, but then our Captain came on the bridge and said, “Looks like it’s too rough to unload at Sanak. We’ll head for False Pass and try it again tomorrow.”

It had been twelve days of anticipation for us and now just as we were almost there, we had to turn away. That was disheartening, almost as disheartening as my dinner the night before.

They served great meals aboard this little ship. It was porterhouse steak that night.

I had eaten all around the main, big, medium-rare mouthwatering last bite. That was all I had left on my plate. I was saving it, because I knew it would be my last steak in a long, long time. I was talking with one of the crew and looking at him across the table when the steward came, thinking I was finished, took my plate away. When I looked back it was too late. My last juicy bite was gone. I have never forgiven him to this day. They still owe me that one big bite of steak!

False Pass is a quaint fishing cannery village at a spot where the waters of the Pacific Ocean meet the waters of the Bering Sea. The pass is too small for large ships to get through, thus the name.

On the dock, we were fortunate in meeting Emil Gunderson who was just leaving for his home on Sanak in his fishing boat after his summer salmon season. We skipped dinner, quickly grabbed our personal gear, and jumped aboard his boat to head for Sanak that night. We only hoped our supplies would follow the next day. The trip over in a following sea was quite rough and tossed the THRASHER around like a cork. I was over my seasickness by then and volunteered to take a turn at the wheel. Emil said “Steer Sow by Sow-East”, and walked out of the wheelhouse. He didn’t even check to see if I knew how to hold a course, let alone steer in these difficult following seas. In the Navy I was the special duty helmsman on a destroyer, but Emil didn’t know that. I thought it to be fairly unique that a greenhorn schoolteacher would know the skills of the sea, but these people seemed to take it for granted. I was soon to find out, they took many other things for granted also about their teachers.

In getting acquainted with the rest of the crew of the fishing boat, we met Gurman Halverson, a rough looking unkept fisherman of mixed race. He seemed to be brooding over something. He spent most of the time by himself and looked at Marie in a way that was disturbing to me. I wondered if he had ever seen a young pretty white woman before. Half way across, Emil came rushing into the wheel house and asked if I had seen Gurman. No one could find him and it was feared he might have fallen overboard. But a thorough search found him alone on the fantail just staring down at the churning waters astern.

Four hours of bucking into a head wind in the pitch black night brought us to Sanak. Emil took the helm from me and squeezed the THRASHER in between two rock mounds resembling the Pillars of Hercules. There we entered the shallow boat anchorage of Pauloff Harbor containing a little dock, with connecting walkway to shore.

As soon as the THRASHER docked, the skipper's wife, Marina, came aboard and took charge of our welcome, telling us about the island, its people and about the children we would teach. She and Marie immediately started a friendship that would last through the years. Marina seemed to be the matriarch of the island and we felt she was measuring us up to see if we'd meet her expectations. We talked for an extended period of time as she offered us a handful of sailor's hard tack called pilot bread, that we dipped into real gourmet butter from a can. It was our first introduction to that combination which has become a mainstay in our cupboard ever since.

We must have passed her inspection as we were soon invited to go ashore to meet our destiny. Chris Gunderson, the school agent, then led us to our new home. As we walked along the wooden walkway in the dark, we heard giggles and saw the heads of children peeking out at us from behind corners of various buildings. Each student was making his or her first impression of us that night. Luckily, in the dark, they couldn't detect how anxious we were. It had been a long day and we hadn't had a meal since early morning.

The first building we saw at the end of the walkway was a Quonset hut. That was the school. The front section, fifteen by twenty-five feet, was one classroom used by both of us. It contained thirty desks with fold-down seats jammed close to each other. At the end were two teacher’s desks. The back fifteen feet was to be our living quarters, with an oil cook stove, table, four chairs, a folding couch that doubled as a bed, cardboard closet for our clothes and a five gallon gas can cut in half for our sink. For light we had two Coleman lanterns, which I couldn’t seem to get lighted without help from a fifth grade boy who happened in just at that moment. On the wall was a scrub board for wash day and two ancient flat irons were on the stove for ironing. Marie was well acquainted with flat irons from the farm and vowed right then she wouldn’t be doing any ironing up here. There was no sink drain so all our water had to be carried both in and out. A 5-gallon can was under the sink to be dumped outside when full. This space was our home as well as our work place for the year. It was definitely a pioneer setting.

Despite it all, we heaved a great sigh of relief. There was good news and bad news. We were finally home! Yet a great concern plagued us. Would our supplies get there and did everything get shipped as planned? Chris had made a nice warm fire for us and since it was past midnight, we just crashed onto the folding couch out of exhaustion.

The next morning, we awoke late to a big commotion outside the school. While we had overslept, the GARLAND had arrived and all the village mail and supplies had already come ashore onto the Sanak dock. Our packing boxes were at that moment being hauled up the walkway and stacked into the school storehouse across from our Quonset Hut. It was done bucket brigade style by everyone in the village. Young boys of school age were there helping, so we passed the word that we'd start school with a half day of classes the next morning. We worked steadily until noon when we broke open a box of crackers and soup for our first meal since the day before. We were starved! It was 11:00 PM before we got everything stored away and accounted for. Hurray! Everything was there, so school would open on schedule in the morn.

Our first day of school was set to begin starting at 8 AM the next morning, yet we were dog tired from all the continued stress of preparation, travel and getting settled in. For the first time we surveyed the pile of books we'd be using the next day and finally found the teacher's manuals. They were on the bottom shelf so we sat down there on the floor and started reading. Marie's books were the outdated "Dick and Jane" series, the very ones she had used as a first grader herself seventeen years before. After a couple of hours we dropped the manuals only partly finished and made up the folding couch into a bed.

Marie couldn't sleep. Long after midnight she woke me and said, "I'm not sure I know how to teach. What do I do? All the stuff we learned in Miss Graybill's Teaching Procedures class was just theory. This is for real, now. We are on center stage up there all alone!" "No problem, honey." I said, ”Just follow the teachers manual," and I went back to sleep.

The next day my brave little wife responded to what she saw was needed in the life of her students and taught from her heart. She rose up to the challenge and did wonderful as "the teacher" starting that day through all her twenty seven years as a professional educator.

Sanak Island is twelve miles long and three miles wide but doesn’t have a tree on it. There is no vegetation over six inches high, only tundra and grass. Being from the Pacific Northwest we really missed evergreen trees. One sight, however, did relieve the monotony of that bleak landscape, the thirteen hundred foot mountain. It stood up, as if forming a backdrop to the village like in one of those old black and white staged photographs.

Sept 12th Held school in the morning.(half day) Kids were very quiet, Sandy has 10 kids in grades 5 6 & 8. I have 11 in grades 1 2 3 & 4.

Nellie Anderson came in while drunk and wanted to enroll in grade 7 ( She is 19 and married) Sandy said she could but she had to be sober. Nellie assumed we as "teachers" must know everything, and expected us to teach her mid-wife skills, she totally forgot about it the next day.

Sept 13 First full day of school. It went slow for both of us so Sandy went behind the blackboard and set the school clock 15 minutes ahead just so we could let the kids out a bit early and spend the extra time getting our own life in order.

All eight grades inside our Little Red Schoolhouse

That label of the hard luck school reputation started happening to us the first week we arrived. We had school but two days when Gurman Halverson and his Aleut wife were found in a bloody mess, each shot dead with a 12-gauge slug. The wife's body showed signs of a struggle. A shotgun lay close to Gurman on the floor. Their three kids came home from school and found the door locked so they stayed with friends that night. The next day after school, the door was still locked so they asked the neighbors for help. That was how the village learned of the tragedy.

The U.S. Commissioner, our nearest “law” was the wife of a tavern owner 160 miles away on Unga Island. Her qualification for the position was that she had finished one year of college, an art major. She was notified by Emil relaying a message via the THRASHER's small VHF radio, connecting to another skipper aboard his fishing boat, who when he came ashore to the tavern, carried the message by word of mouth to the Commissioner.

In the meantime, Marie and I found out, to our surprise, that it was usually the school teacher who was expected to take charge of a situation like that. When the Commissioner did arrive, a few days later, she didn’t even view the evidence, saying she didn’t have "the stomach" for it. The entire crew from Unga had been getting fortified for the ordeal with homemade hooch so their stomachs as well as their minds were clearly not in any condition for the viewing.

The murder scene, the school used as a morgue and the funeral director

The Commissioner turned my school into a court and held a six-man inquest, which consisted of six people telling their views of what they thought had happened. I was appointed to make out the death certificates and she left. After hearing what the six villagers said, I wrote on the official document that it looked like the man had shot his wife, then himself. But with no investigation and no evidence presented, no one will ever know what really happened in the mystery cabin on that fateful night. The cabin lay empty and unvisited all the rest of the year.

The school store-room was used as a morgue, where two coffins were made ready. I wondered who was to conduct the funeral service.

One of the first friends we made on the island was old Chris Halverson. He was a classic Nordic fisherman type who had traveled the sea lanes as an ocean nomad, until he settled with an Aleut wife on this, his hideaway of Sanak. Gurman was his only son and when he came to me, in tears, to ask if I would perform the funeral, he said, "It was hard to lose my wife eight years ago, but to have a son die before you do, is more than I can bear."

I felt tremendous compassion for my newly found friend and accepted the responsibility, without really knowing how I'd handle the situation. I was far from the dignified pious type, but by conducting the funeral, I became more than just "the teacher" and eventually earned a place in the spiritual scene of these Aleut fisher-folk. My formal education hadn't prepared me for anything like this. However by stepping up to the role that was thrust upon me, I began to temper that happy-go-lucky Tom Sawyer demeanor that had up to that time been my trademark.

On the day of the funeral I walked to the cemetery behind the coffins with Marie’s Bible in my hand as I’d seen in John Wayne movies. I wore my only white shirt and a tie. The rest of the villagers followed behind me. When we got to the graveyard there was a loud argument among the fishermen as to the mechanics of how to lower the coffins. I read the 23rd Psalm and as I finished I heard clapping and cheering. Zanzibar Johnson, an old one-eyed sailor who’d chosen Sanak as his retreat from the world, was responding in his own fashion. I spoke a simple sermon in respect for the living present, saying it wasn’t for us to judge what was done and that we should remember the departed for their good qualities not for their last moments. Then I recited the Lord’s Prayer after which all the villagers went to their homes, except for the orphans, who were left to cover the graves of their mother and stepfather.

Two triple crosses were placed on the twin graves. These islands had been occupied by early Russians and the Russian Orthodox Church came with them. The only grave markers they had ever known were these. The marker has a little piece above the main crosspiece and then on the lower part a shorter slanted bar. The three bars represent the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

It seemed to me so cruel to allow the children the gruesome task of shoveling dirt onto the coffins, so I started to take over the job and have the kids return to the village. But an old man gently took hold of my arm and shook his head. I found that an outsider doesn’t change the established habits of a culture. This, he told me later, became their final act of grieving, separating the living from the dead. It was meant to show clearly to the children that they would not be seeing their parents ever again in this life.

I always wondered if the way Gurman looked at my wife coming across from False Pass had anything to do with this tragedy. This was our first week on this strange, isolated island and we wondered, with no little trepidation, what the following months might bring.

Sept 21st Our 8th day of school. We had good organization and lesson plans went well. Gave my first test today. The kids didn't do too well. We each took a bath in the wash tub set up by the stove. Mr. Halverson gave us a fresh salmon catch right in the Harbor via a gillnet which is technically illegal this time of year. One of our formal, unrealistic college professors that taught Teaching Procedures Class was Miss Graybill. There hasn't been a day go by that Sandy didn't ask with tongue-in-cheek, "I wonder what Miss Graybill would have us do in this situation?"

Marie at work at her desk ---Pauloff Harbor Territorial School

I bought a fixer-upper dory from John Holmberg who was about to discard it along with its old worn out nine horse Johnson engine. The boat had some broken ribs but I did some repairs to make it seaworthy (almost). I ordered some Johnson outboard parts from the Sears catalogue trying to make the craft usable in these Aleutian waters are known as “The Cradle of Storms.”

We found out how fast the weather changes during a trip to a neighboring island during our first sea trial of the dory.

Earlier I had taken seriously Katie Morris's offer of help our school, writing to her in Sandpoint of our need for electric lights in the school. She responded by scrounging up an old Kohler generator that wasn't being used in Sandpoint and promised to send it to Sanak on the next boat. Light fixtures and wiring would be up to me. When an old Swede fisherman on Caton Island offered me some used electric wiring, I jumped at the chance to go get them. The Army left all their electrical supplies to him when they vacated his small island after the war. He said I could have them if I'd just come over and pick them up.

It is ten miles of open sea from Sanak to Caton Island. In my newly acquired 14-foot dory, it took us two hours. We made the trip over without serious mishap, with just the inevitable motor trouble of that cranky old Johnson. The weather then turned sour so we stayed the night.

The next morning we started our return trip on a glassy calm sea----too calm to be normal for the Aleutians. It changed to a gentle swell fifteen minutes out and to white caps and blowing spray twenty minutes later. As the wind and the sea grew worse so did our troubles. My dory had some leaks and was developing more as the wave action opened up the seams. Also, the outboard was occasionally hitting on just one cylinder. We were busy, as we tried to bail amidst all the electric wiring that had now fallen into the bilge. I tinkered with the Johnson, using the only two tools I had, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Steering to keep the bow into the waves was difficult without enough power and we both had to hold on to the gunwales to keep our balance in the sloppy weather. Soon waves were five feet high coming from the stern on our starboard quarter. As we came close to Sanak we could see the breakers dashing against the rocky cliffs next to the harbor entrance. We had to run along these cliffs in order to get into the mouth of the harbor. The unreliable motor gave us some anxious moments when it coughed. If it should stop at this time we’d be carried onto those jagged rocks and be churned up into kindling in a minute.

As we neared our island home, I assumed the sputtering motor might be caused by lack of fuel. So I took the can and tried to pour gas into the tank while the boat was rolling. I didn’t try to stop the motor to fill it because I needed to keep the boat going forward as we were too close to the rocks. I managed to splash some gas in the general direction of the opened lid of the tank, but some gas washed over the spark plugs grounding them out. That was bad!! I furiously wrapped the starting chord around the top of the ol’ Johnson's head and pulled to get it started. (That’s the way the old outboards were started, no spring loaded starting chords in those days.) It coughed and sputtered but finally started to my great relief.

We were now in sight of our cozy calm harbor, but still outside of that safe haven. Our biggest challenge was yet to come. The sea was coming from the starboard side and our harbor lay on our port side. Sometime we must turn away from the swells to enter the harbor and at that precise moment we would be broadside to the waves and at risk of having one come over our starboard gunwale. I made the move and when we turned were in a delicate balance on top of a giant comber. Suddenly we were hit with a big foamy cresting wave, just at the wrong time.

It heeled us over. A dory is a very seaworthy boat normally, but when it has a foot of water in the bilge, it gets “cranky.” We had been too busy to bail and there was all that electrical wiring in the bilge, so we couldn’t get at the water anyway. All that bilge water rushed to the downhill side when that big comber hit us. We took water over the gunwale and almost tipped over. We both leaned to the high side and righted our filled-up craft. In next few minutes we drove our half sunk dory safely through the Pillars of Hercules only to run out of gas before we hit shore in front of school. We were one wet but happy crew.

Many a story ends with a "just-in-time climax" of the hero and heroine ducking out of danger just as the violent villain misses them. Not so this one. Ten minutes after bailing the boat, we looked out to see the storm had spent its fury. The very sea that had just threatened us with disaster had quickly changed back to be again flat calm and peaceful.

During the war many soldiers went stir crazy in these islands from the fog, the gloom, the isolation and the continuous wind flapping their tents. We found a way to keep our minds in balance by merely taking walks on the beach and climbing the mountains.

Marie and I decided to climb our mountain one week end. We knew from the summit we could see all over the tiny island, the surf pounding on its rocky shore, the many streams chucked full of spawning salmon as well as the three hundred sixty five lakes, one for every day of the year. On a rare clear day a person could even make out the range of smoking volcanoes way over on the mainland, stretching westward all along the Aleutian chain.

All the villagers thought we had missed too many boats when one morning we started out with our sleeping bags, tent and two days food. We were not only going to merely climb to the summit, but try to camp over night on top of Sanak Mountain. We had to put our tent stakes into solid ice and were almost blown off the summit in the middle of the night but we succeeded in our goal. The next morning we had an experience so emotional it still affects me to this day.

We had finished our meager mountaineer’s breakfast, packed up camp and were hiking along the highest ridge with fog on both sides of us. All of a sudden, the sun came out on our right side like a spotlight. That was nice, but when we looked to our left, we saw a circle rainbow. In the middle was an image of some kind. As we moved, it moved. We waved and it waved back, but on the opposite side. Marie was on a different side of me in the image. It was a mirror of us in the sky below the crest of the mountain. That image was on a silver screen made of fog. The rainbow was in a complete circle around the two of us. It was incredible! I had never heard of such a thing happening to anyone. This was the first year of our marriage and we had had some pretty traumatic events happen to us so far. Undoubtedly, there’d be more ahead. and this clearly was a “mountain top" experience for us.

On our return to the village, Ol’ Chris Halverson told us the early Aleut culture that inhabited Sanak, were directed by the village Shaman who might have said that experiences such as this were “sacred messages” directed solely to the person receiving them. This Shaman era had been during the ancient island times, long before Vitus Bering and the Russians came. After this talk with Chris, who had become my mentor of the island culture, I became very interested in Aleut history and later did some research through the Fitzhugh-Crowell book, “Crossroads of Continents, Cultures of Siberia and Alaska.” Through that source, I learned of the dominating influence each Shaman held over the life of the early Aleuts. Since our rainbow experience happened on his turf, it could mean that this ancient Shaman had given a sort of guardian spirit to Marie and I, as a favored couple of his island. The circle rainbow might have been the manifestation of that promise. Even though this Shaman ruled in the distant past, his influence may have continued on because this, clearly, had been his island.

Whether that was the true message is not certain, yet because I chose to (sort of) believe it, the fable became a reality. Obviously, we knew there would be a purely scientific explanation of the phenomenon, that we discovered much later. After extensive research, we found that an image of themselves had appeared inside a circle rainbow to some climbers while hiking near the summit of a steaming volcano in Hawaii.

Chris also told us of the existence of that ancient Shaman’s cave located along the western shore of the island. Although he said it was considered a sacred place known only to a few ol’ timers who cherished the old traditions. They warned their children to keep away from it as they feared it harbored an aura of bad luck. This was never discussed among outsiders, especially the former teachers, though Chris did disclose, it to me. I immediately became curious and planned to search it out. Marie was of the opposite view, saying, “Haven’t we got enough trouble without you defying the local taboo of an ancient spirit?” So without telling anyone, including my wife, I set out one Sunday to search for this mystic place. I wanted to prove my total infallibility to any no trespassing label. As the big white macho explorer, I expected to be unscathed from any curse given to “non-believers ” by the locals.

After checking every inch of the shoreline, I succeeded in finding the cave and immediately felt a strange sense of reverence, similar to the time I visited the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg. Merely by knowing what historically had happened, at the spot in the past, made me feel I was standing on hallowed ground. It was a cave carved, somehow, out of solid rock with the opening facing the ocean. A rock bench inside must have been his bed or maybe the alter for his worship activities. It might have had a seal skin draped over the entrance to make a door. Since it had been centuries since its use, part of the rock cliff could have cracked and slid off so I might have been seeing merely part of his den. The blackened ceiling gave evidence of a cooking or ceremonial fire, but I couldn't see how the smoke could have flowed out except through the door. The whole cave wasn't anymore than twelve feet long and four feet wide. I wasn’t sure if he had used that cave for his dwelling place or, more likely, for the sacrifice of animals or maybe for his shamanistic treatment of people. He could have lived in a barabara,(native house) dug into the ground nearby. From my research I’d learned that his life as a Shaman came from the ability to gain spiritual wisdom that could, in some cases, heal or give good luck to his loyal subjects yet in other cases cast a spell that could cause bad luck or even death to a disloyal subject. After realizing I was on the sacred ground where these ancient events took place, I came away feeling very humble and respectful, definitely not arrogant and infallible, as my original attitude.

My sketch of an Aleut Shaman circ.1700AD

At the top of this mountain, our circle rainbow appeared with us in the middle

Oct 13th Waited up til 11:00 last night for the mail to come in, it didn't come so we went to bed. This forenoon The DREAM GIRL and the THRASHER went over to Northwest Bay, and picked it up from another fishing boat that had transferred it over to us. All the kids were late for school because they had packages and mail to open. Today one of the Coleman lanterns fell from the ceiling. Luckily, no one was under it and it didn't start a fire.

On our 36 square miles of island, there are at least 400 lakes. With so many lakes on so small an island there isn't much land in between them. The lakes become a spawning ground for the red salmon as well as a haven for ducks and geese. I went on many successful hunts for Emperor geese, one of our sources of fresh meat for the winter.

Our school was far from normal. All eight grades were crammed so tight into one classroom that one desk was jammed right against the next. Marie taught the first four grades on one side of the room while I taught the rest on the other side. The four Coleman lanterns gave very little light by which to read and there were only two small windows at the extreme end of the long narrow Quonset hut. There was no ventilation unless we opened the door. Our drinking fountain was a heavy crock that we filled with spring water each day. An outhouse was built on the dock right next to the school so that the incoming tide was the flush. For many, this somewhat primitive environment was acceptable, as it was similar to what they had at home.

Our laundry day routine was an example of primitive. Metal Blazo cans with wire handles were the buckets we hauled water from the spring, 200 yards up the hill. Water was heated on the stove, then Marie used an old scrub board with the Fels Naptha bar soap to wash the clothes.

Marie and the wash board

Another supply of water was heated for the rinse before the hand-operated ringer was used to squeeze the rinsed clothes. They were taken to the classroom and hung by the schoolroom oil stove to dry, after the kid went home.

Then we mopped the classroom floor with the rinse water for its 2nd use and some of it went to a 3rd use in the chemical toilet. All water had to be packed outside and dumped. There were no drains as they would freeze and be useless in winter.

Health services, to most of the Westward Islands, were furnished by the power barge M.V. ALASKA HEALTH. That state sponsored program visited all Aleutian villages once a year that had a good anchorage. They came with a doctor, dentist and 2 nurses. The populations that weren't visited, were expected to bring their kids by private fishing boat to the village that was visited, whenever they were notified of the ALASKA HEALTH 's arrival date. Sanak, of course, was never visited, so our people seldom took advantage of this service. A few families went over if the barge went to King Cove during the summer.

In these isolated villages, people develop very little natural immunity to outside bacteria. On Sanak, in mid-winter, one case of strep throat from some source, quickly spread to become a village epidemic. I radioed the Alaska Health Department to ask for aid. After four days, they answered back that they wanted more information about our problem. That took another week of delay, as each radio transaction took days to get through on Peter Nielson's battery-powered rig. His marine radio used a six volt battery that had to be charged up by his little wind generator. The transmitting conditions were poor even for the short distance of 60 miles, which was the nearest boat that could start the relay of our message down the line to the Health Department at Kodiak. Because of this uncertain communication link, we felt we were on our own with little medical support from outside.

Marie and I were beginning to believe all the Sanak horror stories and the “hard luck” label they had given this school. Our situation looked even more hopeless when I started getting sick myself from a serious pain in my throat. Soon I became weak and unable to function, as I couldn't swallow. None of our home-spun remedies worked. We tried gargling with saltwater, wrapping a warm scarf around the throat with Vapo-rub and taking aspirin. Nothing relieved it. We were already out of the big green penicillin pills that our stateside doctor sent up with us. Marie was in despair as she couldn't do anything to make things better. It became life threatening as I steadily got worse.

The condition of others in the village was similar. Emil Gunderson couldn’t swallow as his throat was also slowly closing up. His family felt he had to be evacuated immediately and that the teacher should go with him for medical help. It would have to be by sea, even though we were in the midst of a snow storm with high winds and heavy seas. His own forty foot boat was the only one big enough to weather that sea, so the THRASHER would have to take on the responsibility. Emil was flat on his back, unable to walk or talk so couldn’t be the skipper of his own boat. The village held a meeting, picked a crew, and planned the stormy trip to Cold Bay, where there was a small U S Air Force maintenance station. There was no doctor there but it was known to have a sick bay with a pharmacist mate who, it was assumed, could contact a doctor from Kodiak.

When the boat was ready, I waddled out, all bundled up in blankets against the howling wind and got aboard. Soon Emil was assisted aboard. We were a sight. Because of our swollen throats, neither of us could talk except in our own muffled language. We both laughed at each other when we met and tried to talk. “Lough lygg sits glurging to be arahhf rip”. (Meaning, “It looks like it’s going to be a rough trip”.) “Yeah, whhan to op hunk?” (Meaning “Yeah, do you want the top bunk?” As predicted, the sea pounded us just as soon as we got outside our harbor. It was sixty miles by sea to Cold Bay and we knew it would take hours to get there.

My sketch of the THRASHER

It had to be a desperate situation for anyone to be out in that storm during winter in a tiny fishing boat. We were both tossed completely out of our bunks onto the deck twice during the first hour but the experienced village crew handled the storm well and by seven thirty that night we chugged up next to the Air Force dock. Because we were unable to give Cold Bay any advance radio warning that we were coming, the Officer of the Day came storming down to the dock to see what was the intrusion at the port of his military installation. When he heard our story, he quickly drove us out to the airstrip to see a Navy doctor, whose plane just happened to be stopping for fuel on a flight from Adak. It was lucky for us we came when we did.

Both of us went to the small Air Force dispensary to say "Ahhh" after which the doctor put me in the Cold Bay infirmary and took Emil, who was much worse, to the Kodiak Navy Hospital with him in the waiting plane. The Navy doctor thought I would be better in two days, but instead I got worse. The medic didn’t know what to do for me so he sent a telegram to the doctor saying, “Your patient here is not improving.” The Navy answered back, “Your patient there just needs rest and more penicillin.”

One day, I took four pain pills the medic had stashed in a cup near me. I was desperate to stop the extreme pain, but the pills were ineffective. I couldn't eat nor sleep because of the choking. I finally got up and started walking to get my mind off the situation. There was so much swelling that I couldn’t talk. I had to write on paper what I wanted to say to the medic. There was pain under my tongue, in the glands of my neck, in my ear and my teeth became loose in the gums. I could barely breathe and imagined that a python was around my neck slowly squeezing my life away. That was not good! The medic sent another frantic telegram, even signed by the base commander, to the doctor in Kodiak asking to have me sent to his hospital. The Navy’s answer was just more penicillin shots. I was choked off so badly it was affecting my breathing, talking and swallowing. This was clearly a very serious situation. I was not a member of the Air Force so no one was taking responsibility for my condition. I realized that even though I was in a medical facility, I might just die there amidst these medics. It seemed hopeless!

The next day I was as sick as I had ever been in my life. Lying in bed certainly was not productive. The medic offered no advice, so I got up and paced the empty ward. He didn’t care. I soon became so tired that I couldn’t even walk any more, and just collapsed on my bunk. When I awoke the next morning, the pain was better and I felt optimistic about life for the first time. My body just seemed to have prevailed naturally through the ordeal without care from any hospital care.

After a full week in Cold Bay it was obvious I was not a patient of the Air Force nor the Navy, so I asked the medic to send a radio message, in the blind, hoping to connect to Chris Gunderson's boat radio on Sanak. Chris had brought it into his cabin and always kept it turned on each evening for any urgent communication. I asked to be picked up whenever the weather would permit. I was still weak and had a swollen throat and tongue, but it was clear that I would need to be responsible for my own recovery, not the Navy or Air Force.

While I was in the Cold Bay infirmary, Marie had been carrying the full load at school. Two fifth grade girls, Lorraine and Kristin Gunderson, volunteered to stay with her. Some nights Martha Wilson, who had been orphaned by the murder of her mother, would also stay. She had been farmed out to various homes since the tragedy. All three girls slept on the bed-couch and Marie slept on the floor. Norman and Andrew Wilson, the other two orphans, hauled in the domestic water for the school, dumped out the drain water, filled the fuel oil for the stove and filled the gas needed for each Coleman lantern so that school was ready for the next day.

Marie taught all the kids for a short, but legal, day of school which was acceptable under the strained circumstances. She was able to use the lesson plans I had prepared in advance, but only half of the students showed up because the epidemic had spread to many of the island families by this time.

Halloween was approaching so Marie, Kristin and Lorraine made cookies for an afternoon party at school. Olga and Karl Luff had given the school a case of orange pop so they wouldn't get trick or treated. On Halloween night, the healthy kids dressed up in paper masks and visited all the cabins to trick or treat and get candy. When Kristin and Lorraine came back they sat for hours and talked about their dreams for the future. They both wanted to get away from the island and experience the big world. As it turned out, their dreams of leaving the isolated lifestyle never happened as they both married men of the Aleutians, though they did leave Sanak.

One night when the girls weren't with her, Marie went up to the spring for her domestic supply of water. The water bubbled out of the ground into a wooden barrel right next to this ominous cabin whose occupants had a very bad reputation. There were sounds of yelling and conflict coming from inside the walls. Under this insecure situation she quickly filled her buckets and stumbled her way back down the hill. A girl out alone at night in this particular setting was the same as being in the wrong part of town of a big city. In her stress, she spilled most of her water, making it a night time Jack and Jill episode.

Nov.1st Today didn't go so good. Kids were really noisy and I was in an awful mood and I said something to make Merle cry. How long can this go on? Each day gets worse. If he doesn't get well and come back soon I'll go crazy. Can't stand the nights, even with the girls here. Nothing I do keeps me from worrying about my husband. When he left during that stormy night, his condition was life threatening. I haven’t heard anything since! Is he still alive?

Nov 4th Went for a walk to the point. The mountains were beautiful all covered with snow and the sun shining on them. Stayed out at the point awhile, watching the water and mountains. Nature is beautiful but I've never been so lonesome in my life! This is a serious village epidemic. Kristin and Martha stayed with me tonight. I'd like to stay alone but am afraid to. Never know what the drunk men may do! If only I would hear some news from Sandy. I've been knitting to keep my mind off the situation..

Nov. 5th Chris Gunderson came by and gave me a message from his radio from Sandy. He is better and ready to come home! Just knowing that makes me feel excited. Washed my hair and took a bath in the wash tub.

It was wonderful just to return back to the island. The place had seemed like a hellhole when I left. There was no sense of safety. We had a murder, many drunk and unruly villagers, continuous wind, primitive living conditions and finally this death-threatening disease. But somehow, that same place had magically transformed into a paradise when Chris’s boat chugged home through the Pillars of Hercules. There I embraced a calm, bright, green island full of beauty, a loving wife, some grateful students and a rewarding career all wrapped up inside our cozy metal cocoon. Above all, I had returned alive which at times for me was in doubt. I became optimistic about our future. Life was good!

Soon after I got back, however, additional symptoms of the original malady seem to grip the village. We thought that perhaps we had a case of rheumatic fever with the Holmberg girl, five cases of streptococcus throat and many people with a stomach illness similar to the flu. There were some dogs and cats that took sick, so we had to dispose of them for fear of spreading their unknown condition to the islanders. In a village conference of Marina Gunderson, Ol Chris Halverson and my school agent Chris Gunderson, we discussed the possibility that we might be experiencing a repeat of the world wide pandemic flu of 1918 which killed millions worldwide. They’d heard old fishermen tell about remote villages in Alaska being wiped out even when no germ carrying outsider had visited them. Contamination from that flu was said to have spread not from one infected person to others as with other diseases but seemed to be airborne.

Our situation was serious and someone on the island had to make some medical decisions quickly. If only I could get advice from some medical authority.

Over the years, the Alaska Dept. of Health had heard too many false emergency calls that they had developed a reputation of being reluctant to respond. To them a frantic call from a first year bush teacher might be considered just an over-reaction. I knew I might be ignored but sent a message anyway through our makeshift radio relay set-up. I asked for aid, but had no way of knowing whether the message got through or even if they would respond. But, when the weather cleared two days later, we heard an airplane. That Coast Guard amphibian was the first plane to visit Sanak since World War Two. We all ran out to see it drop a parachute high in the air. Even though it was a PBY-5A, capable of landing in our protected waters, the pilot chose not to put down in the unknown waters of Pauloff Harbor, but instead he delivered the cargo a quicker way. Their aim was perfect, as they dropped a cargo parachute directly on top of our bright green, newly painted, Quonset hut.

I picked up the chute and unwrapped it. There was just a bottle of pills without a label. There was no written information. Soon the natives started arriving at the school. I couldn’t send them away so made up a prescription. “Take 2 every 4 hours with lots of water,” I said, thinking it sounded very professional. When an official message arrived by mail-boat two weeks later, I learned that I’d been close. It said, "For severe cases, take 4 tablets to start with, then one every 4 hours, but never more than 6 tablets in one day and always with lots of water to flush the system." By that time, however, that sulfa drug, they had dropped along with my make-shift prescription, had cured the village.

One of the first community responsibilities, Marie and I learned, was to order Christmas presents for every child on the island. The order had to be sent out on the October mail boat so as to get the returns back by Christmas. One evening Marina Gunderson, old Sophie Holmberg and Marie sat down with the latest Sears catalog. They went through it ordering one present for each student and pre-school child on the island, selecting what they thought that child might like. A collection was taken from all the families to pay for the order.

Nov.28th Kids sure got on my nerves today. They just wouldn't settle down at all. Made a banana cream pie using just what I had-banana extract. We had been making model airplanes the day before and Sandy said the pie tasted like airplane glue! Well, that's the last time he'll ever get a pie from me!

Dec.10th It's been six months since we were married. Had a roast Emperor goose that Sandy shot for dinner. Sandy had to eat it all because I am getting a terrible cold. A fishing boat, the Alaco 2 came all the way from Sandpoint with the old used light plant Katie Morris sent to us. Started practicing the Christmas program during afternoon classes. Felt another earthquake last Sunday when we were lying in bed. They happen all the time out here near the Aleutian volcanoes, known as The Chain of Fire.

We didn't see the Garland at all during the month of December as the weather was too rough for them to unload. Were we going to miss Christmas because of bad weather?

However, Emil Gunderson took the faithful Thrasher sixty miles in rough seas over to False Pass where they’d left all our mail. His return to Sanak four days later included the cargo of our Sears and Roebuck order so the kids would have their gifts at our preplanned school program. Sanak would have Christmas after all!!

Dec. 18 Play practice all afternoon. Every kid had a part in the program that Sandy made up. Wrapped some of the 85 Christmas presents for the island people tonight.

Dec. 23rd All the upper grades with Sandy and I went caroling at 7PM. It's a shame to waste those good songs on all the drunks. On the November mail-boat, we got some Christmas decorations from my sister Irene, but there are no trees in the Aleutians. Sandy found a dead driftwood branch on the beach that may have floated in from Siberia, so we wrapped it with green crepe paper and stuck on Irene’s decorations. That was our Christmas tree.

Marie and I adapted a Walt Disney type Christmas skit with choral music for the enjoyment of the islanders. Every person on Sanak Island fitted into the old school storehouse for our program, some standing and some on makeshift benches. It was about Santa’s workshop at the North Pole. With our music and the gifts, the school kids performed well in their program. It was a real Christmas holiday for everyone.

Dec. 26 Had school in the morning. Gave out candy, oranges and apples that the Garland gave to the kids. We forgot to give them at yesterday's Christmas party.

One day, old Mrs. Sophie Holmberg came storming into the school and into our living quarters at the lunch hour. She first asked, "Did I disturb your lunch?" Of course she had, but we invited her in anyway. She came right up to within six inches of my face and shouted, "I want you to find out who infected my little Sophie with lice!" I politely responded that I would check every kid in school when they came back after lunch break. She accused the Hoblet girls, who came from across the bay every day by rowboat. That was like being from the "other side of the tracks" according to the Holmbergs, who seldom spoke with either of the two families who lived on that "other side" of Pauloff Harbor.

Marie and I checked every head that afternoon, running our hands through the hair looking for little white specks next to the scalp. Luckily we didn't find any, as the social implications would have been devastating for the family involved. Prejudice and conflict existed here even in this isolated small, fishing community. We used the incident to give a health lesson to everyone concerning washing hair and general grooming. Every week afterward we held hair inspections.

Every mail day was sort of a holiday celebration on the island. Peter Nielson, the postman, would usually tell everyone when the Garland was about to arrive. Then everyone would be anxiously waiting around the dock in front of the school. When they heard its steam whistle, the fishermen would get in their small skiffs and head out to where it would drop anchor. In bad weather one of the bigger fishing seiners would go. The mail-boat would stop about a mile off shore and the skiffs would arrive just the same time as the anchor hit the water. If the weather was calm enough, everyone would tether their skiffs to a drop-line and come aboard. Each seasoned islander would clamber up the sides like boarding pirates. Soon they would throw down the mail sacks and freight into the waiting dories bouncing along side. The men in the waiting dories would try to receive them safely.. A few times, in rough weather, mail sacks had been lost overboard. When that happened, they'd just shake their heads and say, "Too bad."

There was always a brief trading session with the skipper or sometimes even with a crewmember without the skipper's knowledge. That transaction usually concerned some Sanak smoked salmon in exchange for fresh food from the ship's supply or sometimes from a crewman's personal stash of booze. After the sacks of mail were delivered, the anchor would soon be hauled and each native would climb back down the painter or step carefully down the Jacobs Ladder and jump the remaining distance into his waiting dory and speed away to the Harbor.

When the sacks arrived at the small post office which was housed in the closet of the old abandoned school store room just across from our Quonset Hut, Peter would close and lock the door until he had the sacks opened and all the mail sorted. Many of us would be waiting outside the door. Usually about thirty of the total ninety people on the island would be there. By then it would be dark. Soon Peter unlocked the door and a line formed. All would file, one at a time, into the post office which was lit with one dim kerosene lamp. It was a pioneer moment in my memory, directly from a Louie L' Amour novel.

People would get their mail and some would open an anticipated letter right there, trying to read it in the semi-darkness. The school always had the most official mail and sometimes it took me two trips to carry it all. When I got it into our quarters, Marie and I sorted out the most urgent ones and sometimes we might send an answer back on their eastward run. We could do this if a fishing boat would take our outgoing mail over to False Pass, because the Garland would always stop there at the cannery on its return to civilization. There was never any freight or mail sent from farther on the Aleutian Chain to us so they never stopped for us when heading back south.

Who will be the first to spot the GARLAND, our mail-boat?

It got pretty lonesome for us after the mail-boat came and left, so to spread the time out a little longer, I would stack our incoming personal letters in chronological order and we would play Canasta. Marie would have to beat me in a game of Canasta before she would get to open a letter from the pile. The game got quite competitive during those times! I never eased up to let her win. I know I played the bad guy, but my motivation was to lengthen the joy of reading our incoming mail. I wanted the anticipation of communicating with people to last as long as possible into the next month.

Jan 7th Sandy and the older boys painted the outside of the school yesterday. First they put a red lead primer coat and then finished it with a Kelly Green. The total school looks great along with the sign he made, "Pauloff Harbor School on the island of the Lakes" He printed this lettering above a picture that he painted of Sanak Mountain rising above a lot of lakes.

Other things we did to fight the loneliness was to daydream of what we would do when we returned home. Marie dreamed of buying and wearing the gorgeous yellow swimsuit she had seen in the Sears catalogue. (She did buy one when we returned to the lower 48, but when wearing it in the water, she noticed you could see right through it, so that was the end of the yellow swimsuit dream. Darn!)

I dreamed of throwing a big party with all our friends. When we got home other things took priority, so that dream also went unfulfilled.

We both talked of going to the drive-in and having a big juicy hamburger and a fresh peach ice cream milk shake. Just simple little joys, they seemed, but the thought of them cheered us up. (We did accomplish that dream on returning.)

Jan 15th Played Ping-Pong in the old school storehouse tonight, beat Sandy 2 out of 3 games. People admired the sign Sandy put up. Older boys came for the Boy Scout meeting at night. Sandy started a Troop here, No. 511. They made a flag for the Emperor Goose Patrol, work on hobbies, and make airplane models from the kits we gave them.

The first month up north we had a portable radio and one big dry cell battery. We enjoyed listening to the Armed Forces radio broadcasts of baseball games and the program Ozzie and Harriet, Marie’s favorite show. We discovered one major item we failed to foresee in our pre expedition planning, an extra radio battery. Our battery went dead right in the middle of the final game of the World Series, bases loaded and two outs. Nobody up there was a baseball fan, so we were frustrated for two months. The only way we learned who had won was to ask in a letter to our sport minded friends and wait for the second month for the answer. So much for instant gratification!

As an alternative to radio entertainment, I got pretty good at making up my own fictitious Ozzie and Harriet story plots for Marie. I wrote each play and acted out all the parts with my own humorous touch to keep her entertained until we got the new radio battery.

Wanting to learn to knit, Marie brought an instruction book and yarn to Alaska. She felt no need to do a practice piece and started right off on her main project, a fancy vest. She finished the back knitting under stress when I was in the Cold Bay infirmary. Later she knitted the front during a calmer setting, but when she put them together, they didn't match. She had knit the back part so tightly that it was way too small. She tore it all out and re-knit the entire piece, but never wore it because the memories connected to it were too painful.

Marie wrote her inner feelings and fears in her diary but never mentioned any of our serious trials or troubles in letters to her parents. There was only light talk and humor as if everything was just fine, when in reality it wasn't. She said since she was just the simple farm girl, she wanting merely to live out a quiet wholesome life so her letters always reflected that.

The simple life! Yes, our life was reduced to the basics. Not necessarily food, shelter and clothing, but three other basics: mental health amid gloom, personal safety amid lawlessness and our career dedication to improve the lives of the students in our care.

Of course, basic survival was always on our minds, but we also searched for beauty and optimism. The native population had a serious alcohol problem and "the isle of free love" environment prevailed in a house near the school. We felt a personal challenge to try to teach these kids a better life. We found our balance and a measure of contentment during trips out into the wild beauty of this treeless island during the few days we had of good weather.

Jan 23rd This is the 5th straight day of gale wind. It goes right through our outside storm door into the classroom. The gusts even shake our strong metallic igloo. This morning before school, the ramp out to the dock blew down and was pulled away by the current into the inner harbor. Emil Anderson's dory broke its mooring at recess time, so the older boys and Sandy went out along the beach to save it. Zanzibar Johnson's dory overturned, Rhule's got busted up, Ben's seine skiff sank, and the Uranus which is now listing to starboard, is still tied to the dock out there. We have no way to get out to the dock anymore until we get a skiff repaired . The dock is like an island out in the center of the harbor. A truism for the Aleutians: If you want to discard something, throw it into the air during a storm and you'll never see it again.

After the first couple of months, we felt good about our adjustment to this island life. I must qualify that and say that I loved it as a modern equivalent of the Wild West, while Marie just wanted a bath tub. We did enjoy certain members of the island folk, though we had little in common with them. Our intellectual conversation was limited. We'd often reminisce the wholesome times of our upbringing, the music of the 40's, the good books or movies we had enjoyed and the many good party times we’d had with friends. Talking of those memories made our life tolerable during that rigid, frigid existence when we went forth to the north.

The bath was pretty primitive

Marie knitted a lot, as well as baked bread and pies every week. However, her genius was creating attractive meals from our monotonous canned and dried food supply. She was able to magically transform powdered milk into a palatable drink, powdered eggs into a reasonable breakfast with Spam, powdered potatoes into mashed potato paddies and work those awful packages of margarine, to make that white lard look like butter. In those days we had to hand squish a little capsule of yellow dye into the white Oleo in order to have it simulate butter.

With a return to a normal routine after all the various problems we endured in the village, came a new attitude of acceptance towards us. We had suffered alongside everyone through each crisis and, even though I was but a first year teacher, I felt clearly in command of my position as the professional educator. Maybe some of the naive Tom Sawyer in me was becoming mature.

Many families invited us into their homes and loved to share the unique island history with us. Those fisher-folk that befriended us were rough living, spirited, frontier people, mostly of AleutNorwegian stock. Even though some were a threat when drunk, they all pulled together when in crisis. They put to sea in a gale for medical aid during our mutual life threatening sickness.

They pulled together to work through the village murder-suicide crisis. Several men made sure all the kids had a Christmas by getting the gifts and supplies to our island home when the mailboat couldn’t make it in. Many men were returned GI's with a longing to be free of society's restrictions. They didn’t consider themselves lawless, but often did what they felt was right not concerned whether or not there was some law concerning it. We were given gifts of fresh salmon and Emperor Geese in midwinter. Legal fishing and hunting seasons meant nothing to them.

I remember a Kenny Rogers song with a verse, "You can't outrun the long arm of the law”, yet Sanak Island seemed to be the exception! In our village were people rumored to be running from various crimes on the mainland. The frontier attitude was clearly alive and well on this island. Over time, we were able to adjust to the island’s insecurity. Marie, from her country girl upbringing of self reliance, gained the confidence needed to survive the pioneer environment without any institutional support. Not unlike these islanders, I may have broken a few rules myself by my John Wayne demeanor in the way I handled one threatening situation. It was completely accepted, however, by this unique breed of Alaskans during those less formal pre-statehood days.

Most all the cabins on Sanak displayed a firearm near their door. Usually it was a 12 gauge shotgun, hung on pegs over the top of the door frame. It was there in the event that the man of the house might need it to rush out and bag a goose spotted flying overhead for dinner. Over the door to our living quarters, which coincidently was also just behind my desk, I had an item that was not the custom to display in a school classroom. It was there for pioneer atmosphere and accepted as such by my students.

A law of the National Rifle Association, Never aim a rifle at anything you don’t intend to shoot.

There was clearly no official enforcer on the island. I made but one community rule for the integrity of the school environment. I posted on the front door of the school a notice in big letters: “WHEN DRINKING HOOCH STAY AWAY FROM THE SCHOOL!”

Maybe he just forgot, or maybe he was testing me, but about mid-morning one school day, I looked up and saw this drunk Aleut busting right through the school house door. Complete silence came over the children as I reached for the 30:06 hanging over the door of my living quarters. I’d never had better classroom attention as I worked the bolt action noisily, putting a shell into the chamber. Then I walked up to the staggering, foul-smelling man, who was father to three of my students. As I came near him I distinctly remembered the National Rifle Association oath I took as a thirteen year old boy. Our Marine Corps instructor made us memorize, "I’ll never aim a rifle at anything I don’t intend to shoot”. I thought about that oath when I shoved my Springfield into his soft belly and growled, “You get out of here!”

His face paled a bit, he grumbled, turned and left the school house. I locked the door, picked up the storybook Adventures of Huck Finn, I’d been reading to the class at the end of each school day and started reading aloud. I thought that to be a good way to calm myself as well as the total school atmosphere at that moment. After the reading a chapter, we all went back to the normal school routine and the day finished without further interruption. Surprisingly, nothing was ever said to me by a parent or student about that incident, at the time nor any other time during the rest of the year. The next week, when he was sober, that drunk and I were congenial friends again, just as we had been before. I never had any trouble with him or anyone else in the village after that.

It became clear that, at times, some of these islanders were a serious threat to Marie and I as well as to each other, yet at other times they would pull together in crisis and risk their own lives to aid any one of us islanders if we were in distress. They indeed modeled the Louie L’ Amour attitude of the Ol’ Wild West.

Feb 13th Was awful cold last night 10* at 5:30AM. School stove froze up, ink froze, drinking water froze, so school was late starting. Sandy then drained the filter of the stove oil. Must have been some water in the fuel oil. Did some more wiring in the ceiling for our light fixtures.

Feb. 25th First day with electric lights. There is a new attitude among the kids in school since the addition of the lights. In the evening we heard, on our radio, an advertisement about TV remote controls saying "Do you have to get out of your chair to tune in a new station on your television set?" It was the first we’d ever heard of that. We jokingly said--" It must really be tough living back home in civilization with their troubles!!" What’s TV?

Feb.27th The Coast Guard ship, CLOVER came in at 6:45 tonight and picked up Katie Holmberg. It was an emergency evacuation. Took them 8 hours to come the last 44 miles in a strong SW gale. It came from Cape Scherioff. We'd been sending school work home for her since November and she’d been getting worse ever since. Think she has rheumatic fever.

During the November trip of the Garland, the Department of Education sent us all brand new school books with specific directions to destroy all the old ones. That seemed a waste to us. Why couldn't we just hand them out to the kids who were starved for reading material? But we did as we were instructed. We had a book burning. I'm sure that the same thing happened to one of the former teachers, creating that legend of "the crazy teacher burning all the books."

Emil verified another legend, when he told of the explosion that happened three years before on his fishing boat. It was caused by a gasoline leak in the engine room of his boat while he was ashore. It completely destroyed the boat, killing the crew-member right there in Pauloff Harbor just before the fishing season started. That crew man was that year’s Sanak school teacher.

Marina, Emil's wife, was the midwife for the birth of a baby for last year's teacher who was pregnant when she arrived in the fall. They were semi-prepared for the event, even though they had hoped to get to a hospital by June 1st in Anchorage. But the time came earlier than expected and the native women here were very experienced in home births, so things went well. (One more legend explained)

Old Chris Halverson cleared up another legend, the story of the lady that disappeared while searching for wild flowers. He said she may have been a mental case. It is true that her body was never found but folks around the village said she had been acting very strange for weeks before that. They were suspicious about the situation because the husband didn't seem terribly upset by her disappearance and didn't press for any investigation into the matter. He just left the island soon after and that was the last anyone ever heard of the episode.

I have since learned that my handling of the murder-suicide episode had become another of the Sanak teacher legends.

One foggy day I felt I'd also become a mental case when I thought I saw a lone horse in the misty distance near the village. I reluctantly mentioned it to one of the older boys and he told me, I wasn't crazy after all and told me the history behind it.

Years before someone planned to bring cattle to the island to start an island ranch. There were no predators, no need for fences, and good range grass. That was even better than the open range of the real wild west! However the deal fell through after he got one horse and two cows shipped up. The costs of shipping cattle up to the island was just too high. The horse went wild and no one had been able to ever catch or tame him. He became "a ghost stallion" that showed up usually on foggy days but always a distance away, making Sanak “The Wild Horse Island.” He clearly became the king of a lonely domain.

After the war, cattle were brought onto neighboring Caton Island that also went wild, so that any beef butchering was more like a running buffalo hunt than a round-up into a corral. We were given a portion of a kill one day in midwinter when our island friends went over for fresh meat. The pot roast was welcome but very coarse and tough. So Caton became “The Wild Cattle Island.” Nikolski, an island further westward had a sheep ranch so was nicknamed “The Woolly Island.”

Feb 29th Good day and calm so we called off school told the kids to go home and pack a lunch, we planned an educational field trip to Company Harbor. 10 kids showed up so we left at 10 AM and arrived there at 11:45. There was an old empty school building, still in fairly good condition, an old graveyard and a few fallen down buildings. We were invited to Old Nellie Carlson's house for coffee and smoked salmon. Nellie ,Old Man Carlson and Albert Carlson were the only people there. Albert is kinda strange. We only saw him when peeking around the corner at us. Sandy found an old WW II helmet, cartridge belt and canteen, out in the Tundra on the way back. Wonder what was the history of that? There were no recorded battles here during WWII. All the kids were tired after the 14 mile trip. This field trip gave all the kids a common adventure, to write about, draw pictures and talk about in their "show and tell." They needed something different from the regular routine.

There was clearly a devil-may-care attitude prevalent on the island. It may have stemmed from the island's early history. There was never any firm restricting laws even from Sanak's early beginning. While visiting our school agents home, Chris Gunderson told of an ancient battle way back in the 1600's between rival Aleut chiefs just offshore on the south side of Sanak at a small island. It is locally called Bone Island, because of the crumbling human bone fragments and weapon parts that used to be found there. I had to check it out, but found no artifacts.

During the time of Peter the Great, in the 1700's, Russia sent fur traders to harvest the fur pelts of the Aleutian area and Sanak was one of the many islands that Russians forced Aleuts to hunt down the sea otter, take their skins in trade for a fraction of their value. If the hunters resisted, they were killed. Superior weaponry over the bone spears of Sanak hunters caused them to be treated as slaves.

In 1807 there was a shipwreck on the northern reef of Sanak. The Aleuts living on the island at that time performed an act of compassion that was described by one surviving seaman in his journal. The Sanak Islanders rescued the crew and helped them navigate their repaired lifeboat all the way to Kodiak.

By the 1920's, there was a thriving cod fish industry located on the west end, inside a semi-protected bay, called Company Harbor. Without getting any official permission, those people just walked in and set up business on the island. There were no rules to restrict an enterprise from taking the sea resources for profit in those times. They set up the salting station and hired dory fishermen to catch the cod with hook and line, no questions asked. One season in the 1930's the cod suddenly changed their migrating route and not one showed up. The company folded and just left their buildings never to return.

During World War II, (1944) the US Army occupied both Sanak and Caton Island as a supply bases for the fighting westward along the Aleutians. They built a road across the island from Company Harbor to Pauloff Harbor, where they put in a dock and several buildings. There were no Japanese attacks against the island, even though it was in the war zone.

There was a giant tidal wave in 1946 that wiped out the 60 foot Scotch Cape light house, on nearby Unimak Island. The tsunami kept rolling eastward from Japan, where it originated, and hit the Sanak reef, destroying the buildings of Company Harbor where people had been living freely in trespass among the old Company buildings. The survivors, mostly fisherman and free spirited gypsy types, moved to the more protected Pauloff Harbor and inhabited what was left of the deserted Army buildings.

When we arrived in 1951, there was no village council, no established law enforcement nor any religious order, only a postal clerk. A certain camaraderie existed among these freedom seeking souls. The common bond that seemed to unite them was the common battle against nature.

Sanak people seemed to take pride in the unique reputation they’d earned, knowing that they were the talk of the town among the more conforming mainlanders. They didn't strive to acquire social graces nor to live up to any standards set by others. Every man created an independent self-styled life without society’s restraints while each woman, who had teamed up with him, went along with it.

Pride in a neat, well-maintained house was non-existent. Many were half completed, unpainted and some had cables over the roof that were anchored into the ground on both sides to keep them in place during 100 mile-an-hour winds and the occasional earthquakes.

March 10th Raining and blowing about 80 mph with gusts up to 100. It blew down three outhouses including the schools and tore the porch off the old school storehouse. Occasionally our outer door gets blown open, then all the rest of the doors in the school are sucked open and it puts a vacuum in your ears. It blew down our radio antenna again. During the storm a loose 50 gal drum, sailing in the air of the village, hit the roof of our Quonset sounding like a bomb. Something went wrong with the regulator on the old Kohler light plant. The lights got brighter and brighter until they started blowing out bulbs one by one. We're back to Coleman lamps again. Oh Well!

March 19th Benjamin caused so much trouble, today, that Sandy had to pick him up and shake him. He was very disrespectful to me. The poor kid must have had a bad morning at home, but we just couldn't allow his profane language in school.

Sanak was known as the Isle of Free Love, however, there weren’t any sexy island maidens to make the idea attractive. Yes, it was a surf worn Pacific Isle, but it was the North Pacific not South Pacific. That surf was so threatening that no small craft could land safely on the coarse sandy beaches and there were no Bikini clad natives. All the females were always bundled up in furs and oilskins against gale winds.

Early in the school year, there was one man who quite regularly pounded on our door at 3:00 A.M. drunk, usually he just wanted to talk but once he came to my door and tried to get in. When the door was locked he pounded and pounded. I finally asked what he wanted through the slightly cracked door. He wanted to trade wives for the night. He said it was the custom and I would not be disappointed. It was after that incident that I hung up my rifle over the door of our quarters.

The Free Love Bedroom Reputation was maintained by many of the young fishermen. I hired a female to clean the school each afternoon, at the suggestion of my school agent. He said she needed an income during the winter as she was the wife of an inmate of McNeil Island Federal Prison who had been incarcerated for the last two years. She always did a good job and lived "alone" in a small house up the hill from our Quonset. I noticed that one of the local men, who I knew well as my goose hunting partner, carried in buckets of needed domestic water occasionally to her house. I thought that was friendly of him. One day she didn't arrive to work and also the next, so I asked about her. I was informed that she had just given birth to a baby. Because of the heavy foul weather clothing she and most everyone wore, I didn't even notice her condition.

My own bedroom story: In our Quonset, the wind always made the stove damper flap until we physically put a wedge in it to stop the noise. It was right over our bed so when we'd almost get to sleep, the wind would start the damper flapping and I'd say, "That's all right dear, I'll get up and fix it." Marie was closer as she slept on the outside of the couch. She would always answer, "Oh No! I'll do it." then jump out to fix it. That became a nightly ritual. One night it was louder than normal and when I said, "I'll do it." She surprised me by saying, "OK!" At that moment, I knew that I had to do my share of the household duties. Male domination in our house was forever gone!!

One of our sidelines was the hobby of photography. I brought up an old bellows camera, that used 3x4 sheet film, plus a supply of film, photograph paper, chemicals to develop film as well as the developer, shortstop and hypo to develop black and white prints. I expected to have 110volt power so brought up a printer with big enlarger lens. But when electricity wasn't available, I improvised. I rigged up my flashlight, through the enlarger, to expose the print. The trouble was, it only exposed a portion of the negative each swipe of the flashlight, so I had to experiment many times to get the right pattern to get a full print. We used the toilet closet for our darkroom. After running the prints through the three trays of chemicals, we washed them in photo-flow and rolled them onto the window glass at the end of the Quonset Hut, the only windows in the school. After they dried during the night, they fell on the floor and we picked them up the next morning and they became the photos used in this chapter.

On our Saturday half-day school we allotted a time for crafts after our regular lessons. I showed the older grades how to do photography while Marie did arts and crafts with the primary grades. My students were fascinated as they saw plain white paper magically form an image while in the chemical developer and I became the miracle man. That made up for my science experiment failures. It seems very time I tried one of those do-it-by-the-numbers experiments, from the eight-grade science teacher's manual, my procedure would somehow go astray.

I started a Boy Scout Troop and the older boys loved it. Their weekly meetings in the school were something they looked forward to each Thursday night. They had never been exposed to any serious ceremony nor any mythical stories of King Arthur and the quests of his knights of the round table as much of Boy Scout ritual stems from. They were way ahead of the book (and me) when it came sea-going skills and knot tying.

One night they came to me with a gift, a fresh egg. Marie and I hadn't seen a fresh egg in months. It was a seagull egg. We were a bit skeptical to use it but though it had a red yoke and tasted strong. Other than that, it was quite acceptable.

The Boy Scout Troop of Sanak Island

March 24th, The Garland gave us a surprise, stopping here, in calm weather, on its return trip east. It didn't go west any farther than Unalaska for some reason. Sandy brought back some ice cream he bought from the Garland's cook and we had it right away. What a treat! Then out of his black plastic bag he pulled a beef roast and later some tomatoes. I asked what else do you have in your little black bag? He wouldn't say. He told me it was like in the Swiss Family Robinson story, Mrs. Robinson, shipwrecked on an island, had a secret little black bag. Every time a member of the family really needed something, she would pull it, or a usable substitute, out of her little black bag. (A week later some lettuce and cabbage surprisingly came out of his little black bag.)

Early in our school year, the radio reception came in clear at night. We'd hear a Modesto station advertising Stan's Drive-In. There was this singing commercial, "Lets eat I'm hungry. Please don't think I'm rude. You're sweet and lovely, but I'm in the mood for food." I visualized the younger set enjoying the California good life with hamburgers, top-down convertibles, car-hops in mini-skirts and boys wearing letterman sweaters. Marie wasn't going to let that go by, so she simulated our own drive-in. She baked homemade hamburger buns then from our canned goods she brought out a can of meat balls and made it into patties. She spread on a can of spinach as substitute for lettuce and sliced up a whole canned tomato then added a sliced dill pickle. That was our drive-in hamburger celebration. Using the only available supplies we had in those days, I thought it was actually acceptable, except for the spinach-lettuce substitute.

All our students of the Pauloff Harbor Territorial School 1951

April 18th We finished our 180 contracted days. It's the last day of school!

Sandy is worse than the misbehaving kids. Today he came and kissed me right behind the blackboard, out of sight of the kids.

This was a typical schedule for teaching all eight grades together in one room.

At 9;00 one of the first graders would go out side the door and ring the little hand bell to signify the beginning of the school day. If anyone was still coming up the trail, they'd hurry to get in the door.

9;00-9;10 We'd have opening exercises that included the flag salute, health inspection and a short explanation of the new vocabulary word of the day.

9;10-9;40 Reading, Marie would combine the 1st and 2nd grade and start oral reading. Her 3rd and 4th grade would work in their workbooks. I would have the 5th and 6th read aloud on the other side of the room while the 7th and 8th would work in their workbooks.

9;40-10;10 Marie would work with the 3rd and 4th combined and I would work with the 7th and 8th while the 1st 2nd 5th and 6th would use their workbooks. We might be called by a raised hand to help an individual from the other group while oral reading. We would usually ask them to wait a bit until we were at a stopping place before we could help them.---10:10 Recess outside

10:30-11:30 Arithmetic ( In same manner as reading-alternating workbooks and help)

11:30 Penmanship with the old fashioned stick pens and ink wells

12:00-1:00 Lunch timeThe kids would all run home for lunch

1:00-1:40 Language (all grades) from their Language Arts workbook

1:40-2:00 History-The 1st and 2nd graders would have a story with a citizenship moral

2:00-2:35 Geography with maps and charts of Alaska and the world

2:35-2:45 Recess

2:45-3:15 Spelling-a study of the list of words then a test to see if they remembered them

3:15-3:45 Science-This was usually a disaster as I'd try one of those experiments from the teacher manual. A joke among the kids was to see just how I'd foul up the experiment.

3:45-4:00 Clean up + I'd read to everyone a section of a storybook aloud to end the day

Saturday mornings, we got pretty relaxed with physical education activities and crafts. We even put on a crafts show for the community. Actually the students as well as parents appreciated our weekly routine.

Because we made up the lost days and had no vacations, we caught up with our late start and finished before all the ANS schools, so in the end we had the last laugh on them.

I gave the Territorial Eighth Grade written exam at the school's ending. It was sealed so I couldn't teach to the test. The result verified that I had done a good job. The eighth grader passed and got his diploma on the next mail boat. Our part of their education was to help them to read, to write, to figure and understand society but their lifetime career in the fishing industry would be taught to both the boys and girls by actually with their family.

As soon as school was out we hired the THRASHER to take us to a village on the mainland where we could arrange our transportation home. We were invited to stay with Everest and Hazel Dodd, teachers at the King Cove ANS School.

Marie was asked if she wanted a shower. It was her first real shower since August 29th when she used the Garland's water made from their salt water distilling system. There must have been something that contaminated the water because that shower made her body break out with big white welts. The spots always reappeared every time she took a sponge bath, even with clear spring water from Sanak. It cleared up during the winter but from that time on, I never could get Marie very far away from a good clean bathroom with a tub and shower.

When we left the island, Martha Wilson came over with us as one of the passengers.

There was a special resilience in our fourth grade student, Martha, even in tragedy. The Welfare Dept. had arranged for her to stay with a King Cove native family. Although our heart went out to all the orphaned children of the murdered Sanak couple, we were especially concerned for the future of this girl. Martha seemed to be a happy child at least when she was with other children. Stoic some days, yet loud and fun loving the next day, we wondered what hurt she must be hiding. The murder of her mother by her stepfather happened the week after we first met her and of course there was a break-up of the marriage of her real father before that. During the school year, she was shifted around among two or three different island families who had young girls around her age for playmates. Relying on the generosity of friends was the only way orphans could survive in a village without foster home care. Each of her brothers were taken in by different families so all three children were separated from that time on. Even though there must have been tremendous grief and resentment in her heart, she always showed her pleasant side to us at school. Martha was able to laugh, at least on the outside. She tried hard at her lessons and played with reckless abandon during active games.

I remember at our Christmas program, Marie and I made a special effort to give her center stage attention when all the kids opened their gifts. Her gift was a beautiful little ring with an artificial ruby stone setting. ( In an earlier school assignment we had asked each student for a letter to be written to Santa.) We had picked it out in October, thinking she would really like it. We had put it in a small box within another larger box, that was encased in another big box. We had packed it in continuing larger boxes six times so the last box was the biggest gift box to anyone in school. She kept opening boxes as everyone in the village watched. She was enjoying the attention so much so, that she unknowingly discarded the actual gift box during the shuffle. I was watching and recovered the ring box for her. When she finally saw it, she showed real emotion saying, it was worth the wait.

Martha became the last Sanak student to whom we gave our final goodbye and that represented the end to our adventure on "The Isle of Free Love."

I had taken my dory over to King Cove on the deck of the THRASHER. One night a storm washed the boat away from that beach in front of the ANS School. In the morning, I happened to see a gray speck on the beach and started hiking toward it. As I got closer, I saw it was my dory, the tide had just then moved it off the beach and it was drifting out to sea. I started to run so to catch it before it was out of reach. It was dragging the anchor but luckily the anchor caught and held it for me just off shore. I waded out up to my chest, got aboard, bailed it out and pulled in the anchor. As the oars were still aboard I planned to row around the point and set the anchor solidly in a little sheltered cove, come back later with a power boat and get it back but I hadn’t counted on the offshore wind. I tried to row that few yards shore-ward but the wind was too strong. It blew me seaward in a matter of minutes. It was now too late to drop anchor. I was on my way. There was nothing but water between the Aleutians and Hawaii and that seemed to be where I was headed with only a pair of oars. I was a victim of that off shore north wind that was so strong that I couldn’t row against it, but this time I do have a storybook ending.

I saw a green spot seaward and gave the standard distress signal, an oar straight up. Earlier that week I had seen an old dirty ugly looking green fishing boat at the King Cove dock called the AFFINITY. I didn’t like her looks, but that day when she happened to be out testing her engine, saw me and picked me up a few miles offshore, she was the prettiest boat I had ever seen.

On another night, I was careless in securing it properly so it drifted down the beach. In going after it I had to cross a little lagoon. A skiff was there so I borrowed it to get across. I planned to come back immediately after I finished and return it to its proper place.

But when I returned later with my dory, I was confronted by a very angry man about his skiff being on the other side of the lagoon. “I’ll help you get it back,” I answered and explained why I had to use it.

"My skiff is full of water now because the wind and surf has filled it up. You’ve wrecked my motor. ” he retorted.

I went with him, bailed it out, cleaned everything and dried off the motor. His old nine horse Johnson started and all seemed forgiven. I told my teacher friends about the incident and they were terrified. That’s the legendary Johnny Bearskin, they screamed. He always carries a loaded 45 pistol and it is common knowledge, yet not proven, that he has killed three people. No one messes with him! He has an uncontrollable temper!

After hearing that, we were not unhappy to leave King Cove on a fishing boat for Cold Bay the next day, as we were scheduled to board an old C47 of the Reeves Airlines to Anchorage and civilization. We sat sideways along the bulkhead amid the cargo yet that seemed luxurious to us knowing we were actually on our way home. Our pilot was curious about our situation and came back to talk to us about our life on Sanak. After answering his queries, he treated us like returning explorers. By radioing ahead, he made hotel reservations for us at an Anchorage hotel and ordered a taxi to wait for us at the airport. He even had the owner of the airline meet us as we stepped down the ramp. That was the famous old bush pilot, Bob Reeves. We had read about his life and his part in early Alaskan aviation history yet were really honored when he wanted to hear about the details of our Aleutian adventure, as the word of our eventful year had evidently preceded us.

Just the normal taxi ride from the airport to town with all the swerving, excessive speed and honking was a white-knuckle experience for us. We were suffering from urban culture shock by merely returning to normal city living.

On our return flight we stopped off in Juneau. After all, we had never met our boss. We were offered the job by mail, communicated by written reports each month, and our paychecks were sent to the bank. We didn't even know who we were working for.

When we met face to face with the Commissioner of Education, Mr. Erickson, we found him to be a typical Alaskan, full of enthusiasm for the challenges inherent in The Last Frontier. Mrs. Novotney, who was our immediate supervisor, said, "When you've successfully served at Pauloff Harbor, admittedly a problem school, you can have any school you want that's open next year." We learned that the Federal Government was slowly surrendering all the BIA schools to the Territory. For our next Alaskan year, we chose Copper Center, a former BIA school along the Valdez highway.

The first thing we did when we hit civilization was head for a good restaurant and order some fresh vegetables and finish that bite of steak that was taken away from me on the Garland. When the waitress came with our meal I looked at Marie and summed up the whole year by saying, “I think it was worth waiting a year for this steak.” The surprised waitress was little upset then said, apologetically, “Yes, I guess our cooks here are kind'a slow, aren’t they."

“ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,”

(fromThe Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens 1850)